Blog — June, 2009

Being so enamored of how easy it was to configure my blog for Spirit on the Brain. I spent yesterday setting up a WordPress blog for this site.

All future "Geoff's Blog" postings will be here ... including another pretty damning one on high-fat diets to start it off. (I'm still not allowing comments for all the controversial stuff I post, as I wouldn't get anything else done if I had to respond to all the cult-following idiots and die-hard [artery] carnivores, etc.)

So if it's been bugging you that I haven't been updating the RSS feed for this blog, that will no longer be an issue. :)

Hydrogen: Future of Fuels Finally Drives Up. It really is obvious that in the future you'll charge hydrogen cells from renewable resources like wind and solar.

The very idea, of course, will have conservatives gnashing their teeth, at the thought that anyone would be doing anything to prepare for the day when the oil runs out, or becomes too expensive for Joe Public to afford.

Because if we've learned one thing from Jesus' miracle of loaves and fishes, it's that finite natural resources will never run out, as long as you have God on your side. Indeed, it is only for our benefit that the Earth—nay the entire universe—exists:

New menu item and article: High-Fat Diet? Based on yesterday's post, plus the one from June 3. For posterity, as it were.

Mangan: Feel free to link directly to that piece, rather than to this page, since I doubt you've figured out how the HTML anchors (e.g., "#18") here work. I know, I know: Permalinks were made for people like you, who eat enough fat that their brains are sure to be working properly!

Like the vegetarian journalist Hadley Freeman put it:

[P]ersonally, I have always suspected that I would have thicker hair and more energy if I wasn't vegetarian. And be smarter. And more decisive. Ooh, and totally awesome on the dancefloor.

Dance, "Dennis the Mangan." Dance the night away....

In the Grauniad, too.

And if you thought I was joking or exaggerating, this is the kind of idiocy which race-realist carnivores come up with:

In my experience vegans are also likely to look overweight because veganism is not a healthy lifestyle.

Compare that to "This [greater eating of meat by the upper classes in the Middle Ages] is why the notion that elites used to be fat or even obese, while the commoners used to be thin, is nonsense." And marvel once again at how reality is warped to fit into the theory, by both leaders and followers in the high-fat sweepstakes.

Beyond that, I hope to not have to devote any more time to this subject, which holds near-zero interest for me, except that I again really dislike it when people try to feed me bullshit and then call me ignorant for not swallowing it. I do, after all, have email to answer ... from Barrister hajimamma, no less:

Vous êtes invité :: From Barrister hajimamma (SAB)
Par votre hôte: Haji Mamma

Date: vendredi 19 juin 2009
Heure: 12h 00 - 13h 00 (GMT+00:00)
Rue: Attn: From: Barr. haji mamma (SAB) Off No. 06BP 54 Ouaga 03 Rue 7 Av Nelson Mandela Ouagadougou - Burkina Faso Africa . Dear Friend, with due respect, I am Barr. haji mamma the principle of haji mamma at law firm, I need your urgent assistance in transferring the sum of $30.5 million immediately to your account, the fund is in my late client Dr. Eric Morgan’s account here in my country without any body coming for it. He died a long with his supposed next of kin in the event of terrorist attack on 11th September 2001 World Trade Centre. I don't want the money to go into Bank Treasury as deceased unclaimed fund with the bank, according to the bank protocols guiding inheritance fund. Upon receipt of your reply, I will send you full details on how the business will be executed. Reply to my private box.( barr.hajim@hotmail.com) Barr. haji mamma. haji mamma at law firm

Haji Mamma!

P.S. Geoff on grad.

I made the mistake of glancing at Dennis "High-Fat" Mangan's blog today while setting up some RSS feeds, and saw his semi-endorsement of the Shangri-La Diet—which basically involves consuming canola (or light olive) oil, or sugar/fructose water, between meals, to spoil your appetite (Seth Roberts' Shangri-La Diet in detail).

So I did a little Googling. First, health guru Jonny Bowden:

Fructose may indeed have a low glycemic index which seems to be why [Roberts]—a non-nutritionist—chose it as his sugar water of choice. But it is arguably the most damaging sugar in the world. It creates insulin resistance by another pathway, and it raises triglycerides more than any other sugar.... And canola oil, a very highly processed and crummy oil whose success is a triumph of marketing over science, is hardly the oil I'd choose to take the edge off my appetite.

Also:

In an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Sunday Night program, nutritionist David Jenkins criticized the lack of scientific research validating the diet. In the same program, Roberts responded, saying that the results are there for all to see and that "there was no need for a big study to demonstrate the obvious."

Yeah, the cry of every quack on the face of the planet: "No need to test it, it's obviously working already, never mind the possible confounding factors; nothing to see here!" (McDougall cops the same plea, further absurdly claiming as evidence for the "set point" idea [which Roberts also relies on for his "theory"] the fact that underweight people gain weight on the same [vegan] diet of his as overweight people lose weight on. Of course, he is nowhere actually counting the calories that either group is consuming, there. And needless to say, he has the same impressive body of anecdotal evidence for short-term weight loss as do the Atkins-dieting types, like Mangan. And this was odd because, you know, the low-fat diet is having exactly the same effect, there, as the high-fat one which we've supposedly evolved to eat. Which, to a scientific mind, would suggest that the percentage of fat in the diet is not particularly closely related to the loss of weight.)

Further Troubles in Shangri-La:

[T]he scientific method exists for a reason: to root out poor hypotheses and to direct research towards those more likely to be fruitful. If Roberts were truly interested in investigating his approach, he should have subjected it to the dispassionate rigor of clinical study and peer review.

His hypothesis is clearly testable with a controlled trial by a careful scientist willing to be proven wrong if necessary. That hasn't happened.

Mangan styles himself as a "clinical laboratory scientist." I'm guessing that means more like a technician than someone with formal scientific training. Regardless, any competent scientist should be embarrassed to have anything to do with Roberts.

The "Steveosphere" (i.e., Sailer's commenters) tends to attract people like Mangan, who theorize wildly and paleolithically without bothering to test their ideas beyond the realm of anecdotes, and with no idea about how to take a skeptical/debunking approach even toward obviously dodgy ideas. Sailer can get away with doing the same sort of thing largely because he's got such an amazing feel for human nature, and is working in "soft" fields where that approach can produce insights which are obviously correct, and where double-blind, randomized studies and math would be very hard to apply indeed, so you're arguably better off doing things merely qualitatively anyway. (Cf. the Austrian School of economics.)

Nutrition is not such a "soft" field. And trying to do things merely qualitatively there, without proper scientific testing of the hypotheses, leads you straight into dietary quackery like that purveyed by Roberts, McDougall ... and Mangan.

And of those three, McDougall's vegan diet (which is very light on processed soy products) is by far the least likely to harm its adherents (i.e., versus fructose, canola oil, and high-fat).

Gary Taubes (debunked here) and Seth Roberts are provable quacks extraordinaire in their ideas on nutrition, and are precisely not the people whom anyone with half a clue would be turning to for support. Not unless you want to be instantly discredited on your own petard. Might as well be quoting Wilhelm Reich in support of your magical-thinking ideas.

What will I do if someday Roberts and his ilk perform properly designed studies, which are independently reproduced, that show that he, Taubes, Atkins and Mangan are right? Personally, I'd still follow a vegetarian diet, because I've tried doing it both ways and haven't found it making any difference at all to my health or state of mind, and vegetarianism is markedly more earth-friendly (and moral) than is feeding grain to animals and then slaughtering them.

That really is the thing, for any thinking person: Even if eating a high-fat diet really was/is healthier than a vegetarian one, and even if you don't care about the treatment of animals, your actions don't ever stop with you, they always affect other people too. And we live on a planet with finite resources, so your environmental footprint does matter—all of which was covered, quite thoroughly, in John Robbins' Diet for a New America, more than two decades ago.

It's easy enough to ignore those moral issues—I manage it quite well myself, much of the time. But that doesn't make them go away.

I truly doubt that those ideas have even crossed Mangan's mind.

The other thing about Paleolithic diets and the Steveosphere is that the same people who have no difficulty believing that Neolithic and more-recent cultures have selected for higher IQs and cognitive abilities (e.g., in whites and Ashkenazi Jews), are simultaneously blind to the fact that exactly the same selection effects could well have come into play for diet.

Lactose tolerance developed during exactly the same Neolithic period ... and the very same tolerance is regularly pointed to as proof that our genes have changed since the Paleolithic era. Dairy products provide a valuable additional source of food, especially during hard times, to those who can metabolize them; the same could certainly have been true of grain. Hell, that's potentially true for any food: We like barbequed meats precisely because our ancestors who salivated at the thought of eating small game that had been burned to death in forest fires had an additional source of food, compared to those who have the taste for that.

For anyone who wants to say that dietary needs cannot in principle have changed since the Paleolithic era, then our cognitive abilities (by race) can't have changed either; and vice versa. Otherwise, the groups that switched to an agrarian diet sooner would have had more time to adapt to the cultural-selection pressures (for higher IQ) which arise from living in large cities, etc. (There actually are differences between races in the incidence of coeliac disease, re: tolerance for a gluten protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, though not in the simple order of agrarian cultivation of those. Still, those racial differences obviously came about from selection pressures related to the eating of grains, well after we moved "out of Africa." In which case arguments about humans having supposedly evolved to eat high-fat, low-carbohydrate Paleolithic diets based on our evolutionary history are inherently flawed, just as surely as are the vegan arguments [from evolution] against drinking milk or eating dairy products.)

What high-fat race-realists like Mangan are doing is clinging to the half of the "we haven't changed in 50,000 years" position that suits them (i.e., the high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet), while rejecting the other half that tells them things contrary to what they want to hear (re: IQ differences between races, which in the race-realist view have been produced by differences in the amount of time our respective lineages have been subjected to cultural-selection pressures—which only arose with our living in large cities, which only an agrarian economic base can support).

They have the personal motivation to find genetic reasons for the cognitive differences between the races, and they have the motivation to find reasons in our evolutionary history for why it's supposedly good to eat the large amounts of red meat which they want to eat anyway. But they have no motivation to wonder whether an agrarian diet could have exerted similar selection pressures on us as the domestication of animals did for lactose tolerance, where we would emerge from those pressures adapted more to a cereal-based diet than to a Paleolithic one.

Even if we entered the Neolithic era as a species/race not well-adapted for eating grains, how could thousands of years of consistently "forced" consumption of those not had a selective effect, of weeding out the people who didn't thrive on that diet, and thus creating a species/race which was adapted to that diet? (It takes around six square miles of land to support a single hunter-gatherer. When your society transitions from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and the population grows significantly in size, you can't go back living on a Paleolithic diet, i.e., you are forced to eat a significant amount of grains from that point onward, or die of starvation.) In the wild, if the food supply changes over an extended period of time, you adapt or perish (i.e., the existing genes that allow the species to best utilize the available food supply are the ones that will spread through the population). It's exactly the same thing when the change in food sources is human-caused, as it was beginning 10,000 years ago.

Lactose was a supplementary food source, while grain in agrarian communities was the basis of the diet, and thus was not merely an optional but was rather a "forced" food. But both paths have selection effects on the population, and depending on how vital the supplementary food source was for getting through periods of famine, the "forced" feeding could even have exerted its effects faster than the supplementary one.

And what do you think the odds are that those thoughts have ever crossed Mangan's mind, even as he works on his Grand Unified Quack Theory (recently shared, very respectfully, with the non-Dr. Roberts; the Nobel Prize is surely in the mail) in which all diseases are ultimately inflammatory?

Exactly. He and his ilk try to claim that people who object to a high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet are showing their utter ignorance of the evolutionary history of our species. But predictably, he's the one who hasn't considered the full effects of our evolutionary history, beyond the Paleolithic era, and in fact can't even manage to be logically consistently about that (vs. the agrarian/IQ issue). Par for the course with these loud-mouthed, utterly ignorant dumbfucks: they can't even get that much right.

I haven't seen these selection-for-cereals ideas anywhere before; it's just now that I've started thinking about them. But really, how could 10,000 years of a grain-based diet—with bread as the "staff of life"—and the adverse reactions to that which still persist in a few unfortunate individuals to this day, not have had an effect on what we've evolved to eat, to the point where nearly the only people alive today who should consider eating a Paleolithic diet are those whose societies never progressed to even simple horticulture?

If cereals are a primary food source for your society, and your body can't handle them, that's a serious disadvantage to your survival and the propagation of your genes, isn't it? So how on earth could a high-carb diet be a bad thing for us now, after all those aeons of selection effects, where the genes that are left in the (civilized) human genome are surely exactly the ones which support a cereal-based diet? And again, the same period of time was enough to produce a three-standard-deviation difference between the IQs of Ashkenazi Jews and sub-Saharan blacks ... unless you say that that difference is all just cultural/environmental with no genetic component possible, in which case we all should be eating a high-fat diet, as our Paleolithic ancestors did. It's a package deal.

Further consider: If the only (or primary) food that our species had been able to find for the past 10,000 years was bird vomit, we would have evolved to like the taste of that, and our stomach chemistry would have changed accordingly to be less acidic, simply because the ability to like and thrive on that "forced" food provides a huge survival advantage. (Those changes to human biochemistry would, in turn, have made it difficult or impossible for us to go back to eating the Paleolithic diet we used to eat, even though the latter was truly what we had evolved to eat prior to the move to an agricultural food base.) Conversely, people who couldn't bring themselves to eat it, or who experienced adverse effects from that food, would have quite rapidly died out, taking the genes which gave rise to that dislike and adversity with them.

In that scenario, no one would be pushing the supposed virtues of a Paleolithic diet for today's human beings: It wouldn't matter a whit what our Paleolithic ancestors ate, simply because we had changed so much since then in response to our enforced diet. It's only because we can still survive on a high-fat diet that we have these morons asserting that that's what we should be eating, even in the "best of all possible dietary worlds."

A lot has changed in the past 10,000 years ... and not just in IQ.

I've also seen people complaining (probably on Mangan's site) that if you ever eat large amounts of brown rice, you'll feel bloated and gassy afterwards, etc. And of course, that gets presented as an argument against humans having evolved to eat (esp. unrefined) cereals and rice, and thus a point in favor of a high-fat diet. Except that I've personally eaten huge amounts of brown rice at various points in my life, and never once experienced those "universal" adverse effects.

If I'm not mistaken, what convinced Mangan of the validity of eating a high-fat diet was that, to paraphrase, No one ever refused a thick, juicy steak—never mind that our tendency to load up on fats and sugars is widely recognized as being a product of the fact that those have historically been in short supply, and were never meant to form the core of a human diet. Guess that's just more "low-fat propaganda," huh? (If all you do is shovel high-fat shit and junk food in your mouth, it's no surprise if you lose the ability to taste the nuances in bread and light seasonings. But it takes more than a bit of cluelessness to elevate that corruption of your palate to being a good thing.) I swear I also saw one of these idiots confidently associating a drop in test scores (or the halting of the Flynn effect?) with the popularity of low-fat diets in the late twentieth century, in the comments on iSteve—i.e., claiming that Americans were testing dumber because they weren't eating enough meat, and thus weren't getting enough fat! Unadulterated idiocy like that deserves its own planet.

But again, when you've already decided on the theory, what need is there for evidence? You can just make that up as you go along. Like another high-fat proponent says:

This [greater eating of meat by the upper classes in the Middle Ages] is why the notion that elites used to be fat or even obese, while the commoners used to be thin, is nonsense.

Because when reality and history don't mesh with your pet theory ... feel free to rewrite history to be whatever your theory says it should be.

Now that's ignorance, sheer pig-fucking, lard-on-the-brain ignorance, "Madam," of a level fully comparable to Ken Wilber's reality-rewriting idiocies. It really is the same shit as I dealt with in all the time I spent debunking the Atkins-recommending Wilber, just in a different pile.

To summarize: The push for asserting that humans evolved to eat a high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet is based on the idea that our genes haven't changed since that pre-agrarian era. If that's true, there can be no genetically based cognitive/IQ differences between the races. Conversely, if cultural selection pressures have produced cognitive differences between the races, they can also have produced biological "cereal tolerance" differences; and that same process of adapting to a grain-based diet means that a Paleolithic diet is no longer the one that we've "evolved to eat." The fact that (literally) fathead people like Mangan fail to understand this simple fact is not a problem with reality, nor does that dumbfuckery license them to rewrite history in accord with their half-baked, quack "theories."

I have no doubt that Mangan's done literally 100x the research into nutrition as I have ... just as Wilber's done 100x the reading on spiritual subjects, and meditating, as I have. I've also seen more than enough from both the latter and the former to know that they don't know what they're talking about.

If there's one thing I've developed over the past half-dozen years, it's a keen bullshit detector; and Mangan's high-fat ideas send that detector right into the red.

Still, thanks for the half-dozen click-throughs, D-Man. "Now I can afford to get that operation for me mum...."

You know, to cure all of her "inflammation-based diseases."

P.S. Geoff on free speech (d'oh, sued -> fined), as the USA foolishly takes another step toward passing similar hatecrime legislation to what we already have in Canada.

And Palin accepts Letterman's apology ... sort of:

"Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve," Palin said in a statement late on Monday night.

Well, if that's not gracious, what is? (Plus, the joke was about the 18-year-old, and 18-year-olds are women, right? Help me out here, Gloria. And, if Bristol had gotten "knocked up" by A-Rod in consensual sex, how would that be a "sexual exploitation" of her by him? How was A-Rod not being just as "sexually exploited" by the joke as Bristol supposedly was? Or how would his wife/girlfriend feel about all that? Isn't she the "forgotten victim" in all that?)

But some spectators said Palin and the protesters had lost their sense of humor. "He made a joke, what is America coming to?" said spectator Bailey Wallace, 17.

My sentiments exactly.

And again, in the dishonest conservative recasting of that joke as being about the "rape" of Palin's daughter, they're doing exactly the same thing as when liberals deliberately ignored Rush Limbaugh's explicitly stated intentions in his "I hope Obama fails" speech. (I completely agreed with Limbaugh's sentiments there, by the way: I too hope that Obama fails in his attempts to turn the USA into a national version of handout-dependent inner-city, community-organized Chicago. It's not looking promising, though.)

And How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?.

And What's the Harm? Endorsed by Penn Jillette, too.

It's become obvious to me over the past couple of weeks that, since I need to keep blogging the relevant pieces of the books I'm reading, for writing my next one, that I can't keep doing it in the one-month-per-web-page way I've been doing here.

Also, I need a way to sort my blog posts by categories for that project, to organize them into provisional chapters.

So, behold:

Spirit on the Brain: The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Neurological and Magical Origins of Religion.

(I'm pretty much wedded to that title now, eh? It's my own phrase—based of course on "sex on the brain," and thus easy to remember—which I've since seen has been used close to a dozen times on the Internet before, but never as a book title; and in fact only one of those instances was even a blog-entry title, the rest are just mid-sentence. And no, it doesn't refer to being unable to stop thinking about spirituality; it's rather about how everything that's taken as being "spiritual" is rather neurological/biochemical/natural in its origins.)

I'll keep that blog there permanently, even after the book is finished, but just not as the "home page" of the site, at that point (i.e., c. 2012). I'll also continue blogging here, on topics which don't relate to the SOTB book.

Initially I'm allowing comments there ... though I know I'm going to regret that at some point.

So I've already moved all of the previous relevant-to-SOTB blog postings I've done here to that new site, and will do the same with the notes I had taken a year+ ago before getting sidetracked with Hip Like Me. Thankfully, it works fine just to copy-and-paste the formatted/hyperlinked text.

I can also approach atheist/skeptical/humanist organizations and groups with that site, even well in advance of the book being completed. Plus relevant university clubs (annually), and maybe Mensa chapters too (though there's surprisingly little correlation between those high-IQers and "skeptical intelligence").

All of which is also for working toward doing a serious "author tour" when this baby is done ... maybe even to coincide with the release of my second music CD. (Sent the first one off to manufacturing on Friday.)

When I am done with this, there will truly be nothing left to believe in the realm of spirituality or religion, even in their esoteric incarnations, as opposed to the orthodox positions addressed by Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett, etc. I promise you that... with god as my witness. ;) (I've already done more than enough research to know how it ends, it will just take a number of years to fill in all the details.) With, of course, only the following caveat:

Basically ... out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous—the silliest one I've ever heard is, "Yeah ... there's this big giant universe and it's expanding, it's all gonna collapse on itself and we're all just here just 'cause ... just 'cause.'" That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.

—Trey Parker, South Park co-creator

In the end, we are left with the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" And there are simply no answers to that question—at least, not that any human being, ever, has had access to, whether in meditation or in swallowing-whole the words of a Prophet or Savior. It's fine to be an atheist about every god under the sun ... and about every sun-god ... but the only sensible answer to the question of why the universe exists is to admit that one doesn't know, which is a radical agnostic position, i.e., of not taking Jehovah, Allah, or the Jesus or the Bible seriously for even a minute, while acknowledging that we'll never actually know whether there's a reason for all of this, beyond the laws of physics.

The fact that my FSM t-shirts just arrived in the mail last week doesn't change any of that.

"All the religions are superfunny to me," Parker adds. "The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It's just bad writing, really. And it's really terrible in about the second act."

(They did do an anti-atheist, "science as a religion" story too, poking fun at Richard Dawkins.)

P.S. Yes, the Wordpress Theme I've initially chosen is "Inferno-mf." It was that or aurora (cf. this).

From Steven Taylor's (2003) paper, Primal Spirituality and the Onto/Phylo Fallacy: A Critique of the Claim that Primal Peoples were/are less Spiritually and Socially Developed than Modern Humans:

[T]here is a very good case for suggesting that, at least to some extent, the modern concepts of democracy and equality were derived from primal peoples: specifically, from the Native Americans. The authors of the American constitution borrowed their concept of a union of different states from the centuries-old "Six Nations" confederacy of the Iroquois Indians—in fact the idea was actually recommended to the Europeans by a leader of the Six Nations at a treaty signing in 1744, at which Benjamin Franklin was present (Wright, 1992).

Not so fast, kemosabe. From Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (p. 121-4):

According to Elizabeth Tooker, a prominent anthropologist in the United States, only three documents connect the Iroquois Confederacy to the American Constitution. Two of these concern a speech by Canasatego, an Iroquois chief and spokesman, which was made at a treaty conference in 1744. In this speech Canasatego urges the colonies to form a union so that the American colonists, like the Iroquois, "will become stronger." This speech was then referred to by the commissioners of Indian Affairs in 1775 during another meeting with the Iroquois. In this meeting the commissioners mentioned that "advice was given about thirty years ago, by your wise forefathers, in a great council ... when Cannassateego spoke to us, the white people." The words of Canasatego are then repeated for the benefit of the people at the meeting.

The third document is a passage written by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, responding to some musings of Archibald Kennedy. Kennedy had written a pamphlet favoring the union of the colonies, which he also thought would "encourage our Indians." Franklin agreed, adding that "it would be a very strange thing if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted [for] Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for Ten or a Dozen Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interest."

Tooker points out that the two documents pertaining to Canasatego's speech are not very convincing pieces of evidence for the claim that the American Constitution was based on the Iroquois Confederacy because they only confirm that "at least some whites and some Indians in the eighteenth century realized the advantages of confederation." They do not show that the American constitution was based on the Iroquois Confederacy. The passage from Franklin cannot be considered to support this claim at all, since Franklin uses the success of the system of "ignorant Savages" only to support his argument that a "like Union" would work for the politically aware colonists. It is obvious that Franklin thought that the Iroquois' political system was too primitive to be used by the colonists. Franklin's biographer, Francis Jennings, is amazed that this statement has been used as "proof" for the Iroquoian origins of the American Constitution, calling the people who make this claim "Iroquois propagandists." In Jennings's words, "How [Franklin's] contempt for 'ignorant Savages' can be twisted into praise for them is beyond my comprehension"....

The fact that grandiose claims are made on such shaky foundations illustrates the extent to which the motivations of aboriginal rights advocates have usurped the standards of evidence in social science....

The "founding fathers" were grappling with much more complex issues than those found in an extended kinship group attempting to protect its access to fur-bearers and European trade goods. Theorists developing the American Constitution were considering issues such as states' rights, freedom from British monarchical control, the extend of democracy that would be allowed (i.e., there were arguments over suffrage and whether the presidency and senate should be life terms), separation of powers, federal versus unitary political systems, bicameral versus unicameral legislatures, and the separation of church and state. None of these matters was of concern to the Iroquois. Their "confederacy" was essentially an indeterminate military alliance, not an attempt to reconcile the competing interests brought about by the incorporation of an economic powerhouse into the world capitalist system.

And one does not have to look very far to find the actual intellectual influences on the framing of the American Constitution: the writings of John Locke and Montesquieu. Both political theorists were interested in the separation of powers (executive, legislative, and judicial), and Locke especially was interested in the boundaries between public authority and private property. Although Montesquieu had nothing to say about the Iroquois, since he concerned himself with Roman and British law ... John Locke (like other contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau) maintained that aboriginal peoples were in a "state of nature" without laws or government. It is likely that the "founding fathers" had a similar opinion. If they considered the matter at all, they would have seen the confederacy as too primitive a political system to address the requirements of a constitution for the United States.

As always, if these early societies of truly ignorant savages actually had contributed anything of value to the world, people wouldn't need to make shit up on their behalf, to try and make them look good. (The claims of Iroquois influence are often made much more strongly than Taylor makes them. For example, "there is much evidence to suggest that [the American founding fathers] emulated the Haudenosaunee political system of the Iroquois confederacy.")

To minimize risk, primitive societies [such as the !Kung San, Eskimos, and Australian aborigines] chose tactics like the ambush and the dawn raid. Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them. (Nicholas Wade, Before The Dawn, 151)

Or does that not qualify as ignorant savagery?

Taylor:

Wilber maintains that this animism is the result of pre-personal fusion, the lack of a clear distinction between subject and object. But I believe that animism is both pre-personal and transpersonal, in the sense that it is the result of a combination of elements associated with both these levels. At the most basic level, primal peoples see all things as alive because they are aware of the Spirit in all things: Spirit makes the world alive....

As E.Bolaji Idowu writes of traditional African religion, "there is no area of the earth, no object or creature, which has not a spirit of its own or which cannot be inhabited by a spirit".... These spirits are not autonomous beings with personalities, like gods—as Idowu writes, "they are more often than not thought of as powers which are almost abstract, as shades or vapours".... And although to some extent they are conceived as individual forces, they are also seen as an expression of the "Great Spirit."

Well, no. From Todd Tremlin's Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion:

ADD's [i.e., Agency Detection Device, the brain module which allows us to recognize the presence of other beings around us] default interpretive strategy—namely, when in doubt about whether something is an agent, assume that it is—is worth the errors in judgment. It's better to have a fast device that occasionally gets it wrong than a slow device that is always accurate.

The tendency of ADD to over-attribute agency to objects is graphically illustrated in famous experiments by Fritz Heider and colleagues.... Heider showed adult subjects two-dimensional geometric shapes moving randomly across a flat surface. While these experiments were intended to test thinking about physical causality, subjects also reported their perceptions that the shapes were chasing each other around in space and displaying other intentional behaviors. Because an identifying feature of agents is that they are self-propelled, motion is one of ADD's natural triggers. Subjects went so far as to attribute desires, emotions, and even gender to the shapes. People understand that objects like geometric shapes cannot really be agents, but they also cannot help seeing objects as agents given the proper circumstances. Almost any object that shows spontaneous movement or goal-directed change will activate ADD.

You may abstract shadowy powers from that, even to an archetypal master-of-animals level, but the origin is still in agency-detection, which is an entirely separate concept from the subject/object distinction, and is assuredly neither pre-personal nor trans-personal.

Taylor:

[Primal peoples] generally display a strong sense of empathy and compassion for other living beings, and for nature in general. The fact that hunter-gatherers obtain 10-20% of their food through hunting might seem to contradict this, but most primal peoples approach hunting with great respect and compassion for their prey. Hunting is usually seen as an unfortunate necessity, and the act of killing is never performed with pleasure. Turnbull (1993) describes how, to the Mbuti of Africa, hunting is the "original sin," which occurred when a mythical ancestor killed an antelope and then ate it to conceal his act.... Partly because of this philosophy, they are "gentle hunters" who never show "any expression of joy, nor even of pleasure" ... when they make a catch.

Heh. From Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (p. 219-20):

Cultures at this [hunter-gatherer] level of development reacted to scarcity by trying to appease animal spirits through various taboos and rituals. The Montagnais, for example, blamed lack of success at hunting beaver on feeding beaver bones to dogs instead of hanging them on trees or throwing them into the water, while the southwestern Ojibwa thought "speaking ill of a beaver" would have the same effect. It is such taboos and rituals that are referred to when anthropologists maintain that aboriginal peoples are respectful toward animals.

Rather than methods of "managing" wildlife populations, taboos and rituals were simply attempts to increase the numbers of animals that could be killed and eaten. "Management" of wildlife merely consisted of depleting resources until the carrying capacity of the area had been exceeded, and then moving to another location....

And, from Robert Edgerton's (1992) Sick Societies:

Inuit adults, who prized emotional equanimity and nonviolence, nevertheless encouraged children to torture small animals and birds to death, and he "often" saw men laugh at or strike mortally wounded animals. Almost 100 years later, Lucien Turner similarly reported seeing Inuit hunters "mock" mortally wounded animals....

Even more difficult to explain in adaptive terms than the practice of torturing wild animals was the cruelty the Inuit inflicted on their invaluable sled dogs. Perhaps because they were economically important, dogs were usually not maltreated, but sometimes men whipped or kicked them, and if a dog were injured so that it could not pull its weight on a dogsled, it might be "beaten mercilessly" and left behind to starve.... The Mbuti, who relied on their dogs for hunting ... nevertheless "... kicked them mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die".... [Turnbull] was puzzled and dismayed by the pleasure they derived from watching wounded animals suffer agonizing pain.... [The Machiguenga Indians of the Peruvian Amazon] rubbed hot chili peppers in their dog's mouth and forced them to swallow "... more for the entertainment of watching the animals howl, run crazily, and writhe in agony than to prepare them for hunting."

Yes, that's the same Colin Turnbull as Taylor was quoting, on the same "gentle hunter" Mbuti people. From exactly the same fucking book, just a later edition (1993 vs. 1961, of The Forest People). And I don't believe for a minute that that "unwanted" information was deleted from the later edition. Do you?

Taylor:

Even now there is continual conflict between American Indians and European-American companies who want to "develop" lands which the Indians believe are sacred. Often the Indians refuse to let mining take place on their reservations, even though this would bring them massive financial benefits. In the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, for example, it is estimated that there are around 50 billion tons of coal, but despite large scale poverty and unemployment on the reservation, the Indians' empathic sense of the alive-ness of nature means that they will not allow mining to take place. To them this would be tantamount to murder....

Their sense of the sacredness of nature may not stop primal peoples from unintentionally damaging the environment by over-farming or over-hunting, but it certainly makes them very reluctant to harm their environment in a more direct way, by chopping down trees, ploughing the land, killing animals, and so on.

Oh, this is gonna be fun. Again, from Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (p. 225-7):

David Suzuki, for example, maintains that recognizing aboriginal cultures' "sacred connections to the land" is important for preserving the environment. To support this unscientific contention, Suzuki offers a number of romanticized accounts from native leaders and points to "enlightened land use" by the Cree and Kayapo. The Kayapo are a tribe of hunters and gatherers living in the Amazonian jungle who resisted the destruction of the rainforest so as to maintain their traditional way of life. Suzuki describes one of their villages "like paradise," where people live as they have lived since the beginning of human societies." He also recounts a statement by the renowned leader Paiakan that the Kayapo assume that "the forest is controlled by Nature" and therefore they "would never be so greedy or stupid as to take too much"....

After British rock star Sting threw his support behind the Kayapo and helped them to gain control over 25,000 square miles of rainforest, the Kayapo began entering into agreements with mining the logging companies. As Sting candidly explained a decade later: "I was very naïve and thought I could save the world selling T-shirts for the Indian cause. In reality, I did little."

On the contrary, Mr. Sumner, you did much. Much bad, in having a hand, however well-meaning and inadvertently, in expediting the destruction of whatever percentage of those 25K acres have been exploited since then.

Suzuki inadvertently provides another enlightening example of aboriginal peoples' "environmental consciousness." This is the case of the James Bay Crees whose "practices of good conservation and sustainable harvesting," Suzuki maintains, "are at the heart of their traditions." In the early 1990s the Province of Quebec announced that its public utility, Hydro Quebec, would begin a massive extension of a hydroelectric project it began in the 1970s. After an international campaign was mobilized to publicize the havoc that such a project would wreak on Cree hunting grounds, development was put on hold. Suzuki argued that the environmental impacts of the project explained "why the Cree are rejecting all offers of money and compensation and are prepared to fight any further development on their lands" and maintained that "the resolution of their battle with Hydro Quebec will inform us whether we can change our priorities and values."

But Suzuki's romanticism was again to collide with the events of history. The "resolution of their battle with Hydro Quebec" was the Crees signing an agreement to allow logging, mining, and hydroelectric development to take place. In exchange for this assault on their "sacred lands," Quebec agreed to pay the Crees $3.5 billion over fifty years. And although the agreement promised to consult the Crees in how development would proceed so as to protect hunting and trapping, it was well known that the proposed hydroelectric project was going to flood vast areas of the region. The Sierra Club and Révérence Rupert continued to opposed the project, but they maintained that without the support of the Crees it was unlikely that they could be politically successful.

The James Bay case is not unusual. It has been the typical sequence of events for all aboriginal "resistance" to development projects in the 1990s.... Aboriginal groups also use their opposition to a project as leverage for their land claims, saying that they will not allow development to proceed unless the federal government begins negotiations....

[I]n the case of international whaling ... corporate interests in Norway and Japan are aligning themselves with aboriginal groups in the Pacific Northwest in their attempts to restore commercial whaling. Aboriginal groups in Washington State have gained exemptions from regulations banning whale hunting on the basis that it is a "traditional" or "sacred" activity. Perhaps the right to make "a moderate living" by commercial whaling will be the next step. After all, a legal argument could be made that the commercial sale of whale meat is needed for aboriginal "subsistence."

I know, I know: they've just been "corrupted by colonialism." 'tain't their fault. It's the white man's fault instead. Observe, via Taylor:

Some primal peoples became much more war-like and socially oppressive through contact with European peoples—for example, the Plains Indians or the Jivaro of central America.

And yet, from the anthropologist Roger Sandall;

[In] pre-state, preliterate, precivilized tribal societies: 65% were at war continuously, while 55% were at war every year. As to massacres: at the site of Crow Creek in South Dakota, in what seems to be the year 1325 according to archaeological dating, more than 500 men, women, and children were slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated, and all this well before anything remotely resembling civilization was available locally—and long before Columbus. Regarding the toll of dead and injured, Keeley writes that "the proportion of war casualties in primitive societies almost always exceeds that suffered by even the most bellicose or war-torn modern states."

Speaking as someone who grew up in the flatlands of Manitoba, you can't get much more "plains" than South Dakota.

One good point from Taylor, amid the "interminable dross":

[W]hereas only 2% and 17% of hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies have class systems, 54% and 71% of advanced horticultural and then agrarian societies have them. Whereas war is rare or absent in 73% and 41% of hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies, it is perpetual in 34% and common in 48% of advanced horticultural societies (Lenski, Nolan & Lenski, 1995). In view of this, Wilber's use of Lenski's data has to be selective in order to seem to justify his views. Perhaps the main problem though is that Lenski is referring to contemporary examples of these societies, but Wilber's treats them as historical examples. When Lenski says that war is common in 27% of hunter-gatherer societies, and 10% of them have slavery, this emphatically does not mean that 27% of ancient hunter-gatherer societies had war, and 10% had slavery. In fact, given the lack of archaeological evidence for war from the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods of history, and given the cultural disruption of contemporary hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists (and the influence of colonial cultures), we can assume that these figures would be lower still for ancient societies. Of course, as we've seen, Lenski believes that we can usefully compare contemporary primal peoples with their historic counterparts, but he never states that his statistics apply equally to historic peoples. A more puzzling matter is where Wilber obtains the statistic—also attributed to Lenski—that 58% of foraging peoples practise (or practised, according to Wilber) frequent or intermittent warfare (1995, 1996). I can't locate this statistic in either of my two editions of Human Societies. It's difficult to see how this would be possible when war is absent or rare in 73% of foraging societies.

The (amazon.com) reviews are mixed for both Keeley's book and for Steven LeBlanc's Constant Battles. But then, when you consider that "LeBlanc begins by describes his own field experiences, in which he and his colleagues routinely ignored 'clear evidence for warfare,'" it becomes obvious that the accepted anthropological dataset is deeply flawed, and that any accurate view of primitive behaviors is going to have an uphill battle in going against that orthodox data.

And in that scenario, you're fully justified in giving a greater weight to human nature than to the existing data, in estimating how our distant, savage ancestors will have behaved.

Taylor also quotes from James DeMeo's Saharasia, which has already been half-debunked by Steven Dutch. (DeMeo is the Director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory, of Ashland, Oregon and "cites [quack Wilhelm] Reich repeatedly in his own papers." OMFG.) And he claims that there is a "large amount of evidence suggesting that animals have psychic powers." That "evidence," of course, comes from the latter-day Reich, Rupert Sheldrake (utterly debunked here).

Taylor also buys into Sahlins' "original affluent society" nonsense. Big surprise: he's just another PC/integral fool who only researches half the question, ignores the evidence he doesn't want to face, and then thinks he has it all explained, even when his explanations fly in the face of human nature. You know, the same human nature that liberals think they can change so easily.

Taylor has also packaged his half-baked conjectures and amateur understanding of anthropology into a full-length book: The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era. Forgive me if I don't rush out to buy that load of shite, since I already know it's not worth reading, except to do a more thorough debunking. And Taylor's such a small potato no one would even care, right?

I've still done near-zero reading in the details of anthropology. And yet I've had no difficulty at all poking holes left-and-right in Taylor's superficially well-researched claims. So how do you think a real, non-PC student of that discipline would shred his thesis?

The sooner these dopes forget everything they've ever learned about "integral spirituality" (and "Noble Savage" crap, which is what DeMeo and Taylor's position boils down to), the better off they'll be. Because it's bullshit from beginning to end.

C. R. Hallpike has already done far, far more in-depth work on the Piagetian levels of psychological development of primitive peoples than clumsy amateurs like Taylor will ever do, in the sadly-out-of-print The Foundations of Primitive Thought.

Looks like I got the last affordable copy, too. No, you can't have it.

P.S. So Letterman has apologized for the joke about Palin's daughter and A-Rod. Which I still don't think he needed to do, but whatever.

Now, do you think the "slutty flight attendant" Palin will have the decency to apologize for suggesting that Letterman was a pedophile, who couldn't be trusted around her children? 'Cause, you know, she had already (stupidly) refused to accept that explanation for his confusion about her daughters, regarding it as a lie that took him several days to think up....

One thing's for sure, anyway: The disparaging stories about her being merciless with anyone who crossed her back in Alaska were absolutely true. 'Cause this is exactly the same pattern.

And, 30 ROCK is a rip-off of THE MUPPET SHOW!

Sesame Street - 30 Rocks.

From Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism:

In his 1914 book about Zeus, the classicist Arthur Cook declared that "both Attic and Cretan art presuppose the swastika as the earliest ascertainable form of the Labyrinth. Following Evans, he argued that the Labyrinth represented a Dionysian ritual to promote the fertility of the crops, its twists and turns denoting the pattern made by the feet of flower-wreathed Cretan youths dancing in one of the great courtyards of Knossos. (p.46)

Until the 1850s, speculation about the age of the earth had been safely kept separate from questions about Biblical authority. A compromise had been reached, which acknowledged that the earth was far older than the human race, but broke up the history of the owrld into distinct periods. Only the last of these epochs was the human world whose chronology had to fit with the book of Genesis. In the early nineteenth century, British geologists and archaeologists were agreed that the first appearance of humans was a major event in the history of the earth, dividing the "modern" world of the Christian Bible from a series of former worlds populated by now-extinct animals.

But in the late 1830s, a French customs officer in Abbeville in the Somme Valley named Jacques Boucher de Perthes began to collect flint tools (revealed during the construction of the town's fortifications) that he claimed had appeared alongside the bones of extinct mammals. The Frenchman's draughtsmanship was not good enough to imperil the delicate Anglican truce between Scripture and science, and Boucher de Perthes was dismissed as a crank in geological and archaeological circles in England. Then, in 1858, a cave in Devon yielded seven flint tools along with the bones of long-extinct rhinoceroses, cave bears and hyenas. (p.53-4)

In the 1860s, as Darwinism and the burgeoning feminist movement conspired to undermine the assumption that the patriarchal family was either God-given or natural, the idea arose of a universal matriarchal stage of cultural evolution. From the beginning, the island of Crete occupied a privileged place in these speculations ... due to its reputation as the place of origin of the Lycians who, according to Herodotus, took their names from their mothers. Bachofen characterized it as a place where traces of the matriarchal system—such as the custom of referring to Crete as the "motherland" rather than the "fatherland"—were still visible in classical times....

[Militant feminist Jane Ellen Harrison's] narrive of the primordial oneness of the original Great Goddess breaking down into the squabbling divinities of the Olympian pantheon was highly influential....

Minoan archaeologists began gradually to dismantle the last vestiges of Evans's pacifism [as projected by him onto Crete], seizing the headlines at the beginning of the 1980s with a series of finds suggesting that the Minoans practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism....

[T]he archaeologist Peter Warren excavated a room in the town of Knossos containing a deposit of children's bones covered in knife cuts that suggested that they had been carved up like meat. (p.77, 89, 209, 223)

The poetry of Robert Graves, and the feminism of Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas is rooted in exactly the same [male] virgin-blood-drenched soil, sanitized into a feminist paradise.

In the 1850s, Psyche stood for a widely diffused symbolic association between butterflies and the soul's immortality, popularized through children's books.... [A] "creeping creature" that only "seemed to die" before bursting forth as a "glittering butterfly" was an appropriate symbol for a dying man's hope of attaining immortality....

The symbol replicates itself [across cultures] without the necessity for direct transmission because the association between butterflies and mourning can arise anywhere loved ones die, caterpillars metamorphose, and people look to nature for a symbolic embodiment of their spiritual hopes. (p.136, 8)

[In Moses and Monotheism, after] sketching the history of the Jewish people using the psychoanalytic vocabulary of "latency" and "repression," Freud claimed that the outlines of this history resembled the development of an individual neurosis. From pointing out this resemblance it was but a short step to conclude that: "Early trauma—defence—latency—outbreak of neurotic illness—the partial return of the repressed.... The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of individuals." (p.156)

Echoes of Haeckel's "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" thing—where it was thought that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny. Not to mention of Ken Wilber's writings, where an individual's spiritual evolution retraces the stages which the Kosmos has gone through (even if he now sees those stages as being merely "kosmic habits" or morphogenic fields), and in the same order, without skipping any of the stages:

Just as ontogeny broadly recapitulates phylogeny, humanity's evolutionary history began at the lower realms of the Great Chain, and it did so because it had to recapitulate (nest or envelope) all of the earlier and prehuman stages of evolution....

It does make you wonder whether Freud's idea that history has the same pattern as human psychology (and vice versa) was, you know, at all influential in kw developing his idea that human spiritual evolution recapitulates the evolutionary history of the Kosmos ... especially since Moses and Monotheism is indeed listed in the bibliography of Up from Eden.

I also just stumbled on the work of Paul Devereux, via his Acculturated Topographical Effects of Shamanic Trance Consciousness in Archaic and Medieval Sacred Landscapes:

Death and straightness seemed linked in earlier centuries, but why? Why "dead straight"? The connection seems to be with the spirits of the dead, for German researcher, Ulrich Magin, has recently found an old reference to Geisterwege, or "ghost paths".... "These paths," says the German source, "always run in a straight line over mountains and valleys ... In towns they pass the houses closely or go right through them. The paths end or originate at a cemetery." The spirits of the dead "thrive" on these paths, and "one meets with ghosts quite often" on them....

The concept of lines for spirit use is also incorporated into the American Indian sweat lodge tradition, in which a straight earthen ridge is built to connect the firepit with the lodge entrance for spirits to use to enter there-in....

I have found that the strange, ancient association between spirits and straight lines could also extend to threads and cords.... So an Australian Aboriginal healer would fix the filament produced by a certain insect to the head of a sick person, and run it to a nearby bush where the patient's soul was ensnared.... The spirit would be coaxed down the insect's thread back into the person's body. Again, during a healing, Siberian Buryat shamans would lay an arrow next to a sick person, and run a red thread in a straight line out from the arrow-point to a tree outside the tent, so that the patient's spirit could be brought back along the "road" formed by the thread.... The Kalahari !Kung "climb threads" when their souls go out-of-body during trance dancing ... and the Rigo people of Papua New Guinea leave a taut "fishing line" behind them when they go on out-of-body flights....

Southern African San (or Bushman) rock art repeatedly displays a curious figure known to archaeologists as a "flying buck." Recent research ... confirmed by the San themselves ... shows that this creature, with lines trailing out behind it, represents the out-of-body shaman who transforms into an antelope and then flies....

The effigy mounds (above) depicting birds and winged humans were typical of Amerindian shamanic symbolism. The eagle feather, especially attached to people (c. 900-1500 AD) left many examples of pottery and shells decorated with human-bird figures classed by scholars as the "flying shaman" motif. A tablet of stone bearing the image of a man in bird costume was found in Monk's Mound, North America's tallest prehistoric earthwork, at the center of the Mississippian ceremonial complex of Cahokia....

The antiquity of this bird imagery in shamanism is shown in the Palaeolithic cave painting at Lascaux, France, of an apparently entranced man wearing a bird-mask. Near him is a bird-headed stick, and this was a documented symbol of shamanic trance in Siberia up until recent centuries. In addition, the Siberian shaman might wear bird-claw shoes and a metal representation of a bird's skeleton on his ritual garb, similar to the way a Hopewell Indian shaman would hang bird claw shapes cut out of mica on his robes, as have been found in the Hopewell necropolis known as "Mound City," Chillicothe, Ohio, along with wooden effigies of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Chinese Taoist priests were known as "feather scholars," denoting their shamanic origins (the idea of spirit lines in Feng shui probably came from archaic shamanism via Taoism), while at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, Celtic Druidism, too, was associated with the ability of magical flight. For example, the powerful Druid Mog Ruith is described as wearing an enchennach or "bird dress," and rising up "into the air and the heavens." Again, the father of the pagan Celtic Irish king, Conaire, was said to be a supernatural birdman. The Vedic Upanishads refer to the out-of-body spirit as "the lone wild gander" (in the Brihadaranyaka Upanished) and geese figure prominently in the symbolism of shamanic magical flight worldwide....

Another familiar Western image of spirit flight is the witch on her broomstick. This relates to the use of "flying ointments," prepared by medieval "wise women" (known before their Satanization by the Church as "Night Travellers"—qveldriga, "night rider" or Myrkrida, "rider in the dark") from herbs containing hallucinogenic alkaloids which specifically generate out-of-body sensations and, often, the feeling of body-image transformation into animal forms. Broomhandles were sometimes used to apply the ointments to vaginal tissues....

Tribal societies developed into more complex proto-state and state cultures, and great religions developed across Eurasia, absorbing or marginalizing the earlier shamanic practices. Shamans became priests, and they in turn became theocracies or divine chieftains and kings. Throughout Eurasia, there are myths of "flying sovereigns." In his classic work on shamanism, Mircea Eliade wrote that "The 'magical flight' of sovereigns manifests the same autonomy and the same victory over death" as did the shamanic journey.

Most of the Eurasian myths of flying sovereigns belong to the linguistic group we call Indo-European, and a proto-Indo-European word, *reg, seems to relate to a priest-chieftain function, and means "movement in a straight line." It has become the root of many European words to do with kingship and governmental, spatial, moral and figurative straightness. The English word "ruler" derives from it, for example, and means both a leader and a straightedge. In Sanskrit, *reg can also be translated as mana or supernatural power, and, possibly, "protector." So we have the image of a shaman-chieftain, a protector figure, with charisma or special power....

Eventually, in state societies, the ecstatic, shamanic origins of the straight line-spirit connection became forgotten and the Straight Way became rote ceremonial ways, boundaries, royal routes, imperial avenues, and so on. A vague sense that the Straight Way was somehow sacred or represented power associated with rulership survived, however, as we see with features such as the avenues of Versailles, the Mall leading out from Buckingham Palace, and even the Masonic lines of roads radiating from the White House in Washington DC.

He's also written non-woowoo-ily on the related topic of ley lines:

Feng-shui, the ancient Chinese art of landscape divination, has its ancient roots in ancestor worship and Taoism, which in turn derived from shamanism. One of Feng-shui's basic tenets is that houses and tombs should not be built on straight lines in the landscape. Such features include roads, ridges, river courses, lines of trees, fences and such like. They all facilitated the passage of troublesome spirits, so if a tomb or building was on the course of such an "arrow" in the land, then preventative measures had to be taken. These included the erection of physical barriers to mask the entrance to the building, placing fearsome "door guardian" effigies either side of the door, or placing a special mirror at the entrance so that any horrible spirits would scare themselves off by their own reflections....

This basic idea of spirits traveling in straight lines is found all around the Pacific rim, but the association of straight ways across the land [typically in societies which had neither the horse nor the wheel] with the passage of spirits is even wider....

In Ohio, between 150 BC and 500, the Hopewell Indians built geometrical earthworks covering many acres, along with straight linear features which seem to have been ceremonial roadways. In 1995, archaeolgists announced the discovery of a 60-mile-long, dead straight Hopewell ritual road connecting earthworks at Newark with the Hopewell necropolis at Chillicothe....

NASA surveys have found paths running through the mountainous rainforest of the Arenal area of Costa Rica. These paths, which "follow relatively straight lines" despite the difficult terrain, have been examined at ground level and have been dated to AD500-1200. Investigators discovered that the paths are "death roads," and are still used for carrying corpses to burial, and also for transporting laja, volcanic stone, used in the construction of tombs and cemetery walls....

Five hundred or so miles south of Cuzco, lines criss-cross the altiplano of western Bolivia. These lines can reach lengths of twenty miles, considerably longer than any found at Nazca. These are absolutely straight, regardless of the irregularities of the ground, and link shrines of various kinds.

Lines, solitary and in groups, in the form of desert markings or long rows of small stone heaps, have been seen at other places in the Andean region, at least as far south as the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Prehistoric roads and rumours of lines occur as well in lowland, rainforest parts of South America, east of the Andes. Some of these take the form of perfectly straight causways through dense jungle....

But why straight lines? Dobkin de Rios suspected that they derived from the entoptic patterning that occurs in the human cortex early in trance states as a result of poorly-understood neurophysiological mechanisms. These entoptic ("within vision") images are universal to the whole human race in all periods of time, and adhere to a specific range of "form constants"—grids, dots, webs, spirals and tunnel forms, arabesques, nested curves, lines, and so on. They dance before the closed eyes in trance states (especially in trance states induced by hallucinogens), and form the basis of vivid geometric patterns that shimmer and move. With open eyes, the images can seem projected onto surfaces in the physical environment.

Eventually, as trance deepens, the entoptic forms attract representational imagery stored in memory, so that, for instance, a wavy line might turn into a snake. This produces fully-fledged hallucinatory or visionary material. This would of course always have been dressed up in the cultural baggage of particular Native American societies, in just the same way that ayahuasca-induced entoptic patterns are used to convey cultural ideas within the decorative art of the Amazonian Tukano Indians even now.

In brief, the straight landscape lines were a formalised expression of shamanic trance, whether occurring as a desert marking or ritual, ceremonial road. It was, in essence, a specific entoptic pattern, derived, it would seem, from the "tunnel" form constant, which is an experiential straight line....

The symbolic interpretation given to such straight lines by the native peoples themselves was naturally very different to our modern neurophysiological explanations. To them, the original nature of the straight landscape line appears to have been symbolic of spirit travel, of journeying in the otherworld of spirits, of the ancestors, which in shamanic terms was simply another level or dimension of the physical landscape. The line was a sign, or even an actual mapping, of the shaman's ecstatic, out of body journey.

The shamanic straight lines in many societies developed from direct associations with the spirit flight of shamans and lines of spiritual power, to lines associated with the dead, as the shaman was considered temporarily dead while in trance, and the spirit world was inhabited by the ghosts of the ancestors. From such associations, the idea of the "death road" evolved.

There are numerous ways in which travel in the spirit realm was envisaged, but as indicated above, spirit flight is the pre-eminent form. It is the one most emphasised throughout shamanism worldwide: the allusions to flight, particularly through the medium of bird imagery, can be found in rock art, in geoglyphs, in effigy mounds, on a shaman's robes, in ceremonial dancing and costume, in ritual paraphenalia, in shamanic gestural symbolism (such as the flapping of the arms atop ritual poles), and in the legends concerning shamans (the exploits of flying shamans are particularly prominent in Inuit lore, for example). Flight is the very image of ecstasy, of course, and it is the central experience of shamanic trance.

Within the context of soul flight, straightness lends itself to an extra dimension of symbolism, for flight is the straight way over the land—we say "as the crow flies" or "as straight as an arrow," using the very metaphors used by shamanic tradition itself. The lines, in essence, were the markings of a spiritual geography—a geography of the mind superimposed on the physical landscape. The mapping of ecstasy....

It has recently been ethnologically confirmed that these theories regarding the mysterious straight lines of the prehistoric Native Americans landscape are accurate. Enquiries among the Kogi Indians have confirmed that they view some of their straight paved "roads" as physical traces of the spirit routes they follow in the spirit world they call aluna....

In Old Europe, "spirit traps" consisting of webs or nets of threads woven over hoops or other frameworks, or tangled threads in bottles, were placed on paths leading to and from cemeteries, or at the entrances to houses. These can sometimes still be found in regions such as Bavaria. The principle behind these was that while straight lines facilitated the passage of spirits, convoluted or tangled "lines" of threads or cord could ensnare them. [Cf. Native American "dreamcatchers."] There is evidence that ancient stone and turf labyrinths, found in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia, were also used for trapping evil spirits. These ideas are of course very similar to those in Feng-shui, and the idea of straight lines allowing the passage of spirits and crooked one hindering spirit movement seems to have been universal.

From Christianity and its traditional views on Freedom of Expression:

[T]he Irish Censorship Board, assisted by the Catholic Truth Society, continues to uphold the faith ... its decisions could still cause offending authors to lose their jobs at the end of the twentieth century. Christians in secular states have often managed to ban respectable works, again well into the twentieth century: Webster's Dictionary for example was banned in Arkansas because of its entry on Darwinian evolution. Information about family planning and birth control has been banned in many Christian countries....

Over the centuries the Christian Churches have burned countless thousands, perhaps millions, of books of which it disapproved. The Protestant record may not be quite as bad as that of Roman Catholics, but it is not much better. English Parliaments and juries were keen book burners, and the Public Hangman was kept occupied burning political and religious "naughty writings" as well as their naughty authors....

Some writers destroyed their own unpublished works, fearing the consequences of discovery. Thomas Hobbes, who had been lucky to keep his life after publishing Leviathan in 1651, is known to have burned some of his papers while under threat. Even sceptical ecclesiastics were vulnerable. Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, destroyed an incriminating manuscript in the early 1730s. Theologians sometimes published posthumously for fear of the consequences....

Even at the end of the twentieth century there is only one American dictionary that included what publishers call the "big six" four-letter words....

Not until well into the twentieth century that it was possible freely to publish works describing abortion or birth control. In England, as elsewhere, books on the subject were regarded as pornographic and those involved in their publication could be, and were, prosecuted under obscenity legislation....

For many years the American film industry was constrained by the US Production Code, the infamous Hays Code, inspired by God-fearing Christians. So it was that from 1934 to 1968 cinema storylines had to have "moral" endings, kisses could not last more than three seconds , and people were allowed onto a bed only in the most innocent circumstances. By 1968 the Hays Code had become such a joke that, like the British Lord Chancellor's role, it had to be abandoned, despite vocal Christian protestations....

The traditional Christian obsession with sexual matters resulted in prosecutions for obscenity against not only books about birth control, but also respectable literature and even books on psychology. Amongst the victims of obscenity prosecutions have been Flaubert's Madam Bovary, Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Norman Haire's Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge. Christian morality suffered a setback in 1961 when D. H. Lawrence's last book Lady Chatterly's Lover was published in paperback.... In 1968 a play called The Romans in Britain was prosecuted for obscenity. In 1977 a piece of poetry by Professor James Kirkup, The Love that Dares to Speak its Name, was found to be criminally blasphemous....

In 1989 a 20 minute video Visions of Ecstasy was banned in Britain because it was held to be blasphemous, although it was based St. Theresa of Ávila's own accounts of her visions....

In 1955 the BBC decided to allow rationalists a voice. Margaret Knight, an eminent psychologist, gave a talk in which she suggested that people can lead honest and meaningful lives without the aid of religion. The reaction from Christians was powerful. Mrs Knight was attacked for immoral and seditious teachings. Since then, the BBC has never again dared to give rationalism a fair hearing, preferring a safe diet of religion produced by its Religious Department. Not only the BBC favours Christian preferences. In 1961 advertisements by the Family Planning Association were removed from the London Underground because of Roman Catholic sensitivities....

Fundamentalists in California have managed to ban schoolbooks which deal with a wide range of subjects, including the theory of evolution, race relations, nuclear war, sex discrimination, human sexuality, birth control, and the Holocaust....

Because of its history, book burning is generally regarded with horror in the West. But many Christians still regard it as acceptable. After the Scopes trial in 1925 a Christian High School superintendent in Meridan, Mississippi organised a public bonfire of pages torn from text-books dealing with evolution. Following public burning of Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses in the 1980s an Iranian Fatwah was issued calling for the killing of the author. All secular opinion concurred that this was intolerable. The only influential Western voices raised against Rushdie and in favour of censorship, came from the Christian Churches.

And those, you see, are the real "Christian values" which have (thankfully) been eroded by science and reason in our secular society. Somebody tell Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, Ann Coulter, etc....

P.S. Deepak Chopra Defends Oprah, Commits Endless Logical Fallacies:

[T]he figure of 35% refers to the cumulative effect of everything that is not treatment, which includes not just the actual placebo effect, but more importantly a large component deriving from the body's natural (evolved, not mystical) ability to heal itself.

Indeed, a more recent study by Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche published in 2001 in the New England Journal of Medicine properly compared the improvement achieved with no treatment to the improvement due to the placebo effect, and found little measurable effect of the placebo....

Moreover, a rational person would conclude from the study of "real" and "fake" acupuncture that there is no such thing as real acupuncture! If pricking patients with toothpicks has the same effect as inserting needles, wouldn't you surmise that the whole thing is in fact the result of placebo and natural healing, no acupuncture required thank you very much?

And, Could Newton's Apple Have Been An Indian Mango?

Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the "Kerala School" in India identified the "infinite series"—one of the founding principles of modern mathematics and a basic component of calculus—in about 1350.

And, Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology. Cute girl, and really good at math.

Wow, Sarah Palin really is nuts:

I saw that, and was initially hoping it was just Tiny Fey taking the piss ... but no. It's the real thing.

Palin has been the subject of an unbelievable amount of unfairness and misogyny from the left-wing media since she emerged into the national public eye. And now she really has totally lost it—whether she's in "maternal attack dog" mode for her children being threatened, or feeling her own parenting skills insulted, or just giving in to her "Christian Crusader" side.

She's gone and walked straight into a feud with people who are far smarter than she is, and who get paid to make merciless fun of others. And she's done it in the most truly offensive and un-funny way, by suggesting that Letterman is a pedophile, just because he cracked a joke she didn't like, which was almost surely written by someone else anyway! (Even most stand-up comics don't write their own material, much less could Letterman compose the quantity of material he has to read off the teleprompter.)

Yeah, Dave (who I've never been a fan of, by the way—I doubt that I've watched more than a dozen of his shows in my life) also joked about the difficulties in "keeping Eliot Spitzer away from [Palin's] daughter," implying that the latter girl was a hooker. I guess getting pregnant in high school still carries a certain stigma with it; who knew? And he and his writers didn't bother to check whether Bristol was at the game, and their razzing is transparently partisan. It happens. But if the Republican Mark Steyn was allowed to drool-in-print over Palin's "sexy librarian" look last summer, how on earth is it offensive for Letterman to take that to the next level, and turn that into a "slutty flight attendant" schtick? (Or is this the point where we note that "Steyn is more of a comedian than a political analyst"?) And how offended were these same right-wing idiots when Rush Limbaugh referred to the 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton as the "White House dog"? They didn't find it funny, and worthy of a laugh? Of course they did. Hell, Palin herself might very well have had a chuckle or two about that, back in the day.

Palin has entered a "war" she can't win, going totally over a line, where "the gloves are off," and Letterman's writers have a very personal motivation to "tear her a new V." She's absolutely gonna get her shapely, McCain-distracting ass and perineum handed to her every time she or her kids step out the door, from now on, with the full support of the liberal media's "echo chamber." And from her unhinged, seething, nearly rabid behavior in that interview, she deserves every bit of it. (Unfortunately they can't do the same thing to President Oreo or Lady MacBama, for being afraid of the "R-word," and likely for also supporting those two disasters politically anyway.)

The original joke (about Alex Rodriguez knocking up Palin's daughter during the game) was funny—anyone who can't see that is letting his politics short-circuit his sense of humor. And even if it had originally been directed at her 14-year old daughter (rather than the 18-year-old airhead who can't decide whether abstinence is reasonable or unreasonable to expect of teenagers), "knocked up" doesn't mean "rape" (except statutory, in the underage case). Or have the repressed conservatives who are so up-in-arms about the "knocked up" issue never seen the friggin' eponymous movie, in which the sex was entirely consensual?

This thing where they're so widely trying to claim that the joke was about rape shows their true colors. A few months ago, Republicans were (rightfully) peeved at how the Left was twisting Limbaugh's "I want Obama to fail" line to their advantage, completely ignoring his intentions ... and now conservatives are doing exactly the same thing, when it suits them.

The Mediterranean people have a very different (and much healthier) attitude toward age-of-consent issues. Of course, that same attitude also prevented them from initially recognizing the problem of Catholic priests sexually abusing altar boys, in thinking that the boys were able to give consent to that, "so what was the problem?" But that's a separate thing anyway, having to do with consent under power differentials in a context where the one in power "knows what God wants the other person to do," not with 14-year-olds being unable to give sexual consent in general.

Whenever things like this come up, I think of a hot blonde barmaid at a local tavern who, by her own admission a couple of summers ago, had "been with men since age fourteen," and who knew completely what she was doing, through all of that. Aside from menarche occurring earlier these days in girls than it used to, due to all the hormones in the meat and dairy they're eating, menstruation is nature's way of telling girls that they're ready to reproduce. And aside from puritanical meddling, there's no reason why culture should overrule nature in that regard.

When Leonard Cohen was living on the Greek island of Hydra, he got involved with an underage girl there, leading to some controversy when that was made public (IIRC). A friend asked him, "Didn't you know she was only fifteen?"

And Leonard said: "I thought she was thirteen."

P.S. On other topics, I've ("clem") been busy commenting here.

And, from Did Cooking Make Us Human?

The argument I present is that what cooking does is create a problem of ownership. When you cook, you have to leave your food exposed to view for a certain amount of time. And that means you can no longer do what a chimpanzee can do, which is pick a fruit from a tree and put it directly into your mouth. Among chimps, there would be fighting over it. But humans don't fight at all. There are social rules against that. The rule is the woman is not allowed to feed any man other than her husband and is required to feed her husband. Those rules mean that her food is [protected from other males by her husband]. This makes sense if you see marriage, the pair bond, as a kind of protection racket in which the woman is required to feed a man because of the threat of having her food taken by other men.

And: Neville Chamberlain the appeaser? Yes, but why?

If you're under the mistaken impression that the nomination of the racist, sexist affirmative-action beneficiary Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court is a good thing, this should cure you of that delusion: Sotomayor on affirmative action.

Me, I'll be praying to my god, that the Senate Judiciary Committee does the right thing:

That pirate girl is delicious. Not sure about her "not being able to pronounce" solarium, though. Ach, the American educational system in action....

P.S. Alright, it turns out Sarah Palin really is an idiot, at least in terms of her spat with David Letterman.

In honor of which:

Good move by Schwarzenegger to switch to digital textbooks. Since they'll be properly licensed, everyone wins except the old printshops.

Gutenberg, we hardly knew ye.

Speaking of which, Weston La Barre's sadly out-of-print Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality is amazingly insightful. He summarizes the Stone Age view:

Bones are given by the male parent, and bones can magically reconstitute the whole animal. As the main storehouse of bone marrow, the brain is the source of semen, via the spinal cord. The supply is limited. The fertility of the head is assimilated to cosmic fertility of the sun, rain, lightning. Fire, light, lightning, and seed are all aspects of the same holy male mystery. The fertility of human, wild animals, and fields can be increased by collecting severed human heads. Fat-marrow and bones are appropriate sacrifice to the immortal spirits, the eternal gods. Immortality also consists in the "continence" of muelos-seed, achieved in various ways. Adult manhood is not the result of endogenous forces but must be obtained from outside through a variety of methods, including homosexual acts. Virility is secreted with the semen, in all ejaculation of whatever kind; virility can thus on occasion be made a gift. Loss of manhood, power, and ultimately life itself results from the "spending" of the life-force, which is a finite capital....

In the Old World ... there are relics of a bone cult of the first hunters, and even evidence of head collecting by pre-sapiens Neanderthaloids in Europe and Asia.... [Thus, the] belief that semen is held in the head ... may be even older than our immediate hominid species, trailing back through Neanderthaloid even to brain-eating Australopithecine erectus....

[B]elief in the separable soul ... is arguably as old as Neanderthal burials and the Neanderthal-inhabited caves. (p. 130-1)

In more detail:

The oldest ritual of which we have any knowledge is the rite at the site of the ancient hunter's ill. The rite is partly propitiation of the animal's spirit for stealing its life to feed one's own and is partly expression of a concern that animals be available again in the future. Life in animals and men is enough alike to assimilate the animal's feelings to one's own, and the ritual is essentially both placation and a magical undoing. In order for the animal to come to life again, the hunter puts the bones, often only the head and feet, in proper anatomical position—and the animal, reconstituted and clothed in flesh, will return alive....

The skull and bones ... or more properly the head and the skeleton, are regarded as the germinal source of animal life, and capable of reproducing the whole. [footnote: So persistent is the concept of bone-regeneration that it is also applied to plants. "The ritual practice of leaving part of the [peyote] rootstalk in the ground to ensure new growth 'from Elder Brother's [Deer's] bones' is common among Huichol peyote seekers."].... American and European prehistorians consider that such ritual-induced immortality of animals is an even older belief than that of human immortality, which is based on it. (p. 1)

Of course it makes complete "sense," from a pre-scientific perspective: You can reproduce plants, in their entirely, by "burying" (i.e., planting) small cuttings or seeds from them; so why couldn't you do the same thing for animals, by burying/planting their "seed"? Even hunting-gathering peoples often understood how such planting worked; they didn't make use of that knowledge simply because they could get by with scrounging for food, without doing all the planning and prep work, and staying in one place, that's required to do even simple horticulture. (I'll find a quote for that sometime; it's probably in Hallpike.)

In fact, that's a much more plausible explanation for where the superstition originated in the first place: from an observation of plant behaviors, magically transferred to animals.

Animistic belief in a separable soul, besides explaining life and death, serves also explain the mysterious persistent patterning in animals, since no matter how many individual animals are killed by hunters, and their flesh eaten by the people, the animal species remains abundant, in a kind of immortal logos-pattern that remains unchanged....

Since semen is the material vehicle of life, the question becomes the origin of semen. It is here that consciousness and life become inextricably melded. The head is easily ascertained to be the main site of the senses. Closing the lids extinguishes eyesight, and turning the head alters the field of vision, as does darkness (hence light is a critical component of life consciousness). Hands over the ears muffle hearing. Taste seems to be in the mouth, smell in the nose. Of course the matter is not so simple, for the sense of touch is widely dispersed in the body, like heat-, pain-, and cold-awareness, proprioceptive kinesthesia, etc. And life surely remains related to breath and warmth, all of which complications account for many alternatives to the head as seat-of-the-soul familiar to anthropologists.... (p. 2-3)

Discerning that the senses are, in humans, significantly in the head seems to be [an] inevitable discovery of a real situation.... (p. 7)

I had, of course, figured out most of that (re: the centering of experience in the head) independently.

If bones are the framework of life, more specifically it is the semen-like marrow (muelos) [i.e., yellow marrow, consisting mostly of white-ish fat cells] in the bones that is believed to be the source of semen. The skull, as the bone enclosing the most plentiful muelos-marrow in the body (the brain), is therefore the major repository of the generative life-stuff or semen. Consciousness and life are the same stuff and thus have the same site.... [T]he concept of brain-muelos as the source of semen is everywhere inherent in European thinking, as well as in that of societies elsewhere....

When primitive peoples supplemented their diet with marrow sucked from animal (and human) bones, then, they were doing that with the full expectation of imbibing the life-force from the former animal.

That worldwide primitive superstition is the reason for head-hunting, and very possibly also for the cannibalism which every race has indulged in:

[S]uperstition about the manly marrow is implicit in the Hindu and Christian rationale of "continence"—which aims literally to retain the soul-stuff of life, hence attain immortality, through non-expenditure of it in sexual orgasm.... [W]idespread headhunting, both primitive and ancient European, had as its motive the collection of male strength and fertility (hence no youth could marry before collecting an enemy head, lest the total tribal supply of fertility be depleted). (p. 4)

[T]he springing of male antlers directly from brain-muelos is quite to be expected, given the ancient placing of the life-stuff itself in the head. "The yearly growth of stag antlers and the obvious connection with the sexual cycle suggest fertility and reproductive potency; the autumnal shedding and spring regrowth further imply seasonal rebirth and immortality in nature." (p. 19-20)

Any other mythologist would just associate antlers/horns with rutting competitions among males, etc. La Barre goes at least an order of magnitude beyond that in understanding where the "fertility symbol" comes from, and explains the primitive thought process underlying it.

The head as glans of the body-as-phallus is also a very old visual trope in Indo-European iconography: compare European examples of great age with the traditional Indic Shiva producing the river Ganges from the top of his head. (p. 21)

The head having contained the life essence, the skull cap was also appropriate for drinking from. The practice is evidently ancient. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian (Upper Paleolithic) levels in the Grotte du Placard, skull tops were found which Breuil and Obermaier thought were used for drinking; one of the best of the Placard cups shows traces of red ochre, a well-known Paleolithic symbol for blood–fire–life....

"In 1875, a skull was found at Pompeii, mounted in precious metals and with the inscription in Greek, "Drink and you shall live for many years"—as if longevity could be increased by imbibing life-stuff. In fact, there is much evidence that the contents of the 'cup,' the brain muelos or skull 'marrow' was the life source and seed itself." Here, to drink life (eau de vie, whiskey—both, literally, "water of life") is to prolong it; hence the familiar toasts "to your health" or "salud" and the like—although purists consider that only the hostess who offers it should propose "skoal" (skull)....

[T]he philologist Onians gives many examples of the overlap or the identity of genius and genital words in the Indo-European languages and explains why the seed of grain is in its "head," why from Plautus onward the source of a stream is its "head," and why the generative force and genius alike are thought to be in the head.... A man's genius (feminine juno) is his personality and capacity for pleasure, but originally meant the generative potency resident in his head.... (p. 22-4)

The head of a man in a long series of first-born lineages is peculiarly sacred, for in the head of this living god is embodied the fertility of all the noble ancestors.... For the same reason of rank, commoners crouch or sit down in the presence of the highborn. No man dares stand higher than the head of the high chief, since within it lies his formidable mana and powerful taboo-placing potency. (p. 29)

[Among the Angami Naga ... [m]aleness is thought to be a fixed quantity of substance, not a quality, and headhunting is imperative because of a "zero sum" ideology. Sexuality depletes total tribal vitality, and therefore young men must collect enemy heads to replenish the sum. A man must therefore take an enemy head before he may marry.

The ancient Egyptians collected male genitals in their battles, and something like this is recorded of biblical Hebrews. (p. 31-2)

Among [the Toradja of Celebes, in Indonesia], headhunting was thought necessary to provide spirit-food for the ancestors. When headhunting was suppressed, "there was an intense anxiety lest the ancestral spirits, no longer fed with a 'harvest' of enemy heads, would perforce eat the villagers themselves"....

[A]lmost worldwide, there are magic male rituals—we even have evidence of puberty rituals in the Old Stone Age (e.g., at Montespan)—that are typically patterned on ordinary birth but zealously kept secret from women who do not understand these male mysteries. Puberty rites are a rebirth of the initiate from the male group, and not uncommonly with a significant surgical editing specifically of the genitals. (p. 34-5)

Decapitation was associated with numerous [Mesoamerican] earth-fertility goddesses, and with the ritual alcoholic drink pulque and the maguey plant. There was "strong conceptualism linking agriculture, fertility, birth, and the [ritual] ballgame with severed heads and decapitation [as well as with female and] male agro-fertility deities"....

A Rockefeller-financed expedition to the Kiowa led by the late Alexander Lesser discovered in this Plains tribe the belief that the bones of any animal, including humans, were the contribution of the male parent ... a concept probably universal among American Indians.... (p. 48-9)

[H]air on the head and hair appearing at puberty (on jaw or pubes) are believed to be so located because of their proximity to the main storage place and conduit of the muelos. Like male animal horns, hair is the sign and the locus of virility and strength. Samson's great strength lay in his hair; folklore is full of such beliefs.... (p. 50)

Reichel-Dolmatoff has uncovered a rich cosmology and symbolism among the Tukana Indians, implicating the Sun, sexuality, and the animals. The yellow rays of go'a-mëe, the Sun Father, are his semen and fertilizing power, penetrating all realms of space. The name refers to bone, the skeleton that sustains the body and "constitutes the basis of the moral code," as well as the continuity of traditions and the conviction of their validity. "The bone-god is a penis," said an informant. Lightning is "the ejaculation of the Sun that can fertilize the land," and the paya (shaman) himself is believed to be able to produce lightning.... [T]he Milky Way is envisaged as a vast area of semen and is the sphere of hallucinations [i.e., the place traveled to in visions], where the cosmic levels join. (p. 56)

[T]o the American Indian, any plant [e.g., peyote, Amanita muscaria] that can move life-consciousness in the human head must be that token contain supernatural power to be held in holy awe. (p. 64)

Aztec collected victims' heads to feed soul-stuff to their gods, according to plentiful contact-period information. (p. 66)

The Greeks had two major and originally conflicting beliefs concerning the location of the life-force or soul: the phrenes and the psyche. The phrenes, or midriff, was clearly associated with breath (pneuma), hence speech, thought, consciousness, life. The various states of breathing and the beating heart, especially under stress and emotion, were evidence for the phrenes location of the life of the individual. But to the Greeks the generative power of man was just as plainly in the head.... Hesiod relates sexual vigor to the seasons and the presence of moisture in the head, as does Alcaeus.... Aristotle taught that the psyche is given in the seed of the male, which no doubt facilitated the widely held notion that a woman has no soul.... The human head and the seed of grain are commonly juxtaposed in Greek metaphor: in one legend, Perseus cut off the Gorgon's head with a sickle. (p. 73-4)

[T]he Greeks did not think the testes produced the seed. They were only a cache by the way, part of the channel, removal of which prevented issue. As late as Aristotle the testes were believed merely to retard the seed....

Alcmaeon of Croton observed the connection of senses in the head with the brain, as evidenced by the "passages" he discovered from the eyes, etc., to the encephalon.... [H]e held—as later did also Hippocrates, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia—that muelos was gathered also from the flesh, more particularly from the fat, though to be sure gathered to the spinal marrow (as evidenced in spinal nerves) and thence to the brain....

In the Timaeus, Plato replicates in classic source the popular Greek beliefs in muelos. The divine part of the marrow is in the head (encephalos), and here life (bios) is ensconced. The psyche is itself seed (sperma), or perhaps more precisely it is in the seed, and the seed is in the skull and in the spinal "generative marrow" and breathes through the genital. The significance of breathing is important.... [T]he seed is breath or pneuma for the stoics; and procreation as blowing is very explicit in Aristotle....

The long-conflicting soul-sites of the Greeks (phrenes vs. psyche) are melded when brain and breath become united—yet still expressing the ancient idea of muelos as brain-semen. The Pythagorean Diogenes of Apollonia taught that "the seed is a drop of the brain containing in itself warm vapor," which vapor becomes in turn the psyche of the new creature.... Greeks believed that both the genius of a man and his psyche might emerge from his loins as a snake when he died. [footnote: "Pythagoras says: 'serpents are created out of the spinal marrow of corpses'—a thing which Ovid also calls to mind in the books of the Metamorphoses, when he says, 'Some there are who believe that sealed in the grave, the spine rotting, marrows of humankind do turn themselves into serpents.'"] And like the psyche itself, the snake had the basic attribute of immortality.... Anciently, it was believed, spirit resides in the bones, a notion probably behind the later Christian use of saints' bones as miracle-cure relics. The earliest Greeks even knew the very old connection of male puberty with the sun....

Belief in the supernatural master-pattern of a species had been the first approximation of an answer to what later came to be called "the problem of the one and the many," of the universal and the particular, pattern and specimen, species and individual.... Plato transformed into an all-explanatory metaphysical principle the ancient mystical concept of the "master of animals," each logos or Word fathering its species.

The master of animals is a nearly worldwide belief of hunting peoples in an immortal spirit-principle provided for each animal species. That is, the master is the divine pattern or logos of each particulated specimen or individual animal. The platonic Idea as father to each actuality is essentially the notion of Form as the master-of-animals father of each species of individual objects: the inseminating Idea of it is in the mind like metaphysical muelos and is the mystical progenitor of each material object. For Greeks the seminal Idea would as a matter of course be housed in the psyche, that is in the head, and ... an implicit theory of the facts of life became a fundamental metaphysic. Indeed, the platonic Idea reverberated throughout the Great Tradition of subjective idealism in all later European philosophy and religion. The development of Platonism from this primitive conception is direct and demonstrable....

Greeks also had the very archaic concept of the material finiteness of the male-stuff or muelos. A man aged because he had used up in venery his very soul- or life-substance. A boy became a man only after being given muelos—hence Greek love or paiderastia. And, finally, life could be preserved immortal only by self-containment, literal "continence" or ascetic non-spending of semen....

From outside, from muelos housed in the head in the psyche-semen, the virtue (virility) of a man was passed on to a worthy youth.... (p. 75-80)

A striking assimilation of bones–muelos–fire–life is found in a pre-Buddhist saito goma cult, in which "the ninety-one pieces of wood used to construct the fire are likened to the same number of bones in the human body—the burning fire signifies becoming a human being in the process of growth within the womb." Again, "Self-generation, perpetual regeneration, has its image in Agni, the Fire"—for which reason a "perpetual fire" is a favorite symbol for immortality, commonly of a great hero. In this context, fire is often associated with another very old symbol of life, in the red-ochre burials dating from the Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian-Magdalenian) in Eurasia, which also occur in America. (The Paleolithic Sungir red-ochre burial in Russia had had a layer of live coals placed beneath it; the painting red of a side-recess at Altamira and another at Gargas "appear to mean the magic making of life deep in the earth, as though in the menstrous womb of a woman.") Red–fire–blood is thus a very old association....

The striking of flint on flint, giving so-called triboluminescence, has no fire-making properties. But sparks struck with flint and iron pyrites ("fool's gold") are hotly incendiary particles that easily ignite dry punk.... The necessary differentness of flint and pyrites may relate to sexual metaphor.

The association of fire-making with sexual intercourse is well-nigh universal, especially with regard to the method of rubbing sticks together....

[F]or Heraclitus, sacred seminal fire is the substrate of all changing reality. All fire flies upward, striving to rejoin the cosmic fire in the Empyrean....

Pliny also wrote that the marrow descends through the vertebrae from the brain ... and argued that brain-marrow is of the same substance as semen....

Marrow and fat are not sharply distinguished in classical thinking. Since both easily burn, they are regarded as obviously rich in hidden fire, life. The confounding of muelos and fat and their identification with seed and life explain the many associations of fat with sacred fire and light. A candle ... is both a sacrifice and a prayer.... The meaning of anointment is literal for the ancients: it is an en-oiling of the king or other favored individual, bestowing new life and strength. And, naturally, anointment is of the head....

[N]othing is more logical than that spirits should be fed spirit-food [i.e., the fat and bones of sacrificial victims]. The gods are not being cheated, but are getting the stuff of life. The sacrifice to them of fat and bones therefore keeps immortal gods immortal. (p. 81-5)

The pig is highly suitable for symbolizing the great goddess, whose worship in Europe perhaps reached back to the hypermammalian "Venuses" of the Upper Paleolithic. The pig, rich in fat, is notably fecund.... Classic peoples understood that pigs' fatness and fecundity (in their eyes much the same thing) resulted from their feeding on the [phallic] "mast" (mas, male) of the oak, the All-Father's tree with its abundant replication of the glans or acorn (oak-kernel). Again, according to Frazer, the "reason why the Druids worshiped the mistletoe-bearing oak, above all the other trees in the forest, was the belief that every such oak had not only been struck by lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the celestial fire. [footnote: Annual observations, made for seventeen years in the Lippe-Detmold forest, showed that lightning-stricken oaks exceeded the number of stricken beeches by 60 to 1.]....

The head of the boar, sacred to the fertility goddess Freyr (Freja) whose emblem it was, constituted the chief feature of the Yule feast; the combination of head, boar, and goddess indicates that this solstitial sun rite of Yule was a fertility festival before it became Christmas. (p. 86-8)

Classic peoples ... came to contrive a network of mutually equivalent symbols for their divinely Shining One. Gold, which does not corrode or tarnish, is a fit symbol for the eternal undying "spiritual" male principle of life. "Incorruptible" gold plainly has eternal life. It is as immortal as the sun, which gold also symbolizes. The sun seems to die daily when it sinks into the mother earth at night, her son-consort, but is reborn each dawn, the Roman Sol Invictus.... Because of the seemingly infinite extensibility of gold leaf—like Fire, like Logos—the Orphics found gold symbolic of the soul and its immortality. Another symbol for immortality was a spring of ever-flowing water—ever since Plautus the source of a river, incidentally, is its "head".... Gold is as sacredly eternal as the Sun, as life itself....

Greeks, we have noted, believed that at death a man's spinal marrow emerged from his loins in the form of a serpent. [footnote: "One is led to wonder whether the fascinating quality of the snake [in sloughing its skin] might not have contributed to the origin of circumcision.... Circumcision is an attempt to obtain for the penis the reinvigoration experienced by the snake, through a bit of sympathetic magic"....] The snake is a very old symbol of immortality because it seems to be reborn at each shedding of its skin.... [T]hat flaccid flesh becomes seeming bone [in the male organ] could be another Stone Age metaphor.

Later Jews [after Moses] had a special form of the ageless bone-engendering-life motif. Rabbinic tradition held that the luz, or lower coccyx end of the spine, remains in the grave after the rest of the body is gone and, when the dew of heaven falls on it, will become again a complete body and live. Similarly, Jewish legend has it that the bones, nails, and brain come from the father, but flesh and blood from the mother—in good Old Stone Age tradition. And seemingly before any influence from Europe, Hebrews and other Semites took and kept severed trophy heads in the belief they could prophesy. Gold as a symbol of immortality was also Hebraic.... (p. 89-91)

Siva and his worshippers are often smeared with ashes. "Rebirth from fire is a generally accepted theme in Hinduism, and ashes are a particularly potent form of seed"....

For the Hindus, gold was the stuff of life or immortality. Gold is fire, gold is the seed of Agni = Fire, or of Indra, the god who fertilizes with lightning in the thunderstorm....

Hindus also believe there can be power-transmission from husband to lover via adulterous coitus, much in the same manner of power-transfer among Blackfoot Indians. (p. 94-5)

I had previously guessed that the "the idea of semen being produced in the brain also relates to the kundalini-yoga practice of transmuting your seed into life-force, and raising it up the spine, into the brain." Thus, observe:

The [chakra in the] middle of the forehead may represent a displacement upward of the female organ. "The yogi, by drawing his semen to this special point, the site of the third eye, reverses the flow of normal sexuality and hence the flow of normal time; thus he transmutes seed into Soma, converting the fatal act of intercourse into an internalized act that will assure immortality." The head as "the reservoir in which semen is stored" is the rationale behind the belief that "there are some holy men who learn the trick of stopping the falling nectar [from the brain, down the uvula] with their tongues; and as long as they do that, they cannot die... [A powerful yogi is said to have an intact store of rich, uncurdled semen in his head.]" (p. 97)

That "trick" is known as khechari mudra.

Leonardo [da Vinci] made a full dozen of coition studies in his anatomical drawings, yet in at least one saggital section of the male he shows ducts to convey the brain-muelos from the cerebrospinal canal to the male genital that are in fact not there....

Leonardo believed the tradition that spinal marrow is the same substance as the brain whence it is derived. (p. 2-3, 117)

Finally, the "sensible," Christian perspective:

Even within marriage, intercourse should not be performed for pleasure, a dogma reasserted in a papal bull in the middle of the present [i.e., twentieth] century. The Church cut down the number of days on which even married couples might legitimately have intercourse. It was made illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—the equivalent of five months in the year. Then it became illegal for forty days before Easter, forty days before Christmas, three days before attending Communion—despite rules requiring frequent attendance—and forty days after parturition. Additionally, of course, it was forbidden during penance.... "Involuntary nocturnal pollutions were a sin; the offender must rise at once and sing seven penitential psalms, with a further thirty in the morning. If the pollution occurred when he had fallen asleep in church, he must sing the whole psalter." [footnote: At one time, marriages were legal only when made during a specific twenty-five weeks of the year, between 8:00 a.m. and noon. Abolished in the Reformation, the regulation was restored by Laud and made statute law in the reign of George II, infractions being punishable by fourteen years penal servitude.] (p. 111, 133)

No matter how bad things get, Christians can always find a way to make it worse.

Anyway, that's one book that needs to be kept in print. And it would be so easy ... if only it was digital.

For reference: London broil. Observe:

P.S. Speaking of "making it worse," if you're wondering what's happening in Africa:

The new prez. of South Africa, whom the MSM has suddenly lost interest in, is a polygamist with 5 wives and about 13 kids. He intends making polygamy legal again, after it was outlawed by the British colonial government and later under Apartheid. Of course the white women are not so happy but stay mum since complaining about black chauvinists may just cause someone to label them racist, which is the worst thing that could happen to a modern (white) human being. I have a suspicion that quite a few white men do not mind the new legal possibility and that de facto pseudo-polygamy is also going to set in under whites. This may be a model for poor Afrikaner girls.

It's ironic in that many liberal white women there and of course in the West were so sympathetic to the black movement. Most are mum now, as are the pastors and other apologists of the ANC. Of course they now say that Mandela would not have done this, but he just practised serial polygamy because he was smart enough to know it would not go down so well amongst his western donors. It's funny how quickly we went from Human Rights, freedom, anti-racism and other high-minded slogans to polygamy and bascially primitive tribal society. It only took 15 years in South Africa.

The second half of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation.

The general view [of Canadian aboriginals] is ... that corruption has been caused by European influence, since pre-contact aboriginal societies shared resources and individuals did not accumulate material wealth. These theorists maintain that the problem lies with what is referred to as "neo-colonialism"—the imposition of "colonial institutional structures, philosophies, and norms" on aboriginal political systems.... [T]hey maintain that the key to solving the current leadership problems is for aboriginal peoples to reject "European" values and revert to their traditional conceptions of political organization.

Aboriginal societies were actually pre-class, with distribution determined by kinship relations. In all human societies characterized by neolithic technology and hunting and gathering/horticultural practices, extended kinship groups have shared resources communally. This did not come about because of some "philosophy" or "spirituality" separate from material circumstances but because production was too meagre for wealth to be accumulated. As soon as aboriginal peoples acquired Iron Age technology and participated in a market economy, economic differentiation and "hierarchies" began to form....

Myths about the existence of "natural socialist" philosophies before contact also fail to consider that "consensus" and "sharing" occurred within, not between, kinship groupings.... Institutionalized cooperation with non-kin only emerged with the development of civilization. (p. 119-20)

[T]he native leadership asserts that non-aboriginal people are in perpetual debt to the entire native population, since "white people" stole their land, took away their languages and culture, and subjected them to all sorts of abuse. (p. 127)

[T]raditional aboriginal societies had no understanding of theft because the kinship relations and low productivity of hunting and gathering economies necessitated sharing for group survival. (p. 147)

[Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Effect] is estimated to occur between one to three births per thousand in European countries, but rates for aboriginal children can range anywhere from one hundred to four hundred per thousand of the school-aged population. (p. 162)

Aboriginal peoples were observed to be in good physical condition in comparison to the Europeans who arrived because subsistence practices were incompatible with frailty. In aboriginal societies there was no enough surplus to keep the decrepit alive, and only the strongest survived.... Essentially ... aboriginal cultures believe that people can fall ill because they have been affected by evil spirits or have failed to propitiate good ones. In response to such beliefs, it is maintained that various rituals are needed to bring about a cure. (p. 176-7)

A vague conception of causation makes it possible to claim that just a few [shamanic healing] techniques and remedies can "cure" everything. (p. 182)

E. Wade Davis ... argues that "between 25 and 50 percent of the modern drug armamentarium is derived from natural products, and most of these compounds were first used as medicines or poisons in a folk context." Although Davis references two sources as "evidence," he identifies only twelve drugs that have been developed in this way (four were from the Americas)....

[I]t appears that [historian Olive] Dickason's statement about "500 drugs used in the medical pharmacopoeia today" is not true. First, it is not correct to imply that folk remedies and pharmaceuticals are the same.... Even Waldram et al.'s figure of 170 is a gross exaggeration. Many of the "remedies" derived from these plants include flavorings, colorings, bandages, latex products, and suspensions; they can hardly be considered "drugs." And of the remaining herbal remedies originally used by Europeans, almost all were dropped from the Pharmacopoeia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Vogel's compilation, only ... fourteen were still listed as of 1970....

So, from the "thousands of drugs," we have very few that are significant to modern pharmacology. With the exception of quinine, cocaine, curare, and ipecac, the other remedies have only a very general application. They relieve aches, pains, and coughs or act to purge unwanted substances from the body. And with the exception of coca leaves, all other plants were used to treat much more general conditions than the drugs that were eventually synthesized from them....

The large number of substances used as expectorants and purges also had a superstitious basis. This phenomenon was noted by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in his studies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, where he points out that medicine "consisted essentially in the expulsion of the evil spirit by incantations and ritual acts" and "the nastier the potion, the sooner the demon would take flight."

The process of trial and error, however, did enable those who ate plants with beneficial results to thrive and pass on this experience to their offspring. Through the operation of this mechanism over a number of generations, aboriginal peoples learned to use various plants as remedies for general ailments. But this did not mean that they had knowledge of the pharmacological properties of plants. They had discovered a connection between the ingestion or application of a particular plant and the resulting effect (usually relief from general pain), but there was no understanding of why a particular plant had the effect that it did. (p. 184-7)

Because aboriginal people lived according to an "oral tradition," knowledge was not disseminated with the written word but through storytelling, ceremony, and allowing children to "learn by example." We are also told that teaching was "task oriented." There were no abstract principles that had to be learned; education was concerned with helping children to understand their place in the community and giving them the skills to hunt or gather and be a member of the group. (p. 195)

The ignorance and insularity being perpetuated by self-governance of education has yet to be understood, as native education programs are reviewed by advocates. In these evaluations, the most common maneuver is the usual confusion of culture and race, and the charge of racism that meets anyone who recognizes the developmental gap between aboriginal teaching methods and modern educational processes. There is also the accusation that acknowledging this gap will be harmful to aboriginal peoples' self-esteem and that a critical analysis of native spirituality is disrespectful....

One of the proposals made by the National Indian Brotherhood ... is "eliminating the use of IQ and standardized tests for Indian children." (p. 200)

Animistic beliefs are a reflection of the neolithic period's lack of technological development and a lower capacity to control nature. Cultures at this level of development reacted to scarcity by trying to appease animal spirits through various taboos and rituals. The Montagnais, for example, blamed lack of success at hunting beaver on feeding beaver bones to dogs instead of hanging them on trees or throwing them into the water, while the southwestern Ojibwa thought "speaking ill of a beaver" would have the same effect. It is such taboos and rituals that are referred to when anthropologists maintain that aboriginal peoples are respectful toward animals.

Rather than methods of "managing" wildlife populations, taboos and rituals were simply attempts to increase the numbers of animals that could be killed and eaten. "Management" of wildlife merely consisted of depleting resources until the carrying capacity of the area had been exceeded, and then moving to another location....

Aboriginal beliefs can even result in opposition to environmental management. One example is the belief in reincarnation; killing more animals becomes one answer to wildlife scarcity, since a greater number are believed to be "reborn." This concept has led some aboriginal people to resist the implementation of wildlife management practices on the grounds that animal spirits would be offended. Another example is the idea that animals "choose" to be hunted, and therefore imposing limits on harvesting "is denying the animal's right of choice and hence exhibits not only extreme disrespect towards the animal, but also endangers the continuation of everybody's survival as the animals may refrain from offering themselves in the future." With this logic, even the mass slaughter of endangered species could be justified by the belief that the sighting of an animal indicates that it "has offered itself to the hunter." (p. 219-20)

[The scientific] methodology has evolved out of "traditional knowledge." Rather than being another "way of knowing," traditional knowledge is a precursor to the scientific method." (p. 235)

Jared Diamond claims that hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers are "walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution and potential uses." But substantiation of the "detail explanation" of the effects of permafrost, the nature of the "better predictions," the "more precise" and "much richer" observations, or the specific nature of these "walking encyclopedias" have not been supported by evidence made available for public review. (p. 238)

[Native] "ecological logic" ... consists of dividing organisms into categories based on considerations of whether or not they "rise to the surface," "walk," or are found on the sea bed. This kind of "classification" appears to reflect the fact that the methods used for hunting these organisms would differ considerably. (p. 241)

[A]ll employees working for the Government of the Northwest Territories are required to recognize native spirituality as a legitimate way to explain natural processes, because challenging it would result in their opposition to declared policy [re: the taking of "traditional knowledge" as having scientific value in the settlement of land claims] and allegedly constitute a breach of the Public Service's "oath of loyalty." (p. 244)

[T]he undeveloped character of aboriginal culture makes it impossible for most aboriginal people in their current state to become productive members of Canadian society. (p. 253)

Attempts to communicate directly with community members about important issues are thwarted under the pretence of "respect." Liberal democratic principles like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality under the law are not part of aboriginal culture and are generally lacking in native communities. This means that current initiatives to enable aboriginal peoples to "decide for themselves" actually result in the opposite; civil rights are eroded with the implementation of self-government, enabling powerful families to decide for everyone, distributing resources as they see fit. (p. 255)

Aboriginal communities produce little of economic value and therefore cannot be considered "socialist" or "communistic" in any way. Aboriginal politics actually has more in common with capitalism than socialism. Aboriginal peoples are encouraged to become "businesspeople" and live off royalties from resource development. This is in complete opposition to the real conception of socialism, where resources are collectively owned and everyone participates in production. The capitalistic nature of aboriginal politics can also be seen in the failure of any attempt by the government to evenly distribute the subsidies to native communities. The native leadership opposes all proposals to equalize wealth by helping the poorest first, instead using its power to distribute money to friends and relatives. This is what happens when tribal culture combines with capitalist economics; "socialism" in aboriginal communities is nowhere to be found. (p. 257-8)

Aboriginal peoples' lack of education and their impoverished subsistence is also romanticized under the rubric of postmodernism because they are "children of nature" and should not be contaminated by "linear thinking" and "white greed." These kinds of ideas are constantly disseminated by the mass media, where films like Dances With Wolves portray natives as having a natural nobility not possessed by whites. (p. 260)

[T]he same rules did not apply inside and outside [Amazonian] Yanomamö villages; stealing from others and killing people, while unacceptable within the village, were appropriate activities if directed at neighboring clans perceived to be enemies....

The Yanomamö were an important case for study because they had not yet been colonized, and therefore the violence that occurred could be directly linked to relations within and between indigenous lineages, clans, and marriage alliance systems.... [T]hese circumstances are unlikely to have been unique to the Yanomamö, and reflect the violent relations that existed between all kinship groups before institutions binding upon the entire population could manage tribally based violence.... "Had anthropologists been around before Columbus in North America, I am sure that levels of violence among native Americans would be strictly comparable to those found among the Yanomamö. And the probability is very high that in our own tribal background violence was very common as well." (p. 263-4)

P.S. Rush Limbaugh Receives "Freedom of Speech Award". Very good ideas, whatever else you may think of the man. Because the appropriate response to people who try to silence you as a "racist," "sexist," etc., really is to shout louder.

And, good news, Iran's current fertility rate is below 1.9 children per woman, lower even than women in the United States.

And An essay on race and intelligence. The (valid) thing which always gets brought up against the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study is that the pre-natal environment of blacks and whites may differ—black mothers not getting the same nutrition, etc. Against that, you can live on fortified breakfast cereal and macaroni-and-cheese, and still not be malnourished; so it's doubtful that any combination of malnutrition and lead pollution can account for a significant amount of the 15-point IQ gap between American blacks and whites.

Of course, that objection doesn't apply to twins who are adopted by white vs. black families (i.e., if there's any difference between the environments of each of the twins in the womb, it would even out in the randomness of the adoptions) ... so what you really need to do is to have a Transracial Twin-Adoption Study. And you'd have to follow through and test them as adults, not just at age seven where environment still contributes a large percentage of IQ:

IQ tests given to young children are obviously unable to test the full range of adult level thinking skills. They can only test a narrow subset of skills, and the enrichment activities given to young children are very similar to the types of questions on early-childhood IQ tests, so children are being trained [in Head Start, etc.] or coached to do well on such tests. A dog who has learned to sit on command isn't any smarter than the untrained dog, the trained dog has simply been taught a trick....

So suppose we determine beyond all doubt that the racial IQ gap is entirely environmental. What can we do about it? Take babies from mothers in the bottom decile of IQ and give them to better parents? Ethics aside, it's utterly impractical. For all practical purposes, it might as well be genetic....

[Using "correlation doesn't prove causation" as an argument against the correlation between IQ scores and metrics like adult literacy, enrollment in tertiary education, life expectancy, adult earnings] is ironic because the egalitarian position is that the lower economic status of the average black family in America is what causes blacks to underperform on standardized tests. They are unable to grasp that cause and effect can be reversed, and that it is lower average black intelligence that causes blacks in America to be the most economically disadvantaged group.

Some (related) good book reviews, including "an interesting glimpse into the intellectual period after Darwin but before political correctness; the unique period of sanity in Western thought. It remains to be seen if we'll get another one."

And inexpensive colored e-paper is coming.

And, the "Lost city of the Incas" was not a true city:

Magli suggests that the ceremonial path into the city was conceived as a replica of the path followed by the first Incas in cosmological myth....

According to Magli, the picture also fits with celestial cycles that appeared in the sky at the times of the Incas. These were dominated by the Milky Way, which was perceived as a "celestial river" having its terrestrial counterpart in the Urubamba River.

... and, if their spiritual seekers were practicing techniques of kundalini-like meditation (as many New Agers would certainly argue), those again also mapped to the astral spine, cf. the Ganges in India, as an internalization of shamanic rituals aping the travel of souls along the river-like/serpentine Milky Way.

"Machu Picchu was located at the ideal, opposite crossroads between the terrestrial and the celestial rivers. It was the other end of the sun's path," Magli concluded.

And you know what bugs PZ Myers about the new Star Trek movie?

Miniskirts. Uhura was one good flounce away from a major wardrobe malfunction.

And that's a bad thing?

Plus, Myers is old enough to know that in the '60s (when the original series was made, of course), miniskirts were a sign of womens' sexual liberation, not a symbol of male oppression.

Sometimes you just have to smile, and take whatever the universe drops into your lap. ;) Like Heather Graham on Tantric Sex ... and levitation:

I practice transcendental meditation and there is a phase where you're meant to lift off the ground. It hasn't happened yet. I'll manage it one day. In fact, I'm aiming beyond levitation. I want to be able to fly like a superhero. I won't be happy until I can fly across oceans and cities, saving people from being murdered.

You go, girl.

More from Elaine Pagels' book, The Origin of Satan.

Between 70 and 100 CE—the interval between the writing of the gospel of Mark and of the gospel of John—the Christian movement became largely Gentile. Many converts found that having become Christians placed their lives in danger, and that they were threatened not by Jews but by pagans—Roman officers and city mobs who hated Christians for their "atheism," which pagans feared could bring the wrath of the gods upon whole communities. (p. 112)

Gentile converts who were hated by other Gentiles—often members of their own families, their townspeople, and their city magistrates—believed that worshipers of the pagan gods were driven by Satan to menace God's people. As Christian preachers increasingly appealed to Gentiles, many found that what had offended most Jews about Christianity offended pagans even more: "Christians severed the traditional bonds between religion and a nation or people," and, as the historian Robert Wilken points out, "Ancient people took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city, nation or people." (p. 114)

[The baptismal candidate] would descend naked into a river, immersing himself to signify the death of the old self and the washing away of sins. Once the divine name was pronounced and the celebrant had invoked the spirit to descend on him, he would emerge reborn, to be clothed with new white garments at the shore and offered a mixture of milk and honey—babies' food, suitable for a newborn. (p. 118)

Born again, Justin [Martyr] saw the universe of spiritual energies, which pious pagan philosophers called daimones, as, in his words, "foul daimones." By the time the Christian movement had swept across the Western world, our language would reflect that reversed perception, and the Greek term daimones, "spirit energies," would become, in English, demons. (p. 120)

Although many pagans had come to believe that all the powers of the universe are ultimately one, only Jews and Christians worshiped a single god and denounced all others as evil demons. Only Christians divided the supernatural world into two opposing camps, the one true God against swarms of demons.... (p. 130)

[Celsus] writes that the Christians' refusal to obey certain laws and to cooperate with local or imperial officials threatens to "destroy legitimate authority, and return the world to chaos and barbarians"—even to "bring down the empire, and the emperor with it." (p. 139)

[T]he pagan Celsus argues for monotheism against what he sees—quite accurately—as the Christians' practical dualism [of God and Satan].... Celsus urges Christians, too, to worship the one God and to revere everything that providence brings as manifestations of his goodness....

[T]he prayers intoned at the festivals of Hecateten often identified the particular deity that had come to worship with the whole of the divine being. By the time of Marcus Aurelius ... many took for granted the unity of all the gods and daimones in one divine source. (p. 141)

Celsus warns that the "insanity" that impels Christians to "refuse their religious obligations, and rush headlong to offend the emperor and governors," actually may ruin the empire, eclipse the rule of law, and plunge the world into anarchy. Celsus demands that Christians do instead what all pious and patriotic citizens should.... (p. 145)

Wow, them Christians were quite the "liberals" back in the day, weren't they? No wonder the status-quo conservatives hated them, for threatening the stability of the empire....

A hundred years after the gospels were written, then, Christians adapted to the circumstances of pagan persecution the political and religious model they found in those gospels—God's people against Satan's people—and identified themselves as allies of God, acting against Roman magistrates and pagan mobs, whom they see as agents of Satan. (p. 147-8)

The author of the Gospel of Philip, a follower of Valentinus, describes gnosis [i.e., "wisdom" or "insight"] as a natural progression from faith. Just as a harvest is gathered through the cooperative interaction of the natural elements, water, earth, wind, and light, so, Philip says,

God's farming has four elements—faith, hope, love, and gnosis....

According to Valentinus, [God] is an anthropomorphic image of the true divine Source underlying all being, the ineffable, indescribable source Valentinus calls "the depth," or "the abyss." When Valentinus does invoke images for that Source, he describes it as essentially dynamic and dyadic, the divine "Father of all" and "Mother of all"....

[T]he author of Philip wants to throw away all the lists of good things and bad things—lists that constitute the basis of traditional Christian morality. For, this author suggests, what we identify as opposites—"light and dark, life and death, good and evil"—are in reality pairs of interdependent terms in which each implies the other. (p. 168-71)

Irenaeus declares, believers must accept only certain priests—priests who not only are properly ordained but who clearly repudiate secret teaching and refuse to participate in private meetings unauthorized by the bishop. Therefore, Irenaeus concludes, "it is necessary to obey the priests who are in the church—those who, along with apostolic succession, have received the certain gift of truth".... [Other priests], Irenaeus warns, will receive divine punishment: fire from heaven will consume them. (p. 177)

Martin Luther, founded of Protestant Christianity, denounced as "agents of Satan" all Christians who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, all Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, all who challenged the power of the landowning aristocrats by participating in the Peasants' War, and all "protestant" Christians who were not Lutheran. (p. 180)

Megan Fox got it right:

The "Transformers" bombshell-cum-uninhibited philosophizer also contemplates—reluctantly—what she would say to Megatron to keep him from destroying the world. "I'd barter with him," she muses to the July issue [of] Total Film UK, "and say instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?"

That would constitute a big chunk of my list, too.

Of course now she's "stupid" and a "nutjob," etc., albeit still a hot one. (The way the Left treated the boob-enhanced Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin is still far worse than mere name-calling, though.)

P.S. Atheist PZ Myers defends atheism against the dumbfuck God-botherers: Katherine Kersten, Minnesota's little pillock.

And dumbfuck atheist Greg Laden blows his load on how Women are smarter than men (well, duh!). Wherein Mr. Laden's ball-less thesis is met with level-headed, rational argument and evidence (below), to which he moronically responds: "Touched a nerve did I?" (I had linked to my The (Math) Gap in a previous post of his, wherein he was celebrating Begley's presentation of Hyde's shoddy research. But some people don't learn all that quickly.) The commentorial debunking:

Women are not smarter. Clues to what is really going on [are] given in the story you linked:

1> There are also still some subject areas, such as courses related to maths, physics and technology, where men are in the majority.

2> However male students still maintain a narrow lead in firsts—13.9% to 13% of those who graduate.

3> The introduction of GCSEs in the late 1980s coincided with the time that girls began to overtake boys in academic achievement.

4> A science test taken by 11 and 12-year-olds in the mid-1970s had been successfully passed by 54% of boys and 27% of girls. When the same test was taken in 2003, the scores for both boys and girls had fallen to 17%—a much more rapid decline for boys.

Okay, what does all this mean? It means the following: during the 1970s, there was a push for "girl-centered education," premised on the assumption that the curriculum discriminated against girls. Maths and science were dumbed down in the new GCSE exams. Exams themselves were given less weight, in favor of coursework. In the study of literature, female-centered fiction was brought to the fore (more Pride and Prejudice, less Gulliver's Travels). These changes came about because it had been observed that boys do better at exams (relative to coursework), and do better at objective exams (as opposed to essays), and are better at mathematics and science, especially when it is tested rigorously, and because it was believed (reasonably) that "boy's own" stories [were] alienating to girls. Result: (a) girls "outperform" boys, (b) boys become demotivated, (c) science and engineering departments at universities cannot recruit good students, because no-one has an adequate background any more, (d) science and engineering departments actually start closing. However, notice that despite all this, more boys than girls get first class degrees—giving the lie to the tale that girls are smarter....

There is ample evidence (from the standardization of tests) that ... the very brightest individuals, especially in areas that require abstract reasoning, are mostly men. Unsurprisingly, at the highest level of attainment, men surpass women in most disciplines, and in the more technical fields (e.g., mathematics, science, engineering, economics), where being smart really matters and is objectively measurable, men overwhelmingly predominate.

The high proportion of women passing the low-to-moderate thresholds required for admission to university is entirely consistent with women being no smarter than men (or perhaps even slightly dumber), but working more steadily during adolescence. The lower the threshold, the greater should be the proportion of girls surpassing it, because variance in ability is greater among boys than among girls. However, if the bar is set high enough, a point will be reached where the boys outperform the girls, due to the same wide variance....

The statistic in the report on which the news story is based bear this out: the lower the status of the institution, the higher the proportion of women to men, but when we get to Oxford and Cambridge, the proportion of women to men becomes equal. Similarly, more women than men obtain middling degrees, but more men than women obtain first class degrees.

The pattern of girls working more steadily than boys in adolescence tends to reverse during adulthood, with women seeking "work-life balance" and valuing family above career, while men put all their energy into achievement at work. Hence, girls who seemed promising at school and university achieve little in their careers, while boys who seemed to have serious problems at school actually turn out stellar performance in their post-education careers. This pattern is well-attested, and is discussed by Susan Pinker in "The Sexual Paradox."

The sexes have different sets of talents. It should not surprise anyone that girls would rush into medicine and do well in that field (caring profession), or law (verbal skills highly valued). However, girls avoid fields where the highest levels of visual, numerical and abstract reasoning are demanded, and most fail to thrive in those fields if they enter them.

Girl-centered education is a public policy fact, and it constitutes a serious dumbing down of the education system. The predictable effect on boys is less important than the equally predictable overall effect on the economy: All countries that have adopted it will, over time, find their economies deeper in the shitter, because they are lagging behind in technology and science.... Another problem is that, women are major slackers at work. The state-run National Health Service in Britain is suffering from accelerating doctor shortages. Reason: female doctors are much more likely than male doctors to opt for part-time work. If all medical doctors were women, as opposed to all men, about 50% more would have to be trained in order ensure the same level of service.

Incidentally, there is strong evidence of widespread discrimination in favor of women in the labour market in the UK (women are anything from twice to four times as likely to be invited to interview as men with the same CV, in most occupations studied—Riach & Rich 2006). I wouldn't be surprised if the same process was in operation in higher education.

Or, as one commenter summed it up:

Greg, you are an utter anti-male bigot and blathering idiot.

To which I add my response #1, and #2.

And, Half Sigma expressed quite nicely why dumb people hate intellectual activities and place a low value on them, and what the converse of that is:

Jewish people value education because people naturally value what they are good at. So people with genetically high IQs will value education, and people with genetically low IQs will find something else they are good at and value that more than education.

People who hate math invariably suck at it, etc.

I've been reading Elaine Pagels' book, The Origin of Satan.

It's nowhere near as detail-tracing as I had hoped, but there are a few good points of research:

[W]hen Israelite writers excoriated their fellow Jews in mythological terms, the images they chose were usually not the animalistic or monstrous ones they regularly applied to their foreign enemies. Instead of Rahab, Leviathan, or "the dragon," most often they identified their Jewish enemies with an exalted, if treacherous, member of the divine court whom they called the satan. The satan is not an animal or monster but one of God's angels, a being of superior intelligence and status; apparently the Israelites saw their intimate enemies not as beasts and monsters but as superhuman beings whose superior qualities and insider status could make them more dangerous than the alien enemy.

In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an "evil empire," an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike. As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of Numbers and in Job as one of God's obedient servants—a messenger, or angel, a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal'ak) into Greek (angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called "sons of God" ... and were envisioned as the hierarchical ranks of a great army, or the staff of a royal court.

In biblical sources the Hebrew term the satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character. Although Hebrew storytellers as early as the sixth century BCE occasionally introduced a supernatural character whom they called the satan, what they meant was any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity. (p. 39)

In Zechariah's [3:1-2, 7th century BCE] account of factions within Israel, the satan takes on a sinister quality, as he had done in the story of David's census, and his role begins to change from that of God's agent to that of his opponent. (p. 44)

More radical than their predecessors, [the Jewish dissidents in the second century BCE, bent on separating Israel radically from foreign influences in the decades following the Maccabean revolt, victory, and rededication of the Temple now commemorated in the festival of Hanukkah] began increasingly to invoke the satan to characterize their Jewish opponents; in the process they turned this rather unpleasant angel into a far grander—and far more malevolent figure. No longer one of God's faithful servants, he begins to become what he is for Mark and for later Christianity—God's antagonist, his enemy, even his rival. (p. 47)

[T]he book of Daniel powerfully reaffirms the integrity of Israel's moral and ethnic identity. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Daniel, unlike such other apocalyptic books as the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees, is included in the canonical collection that we call the Hebrew Bible and not relegated to the apocrypha. (p. 56)

New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl characterizes Matthew's gospel as a kind of "community rule," considerably more liberal than that of the Essenes. The gospel of Luke, probably written by the only Gentile author in the New Testament for a predominantly Gentile community, insists that his group has inherited Israel's legacy as God's people. The author of John, probably Jewish himself, describes a close-knit group of "Jesus' own"—insiders who follow Jesus' command to "love one another" (15:12) while regarding their Jewish opponents as offspring of Satan.

That such patterns of group identity are found in these gospels—patterns that have shaped Christian churches ever since—is certainly no accident. The four gospels collected in the New Testament were canonized around 200 CE, apparently by a consensus of churches ranging from those in provincial Gaul to the church in the capital city of Rome; they were chosen not necessarily because they were the earliest or the most accurate accounts of Jesus' life and teaching but precisely because they could form the basis for church communities. (p. 65)

[Bishop Iraeneus of Lyons] was the first, so far as we know, to identify the four gospels of the New Testament as canonical, and to exclude all the rest.... Only the four gospels of the New Testament, Irenaeus insisted, are authentic. What was his reasoning? Irenaeus declared that just as there are only four principal winds, and four corners of the universe, and four pillars holding up the sky, so there can be only four gospels. (p. 69)

The gospels he endorsed helped institutionalize the Christian movement. Those he denounced as heresy did not serve the purposes of institutionalization. Some, on the contrary, urged people to seek direct access to God, unmediated by church or clergy. (p. 70)

Apparently Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where he would have read the following:

"The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son; and shall call his name Immanuel—God with us" (Isaiah 7:14).

In the original Hebrew, the passage had read "young woman" (almah), apparently describing an ordinary birth. But the translation of almah into the Greek parthenos ("virgin"), as many of Jesus' followers read the passage, confirmed their conviction that Jesus' birth, which unbelievers derided as sordid [i.e., as being illegitimate, and from a common family rather than from royalty], actually was a miraculous "sign." Thus Matthew revises Mark's story by saying that the spirit descended upon Jesus not at his baptism but at the moment of conception. (p. 77)

Since no historical record mentions a mass slaughter of infants among Herod's crimes, many New Testament scholars regard the story of the "slaughter of the innocents," like the "flight into Egypt," as reflecting Matthew's programmatic conviction that Jesus' life must recapitulate the whole history of Israel.... Matthew does here what he does throughout his gospel; he takes words from the prophetic writings (here words from the prophet Hosea), generally understood to apply to the nation of Israel ("Out of Egypt I have called my son"), and applies them to Jesus of Nazareth, whom he sees as the culmination of Israel's history. (p. 78)

Separately, Jonathan Haidt's What Makes People Vote Republican?:

My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations [i.e., harm/care and fairness/reciprocity], but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: in-group/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest....

[P]eople who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally.

Which is one more demonstration of the fact that conservatives are much more in-group conformist than are liberals, even if liberals band together to push back against conservatives trying to meddle with how they live their lives.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group.

Or, as I wrote in NE:

[B]oth religion and politics utilize the same techniques of manipulation on their followers, bringing out exactly the same psychological defenses [and bonding into "safe" in-groups] in their adherents. Does it really make a difference whether the Evil Other is Satan, or communism/terrorism? (If you studied Arthur Miller's play The Crucible back in high school, with its intended parallels between the Salem witch-hunts and McCarthyism, you already know that it makes no difference.) Could the psychological reactions/defenses really be any different against one than against the other? Isn't it obvious that, given a structurally comparable set of threats and fears in the political world as in the religious, the psychological reactions to those real or perceived dangers will likewise be hardly distinguishable?

Haidt:

The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam ... found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity....

The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who "work hard and play by the rules." But if you don't do it at all—if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers—then you are committing a kind of sacrilege.

P.S. My response to a n00b at Half Sigma. And again.

When Evolution Is Not So Slow And Gradual:

A research team led by Swanne Pamela Gordon from the University of California, Riverside studied 200 guppies that had been taken from the Yarra River in Trinidad and introduced into two different environments in the nearby Damier River, which previously had no guppies. One Damier environment was predator-free. The other contained fish that occasionally snack on guppies.

Eight years after their introduction, the team revisited the Damier guppies to see what adaptive changes they might have picked up in their new environments. The researchers found that the females had altered their reproductive effort to match their surroundings. In the environment where predators were present, females produced more embryos each reproductive cycle....

The fact that fitness differences were found after only eight years shows just how fast evolution can work....

[T]he elapsed time frame was 13-26 guppy generations.

And, Gene linked to violent behavior; HBD proven:

A reader sent me a link to an MSNBC article about how a variant of the MAOA gene is correlated with aggressive and violent behavior. This proves that at least one significant aspect of personality varies between individuals because of genetic predisposition.

Searching the internet, I discovered a study from 2006 explaining that the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, are approximately twice as likely as whites to have the bad variant of this gene. Thus we see that one racial group is, on average, genetically predisposed to anti-social behavior compared to another racial group.

Unfortunately, since blacks don't have high levels of that gene, that finding doesn't explain Baltimore's black youth intifada:

[Ron] Smith quotes at length author Jack Weatherford's argument that civilization is failing because in the world's cities, especially in the West, the "savages" who once had been banished and driven back by civilization are wreaking their revenge....

Smith's column ... comes in the midst of a recent wave of violent assaults on white people by roving gangs of black youth in the downtown and Inner Harbor areas of Baltimore....

[Weatherford:] "Nowhere in the world had I witnessed as much savagery, brutality, crime and cruelty as I did on the streets of the capital city of the United States." He worked at a bookstore. The clerk who worked at it before him was shot in the head and killed. The clerk who replaced him was beaten with a metal pipe and left for dead. "On the streets of Washington," he writes, "I saw forms of social organization and culture that I had never seen among any tribal people. Everywhere in the world, tribal life centers on the family and family units, but in the center cities of America, the family has broken down." The welfare state put the finishing touches on the destruction of the family....

Many of the [recent Baltimore, black-on-white] assaults, which have been reported in areas within walking distance of the harbor, follow a similar pattern. The [white] victims report being attacked from behind while they walk, punched and kicked in the head and upper body by groups of [black] males and females. Items are rarely taken, and few, if any, words are spoken....

In December 2007, Sarah Kreager, a 26-year-old white woman, suffered broken facial bones after she was punched, kicked and dragged off a bus in Baltimore by a group of black youths. The group also attacked Kreager's boyfriend and menaced an elderly white passenger. Kreager's beating was so vicious that two seats and the bus's rear glass were destroyed during the attack. The Maryland Transit Authority initially said it was investigating the attack as a hate crime, but no hate crimes charges were ever filed.

As in the recent beating of Williams and Parish, Kreager's attackers tried to blame the victim by claiming she had used the word "nigger." This tactic is commonly used to try to deflect blame onto white victims. For example, Mychal Bell, the 4-time convicted juvenile felon who was one of the Jena 6, claimed the white student he knocked unconscious had used the word "nigger"; dozens of other witness statements, by white and black students, disputed [I would say, refuted] this allegation.

Less than a week after the attack on Kreager, two white men were beaten by a group of black youths on another Baltimore bus. One of the victims, Patrick Green, was adamant that he had been the victim of a hate crime. "It was a hate crime against me because I was white. I did not know these gentlemen. The whole time during the beating it was, 'white this, white that.' They didn't want anything from me except to see me beaten."

Following this second bus attack, Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon (who is under indictment) publicly refuted Green's allegations, declaring that the motives for the attacks were "not race based." In response, Green asked the Maryland Transit Authority officials to release surveillance video of the attack, saying it would prove the beating was a hate crime. The MTA refused Green's request.

Instead, the MTA introduced a program to monetarily reward black students who pledged to refrain from attacking white people while riding the bus. Discount cards good at local businesses were handed out at the African American Heritage Festival to students who pledged good behavior....

Presumably they're still free to beat up honkeys elsewhere. Just not on buses. Or maybe just not on specific bus routes.

And if they lapse, and beat the shit out of a bus-riding whitey or two, they have to give back the cards, or what?

This is like giving candy to your kids just because they've promised to be nice. What kind of a moron would do such a thing?

In November 2008, Aysha Ring, a 24-year-old white woman, was waiting in line at a liquor store when David Aaron Briggs, a 23-year-old black man, walked up behind her and slit her throat. Ring was taken to Shock Trauma, where she died. Briggs didn't say or take anything during the stabbing.

You can see why I'm in favor of the death penalty (whether or not it has any "deterrent" effect). Not of hate-crime legislation, even though these were truly black-racist hate crimes. But simply of removing such fuckers as Briggs from the face of the Earth, for the good of civilization. Racist, murderous little animals like him truly don't deserve to live.

As one commenter noted:

The insolence of black Americans is somewhat amusing.... They grow none of their own food, produce none of their own electricity, and earn virtually no legal income. If white society collapses, they will be left with nothing. They can merely attempt to venture out in the suburbs to loot, but if anarchy was the rule of the day, they would be gunned down by angry white gun-owners. They are, of course, too stupid to think about this.

The American Indian-related letter quoted a few days back prompted me to pull this book out of the towering stacks which nearly form an obstacle course in my apartment: Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. Fantastic book, with far too many right ideas to quote them all.

The characterization of cultures in terms of the materials they used for making tools (the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages) is complemented in anthropology by the classification of human development in terms of three stages—"savagery," "barbarism," and "civilization".... The stages of savagery and barbarism refer to hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists respectively, and these types of societies roughly correspond to the paleolithic (in the case of savagery) and neolithic (in the case of barbarism) periods. "Civilization," on the other hand, refers to the stage of human history that invented writing and the alphabet. (p. 12)

[M]uch of the aboriginal participation in modern societies is as consumers, not producers. Isolation from economic processes has meant that a number of neolithic cultural features, including undisciplined work habits, tribal forms of political identification, animistic beliefs, and difficulties in developing abstract reasoning, persist despite of hundreds of years of contact....

[A]boriginal circumstances differed from undeveloped cultures in other parts of the world. While the lives of slaves in the United States, peasants in Europe, and fishers in Asia were undoubtedly miserable, these groups were important producers in the economic system. This was not the case for the aboriginal population. (p. 13)

Labeling the [Christian] missionaries' efforts as "genocide" ... obscures the fact that "obliterating" various traditions is essential to human survival. Conservation of obsolete customs deters development, and cultural evolution is the process that overcomes these obstacles. Many of the activities held as destructive to aboriginal peoples—the teaching of English, the discouraging of animistic superstitions, and encouraging of self-discipline—were positive measures intended to overcome the social isolation and economic dependency that was (and continues to be) so debilitating to the native population. Accusations of genocide are affected to avoid the reality that when cultures at vastly different levels of development come into contact, more components of the relatively simple culture have to be discarded in comparison to those of the more complex. So, oral cultures are "stolen" from pre-literate societies when they learn to write, as are creation myths when they are faced with the scientific theory of evolution. (p. 25)

The isolating effect of inferior [educational] services, along with the diminishing role of religion in Canadian society, set the stage for a transition in the missionaries' role from assimilationists to advocates for segregation. Initially the churches shared the government's interest in aboriginal modernization; the power of the churches in early Canadian history was based on the extraction of tithes from small family farms, so creating aboriginal agricultural communities would increase the wealth of a particular denomination. But as the country became more secularized and the industrial sector grew, the agricultural base of church power eroded. The churches became increasingly oriented toward maintaining aboriginal dependency rather than providing tribes with the necessary skills to integrate with Canadian society. To retain the loyalty of the native population, it became necessary to isolate aboriginal peoples from "corrupt" influences. Isolation ensured that the church, not public institutions, would receive funding for education and health services designated for aboriginal communities.

Their interest in maintaining aboriginal dependency led the churches to become the first lobbyists for land claims.... The church increased its power by obtaining land, compensation, and special rights for the native population. This led to religious sects encouraging political divisions within native communities in order to set up rival missions and gain control over Crown land and resources. (p. 27)

And increasing preoccupation with the legal gains being made by aboriginal groups has also led to the use of methodologies that result in distorted or subjectively interpreted data. The most flagrant of these is the use of "oral histories" in documenting the features of aboriginal cultures in the past. Oral histories must be regarded with extreme scepticism, not only because memory is often faulty but also because ... there is a "tendency for lore to be refashioned as circumstances change".... [E]ven during continuous settlement of an area, accurate memory lasts no more [than] two generations and "in times of ... social upheaval change [in the oral "histories"] is quicker and more profound." (p. 43-4)

[The Eleventh Commandment] is "Thou Shall Not Say No to an Indian." Anyone who does not abide by its associated "norms and taboos of deferential conduct" is immediately labeled as an enemy of aboriginal peoples. In Canada, "racism," "colonialism," and "insensitivity" are the usual accusations that constrain debate.... (p. 46)

Native carvings and paintings are considered an industry, and consistency of form is important to assure buyers that the product is genuine....

An Inuvialuit friend, Angus Cockney, experienced reactionary cultural imposition when his attempts to broaden his style met with the response from dealers that his work was "not native enough." Such strictures on native artists preclude individual creative development and participation in the universal art world. (p. 58-9)

In archaeology, the rejection of cultural evolution is most clearly manifested in studies of the New World, where there is a tendency to exaggerate the development of the ancient Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. Population counts climb higher with each telling, and it is asserted the "civilizations" existed in the Amazon rainforest before contact. Massive empires are now claimed to have existed despite the absence of draught animals and the necessary technology to sustain large, integrated populations (e.g., the wheel, iron, the plough, alphabetic writing). A number of inventions have been "discovered" recently, in an attempt to give credence to this exaggeration of development. Included are claims about the existence of pre-contact wheels (attached to toys, not as transport), phonetic hieroglyphs, the zero, and a calendar and road system similar to those of ancient Rome. All these "findings," however, either rely on a failure to rule out post-contact influences, or are made possible by huge interpretive leaps unsupported by convincing evidence. (p. 61)

Calls to "celebrate cultural diversity" ... act to perpetually preserve aboriginal peoples in a jar so they can continue to provide a living laboratory for anthropological research. (p. 63)

"[M]any Native groups now routinely regulate the anthropological research that can be done in their communities and are quick to take issue with conclusions that they find objectionable".... One [incident] concerns aboriginal opposition to any archaeological findings that support the Bering Strait theory (that aboriginal peoples migrated from the Old World over the land bridge in the Bering Sea, and possibly by boat, during or before the last Ice Age) since this has been perceived as "weakening the land claims of aboriginal peoples." So strong is native opposition to this hypothesis that museum exhibits examining it have either been eliminated or reduced in "size, impact, and clarity of message"....

Another disturbing development concerns the study of aboriginal remains.... The controversy surrounding the study of Kennewick Man in Washington State, for example, involved a skeleton that was 8,400 years old. In the "Long Ago Person Found" case in northern British Columbia in 1999, although the skeleton was 560 years old, the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations insisted that the remains be "repatriated" to them. The skeleton was "cremated" during a "spiritual ceremony" in 2002, destroying an archaeological find that potentially could have continuously contributed to the knowledge base of all humanity. (p. 69)

For the vast majority of humanity's history, labor was directed toward the completion of a task. With wage labor, workers were expected to engage in continual production, regardless of the number of tasks completed, for the amount of time they had sold their labor. This necessitated a dramatic change in the way people related to the labor process ... a replacement of the habits of irregularity, ill-discipline and sloth and a preoccupation with the immediate, with habits of punctuality, regularity and order and a longer-term view....

[U]nlike most social groupings in other areas of the world, aboriginal cultures in what is now Canada had not progressed into indentured or compensated labor when capitalism was thrust upon them. Their hunting and gathering and horticultural economies before contact were at an earlier stage than that which involved the production of commodities—goods produced to be sold on the market....

Their simple technology and division of labor resulted in their following the rhythms of nature, instead of developing the abstract conceptions needed for a more coordinated and productive economy. A lack of surplus means that once a requirement is met, the fruits of that labor are consumed or used, and the effort is repeated only when the need arises and natural circumstances permit. This is the reason behind anthropologists' conclusions that "hunter-gatherers focus on the present. People make decisions based on what they can find, kill, or gather now, not at some later time or as a result of long-term strategic planning"....

This situation is compounded by the kinship orientation of aboriginal culture. Cooperative work with others outside of their kinship group is difficult for people who place a strong emphasis on the value of tribal loyalties. Aboriginal people retaining tribal cultural characteristics feel uncomfortable when they must leave their communities to look for work or to get an education.... It is also important to point out that one of the "changes in attitude and belief" needed for development in modern economies is "impersonality," or the "judgment of merit and performance, not social background or irrelevant qualities." Tribalism prevents this kind of judgment from taking place, because it is kinship reciprocity, not "merit and performance," that shapes economic decisions in aboriginal cultures. This results in nepotistic hiring practices rather than selection of those best qualified for the job. (p. 95-6)

[A]boriginal peoples are constantly told that they are "owed" for the abuses suffered at the hands of the colonizers. (p. 98)

[N]o regime today officially promotes the segregation of different races—that is, except when it comes to various self-government initiatives concerning aboriginal peoples. Because of their focus on ethnic isolation, these initiatives embrace a philosophy not unlike those promoted in Nazi Germany, South Africa, and the southern United States....

[T]he pervasive attempts at connecting "ancestry" with "land" comes very close to the fascist conception of ... blood and soil. All claims to aboriginal self-government, like all ethnically based forms of nationalism, have racist tendencies because they oppose forms of political mobilization that find common ground among groups that are ethnically different, and grant privileges on the basis of ancestral connections. (p. 106-8)

[A]boriginal leaders argue that the inherent nature of their rights is due to the fact that they were the original occupants of what is now Canada. But doesn't this mean that all previous occupiers of territories have an inherent right to govern themselves on what used to be their "ancestral lands"? Shouldn't the ancestors of the Huron govern what used to be Huronia, or the Cree give up some of the land they came to control in the course of the fur trade, since they used arms acquired from the Hudson's Bay Company to displace other tribes? And if we all go back in history to our original ancestry, doesn't this mean that all of us, including aboriginal peoples, have a right to land and governance in our original "homeland"—Africa? (p. 109-10)

Many aboriginal leaders are so tribal in their outlook that they do not think that distributing public money on the basis of kinship is wrong. This explains the astonishing arrogance of a number of aboriginal leaders when their unethical practices have been discovered and publicized. Exposure of the endemic corruption that exists on reserves is met with aggressive assertions that this is merely a racist attempt "to discredit First Nations and put into question their ability to govern themselves." (p. 117)

That's just about the first half, but it's enough for now.

The very last paragraph of the book, though, is surprisingly idiotic:

[A]s Marx himself realized, such an achievement [of widening the range of social contact until each of us becomes a "species being"] is not possible until the causes of human conflict are removed. This conflict, elaborated in all of Marx's writings, is the conflict that exists between the few who own the means of production and those who are the producers of all value. It is by eliminating this fundamental "difference" that we can become a global tribe and the "world can live as one."

Which finally explains the claim near the end of the introductory chapter (p. 15) that "Addressing these conflicts requires socializing ownership so that goods and services are produced not to obtain profits but to satisfy human need." Which, of course, won't do anything to drag our native people into the 21st century, to get them educated and skilled, and so is pretty much irrelevant: If the only thing you know how to do is manually dig post-holes, it doesn't much matter whether someone else is making a profit off that or not.

Amazingly, everything else between those two points (aside from them being fooled by the claims of Marshall Sahlins (p. 99) and Jared Diamond) is sensible: science good, postmodernism bad, alternative-medicine quackery, etc.

And some good news: Holland's Geert Wilders' Party Scores in EU Election, finishing second, with 15% of the vote, and winning four of the Netherlands' 25 seats.

That ain't gonna make the fascist Lizard Censor-King happy at all.... 'Cause his whole schtick (least as I recall, before the cowardly little fucker blocked my IP address after my first comment posted there) is that the anti-Islam movement in America will never get off the ground as long as it associates with people like Wilders.

Whadda maroon.

Only 40% turnout for the voting in Holland, though. Sheesh, your way of life is threatened by an easily identifiable source, there's only one candidate who will properly fight to preserve your rights, and you can't haul your European asses down to the polling booth to cast a vote? Sure, I don't bother voting in Canadian elections; but if someone like Wilders was running here, I sure as hell would.

And:

Simon Singh, the science writer who had the temerity to say that chiropractic treatment for ear infection was "bogus," and who was found guilty by a British court of libel, has decided to appeal the decision.

I'm torn on that one, because while the treatment mentioned is surely medical quackery, and British libel laws are indeed draconian ... Singh is also the guy who was badgering Katie Melua about her song "Nine Million Bicycles" not being scientifically accurate, and suggesting the replacement lyrics:

We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe,
that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it's true, but acknowledge that it may be refined,
and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you

P.S. Trendy New Lifestyle: "Funemployment".

And another scientifically inaccurate song (since methane doesn't erode the ozone layer):

Big news in the papers these days, about the "math gap" between the sexes. Via Newsweek's Sharon Begley:

Even the most hidebound male chauvinists have been forced to admit that girls are as good at math as boys, on average. Boys no longer start outperforming girls at age 12 or 13, as they did as late as the 1970s ... tests mandated by No Child Left Behind [NCLB] show that girls have reached parity with boys in math achievement through high school....

[T]he stereotype that females lack the innate ability to match males at the highest levels of math lives on. A new study comes as close to burying it as anything yet.

In a paper posted this evening in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe analyzing data on the highest level of math achievement....

In the U.S., tests typically show that, among students scoring in the 99th percentile for math achievement, boys outnumber girls 2-to-1. But that's only among white students. Among Asians in the U.S., girls outnumber boys [in math achievement] very slightly, as they do in Britain, Iceland and Thailand. That suggests that males' superior math ability does not hold true across the world, which is always a strong clue that social and cultural forces are involved....

"We concluded that the main reason many fewer females than males excel in math in most countries is not lack of innate ability or 'intrinsic aptitude' but gender inequality," says [Janet] Mertz. "Nations with greater gender equality typically have a smaller math gender gap".... That suggests that the root of gender disparity in math is sociocultural factors, not anything unchangeable that girls are born with. Society either sends a message that girls can excel at math, that they will be rewarded for doing so—or it doesn't....

Mertz and [also Janet] Hyde looked for evidence of [the "greater male variability hypothesis"] imbalance—more boys than girls at the extremes of math ability—in international data, too. Again, they found that in some countries as many girls as boys score above the 99th percentile, and in others more girls than boys are extreme math dunces or math geniuses. In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands. If the greater male variability in math performance that Summers cited as an explanation for the low numbers of women among math geniuses is not ubiquitous across the world, then "the occurrence of greater male variability and scarcity of top-scoring females in many, but not all countries .. . must be largely due to changeable sociocultural factors," the scientists write, "not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes." If the differences were innate, they should show up in every culture.

For anyone who still believes that innate factors explain the math gender gap, as I wrote last year, look at countries with a common gene pool. East Germany regularly sent many more girls than West Germany to the International Mathematics Olympiad by margins of 5-to-0; Slovakia sent more girls by a margin of 3-to-1; Korea topped Japan by 6 to 0. As I wrote then, "It's hard to see that as anything but the result of the starkly different social and other environmental forces in each country, not intrinsic biology."

Convincing arguments, eh?

And even more convincing when you read Hyde's recent paper itself:

In one recent study [done by Hyde herself; the reference points to her July 2008 paper], researchers obtained useable [NCLB] data from 10 states representing the testing of >7 million youth. Averaged across these 10 states, gender differences in performance were close to zero in all grades, including high school.... When analyzed by ethnicity, the same pattern of gender similarities was found for all ethnic groups studied, that is, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, American Indians, and Whites. Thus, girls have now reached parity with boys in mathematics performance in the U.S., even in high school where a gap existed in earlier decades.

However, coding of the test items on these [NCLB] examinations for cognitive level indicated that none of them tapped complex problem solving at most grade levels for most states. Thus, it was impossible with these NCLB datasets to investigate whether a gender gap existed in complex problem solving. Therefore, the researchers also examined data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federally managed program that tests a random sample of U.S. students each year. Items from 12th grade data categorized by NAEP as hard and by the researchers as requiring complex problem solving were analyzed for gender differences; effect sizes were found to average ... a trivial difference. These findings provide further evidence that U.S. girls have now reached parity with boys, even in high school, and even for measures requiring complex problem solving.

Per Hyde's references, the NAEP data she is using came from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (2008) The Nation's Report Card. Available at http:// nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrls/startsearch.asp.

The interesting thing is that Hyde's earlier work on exactly these issues was convincingly debunked by the statistician La Griffe du Lion back in December of last year:

Hyde et al. analyzed a huge database of standardized test data from state assessments mandated by the No Child Left Behind initiative (NCLB). Records from 10 states and 7 million students in grades 2 through 11 yielded a math gender gap of 0.0065 SD in favor of boys—trivial by any yardstick. For all intents and purposes there was no gender gap. "Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills," concluded the authors.

The problem here is one of sophism rather than error. Sex gaps favoring boys are not fully developed until the onset of puberty. In lower grades, math gaps are often non-existent or favor girls. By including data from the lower grades, Hyde's estimate of the gap was much too low. The average gap in grades 2 through 8 was 0.0054 SD. Data from post-pubescent students in grades 9, 10 and 11 were an order of magnitude greater....

NCLB assessments, for example, are ill suited to the job of assessing the math gender gap. Rather, they are designed to assess whether a student has reached some minimum level of proficiency. None of the questions require complex problem solving skills—the domain where sex differences are most apparent. As a result, NCLB tests underestimate sex gaps. Hyde et al. addressed this issue by turning to the somewhat more difficult National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. There too, however, they could find no complex problems. They did manage to harvest some moderately difficult questions from the NAEP set, from which they obtained gender gaps of 0.07 SD and 0.05 SD in grades 12 and 8, respectively—both in favor of boys—and also an order of magnitude greater than the NCLB gaps reported for grades 2 through 11. None of this appeared in the paper's conclusion or in post-publication publicity.

Uh, so these "moderately difficult questions" are what Begley characterizes as being "not multiplication calculations, not even second derivatives; they're more like calculating the necessary relationship between N and epsilon for a uniform continuity proof"? Surely the questions haven't changed that much in a year, to become so much more difficult, even accounting for the differences in perception of difficulty between La Griffe and Begley?

The only thing you can do in a situation like this is bite the bullet and purchase the original (2008) paper by Hyde, et al. (Two pages, $15, Highway Robbery.) From which:

In all cases, the [NCLB] data represent the testing of all students attending school in that grade. These [ten] states are geographically diverse and appear to be representative of all 50 states insofar as their average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, a federal assessment that carefully samples students nationwide) match the average for all 50 states quite closely. For 8th-graders, the average NAEP mathematics score was 280.22 for our 10 states and 280.17 for all 50 states....

Greater male variance [in NCLB results] is indicated by VR > 1.0. All VRs, by state and grade, are > 1.0 [range 1.11 to 1.21....]. Thus, our analyses show greater male variability, although the discrepancy in variances is not large. Analyses by ethnicity show a similar pattern....

Hyde essentially repeats that (VR) paragraph in the 2009 paper.

For whites, the ratios of boys:girls scoring above the 95th percentile and 99th percentile are 1.45 and 2.06, respectively, and are similar to predictions from theoretical models. For Asian Americans, ratios are 1.09 and 0.91, respectively. Even at the 99th percentile, the gender ratio favoring males is small for whites and is reversed for Asian Americans. If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women....

That paragraph, too, is essentially just repeated in the 2009 paper.

Today, with the gender gap erased in taking advanced math courses, does the gender gap remain in complex problem-solving? To answer this question, we coded test items from all states [on the NCLB data] where tests were available, using a four-level depth of knowledge framework. Level 1 (recall) includes recall of facts and performing simple algorithms. Level 2 (skill/concept) items require students to make decisions about how to approach a problem and typically ask students to estimate or compare information. Level 3 (strategic thinking) includes complex cognitive demands that require students to reason, plan, and use evidence. [Lofty goals, indeed, in a country that self-identifies as majority [78%] Christian, and 84% religious.] Level 4 (extended thinking) items require complex reasoning over an extended period of time and require students to connect ideas within or across content areas as they develop one among alternate approaches. We computed the percentage of items at levels 3 or 4 for each state for each grade, as an index of the extent to which the test tapped complex problem-solving. The results were disappointing. For most states and most grade levels, none of the items were at levels 3 or 4. Therefore, it was impossible to determine whether there was a gender difference in performance at levels 3 and 4....

To address this limitation in the state assessments, we returned to the NAEP data. [Reference: National Assessment of Educational Progress, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itmrls/startsearch.asp (2008).] NAEP categorizes items as easy, medium, or hard. We coded hard sample items for depth of knowledge. No items were at level 4 but many were at level 3.

Recall: Level 3 "includes complex cognitive demands that require students to reason, plan, and use evidence." But there were no "Level 4" questions, i.e., ones which required "complex reasoning over an extended period of time and require students to connect ideas within or across content areas as they develop one among alternate approaches." So Hyde's "complex problem solving" is not the same thing as the "complex reasoning" which would qualify a question as being level 4, even though they've confusingly/obfuscatingly decided to use "complex" in both of those categorizations. (Outside of the paper's context, doesn't "complex reasoning" sound like something you'd use in doing "complex problem solving"?)

Ach.... I weep for our children, when I reflect that this is what the American educational system is doing to them.

Of course, I'm Canadian, so they're not actually screwing up my children (of which there are, thankfully, none anyway). But you know what? When I was in grade 12, we (i.e., the rural Hanover school division south of Winnipeg) were so poor ("How poor were we?") we were so poor that we couldn't even afford up-to-date textbooks. So the math text I used in my graduating year was published in 1964, a couple of years before I was even born.

Those of you who understand what it means to have learned from a curriculum that was created before all the dumbing-down of the educational system occurred, even (to a lesser degree) here in the Great White North, are now turning green with envy. Don't you wish your kids could learn in that kind of environment? Alas, you've thrown it all away, as part of the "long march through the institutions," guaranteed to make everything "fair" for every blank-slate person of color, creed, language, and gender. You damned fools.

We computed the magnitude of gender differences on the hard items that were at level 3 depth of knowledge. At grade 12, effect sizes for these items ranged between 0 and 0.15 (average d = 0.07). At grade 8, effect sizes for these items ranged between 0 and 0.08 (average d = 0.05). Thus, even for difficult items requiring substantial depth of knowledge [but no actual "complex reasoning over an extended period of time" or "connect[ing of] ideas within or across content areas"], gender differences were still quite small.

So yes, it's NAEP there too, with no level-4 questions at all to truly "separate the men from the boys" ... and from the girls.

In fact, a closer inspection shows that the 2009 paper includes no new research in the area of the "math gap," but is instead simply quoting the 2008 study's results! (That is, the 2008 study done by the same lead author.) And it gets served up as "news," for closing the gap, by the "useful idiot" Sharon Begley at Newsweek!

I had originally figured that they'd at least be using different (annual) data sets. In that case, the grade 12 girls of 2009 would have been the grade 11 girls of 2008, etc., ... and had equally figured that the latter were behind the grade 11 boys in math skills, even on the NAEP tests, by somewhere between the 0.07 and 0.05 standard deviations (for that year's grade 12 and 8, respectively), as measured by Hyde herself. And now (I thought to myself, incredulously) the very same girls have caught up, in the year since then?

But, of course, it wasn't even that "complex." It was just Hyde and Begley re-heating old (invalid) results, and presenting them as something new.

As long as there's a math-sex gap in the SATs for people scoring above 750 on the math portion, there is a gap at the high-proficiency end in grade 12, too. When that (SAT) gap vanishes, without dumbing the test down further, you'll have a reason to get excited. Until then, not so much. (Note: The odds of that actually happening are near-zero.)

And the thing is, if they have to fudge around like this to get the answers they want/need to hear—with Begley disingenuously claiming that Hyde's regurgitated study data relate to "the highest level of math achievement," for example—you know (yes, you do) that the real answers in the objective universe are exactly the opposite of what they want and need to hear. 'Cause they wouldn't have to fake it, if it was real.

Hyde, 2009:

Some studies have focused specifically on the mathematically talented. The best known example is the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) or Study of Exceptional Talent (SET), an ongoing study originally begun at The Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s. These researchers administer the SAT to children <13 years of age who have been identified as mathematically advanced. Their sample is voluntary, and the sampling frame is not well defined. It has also changed over time with respect to sample size and ethnicity, including large numbers of children of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia in recent years. In 1980–1982, they reported a very lopsided M:F ratio of 13:1 among students scoring >= 700 on the quantitative section of the examination. However, here too, the gender gap has dramatically narrowed with time. The M:F ratio was down to 2.8:1 by 2005. Thus, females now represent at least 1/4 of the mathematically precocious youth being identified in this U.S. talent search. This fairly rapid and dramatic change occurred coincident with enactment of Title IX [in 1972], the second wave of the women's movement, and greatly increased immigration of Eastern Europeans and Asians to the U.S....

Yes, and what else has changed, in that area, since the early '80s? That's right: The SATs have been repeatedly dumbed-down, even in the "quantitative section." Observe:

Anecdotally, I can tell you that the test has definitely and drastically been dumbed-down over the last 30 years.... my brother is 13 years older than I am and took the test in 1975, scoring about 1200. I have a cousin who is a senior in high school and recently scored a 1440 on the math/verbal component (not including the essay). I had occasion to look at my brother's old SAT prep book and compare it to my cousin's current edition. Long story short... the two tests are not even in the same ballpark. It's as if the new version is designed for people who are 3 or 4 years younger (junior high). This is particularly noticeable in the math section which on the current test seldom rises above intermediate level Algebra and Geometry. The older tests made numerous forays into Differential Calculus, vector analysis, sophisticated Trigonometry, etc.

It's just as bad in the non-math sections:

First, after three decades of falling SAT scores (i.e., of the American public getting dumber and fatter, not necessarily in that order), in 1994 the test was "re-normalized" to an average score of 500.

In recent years, SAT scores have again been rising. Why? In 2005, verbal analogies were scaled back significantly so as not to discriminate against ESL minorities, and quantitative comparisons were removed from the math section. The same year, an Essay component was introduced, in which there was no penalty for factual errors, and where the grade awarded was basically proportional to the length of the essay delivered!

So a 700 (math) now doesn't mean what it did in the early '80s. That is, Hyde is comparing apples and oranges. Because:

[T]here has been a deterioration in the quality of education. This deterioration precludes any comparison because if one dumbs down math beyond a certain point, eventually the innate differential advantage of boys will be untapped and thus invisible. [That is why the ratio of high-scoring boys to girls on the SATs has dropped markedly since the early '80s: It's a simple artifact of the test being drastically dumbed down.] It is probable that what are considered grade [i.e., level] 3 and 4 questions today are really the grade 2 questions of 20 years ago.....

And yes, it is no coincidence that Title IX has been a major force in that "improvement" of girls' scores, simply because the only way to get women and non-Asian minorities to score comparable to white men in the upper end of the distribution on tests of real math/science ability is to dumb the tests down to the point where there's "no room left to excel." If you did a similar thing to English/Reading tests, you could equally "improve" the performance of boys relative to girls, there, and thus reduce the "English gap," which has always favored girls (and will continue to do so).

Hyde can't admit any of that, of course. But regardless, if she's doing research in this area and doesn't already know about the SAT re-normalization and dumbing-down, she's not academically, er, "fit" to be publishing, much less as a lead author; if she knows about it and is deliberately leaving it un-mentioned to further her thesis, she's academically dishonest; if she just forgot, she's garden-variety bumbling. Take your pick. Either way, what the hell were the referees for the 2009 paper thinking, to let that slide?

Back to La Griffe:

A persistent sex gap favoring boys in the math SAT is a gap buster's nightmare. At odds with the claim of a nonexistent math gap, Hyde et al. needed to address this matter [concluding that "The gender gap is likely in large part a sampling artifact"]....

By making use of the Colorado and Illinois ACT data we can estimate the effect of sampling error. In 2007, the gender gap nationally on the math ACT was 0.21 SD. The same year in Colorado and Illinois, absent sampling error, the gaps were 0.13 SD and 0.16 SD, respectively. The difference between the national and full-cohort gaps is the contribution of sampling error to the math gap. Thus, "largely an artifact of sampling" means that sampling errors caused the gender gap to be overestimated by approximately 0.05 to 0.08 SD, leaving behind a generous gap of between 0.13 and 0.16 SD, remarkably close to those we shall presently reveal. Sampling error not withstanding, the math gap proves durable....

Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales concluded that the sex gap in mathematics is cultural in origin and therefore erasable. In fact, they maintain, it has already been erased in a few gender-neutral countries. These conclusions were drawn from correlations between gap sizes and measures of women's emancipation, or, as they put it, gender neutrality. Guiso et al. also looked at the effect of gender neutrality on the reading-comprehension gap where women enjoy a substantial advantage. They summarized their findings writing: "In more gender-equal cultures the math gender gap disappears and the reading gender gap becomes larger"....

In the three years between PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] 2003 and PISA 2006, Iceland, Korea, Macao-China and the Netherlands, outliers in 2003, migrated sharply back into the mainstream of performance.... The Czech Republic moved in the other direction away from prediction. None of the swings was accompanied by a corresponding change in gender neutrality. They are statistical fluctuations whose size warns against overinterpreting data from a single PISA year....

Each country that took part in both PISA years, 2003 and 2006, contributed a single point to the plot giving its gender math gap in both years. Not only do the points not lie on a straight line of unit slope, but excluding the outlier Iceland, there is no relation whatsoever between the gaps observed in 2003 and 2006 (r = 0.0006). The graph is nothing more than a plot of statistical noise....

[footnote: Icelandic girls performed anomalously well in both PISA 2003 and 2006. A more detailed look at Icelandic data, however, reveals that only in rural Iceland were girls' mean scores higher than boys'. In the Reykjavik metropolitan area the math performance of girls and boys was much like that found in other countries. No satisfactory explanation of the Icelandic anomaly has yet been put forth.]

Both tests confirm a single math-ability gender gap independent of country, and by implication of race and culture....

National mathematical ability and national ability of men correlate at r = 1.00. Both are excellent proxies for national intelligence. PISA math means correlate at r = 0.85 with the Lynn and Vanhanen compilation of national IQ, while PISA means of males correlate even higher at r = 0.87. One could even argue that PISA means, whether national or male, better assess national intelligence than do the IQs derived by Lynn and Vanhanen from often sketchy data and dubious assumptions based on the Flynn effect. (Alternatively, one could take these correlations as evidence in support of the L and V compilation.)....

In brief, we have seen ... that the gender gap in mathematics has been stable for at least half a century; that sex differences in ability-distribution means and variance ratio are independent of race, culture and geography; that female math performance is closest to that of males in high-IQ countries; [and] that culture plays a role in math performance, albeit small....

I have no vested interested in boys being better at math than girls, at any level; on the contrary, smart girls are sexy. But I also can't stand being lied to by the "PC Police" and their enablers ... or by anyone else (including idiots who won't accept that a vegetarian/vegan diet can be perfectly healthy—even for world-class athletes—regardless of how much you debunk their cherished, carnivorous, magical-thinking notions).

Further, as far as how many girls East Germany vs. West Germany were "regularly sen[ding]" to the International Mathematical Olympiad, etc., it turns out that Begley got those numbers from pages 4-5 of Hyde's 2009 paper, as follows:

[T]he U.S. had zero females on its teams throughout the first 23 IMOs in which it participated, finally having 3 females on 5 of its teams during the past 11 years. Likewise, the United Kingdom fielded only 1 female on its teams from 1967 to 1988, yet has had 10 different females on its teams during the past 2 decades, with several participating more than once. During the 13-year period immediately before reunification, the German Democratic Republic had 5 females on its teams, whereas West Germany had zero. Since partitioning, Slovakia has fielded 3 times as many females on its teams as has the Czech Republic. During the past decade, the Republic of Korea has had 6 female participants versus Japan's zero. Such large differences among genetically related populations and rapid changes over time within countries in the frequency of identification of females with extreme talent in mathematical problem solving cannot be primarily due to biological factors.

The thing about "common gene pools," however, is all Begley's.

So then consider this: "Korea topped Japan by 6 to 0." But while both of those are in the "top 12" of PISA-scoring countries, Korea actually has a slightly lower World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index (0.6157 vs. 0.6447) than does Japan. (Higher is better, in terms of female emancipation, etc.; Sweden, for example, is 0.81, while Yemen is 0.45.) So the 6-to-0 ratio between countries with a "common gene pool" is exactly in the opposite direction of what it should be if the greater number of girls sent by Korea was the product of negative "social and other environmental forces" directed toward young females, and rather wildly so. (In terms of the disparity, not the girls-gone-wild. Anyway....)

So that ratio is either a statistical fluctuation, or it's one data-point of disproof for Begley's ideas; either way, it doesn't support her thesis, so she was dumb to quote it. And it quite probably encapsulates the depth of thinking and research she's even capable of doing.

La Griffe du Lion:

Of the 26 percent [of college graduates] that proceeded to the doctoral level, men entered math-intensive fields at five times the rate of women. Women frequently chose careers in the life sciences and medicine, as well as in the social sciences, arts and humanities. If we incorporate this proclivity factor of 5 into the rank-order calculation, the ceiling on tenured women faculty in math-intensive fields at research institutions drops to between 4% and 6%. In elite departments, say the top five, the ceiling will be lower still....

Or, like "mathgirl" says:

Results in science are not only about abilities. You can be very good at something, but just not that interested (and choose biology or medicine over math, for example). Scientific achievement at 40 is not perfectly correlated with grades at the graduate or undergraduate level at all. And the "extremes of math ability" as manifested by the number of math professors is not 1% of population, it is much much less, so drawing conclusions on the basis of school results is similar to describing the properties of 10 karat blue diamonds by looking at large pool of standard 1-karat ones.

Oddly enough, that's a point Larry Summers brought up, too:

[I]f one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean.... [I]t's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.

Hyde actually quoted exactly those figures, in her current paper (p. 2 of the 7-page PDF), while otherwise focusing on 99th percentile values for boy:girl comparison. The gloss that the 99th percentile has any relation to "math geniuses" is thus much more the product of Begley's mangling of the study and garbled writing (and thinking, one assumes) style, than it is Hyde's error. (I am serious about "garbled": When Begley writes that "Slovakia sent more girls by a margin of 3-to-1," Hyde's paper itself is clear that the implied "than" relates to the Czech Republic; Begley's isn't, and instead leaves one wondering whether it's a 3:1 ratio of girls to boys.)

There's also this debunking of Hyde's earlier paper:

Hyde herself offers a conceivable but not straightforward interpretation of [the SAT math-sex gap]—one that she chose not to apply in other cases....

The larger second moment of the male distribution is what primarily decides about the small percentage of women in math-loaded occupations (especially the top ones), more than the central value does....

[T]heir paper does mention that in the 99th percentile, they found the boys:girls ratio to be 2.06:1 (and for the 95th percentile, it was 1.45:1).... But Hyde et al. were very careful that this particular result didn't get into the media....

In the paper, they also say some "likable" stuff about the ratio being different for Asians: some people argue that this shows "complex cultural factors." That's of course complete rubbish. The ratio is closer to one for Asians simply because the Asian boys and girls have a higher central value, and the 99th percentile of the whole society therefore cuts their distributions closer to the bulk where the difference in variances doesn't play such a role.

Even if this effect were not enough to explain all the data, one should realize one more obvious thing: there is no reason why the magnitude of math skills gap between the sexes should be exactly universal for all races....

In order to show you a much more meaningful and transparent measure of the real mathematical talent among American boys and girls, let us look at the winners of the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad....

If you assume that the a priori chances are 50:50, the probability that among 24 winners, there would be less than 2 female winners [in two years] is equal to 25/2^24 = 0.0000015, roughly one part per million. That's already pretty much a five-sigma falsification of your hypothesis about "equality." Moreover, all these kids have spent all their lives in the atmosphere of political correctness so one would have to be really mad to argue that the small percentage of girls is due to the terror against female scientists....

[T]he female percentage in the teams (10% in average in 2008) is heavily correlated with the success of the team. The winning teams are near 1% [of girls] while the losing teams at the bottom approach up to 30% of girls.

This correlation can't be explained by any bias in education "before the olympiad": you would have to accuse the IMO graders of fraud. Instead, this correlation proves that the average global cutoff for the girls to attend IMO was somewhat lower. Despite this fact, the girls only made up 10% of the participants....

The rate of female physics/chemistry Nobel prize winners has dropped, too (there's been none since the early 1960s), for exactly the opposite reason. Relatively speaking, it becomes tougher to earn a Nobel prize "by chance" (sorry, Marie Curie!). [Plus, her second Nobel prize was actually just given in sympathy for the same work as the first but in a different field, over the fact that her name was getting dragged through the mud/newspapers for having an affair with a married Frenchman. You see, chivalry isn't dead, it's alive and living in Stockholm.] This fact doesn't mean that the new discoveries are more revolutionary than the old ones. On the contrary, they may be less revolutionary but they require a lot of systematic high-expertise work.

The asserted "30% of girls" on losing teams may be contrasted with Hyde's 2009 paper, regarding the composition of the International Mathematical Olympiad teams:

Table 4 indicates the percentages of students on IMO teams who were female during the past 3 decades for countries whose teams achieved a median rank among the top 30 in recent years. Some of these high-ranked countries (e.g., Russia, Serbia) had >20% female team members during some decades, a number that should be considered a lower bound on the percentage of the population with profound intrinsic aptitude for mathematics who are female.

I don't think that last sentence makes sense: In no way does 20% of the female (or male) population have "profound intrinsic aptitude for mathematics," at a 99th-percentile-plus level. By friggin' definition, the top 20% of the population is at or above 80th percentile, and there's nothing "profound" about that. But regardless, the only teams with greater than 20% girls on their above-median iterations were: USSR/Russian Fed. (1989-1998), and Yugoslavia/Serbia (1999-2008). Rep. of Moldova (1989-1998), Hong King (1978-1988), and People's Rep. of China (1978-1988) were above 15%; the rest of the 30 countries by three periods were below that, usually well below 10%.

To know exactly what Hyde's "Table 4" implies, you'd need to know whether the percentage of girls on teams below the median rank was lower or (as is more likely) higher than the figures she's presented. That is, are the girls raising the game of the teams they're on, or is ~22% females (i.e., one or [rarely] two per six-person team) the maximum that a team can carry, and still be competitive? As usual, Hyde's obfuscating "damned lies and tables" give no indication.

No one with even half a clue would dispute that there are indeed women who can do mathematics at the highest level. But that's very different from the "equal outcomes for women as for men" that people like Hyde and Begley are insisting on. As a sobering thought, La Griffe du Lion calculated, based on the differences in variability between men and women, that one should expect a female Fields Medal winner to surface once every 103 years.

Hyde again, from 2009:

Guiso and colleagues, using 2003 PISA data testing 15-year-olds from 40 countries, found that gender inequality as measured by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index (GGI) significantly correlated with the magnitude of the mean math gender gap.

Of course, La Griffe already debunked that study ... back in December of 2008. Quite presciently, seeing as it wasn't even mentioned in Hyde's 2008 paper!

There's also this for additional thoughts, debunking Hyde's year-old work:

[T]hey cannot make any conclusions regarding the alleged "improvement" in girls vs. boys because the level of deterioration has affected boys MUCH more than girls....

They completely gloss over the sample size of Asians which is only 219 (compared to 3473 for whites) and also the fact that they have cherry-picked Minnesota to represent the whole U.S.

Finally, there's this from Hyde's 2009 study:

Penner has performed a detailed analysis of the distributions of math scores obtained by boys compared with girls in each country that participated in the 1995 TIMSS. [Reference: Penner AM (2008) Gender differences in extreme mathematical achievement: An international perspective on biological and social factors. Am J Sociology 114:S138– S170.] Striking was his finding of considerable country-to-country variation, not only in the magnitude of the difference between mean male and female scores, but also in the shapes of the distributions, ratios of males-to-females scoring in the right and left tails of the distributions, and difference in standard deviation (SD) between males and females. We have normalized these latter differences to overall within SD for each country.... Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero [i.e., the same variability among girls as among boys], with 3 [Germany, Lithuania, and the Netherlands] even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. Neither the 10th-grade 2003 PISA nor 12th-grade 1995 TIMSS data gave any indication of greater male variability in mathematics for either Denmark or the Netherlands. As Penner concluded, "The common assumption that males have greater variance in mathematics achievement is not universally true." Given the absence of universality, the occurrence of greater male variability and scarcity of top-scoring females in many, but not all, countries and ethnic groups must be largely due to changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.

I don't know what the "debunking" response to that might be. But you could get a greater female variability if you had a lot of really, really stupid girls, perhaps brought into the country by immigration. Say, girls from cultures where there already wasn't a really high average IQ, but the boys were still encouraged to learn in school, while the girls are encouraged to just become baby machines, so their education won't matter in the long run anyway.

Hmm, what are the Muslim immigration/population figures for Germany, Lithuania, and the Netherlands, then...? (Answer: 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, out of 82 million people; a mere 3000 in Lithuania, out of 3.4 million; and 950,000 out of 16.5 million in the Netherlands.)

Well, it's gotta be something like that, where immigration and/or dysgenics are skewing the dumbfuck end of the girls' distribution downward, more than they're doing it for the boys.

Also, more boys drop out before completing high school than do girls, for any race (and probably for any religion, too). So that loss of the male "bottom-end," too, increases the girls' variability relative to the original boys', as the high-school years pass: even utterly stupid and unmotivated people can complete grade 4, but less so for the higher years, where it's increasingly a self-selected group, thus having potential selection biases.

When you consider that the 1995 TIMSS assessment included grades 4, 8, and the final year of high school, you begin to hope that Penner took all of that into account, eh? 'Cause the dropout rate and attitude toward female education even for those girls who stay in school could seriously warp his calculated variabilities for the kids who are still attending classes, which is the only place they'd get tested, right?

Oddly, TIMMS was done in 40+ countries in both 1995 and 2007 ... and also in 1999 and 2003 (data released December 14, 2004) ... and Penner's paper was published in 2008 ... yet he uses the 1995 data. Why? The data is collected and available online every four years!

Something does not smell right, there: Why use 13-year-old data when you could just as easily use numbers that are only half a decade old?

So, "Even the most hidebound male chauvinists have been forced to admit that girls are as good at math as boys, on average"? Unfortunately not, Toots. If you were thinking clearly, rather than demanding that reality fit into what you've a priori decided it must be in order for it to be acceptable to you, you'd already know that.

And, "A new study comes as close to burying [the stereotype that females lack the innate ability to match males in math] as anything yet"? Well, in the words of Weird Al Yankovic, "Close, But No Cigar."

P.S. OMFG, Kaki King rocks out to "Pink Noise".

See, there's also a "guitar gap," where it's rare to find "guitar goddesses" among the "guitar gods." But as Kaki and Marnie Stern demonstrate ... OMFG!

I remember reading, years ago in Keyboard magazine, a letter to the editor in response to one of the contributors to the mag having basically attributed a greater appreciation for complex time-signatures, etc., to testosterone or XY chromosomes, in the context of guys liking art/prog rock more than girls typically do. The letter related the story of a very talented female drummer, who had quit Berklee just because of the harassment she had to deal with from the guys there.

So I realize it's not just talent, and not just practice, and that there is value in things like girl-only music/band schools, where aspiring rock-ettes can do more than just make sandwiches for their boyfriends while the latter practice.

That doesn't make stuff like those "band camps," or Lilith Fair, any less sexist. (If you can't admit that a school or festival that excludes male solo performers and male-majority bands is sexist, you're an idiot: by definition they're sexist. But then, we live in a world where criticizing Oprah for giving bad medical advice (e.g., anti-MMR) is probably "racist," so what the hell do you expect?) But it does sort of explain and excuse why they exist. Sometimes.

'Cause in my "perfect world," every girl would be a math genius ... and a guitar goddess. (Yes, the album is finished [sample tracks], and will be on its way to manufacturing within the next week.)

P.P.S. The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal.

Well, if it looks like a duck, and fucks like a duck....

And a letter from one Robert B. that more or less sums up my own viewpoint on colonialism, "natives," and immigration:

Some of my ancestors came here in 1740—one such produced a needlepoint to celebrate it. As such, handed down from one generation to the next, is the reality of what they found when they got here—I have books that are 150 to 200 years old, history books.

What the "white man" found when he got here was appalling to his sensibilities. There was no myth of the "noble savage" here at the time, only reality. They found a people who lived in (relatively speaking) small tribal units that preyed upon one another in the most savage ways—taking women and children as slaves after killing off the older ones and warriors for such petty things as animal hides. The truth is, is they all attempted to use the white man for his advanced abilities as a means of gaining advantage over one another. What the Euros found was a people that one might have found living in Europe 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. A people living in the stone age with stone age superstitions. They were incapable of harming the land because they had no technology—they did, however, set forests and prairies on fire in order to drive herds into kill zones where they would gorge themselves until the meat rotted. Then they would take the hides and leave the carcasses to rot. Today we know that there was a great "kill off" of species around 5,000 years ago—including the native horse population. Simply put, they ate everything in sight.

It is a common modern myth that the white man forces modern day Indians to live in abject poverty on their reservations out West. This is a falsehood. This is the way they choose to live—I have seen it many many times with own eyes and know once-"pie in the sky" individuals who went to these reservations to educate and uplift these people—just like some of my ancestors tried to do 250 years ago. Just as then, they learned that the teaching was not wanted nor appreciated—they want to live the way they do and have no desire for "the white man's ways." Their "towns" are filthy with garbage everywhere. Abandoned cars, refrigerators, stoves, you name it, are everywhere on the streets and yards. They live in the midst of the most beautiful land in the world and this is how they care for it.

There was nothing here when the modern white man got here. "We" collectively made this nation, a great and thriving place, at least as it once was. It was our Protestant Work Ethic that transformed a rugged wilderness into the world's foremost economic, military and technologically advanced nation on earth in a mere 250 years (1690-1940) while "great nations" such as China languished in a medieval stupor. Let us not even compare the 10,000 years that others were here with no discernible progress whatsoever.

They are all jealous—all of them. They hate us for doing here what the rest of the world could not do in a thousand years. And thus, you are right, we never should have let them in. The Founders knew and understood this—it is why, up until 1965, none but Europeans were allowed into this country or its predecessor colonies—save (the great mistake) of the African slaves. And they knew that some day, there would be a reckoning for having done so—that two peoples so different could never occupy the same space in peace.

Back when I used to do menial (and bartending) work at a fishing lodge, I'd also sometimes have to drive the Indian guides home at night, to their reservation. You'd regularly see houses there with all of the windows busted out, and covered in polyethylene ... owned by men who did fantastic woodwork at the lodge.

It's not just that they're "fine except when they're drinking"; it's that they have no culture of upkeep. Whatever you give them, they'll bash it around until it breaks, and won't bother to fix it, even if they know perfectly well how to do the repairs.

I've seen that same lack of respect for technology (and the upkeep and gentle handling it requires) from Indians I lived down the hall from in an apartment-hotel a couple of years ago, who couldn't close their door without slamming it ferociously; I've seen it from Native Americans on public phones, slamming the receiver down in a way that was sure to eventually break it.

I also took classes (back in my engineering days, at the U of Manitoba) with a very friendly Native American guy. Sitting near him in the lectures—back in the days when I used to sit in the front rows!—I'd see his style of making notes. Rather than starting at the top of a page and working down it in a single, page-wide column, he'd effectively have three columns per page. But they weren't separated at the outset by vertical lines; instead, he'd write down a few equations, then draw a "backwards L" around them to contain them, and then move (probably downwards) to the next region, and repeat. Obviously, each one of us has our own style of note-taking. The point is that that's the way it made the most "logical sense" to him to organize his thoughts.

If you've ever seen Native American "architecture" you'll recognize the resemblance to that, in how they'll add little ad hoc lean-to's onto the sides of their houses, rather than planning it all out properly, and keeping the style consistent with the rest of the structure.

There's something profoundly non-wholistic about that, akin to having a name for every bend in the river, but no name for the river itself, and no way of counting how many rivers exist in your region. (I was just reading about that in an amazing book on anthropology: C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here. I'm only one-quarter through, but let me tell you: If you only read one book on anthropology this year, make it that one. Aside from the fact that Hallpike still buys into the "Original Affluent Society" myth, and quotes Jared Diamond favorably, it's absolutely golden, on every page.)

As to how you'd apply that way of thinking to, say, a large engineering or software project, where a significant part of the maintainability is based on having a good internal architecture.... (I once worked with a Russian programmer, who was tasked with making modifications to an Internet Explorer plug-in that had been built by a "genius hacker," who in turn had previously built compilers at the U of Toronto. Hackers have notoriously bad architecture, too, so at one point Igor [yes, that was the Russian guy's name] vented: "I hate genius programmers!" 'Cause it was all just ad hoc hacks, without concern for maintainability. My guess is that "Native American software" would be just as poorly built ... but without the "genius" part.)

If you wonder why people like that prefer their "ancestral ways" to the "linear, rational thought" of us patriarchal whites ... you have your answer. Because the way their still-primitive culture teaches them to think just doesn't fit with "Western, logical" ways of doing things. And as long as we encourage them to wallow in that same "traditional culture," they're never going to be able to keep up, even aside from IQ issues, never mind fetal alcohol syndrome.

And from another email on the same (aforementioned) site:

The reason why the USA does (not should; does) own this chunk of land north of the Rio Grande, is that our ancestors conquered it, while avoiding being conquered in turn. This was perfectly OK by the international law of the time. But why did that law say that? Two reasons. First, there is no way to right earthly wrongs against the dead. Those Indians who the USA lied to and dispossessed and killed and whatnot? Dead, every one of them. Second, righting wrongs that states disagree about means war, and war is a very nasty thing. Minor injustice is better than war.... Our European ancestors learned that at tremendous cost; you would do well to learn from history on this one, rather than experience.

P.S. The next time someone tries to claim (online) that male homosexuality didn't exist in hunter-gatherer societies, I'm going to throw this right in his (online) face:

Homosexuality in "Traditional" Sub-saharan Africa & Contemporary South Africa—an Overview. From which:

Although I do not think any serious scholar has attempted to deny pederastic practices in North African cultures, recurrent attempts have been made in English to deny any indigenous homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, [Daniel] Hrdy (1987:1113) categorically asserted, "Homosexuality is not part of traditional societies in Africa" and, after asking some chiefs and headmen about it, Gelfand (1979:201) wrote that "the traditional Shona [of Zimbabwe] have none of the problems associated with homosexuality [so] obviously they must have a valuable method of bringing up children, especially with regards to normal sex relations, thus avoiding this anomaly so frequent in Western society."

Dynes (1983) traced the myth of exclusive heterosexuality in indigenous Africa to the 94th chapter of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781)....

... and proceeds to utterly demolish that absurd myth ... which (myth) I'm pretty sure I saw someone quoting Gregory Cochran as having endorsed, recently.

The paper is mostly compiled from the Preface and early chapters of Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe's Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities.

By the same author: Homosexualities.

From Stigler, et al., Cultural Psychology (p. 215-6), in the midst of a chapter which attempts to explain the basis for sympathetic-magical thinking (and its "law of contagion") in human beings:

On reflection, "you are what you eat" seems like an eminently reasonable idea.... In the real world, mixture of entities (one version of what happens in ingestion) often gives rise to a product that shows properties of the constituents. Why shouldn't one turn orange after eating a lot of oranges, or become a good swimmer after eating fish? It is only the knowledge of the process of digestion in modern developed cultures that makes this idea implausible....

It is possible that "you are what you eat" is a universal belief, present in all children, and stamped out of adults through a scientific education. Indeed, according to Keith Thomas (1983), in his survey of the development of attitudes to the natural world in 17th- to 19th-century England: "It was generally accepted that food affected the character."

[We tested] whether there is an implicit, unacknowledged belief in "you are what you eat" among educated American adults.... Subjects (a few hundred undergraduate students) read a half-page vignette describing a hypothetical culture. There were two versions of the vignette (unknown to the subjects), which were identical except that in one case, the people were described as eating marine turtle, and hunting wild boar, but only for its tusk, whereas, in the opposite case, wild boar was eaten and marine turtle was hunted, but only for its shell. So the two vignettes differed with respect to what was eaten (and fabricated), and not in terms of other contact with the two animals in question. After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to rate male members of the culture on a number of personality scales, including good swimmer versus good runner, irritable versus good-natured, phlegmatic versus excitable, long-lived versus short-lived. Many of these traits had been selected to discriminate boar from turtle. We found that subjects reading the boar-eating vignette rated the people in this culture as more boar-like than those rating the turtle-eating culture. We obtained similar findings, with other subjects, using a contrast between an elephant-eating culture and a vegetarian culture that hunted elephants for their tusks.

A few days ago, I happened to see this on a blog which I've occasionally found insightful in the past: The late Medieval shift away from carbs and toward meat. It's touting Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories, and the supposed benefits of a high-fat, low-carb, Atkins-like diet, first suggested by Taubes in his celebrated NYT article, What if It's All a Big Fat Lie?

So I did a little Googling:

• Science, logic sorely lacking in pro-Atkins article

  A close look finds Taubes misquoting, misrepresenting, equivocating and running logical loop-the-loops to persuade us that Atkins had the answer, before finally revealing that he's on the diet himself and doesn't really care whether it shortens his life. Doubtless most readers are unaware of the CNN report in which scientists quoted by Taubes backed away from the concepts attributed to them....

  [Taubes] slams the establishment for vilifying "fats," Taubes means "saturated fats," but when he cites positive health effects of "fats" he cites studies on monounsaturated fats.

  Similarly, when he warns of the dangers of "high carb" intake, he means sugar, corn syrup, and some starches, not the fruits, beans, and whole grains that make up such a large part of a healthful, plant-based diet.

• Pritikin Doctors and Dietitians Challenge Gary Taubes' Fat-Promoting Article, What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? published July 7, 2002, In New York Times

  Mr. Taubes points out that sugars and other refined carbs like white bread and white rice cause spikes in blood sugar and surges in insulin, which, in turn, stimulate appetite, worsen cholesterol profiles, and decrease fat-burning, contributing to the fattening of America. Though the author mentions that there are different types of carbs, he seemingly pronounces all high-carb diets the same, infers that they are all ineffectual, and then makes the leap to high-fat diets as the answer.

  There is, however, another far healthier alternative: a low-fat diet that is rich, not in sugary, REFINED carbs, but in carbs of a different color—fiber-filled, nutrient-packed, straight-from-the-earth carbs like fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains such as oats, brown rice, and corn. These high-fiber carbs, known as unrefined carbs, cause no insulin overreaction. Unlike the low-fat, high-carb diets generically referred to by Mr. Taubes as causing an increase in triglyceride levels and other ills, low-fat, high-carb diets full of UNREFINED carbs have the most proven healthy effects of all diets.

• Big Fat Fake: The Atkins diet controversy and the sorry state of science journalism, by Michael Fumento, which includes a link to a rebuttal by Taubes. Fumento in turn responded to Taubes' response.

Taubes also responded to the "debunkings of his debunking," in an interview:

I think the better scientists in the obesity field never saw me as an advocate for Atkins. They read the article and took out of it what I put into it. It's the more zealous journalists/advocates of the low-fat diet dogma—Sally Squires of The Washington Post, for instance, or Bonnie Liebman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest—more than any one who tried to spin the article into saying something that I couldn't or wouldn't want to defend.

The most convincing evidence Taubes presents is from a study at the University of Cincinnati, led by Randy Seeley and David D'Alessio, where people on a high-fat diet lost twice the amount of weight as those on a low-fat one, while consuming the same number of calories per day. Neither Taubes nor Fumento actually say where that study was published, but this appears to be the follow-up study to it, from 2005:

The Role of Energy Expenditure in the Differential Weight Loss in Obese Women on Low-Fat and Low-Carbohydrate Diets. From which:

We have recently reported that obese women randomized to a low-carbohydrate diet lost more than twice as much weight as those following a low-fat diet over 6 months. The difference in weight loss was not explained by differences in energy intake because women on the two diets reported similar daily energy consumption. We hypothesized that chronic ingestion of a low-carbohydrate diet increases energy expenditure relative to a low-fat diet and that this accounts for the differential weight loss.... To study this question, 50 healthy, moderately obese (body mass index, 33.2 ± 0.28 kg/m2) women were randomized to 4 months of an ad libitum low-carbohydrate diet or an energy-restricted, low-fat diet.... The low-carbohydrate group lost more weight (9.79 ± 0.71 vs. 6.14 ± 0.91 kg; P < 0.05) and more body fat (6.20 ± 0.67 vs. 3.23 ± 0.67 kg; P < 0.05) than the low-fat group.... Estimates of physical activity were stable in the dieters during the study and did not differ between groups. These results confirm that short-term weight loss is greater in obese women on a low-carbohydrate diet than in those on a low-fat diet even when reported food intake is similar. The differential weight loss is not explained by differences in REE [resting energy expenditure], TEF [thermic effect of food], or physical activity and likely reflects underreporting of food consumption by the low-fat dieters.

(Of course, that study wasn't available to Taubes when he was doing his earlier writing, in 2002-4. It was, however, available to him by the time he published his book, in January of 2007 ... yet the only reference to Seeley's work in that text is to the presumably-original 2003 study.)

Anyway, the aforementioned "insightful" blog sort of gives the game away with this piece of astonishingly specious reasoning:

[A]nimal products, especially good muscle and organ meat, are more expensive to produce than grain products. So, the elite have always been less reliant on empty carbs, and enjoyed more animal protein and fat, than the commoners. This is why the notion that elites used to be fat or even obese, while the commoners used to be thin, is nonsense. As a rule, they never have been. By consuming so much of their food in the form of non-fibrous carbohydrates, the commoners of the Middle Ages would not have looked very different from today's Wal-Mart shoppers.

I don't buy that; but either way, and whether or not there is any scientific basis for Taubes' ideas (in the book which was written as an expansion of his NYT article) or for a paleolithic diet, the boar/turtle study makes it clear why people (especially "real men") are so eager to embrace the idea that eating large amounts of meat leads to healthier, more masculine bodies:

Sympathetic-magical thinking. Even at a purely subconscious level of bias.

[T]he law of similarity holds that the image equals the object. That is, things that show a superficial resemblance, which in most cases amounts to looking alike, also have a deep resemblance. Furthermore, because like produces like, or like acts upon like, action against an image can influence the object that it corresponds to. That is a form of backward causation. Indeed, a particularly common manifestation of similarity occurs in the sorcery practice of attempting to harm someone by damaging his image. Perhaps as a result of the dominance of the visual sense in humans, similarity is almost always evaluated in terms of visual resemblance....

A particularly interesting recent example [of the "law of similarity"] is the reluctance of members of some traditional cultures to have their picture taken, on the grounds that something of them will be taken away when the developed replica leaves their community in the hands of a tourist or researcher. (p. 224)

P.S. Just saw that Tyler Cowen has posted a link (#1) to one of Steven Dutch's pieces on global warming. Since I've been posting that same link myself whenever the topic comes up, and have never (seriously: never, ever) seen anyone else link to Dutch's site ... and since I also just posted the same link the day before at this economics blog ... well, let's just say it feels good to make a difference now and then.

Likewise for Bernie Planck's The Laffer Curve or Who is Laughing Now? ...

If states truly want to increase revenues they have to make an investment: pay poor people to get the f* out of their state and never come back. Since poor people, over their lifetime can easily cost a state a few hundred thousand dollars, it might not be a bad idea to pay poor couples $20,000 plus 10 grand for each child to induce them to leave. I figure that the poorest 20% of New Jersey's population gobbles up 80% of the state's expenses. There are 8.6 million souls who count themselves as citizens of New Jersey. Assuming that 1.7 million are poor it would cost New Jersey only 17 billion dollars to get these buggers out. Those who won't leave should be taxed at 90% of their income. What? You say it's unfair to tax someone that much? Liberals don't think so.

New Jersey has the nation's highest state- and local-tax burden because the state caters to the poor. If it won't tax the poor, soon it won't have anyone else to tax. New Jersey will spend 26 billion this year and perhaps as much as 35 billion next year with no end in sight. Every special interest group is fighting to stop cuts in hospital charity, education expenses and aid for the disabled. I say spend $17 billion so that we can end up with a state budget of only 5 or 6 billion a year. In less than a few years the state can recoup the money it spent on getting rid of all those free-loaders who pay no state taxes, eat up social services, burden schools with kids who will end up in jail anyway, and burn through health care costs.

... which is almost surely based on this.

Of course, Bernie needs to realize that a disproportionate number of the poor people he would (quite reasonably) pay to leave his state are exactly the uneducated, low-IQ Mexicans whom he otherwise welcomes into the country. More people = more customers, and lower employee wages, right? So what's not to like, if you're a businessman with dollar-signs in your eyes?

First you stop the leak. Then you mop up the floor. Any questions?

Plus, paying undesirable people to leave your state only moves the problem to another part of the country, i.e., it's not in the best interests of your nation as a whole. What you need to do is pay them to leave your country, and never come back. And then enforce that by building an impenetrable wall across the border, so that they can't come back even illegally.

And then there's this, which I had nothing to do with, but was still glad to see:

In almost every conversation I've had regarding racial achievement differences, socio-economics is broached. I then present situations where the gap exists, but economics, parental education, and school quality are similar (see Shaker Heights, Princeton High, and other schools in the Minority Achievement Network). So the discussion inevitably leads to overt and institutional racism. The idea is two individuals of similar ability will be judged differently according to their race. The resumé experiment from Freakonomics is usually mentioned. Basically, blacks can't ascend as a group because racist employers won't hire them.

Well, Dr. Kanazawa has blown away that myth. He follows black and white individuals and compares their NLSY scores with their incomes. He found that at a given intelligence level, blacks actually make more money than whites. Clearly, this black edge can be attributed to affirmative action.

As I've noted before, they're already getting a "free ride," but it's still not enough to make them happy. Nothing Whitey can do will never be enough for such ungrateful, racist bastards. So why even try?

Also, this would be great if it was true: The World's New Numbers. But it probably isn't. And even if it was true that immigrants' birthrates are going down as they reach socio-economic parity (which will never happen for wetbacks in the States, where today only 6% of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans are college graduates), and that white rates are going up, the latter would still probably reflect the coming idiocracy (i.e., low-IQ rednecks having more kids) more than anything worthy of optimism. So Steyn still has it right when he says, "We can debate the speed, but not the direction."

From The Earliest Cosmologies: The universe as pictured by the ancient Hebrews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Iranians and Indo-Aryans (p. 114-5):

I many years ago printed a study in which the World-tree symbol of the universe was traced through twelve mythologies. The idea was found to be pre-Babylonian. The study further showed that sometimes, in place of the "Spindle of Necessity," we have a "lance," or an "arrow," or a "spear," on which the heavens revolve. In the Vedas, it is an "imperishable axle," on which without intermission celestial and terrestrial wheels are forever turning. Again, as in several mythologies, the columnar "bridge" is pictured as a "ladder," with seven, or eight, significant step-supports. In Burmese thought and imagery it is the "Umbrella Staff of Universe Sovereignty."

Plato locates Apollo, the god of light, at the North Pole.... The present writer has little doubt that the remarkable Stone Tablet of Abu-habba will eventually be recognized as a representation of Shamash, seated in state in his sanctuary, upon the summit of the "mountain of the world," precisely as Plato has represented Apollo; that the solitary timeru (column) will prove to be the Atlas-pillar, the Shu-support, of the world; that Siru, the over-arching serpent, will be recognized as the guardian constellation Draco; that the so-called "sun wheel" upon the altar will be found to be the Earth-navel with the sign of the Quadri-furcate Waters.... (p. 194-5)

Well, I suppose if I had ever taken as astronomy course, I would have known that the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor, in the constellation Draco), too, is composed of seven stars, with the one at the end of its handle (Polaris) being the current North Star itself:

In early Greek mythology, the seven stars of the Little Dipper were considered to be the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas. Together with the nearby constellations of Boötes, Ursa Major, and Draco, it may have formed the origin of the myth of the apples of the Hesperides, which forms part of the Labours of Hercules.

In earliest times, Ursa Minor was named the Dragon's wing, and was considered a part of Draco....

In other cultures, Ursa Minor was the hole in which the earth's axle found its bearing. In Hindu mythology, the Pole Star is Dhruva (the word means pole today)....

On Draco:

The star Thuban (α Draconis) was the northern pole star around 2700 BC, during the time of the ancient Egyptians. Due to the effects of precession, it will once again be the pole star around the year 21000 AD....

In another Greek legend, Draco represents the dragon killed by Cadmus before founding the city of Thebes, Greece. In a third legend, it represents the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece (occasionally revealed as the sleeping or nearly dead figure of Ladon) and was killed by Jason. The fact that the stars of this circumpolar constellation never set plays an important part in its mythologies.

In Roman legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and tossed into the sky upon his defeat.

Early Christians originally of the Roman or Greek faith then depicted Draco as the serpent who temped Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

[T]he moment we take, as we ought to do, a high-north viewpoint in visualizing the heavens and earth, we immediately find the world's axis substantially upright in position, and therefore easily seeming like a column for the support of the dome of stars which revolves, as on a pivot, at its head. This column, extending from visible zenith to lowest nadir of the universe, furnishes the one bond needed to give unity to all regions celestial, terrestrial, and infernal.... It is the trunk of all world-trees. (p. 200-1)

That's a bit different from how I had been thinking of it, but it would still leave the two "halves" of the Milky Way as paths to the North Star at the top of that (spine-like) column, a la the serpentine ida and pingala nadis.

West of Babylonia is found the Hebrew conception of a quadrifurcate river of Paradise which flowed forth in opposite directions to water the four quarters of the pristine earth. East of Babylonia is found the Indo-Aryan conception of the Ganga-stream which, descending from heaven to the top of the Sumeru, there divides itself, according to the Vishnu Purana, into four world-rivers, and descending the several sides of the mountain from varsha to varsha, waters the whole earth. (p. 206)

In both [Indo-Aryan and Babylonian] systems the order of the seven planets is not that of the matured Greek teaching of Ptolemy, but is conformed to the older Babylonian view, according to which both sun and moon are nearer to the earth than the nearest of the remaining five. (p. 209)

P.S. The Jenny McCarthy song:

And, The Smartest Man in the World:

A.k.a. Chris Langan, also profiled in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers.

His metaphysics is obvious garbage, but most of the rest of his ideas as given in the interview (including those on the necessity of eugenics) are worth paying attention to.

Langan's Mega Foundation links to a paper/website on his The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory, where his full support for Intelligent Design comes out. I've only glanced at the 56-page PDF, but it appears to be classic, neologism-filled quackery. (Note: Basing your metaphysics on John Wheeler's ideas is always a Very Bad Idea, even if you manage a footnote [#49] to Bohm's implicate order.) Stuff, that is, written by someone who's so much smarter than average that he thinks he can just guess his way through any field he applies himself to, and ends up being radically incompetent in those same fields, having abandoned any reality-checks—yet still certain that he's making profound, fundamental contributions to human knowledge, and really should be King of the World, as a platform for remaking the Earth in his own image.

Well sorry, but that position's already taken.

P.P.S. Famous Dead Nontheists.

The most serious challenge to the reality of g (i.e., general intelligence, of which IQ is a proxy) was published in October of 2007 by Cosma Shalizi, at g, a Statistical Myth.

It's since been debunked here: Cosma Shalizi on IQ. From which:

The main thrusts of his argument is that test data do not statistically support a g-factor. Gould tried to discredit g but his argument was statistically incompetent (for a statistician's critique see Measuring intelligence: facts and fallacies by David J. Bartholomew, 2004). Shalizi's criticism is incredibly sophisticated, but likewise incorrect. In a nutshell, Shalizi is trying to argue around the positive correlations between test batteries. If those correlations didn't exist, his argument would be meaningful. However, these intercorrelations are one of the best documented patterns in the social sciences....

It's possibly not well known that enormous efforts have gone into trying to make tests that have practical validity for life outcomes yet do not mostly measure g. See for example the works of Gardner and Sternberg. The current consensus is that their efforts have failed. A notable exception might be measures of personality.

And this:

Cosma Shalizi misrepresented Spearman and his two factor model. The author tried to present Spearman as ignorant of group factors (he should have called them out as such or noted that they are from the second stratum). The fact is that Spearman gave up on the two factor model and accepted group factors. The fact beyond that is that the predictive validity of group factors typically appears in the range from (and including) zero to about 4%. In other words, the two factor model is not rigorously correct, but it captures virtually all of the practical validity of any test.

All of which would be relevant to the Race and IQ and Slate.com on race and IQ threads.

And none of which means that you can afford to trust any of Richard Lynn's IQ-by-nation numbers, for the reasons given at the Sex and IQ posting, and at Richard Lynn, Fearless Champion of Truth. Probably the same thing for Rushton too.

Don't know if Shalizi's earlier Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ paper has been equally debunked yet. (Some here, here and here.)

And a Quick, Easy to Understand Primer on Average Racial Intelligence Differences.

P.S. Charlotte Allen, on Atheists: No God, just whining: Atheists are a tiresome, self-pitying bunch whose primary motivation isn't rationalism but anger.

I do hope that Christopher Hitchens takes it upon himself to publicly "tear her a new V" for that pile of self-serving tripe.

Responses/threads up at Richard Dawkins' website, and PZ Myers (editorial).

Is that the same Charlotte Allen who wrote the Scholars and the Goddess piece, debunking the Great-Mother myth of feminist/pagan spirituality? If so, how sad. I guess she was just interested in debunking that nonsense to make room for her own, Christian nonsense. ("In the end, Allen prefers her Jesus as a Jew who is the divinized Christ of Catholic Christian orthodoxy.")

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