Blog — May, 2009

What will America stand for in 2050?

Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.

The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.

Do I sound like a right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.

Congresswoman Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans. The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end....

Yes, idiocracy is indeed the future of America, regardless of whether IQ has any genetically based component that differs between races (though it probably does). It's simple demographics, and culture. And that culture ain't white middle-class with a Protestant work ethic, any more. The only thing that can prevent that dystopian future is genetic engineering for higher-IQ children, and a widespread program to make that available/mandatory to everyone. It's called eugenics, and you better hope it happens, because it's the only way out.

Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled chiefly by immigration.

That is indeed a serious issue, which any thoughtful environmentalist should be very concerned about. No developed country "needs" to keep importing the Third World to keep their population (and ostensibly their economy) growing. Most of America's economic growth in the '90s (IIRC) was the product of technology-driven increases in efficiency. And it's precisely high levels of unskilled immigration (i.e., cheap manual labor) that holds back the adoption of those new, labor-saving technologies.

Prominent Latin Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.

That's the thing about conservatism: Espousing "traditional values" only works in a relatively functional country, which has values that are worth preserving. (Ignoring for the moment that the same "traditional Christian values" that gave America a good work ethic are also the ones which oppose gay marriage, etc. Say what you want about that, but America could have gone on indefinitely as a world superpower with 1950s values. That is, conservative Christian culture has a built-in survival value, whereas gay culture doesn't, simply because they can't and don't reproduce.) What Mexico needs is to inculcate non-traditional values (relative to their existing culture) in their people. By definition, they won't get that change from their local conservative politicians.

So what you end up advocating, if you've thought about this at all, is that underdeveloped countries should be extremely liberal, in embracing change and novelty ... but then switch to being ultra-conservative and opposed to change as soon as they actually get their shit together; that is, they would then need for their conservative politicians to adopt the "new" values, and freeze them, to not backslide into the old, "traditional" values. Needless to say, no such thing can ever work, for simple reasons of basic human psychology.

Latin America's cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate—40 percent in California, according to a recent study—and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America....

Yes, and that will happen any time that you allow large numbers of any one foreign ethnic/linguistic group into a country: In Canada, there are Chinese enclaves in Vancouver where the children aren't learning English. It's not even culture (in terms of low value on education) or IQ there; it's just what predictably happens when you have too many speakers of a foreign language settling in one place.

Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").

Wow, I didn't know that. How can you have gotten into the twenty-first century without words for those values? How can you function in white, middle-class ... oh right, never mind.

In a letter to me in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote, "when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth, and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American nation."

Yep, that's exactly where too much "diversity" will get you: The loss of your own traditional culture. (The things that are wrong with America could have been fixed without immigration. In fact, if you want to pick the most homophobic group of people on the face of the Earth, wetbacks would be a pretty good choice ... with blacks coming in second.)

Obama should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.

The one thing is that since the primary competitors for the dumbfuck jobs which underclass blacks and wetbacks in America work are illegal immigrants, the former two groups have the greatest stake in limiting unskilled immigration. So when they control the vote, you may yet get that wall built across the Mexican border ... long after, you know, the horse has left the barn....

P.S. A couple of new songs on my MySpace page, plus now the mastered versions of the older ones.

And, Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm.

I stumbled across a very old (1909) book by William Warren, yesterday:

The Earliest Cosmologies: The universe as pictured by the ancient Hebrews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Iranians and Indo-Aryans.

It sounded very interesting, which is why I was up most of the night reading half-way through it. But it's actually one of the worst books I've ever read, and is useful mostly just as a demonstration of how primitive the academic thought was in comparative religion, a century ago.

He's also written (1885) Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole; A Study of the Prehistoric World. We'll have to see about that, as its thesis is apparently that the Garden of Eden was located at ... yes, the north pole. Which, again, shows you how far we've come in the past century.

Anyway, all of the stuff about ancient cosmologies prompted me to look up the history of our ideas of a spherical earth. From Wikipedia:

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BCE in ancient Greek philosophy and possibly ancient Indian philosophy.

The concept of a spherical Earth displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth: In early Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus. Other speculations on the shape of Earth include a seven-layered ziggurat or cosmic mountain, alluded to in the Avesta and ancient Persian writings....

If you travel far enough, on land or sea, you'll see the features of the place you left sink below the horizon, and likewise for when you leave your destination and travel even farther in the same direction. So in that regard it's not difficult, even for people with no technological development at all, to come up with the idea that there's a fairly constant curvature to the surface of the Earth, even if you're coming from a pre-scientific society: You just have to travel a lot in many different directions, and observe a little.

Barbarians have been known to point out cave-mouths supposed by them to lead to an underworld. (p. 42)

The three regions of primitive cosmology were basically Earth, Atmosphere, and Sky. Extra points for using the word "barbarians"!

[I]n the ancient literatures the term "the Navel of the Earth" ordinarily signifies the northern terrestrial pole. (p. 94)

Ah, so that must be where he's gotten the absurd notion from, that the Garden of Eden was up at the center of the Arctic Circle. Oy vey....

The navel in the human body is at its center of gravity. What other "centers" do we know of, that could have a sympathetic-magical correspondence with that, for sharing the property of "center"? How about the "center" of the revolving sky, at the North Star, which sits directly above the north pole, and due north of anywhere else on Earth. So the north pole would indeed be the "Navel of the Earth"; but it's a bit of a leap from that, to thinking that the Garden of Eden (with its Trees being symbols of the World Axis, etc.) literally existed, at one time in history, at the same pole.

P.S. Conservative or Liberal? Workspace Reveals All:

In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

"I think it's a truly fascinating possibility that the left-right distinction, which emerged over 200 years ago in response to the French Revolution and continues to be the single best way of understanding ideological differences today, may be rooted in fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," Jost told LiveScience.

So no one better ever again try to tell me that conservatives are less conformist than liberals, just because liberals band together to fight against conservative intrusions and bigotries into their lives. Conservatives are indeed more conscientious on average, sure; but they're also much more conformist. And the (conservative) people who need order and discipline the most, will be the first to impose those on others. (In Zimbardo's prison study, "those prisoners who had the highest [authoritarianism] scores were best able to function in this authoritarian prison environment." That is, the ones who most enjoy giving orders and disciplining others, are also best able to follow orders from others; and vice versa, I assert.)

Also, Religiosity and same-sex marriage, abortion:

Without exception, as frequency of worship increases, support for same-sex marriage and for abortion decreases.

It is understandable that devout Christians feel support for things like same-sex marriage and abortion are tantamount to assaults on their value systems. Conversely, it's easy to see why progressives see religion as an obstacle to realizing their social objectives, even if they do not necessarily despise religiosity per se.

And then I saw this:

As a person of middle-class background, I have gone through spurts where I have thought that I "should" advance my career, but usually fall back into not giving a shit. I spent about a year trying to get into the IT industry, but once I succeeded, I stopped caring. Why? Because I have no wife (I do have girlfriends), no kids, no car, no mortgage, and don't plan to ever have any of those things. I can fund my lifestyle with any garden variety low-responsibility job. There's no reason for me to care about my career, unless I wanted to win friends among people with yuppie values. However, I have no interest in doing that either.

I am getting laid off next month, and am looking forward to it—it will pose no financial difficulty to me. Nobody else in my department is looking forward to it, as they all have spouses, kids, cars, a mortgage, etc. Consequently, they have a much larger stake in being constantly employed, in addition to advancing their careers.

That made me laugh, 'cause it's so close to my life....

Not a social charge, wipe that smirk
But I was happier last year, full-time out of work

—Geoff, "Glass Half Full" (song #6 on the forthcoming album, which has already been mastered, and will be sequenced tomorrow)

From Georg Feuerstein, et al., In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (p. 211):

Astrology is traditionally considered to be effective not because of any actual physical influence of the planets or stars upon the human individual or collectively, but because of the preestablished harmony between macrocosm and microcosm. In other words, astrology is deemed an expression of the inherent generative mechanism of Nature, which we can grasp, to some extent, through the theory of correspondences or equivalences [i.e., through sympathetic-magical thinking].

From Moti Ben-Ari's Just A Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (p. 85-8):

The word "planet" means "wanderer," because these apparently star-like objects were observed to move relative to the immense number of other stars, which just rose and set together. Once upon a time, it was believed that there were only five such planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—because only these can be discerned by the unaided eye....

As for the constellations, they have no physical meaning whatsoever. A constellation is simply a two-dimensional projection of a subset of the bright stars in a three-dimensional sector of the sky. Individual stars in a constellation may be thousands or tens of thousands of light years distant from each other, and they may be of widely differing sizes and temperatures, because a small, weakly radiating star may appear bright and thus significant simply because it is relatively nearer....

From a vantage point in the universe "off to the right" of our position [on Earth, observing the Musca Borealis constellation in Aries, i.e., the Ram], you might still be able to see Sheratan and Hamal, but the other two stars would be out of your field of view. Ascribing "Ram-ness" to these four unrelated stars is totally arbitrary and meaningless, unless you believe that the Earth is a privileged vantage point. But that puts you back into the pre-Copernican dark ages.

The number of constellations and their boundaries is totally arbitrary. The arbitrariness is reinforced when we note that people of other civilizations (for example, the Chinese) saw a different number of constellations and gave them entirely different forms and meanings....

The definition of a constellation is based upon ancient observations performed with the unaided eye; now that telescopes have been invented, the projection of the region of space attributed to a constellation will contain hundreds or thousands of other stars that could not have been observed before its invention. There is no a priori reason to assume that these stars have less influence on our lives than the ones that are interpreted as forming the constellations simply because they were easy for the Greeks and Babylonians to see.

Since the stars are moving with tremendous velocities, the two-dimensional projection changes over time, so the constellations are not an "eternal" characteristic of the universe....

And that, you see, is why the claim that astrology "works" through sympathetic-magical "correspondences" rings even more of a death-knell for the validity of that art, than if known or yet-to-be-discovered forces were involved. (Ben-Ari successfully debunks those other possibilities, on p. 89-92.) Because, if the positions of the stars (and thus the shapes of the constellations) are changing, there cannot be a constant set of "correspondences" in pattern between any constellation or zodiacal sign, and the traits or behaviors of human beings supposedly being influenced by that sign.

The most basic and central concepts of astrology turn out to be a remnant of the Earth-centered worldview that was demolished by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo hundreds of years ago, yet the "theory" of astrology does not take this new knowledge into account.

Of course, the seeming predictive validity of astrology is all just the Forer effect anyway....

The five planets mentioned above, plus the sun and moon, constitute the seven heavenly bodies, each of which gives its name, directly or indirectly, to one of our days of the week: Sunday is the day of the sun, Monday the day of the moon, and Tuesday the day of Tiw (the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Roman god of war, Mars). Wednesday, then, is Wotan's day (a corrupted form of the day of Mercury), while Thursday is Thor's day. (Thor was the Norse god of thunder and the sky, akin to the Roman god of the sky and of rain, Jupiter. In German, Thursday is "Donnerstag," or "Thunder Day.") Friday is the day of Freya (she being the Norse goddess of love, cf. Venus), and Saturday, finally, is Saturn's day.

There are also seven stars in the Big Dipper, which itself circles rather magically around the North Star, while even pointing to the latter (in a line along the two stars in its ladle).

If you wonder where the "magical" nature of the number seven came from, and why it is so prevalent in religion and mythology, those two natural phenomena (i.e., the visible planets, and the stars of the Big Dipper), visible to everyone in the northern hemisphere regardless of their latitude, are more than sufficient to account for that. (There is no "South Pole" star; but there is, conveniently and not coincidentally, the Coalsack Nebula in the same position, which appears as a starless "hole" in the southern sky. So, although people in the southern hemisphere didn't have the seven stars of the Big Dipper to find magical "correspondences" with, they still had the seven heavenly bodies.)

Even with no knowledge at all of anatomy, it's easy to pick out the following major regions of sensation in the body: one's sexual organs, a full bladder, an empty stomach, the beating of one's heart, the vibrations of one's voice, the eyes which are our primary means of gathering information about the world, and the fontanelle opening at the crown of the head, observed in newborn children (and associated in sympathetic magic with the North-Star "hole" in the hemispheric "cranium" of the sky).

Those easily discernable regions correspond closely with the seven chakras. And indeed, there have been numerous attempts in recent centuries to locate the chakras at the endocrine glands, and/or centers of the nerve plexuses along the spine:

It is noted by many that there is a marked similarity between the positions and roles described for chakras, and the positions and roles of the glands in the endocrine system, and also by the positions of the nerve ganglia (also known as "plexuses") along the spinal cord (branching to plexuses by endocrine glands or organs), opening the possibility that two vastly different systems of conceptualization have been brought to bear to systemize insights about the same phenomenon. By some, chakras are thought of as having their physical manifestation in the body as these glands and their subjective manifestation as the associated emotional, mental, and spiritual experiences. (Wikipedia)

And since the axis of the (serpent/tree/river/spinal-symbol) Milky Way always passes close to the North Star (in exact line with the literal World Axis) which the seven stars of the Big Dipper point to, it would have been very natural, by the "theory of correspondences," for the spiritualities of pre-scientific societies (esp. in the northern hemisphere) to associate seven "stars" or chakras with the human cerebrospinal axis.

Of course, pre-scientific people had no idea why the North Star was stationary in the sky, while all of the fixed stars rotated like clockwork around it. (Literally like clockwork, completing a revolution in 24 hours, so that the Big Dipper's rotation around the Pole Star can be used to tell time.) On the contrary, since even the most complex ancient Grecian models saw the universe as being composed of concentric crystal spheres revolving around a stationary Earth, they had no idea that North Star appeared to be stationary in the night sky precisely because of the Earth. But, would that not have made that "still point" all the more magical? To be singled out in the sky for no apparent reason ... while being so near to the serpentine Milky Way.

P.S. I hadn't seen this before:

General relativity extended the special theory to accelerated motion. The basic idea came to Einstein one day at his desk in the Bern patent office. He noted that when he tipped back his chair, it seemed to be weightless. Einstein inferred that gravitation and acceleration were indistinguishable.

The closest I had previously read to that (in a dozen biographies of Einstein) was the (apocryphal) story that he looked out the window from his office, saw a workman fall off a roof, and figured that the man must feel weightless during his fall. The chair story makes more sense.

How many of us have ever tipped back in our chairs? And how few ever developed a revolutionary theory of physics, from doing that? Aye....

P.P.S. Lotsa good stuff in Dennis MacDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark:

Mark's Jesus shares much with Hector and, even more so, with Odysseus. Odysseus and Jesus both sail seas with associates far their inferiors, who weaken when confronted with suffering. Both heroes return home to find it infested with murderous rivals that devour the houses of widows. Both oppose supernatural foes, visit dead heroes, and prophesy their own returns in the third person. A wise woman anoints each protagonist, and both eat last suppers with their comrades before visiting Hades, from which both return alive. In both works one finds gods stilling storms and walking on water, meals for thousands at the shore, and monsters in caves. Furthermore, Mark's dependence on the Odyssey suggests elegant solutions to some of the most enigmatic and disputed aspects of the Gospel: its depiction of the disciples as inept, greedy, cowardly, and treacherous; its interests in the sea, meals, and secrecy; and even its mysterious reference to the unnamed young man who fled naked at Jesus' arrest. (p. 3)

The debate over Mark's [rendition of Jesus'] disciples continues and may not soon subside, but a comparison of the Gospel with the Odyssey suggests an elegant solution. Homer highlighted Odysseus's endurance, courage, and wisdom by contrasting him with other characters, especially the comrades who sailed with him from Troy....

Both in Odysseus's nostos and Mark's Gospel, the narrator first presents the hero's retinue favorably and gradually introduces evidence of their fully until, in the end, they fail altogether. (p. 21-2)

The earliest evangelist renamed only three of the disciples: to Simon, Jesus gave the name Peter, and to James and John the collective name Boanerges, or Sons of Thunder....

In 1913 J. Rendel Harris published an extensive study entitled Boanerges in which he suggested that the sons of Zebedee were christianized Heavenly Twins, avatars of the Dioscuri.... Greeks knew Castor and Polydeuces as sons of Leda by her husband Tyndareus, but also as the Dioscuri, "Zeus's boys".... As early as Homer, thunder and lightning were taken as signs of Zeus. Both sets of brothers thus were given collective names that identified them as sons of someone other than their biological father, and in both cases the father was related to thunder.

According to Harris, the origins of Dioscurism lay in prehistoric astrology and superstitions concerning twins. He argued for the ubiquity of the myth not only in ancient Greece and Rome but also in Egypt, India, Palestine, central Asia Minor, Syria, Australia, North and South America, Southeast Asia, and various regions of Africa. (p. 24-5)

In the art of the Roman Imperial period, the Dioscuri commonly appeared on the right and left of an enthroned deity.... Mark's readers might naturally have seen in the request of the Sons of Thunder [of Jesus, to be allowed "to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory"] a request for glorification like that of the Sons of Zeus. (p. 27)

Medieval Spanish Christians exalted Santiago, that is, James, into a victorious saint almost certainly modeled after Castor.... Here one finds James as a Son of Thunder, sending lightning and rain from heaven and protecting sailors at sea. Pilgrims to the famous shrine at Santiago de Compostela to this day wear scallop shells as talismans, a practice the rest of the world celebrates in the delectable Coquilles St. Jacques. One ancient tradition claims that the apostle himself used a scallop shell to baptize new converts. One can explain these beliefs as developments of information provided in the New Testament without appeal to Dioscurism, but the New Testament cannot account for one of Santiago's most distinguishing traits, his appearances on a white horse flying through the sky.

As early as Homer and the Homeric Hymns, Castor was known as "tamer of horses." Both Dioscuri were called "riders upon swift horses." Pindar called the brothers themselves "white horses," and Euripides called them Zeus's "white colts." (p. 31)

After the Jewish authorities had formally condemned Jesus, they handed him over to Pilate. "Now at the festival he [Pilate] used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked." No independent attestation exists for this most unlikely custom; Mark seems to have created it to provide a contest between the Lord and the bandit [i.e., Barabbas], similar to that between Odysseus and Irus. (p. 40)

Jesus, like Odysseus, was a carpenter who suffered many things, returned to his fatherland without honor, overturned tables, chairs, and vessels in outrage because his home had become a den of thieves, was betrayed by one of his intimate associates, was despised by his opponents in favor of a rogue, and one day would return violently against them. (p. 42)

By healing the paralytic ... Jesus demonstrated that he had the authority to forgive sins. He did not say that he had authority to forgive sins as the Son of God, but as the Son of Man, employing a notoriously ambiguous title that applied even to Jewish prophets. (p. 52)

Prior to Mark's composition ... no one seems to have referred to the lake in the central Levant as "the Sea of Galilee." Josephus usually called Mark's "Sea of Galilee" the Gennesar.... Luke, who knew a real sea when he saw one, consistently demoted Mark's [sea] to a mere "lake."

But Mark portrays this lake, seven miles long and four wide, as a ferocious sea, troubled by storms, mighty winds, and lofty waves....

Of the hundreds of voyages in ancient literature, few involve a protagonist waking during a storm and rebuking culpable companions. Furthermore, the earliest evangelist provided distinctive flags to alert his readers to the presence of his model. Like Odysseus, who told stories to Aeolus while floating on an island, Jesus told his stories floating on a boat. Only in this voyage among all the gospels does Jesus sail "with other ships," a detail that points to Odysseus's twelve ships. Mark ends his tale with the disciples asking themselves who Jesus was, "that even the winds and the sea obey him." He is like Aeolus, the king of winds. (p. 57-8, 61)

Tiresias [the blind Greek seer] and Bartimaeus [the blind man/seer healed by Jesus] both recognized the identities of their heroic guests and addressed them according to their parentage. The order of Bartimaeus's address to Jesus is unusual: "Son of David, Jesus." Matthew alters Mark to read, "Lord, son of David"; Luke reads, "Jesus, son of David." In other words, both rewritings of Mark move "son of David" to the end of the address, which conforms to Mark's own style elsewhere. The distinctive order here, however, conforms to Tiresias's recognition of Odysseus: "Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus." (p. 101)

Several details in Mark's story [of Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem] are sufficiently distinctive to serve as flags to the entry of Odysseus.... Homer repeatedly makes a point of Odysseus's amazement as he looked about Alcinous's fabulous palace. The motif is organic and motivated in the epic, but not in Mark, where Jesus' looking around at everything in the temple seems strange and anticlimactic. Matthew and Luke may have thought so, too; they omitted it. The most obvious flag is the phrase "it was not the season for figs." The evangelist's model—at precisely this point in the story, after the procession to the city and before entering the palace—had spoken of an orchard with fig trees that bore fruit year round. (p. 109)

[In his story of the woman whom Jesus met at the well] Mark also retains a feature distinctive to the Odyssey. In both accounts the following of the water carriers ends in a cannibalistic feast; the eating of Odysseus's companions and the symbolic eating of Jesus' body and blood.... Christian apologists repeatedly fended off pagan accusations of cannibalism, often arguing that pagans were more anthropophagic than they. (p. 123)

The parallels between Odyssey 10 and Mark 14 clearly are dense and sequential. On the eve of their departures for Hades, both heroes ate last suppers with their comrades, after which the comrades slept while the heroes stayed awake and agonized over their fates. Both then mustered their sleeping comrades and departed.

To be sure, feasting and sleeping before journeys are common in ancient writings; these and other similarities obviously do not require mimesis. The same is not the case, however, with the heroes staying awake all night agonizing over their journeys to the realm of the dead.

Mark's dependence on Homer also explains a famous difficulty in the Gethsemane scene. Mark's narrator had been omniscient throughout the narrative, and here he dares to repeat Jesus' most private prayer to his Father while his disciples slept. The suggestion that the drowsy disciples heard Jesus' utterances just before nodding off is historicizing hogwash. The disciples had not overheard Jesus—Mark imitated Homer, who had dared to record Odysseus's pillow talk with Circe their last night together. (p. 127)

Mark's account [of the crucifixion] retains distinctive traits from Homer, such as the abandonment of the hero by his protecting deity, the summoning and nonappearance of a mortal ally, the linkage between the death of a hero and the destruction of a city "from top to bottom," and the laments of women watching from a distance. (p. 145)

Mark retained at least one distinctive trait from the story of Hermes [in his fable of Jesus walking on the water]. Like Zeus, Jesus is on a mountain and sees his disciples in danger, even though it is dark. Jesus' telescopic vision occurs only here in the gospels. Marks' dependence on the epic also may explain a notorious problem. Mark states that when Jesus walked on the water "he intended to pass them by." This phrase long has puzzled interpreters, for it suggests that Jesus had no intention of saving his disciples from the storm but only of manifesting his glory. Thus scholars have called the story an epiphany, not—at least not originally—a rescue. The comparison with Iliad 24 suggests another solution. Priam's squire saw Hermes "from up close" but not close enough to be distinguishable. Later, Hermes "drew near" and told who he was. Homer needed penumbral distance to facilitate the misidentification. Similarly, Mark may have used Jesus' walking past the ship instead of directly to it to set the scene for the misidentification of Jesus as a phantom. (p. 153)

The parallels between Priam and Joseph, Hector and Jesus, and the women of Troy and those at the tomb are thematic and seldom verbal, but the resemblances are dense and often appear in the same order....

Mark's narrative also retains distinctive traits from the burial of Hector: the rescue of a corpse at night and the appearance of three women at the tomb to care for the body. Dependence on the last book of the Iliad also explains peculiarities in Mark, such as its unique reference to the dangers Joseph risked to claim the body and the preservation of Jesus' corpse from defilement. (p. 158-9)

Jesus ... granted Peter and the Sons of Thunder a spectacular demonstration of his glory on the Mount of Transfiguration, an episode modeled after Odysseus's demonstration of his identity to Telemachus. Athena transformed Odysseus's garments, just as God did for Jesus. (p. 178)

Jesus finally arrives in Jerusalem in chapter 11; never again will he wander about or oppose demons. As in the second half of the Odyssey, his enemies now are mortals who have made his house a den of thieves. Odysseus and Jesus both reside in humble accommodations—the hut of a swineherd or the home of a leper—and enter the palace or the temple to confront their rivals. (p. 179)

It is entirely possible that before Mark picked up his quill no one had heard of Jesus stilling the sea, manifesting his glory to three disciples, sending disciples to follow a water carrier, or agonizing all night about his death. Homer, not history or tradition, explains the Gerasene demoniac [whose demons were cast into swine by J.C., a la Circe's transforming of men into pigs ... not that that was much of a "transformation," eh? help me out, girls....], the anointing woman, the fleeing naked youth, Joseph of Arimathea, the women who came to anoint Jesus, and the youth sitting in the tomb. (p. 190)

One Amazon.com reviewer noted that when differences between the Homeric myths and the Gospel of Mark can be taken as "transvaluations," it does offer a lot of scope for finding potentially unintended correspondences between the two. Still, given that the miracle-working Jesus of the Bible never existed, the stories had to come from somewhere. And that "where" is unquestionably pagan sources, in one form or another.

Well, whaddya know: Tony Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor.

But apart from skewing one's perspective on war, Catholic sex-abuse, abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, capital punishment, gay marriage, environmentalism, the origins of the universe (big bang vs. 6000 BC creation), and evolution (vs. Intelligent Design), what harm has religion ever done to us?

Oh, right: the witch hunts, and the Inquisition. With God-botherers standing in the way of science whenever reality didn't mesh with what the Bible says.

And, from an excellent comment in the otherwise not-especially-insightful Reply to Gelman posting at the Overcoming Bias blog:

[C]onservatives are respecting their ancestors and traditions, while liberals are respecting their reason and empathy. I say reason because it requires an openness to new facts and changing beliefs that conservatives only face as a last resort and only when it can connect with something else in their past. Conservatives see change being forced on them by new ideas of liberals. Liberals see oppression by custom of conservatives. It is no surprise conservatives opposed civil rights. Libertarians probably do relate to the self-made individual threatened by outside forces more than are sympathetic to the oppression of others since they see themselves more self-focused and more self-empowered. They may oppose discrimination by society but not by themselves since this impinges on their own control.

And there's this, in Moti Ben-Ari's Just A Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (p. 132):

[I]f the entire content of a religion were limited to a description of life on planets in the Andromeda galaxy, then the potential for conflict between that religion and science would be minimal. Conversely, since science (currently!) has nothing whatsoever to say about life forms in the Andromeda galaxy, scientists could equally well accept or reject the religion....

The existence of a conflict between science and religion depends on the existence of contradictory claims. For example, I am not aware of a serious conflict between chemistry and religion, because neither makes claims that are likely to contradict claims from the other field. With a few possible exceptions (like the transformation of water into wine, the miracle attributed to Jesus), religious texts do not contain significant material on, say, the reaction of acids and bases. Similarly, there should be little conflict between religion and fields such as physical optics or superconductivity.

Conflict between science and religion exists because there are fields in which there is significant overlap between the claims of science and those of religion. There are now well-established scientific theories describing the origin and subsequent development of the universe, the origin and subsequent development of the planet Earth, and, most significantly, the development of life, including human life. Most religions contain a description of the creation of the universe and the Earth, as well as of the origin of humans, so conflict is unavoidable. Potential conflict between science and religion exists, above all, in some areas of physics, and in geology and biology, because these sciences are ineluctably bound up with theories that provide natural, nonreligious explanations of the origins and development of the world as we experience it.

Good to see I'm not the only one who's figured that out. And, in the cases where such conflict does exist, the true believer has only two choices: Deny/Suppress the science, or reinterpret scripture, after-the-fact, much less literally (e.g., seven days of creation being seven geologic periods).

Perhaps since the origin of the Earth has less personal implications for our self-esteem than the origin of life, theories in geology have evoked somewhat less conflict with religion than have theories of evolution. Many creationists are willing to forego the literal truth of creation in six days, but continue to believe in the special creation of each species.

Or, as a third alternative, e.g., in the case of evolution, accept the evidence but insist that God is still twiddling all the knobs, behind the scenes ... and that humans still uniquely have souls ('cause the Bible says so!), while our last common ancestor with the great apes didn't. And Homo habilis and Neanderthals didn't, either.

When exactly did members of our species start having these (imaginary) things called souls? Was it before the postulated brain mutation that led to the cultural explosion 40,000 years ago? If not, why not: We were the same Homo sapiens species, going back for 200,000 years. Hey, maybe when God gave us souls, that's what caused the cultural explosion! Yeah, that's the ticket. (I'd actually be surprised if some Bible-thumper, somewhere, hadn't already suggested that.)

Darwin was unable to work for extended periods of time because of illness. There are many fascinating theories concerning this illness.... [S]ome religious people have suggested that Darwin was tortured by God as punishment for promoting atheism.

Well, yeah: You go against the wishes of the Big Guy in Heaven, what do you expect?

What is "Political Correctness?"

Answer: Something you won't find on this website.

Waxman-Market cost-benefit calculations:

One alternative approach is to have a revenue-neutral carbon tax (or other measures) kick in, but only if we have first captured the "low-hanging fruit," namely preserving various forests, limiting indoor emissions in poor countries, and limiting meat-eating. That way the major costs come only if we first show that we are even a wee bit serious about addressing the problem.

Wow, didn't expect to see that: an actual recognition that feeding grain to livestock is so much less efficient than eating it directly that a movement toward worldwide vegetarianism could actually affect AGW.

Of course, that brought out more than one idiot carnivore in the comments, yammering on about how humans supposedly evolved to eat high-protein diets, and thus showing their complete ignorance of the fact that even an otherwise nutritionally-deficient diet will contain adequate protein. (That adequacy was demonstrated in John Robbins' Diet for a New America more than twenty years ago.) But what did you expect?

The Paleo Diet actually looks scrumptious; but even vegans have no difficulty getting their RDA of protein (iron and B-12 are a different issue). But of course you can't be a "real man," much less a world-class athlete, if you're not eating red meat, can you?

And, If it didn't suck to be poor: why Europe is different:

[W]hat would happen if poor people had the same middle class values as everyone else? Well, if that were the case, a major motivation for not being poor would be removed. People wouldn't be motivated to work extra hard in order to insulate themselves from poor people. This explains why Europe is different than the United States....

[I]t has been a mystery why the United States has much higher per capita income than Western Europe, despite the fact that Western Europe has a higher average IQ because of lack of dilution by low-IQ minorities. Conservative types have insisted that it's socialism which is keeping Europe down. But in fact, socialism is a symptom of the differences between Europe and America, and not the cause. As Steve Sailer has explained quite frequently, there is a greater inclination to want to help out your fellow citizen with socialist programs when your fellow citizen is just like yourself. Our minority underclass causes people to work harder and make more money to avoid living near them, and it also causes people to be less in favor of socialist government programs.

That has become painfully clear to me over the past couple of years: I'd be willing to work damned hard, to make enough money that I could afford to live in a gated community, with the immigrant-excrement part of the world on the other side of the gates—in particular, to be able to permanently avoid the racist ones who won't let a scrawny white guy walk down the street without harassing him, just for the color of his (my) skin. Because really, the only way to avoid those racist dregs of humanity is to make so much money that you can afford to live somewhere that they'll never be able to afford to even rent. (University communities are the next-best thing, because even "starving students" are consistently above-average in intelligence.)

Of course, I've got over 500 books right now on my "need to read" list, as research for the book I've been planning on writing for a year and a half now, on the the paleolithic origins of religion. At 20 hours per book, that's two years of 100-hour weeks spent doing nothing but reading. So there's no "happy medium" where I could do that, and also do any amount of work in I.T. ... much less also find time for music, along with that. (The Photographed in Monochrome album is mastered, and the graphics files are all ready for upload; all that's remaining is to finalize the song order.) Blogging is a part-time job, but research ... aye, that's a more-than-full-time one. And as much as I'd be happy to be working full-time, year-round in software/website development, it's also a miserable thing to have to do, when you have other ideas you want to explore—ideas that matter—but have no time to do that.

Makes me wish I had done the academia-by-numbers thing, to be able to get paid to think and teach. But in what faculty? Computer Science? Ach, then that's just more of the same "full-time in I.T." problem I already deal with, periodically.

The best place in the world to live would be a country with a homogenous racial population with a high IQ, and a low population density. That describes places like Sweden and Norway pretty well, places which liberals in the United States consider utopias to be emulated. All we need to do to get there is kick out the minorities and lower our population density—of course that can't happen, they are citizens too, most of them anyway. The United States is forever doomed to be not like Sweden or Norway. But we could prevent our country from getting worse by halting immigration....

Living in a community where you need to own a car is a great way to insulate yourself from people who are too poor to own a car. This is the reason why "walkable communities" are only for the rich, because a walkable community affordable to the average blue collar worker would attract undesirables.

Again, university communities are a partial exception. But even there, as soon as the rents get low enough that students can afford them, you can't avoid the deservedly poor, low-IQ dregs of society. I am reminded of this, quite against my will, on a semi-regular basis. And I absolutely fucking hate it.

Could be worse, though: At least I'm not living in the U.K.:

Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely....

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males." He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive"....

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government's anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name....

Well, at least I'm vegetarian, so I'd have some rights....

Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children's television, who had made a joke about Gypsies. The BBC confessed that Brush had behaved inappropriately and assured police that the episode would be banned.

"Many of them [not] Hungarians." Will they still be allowed to broadcast Python, then?

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity," the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia....

There have been innumerable cases in recent months of people in schools, hospitals and other institutions losing their jobs because of various religious scruples, often, as in the East Germany of yore, not shouted fanatically from the rooftops but betrayed in private conversations and reported to authorities. The crime of one nurse was to offer to pray for a patient, who did not complain but merely mentioned the matter to another nurse. A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class, faces the sack for seeking support from her church. A private email from her to other members of the church asking for prayers fell into the hands of school authorities.

Blimey. "First they came for the fox puppets, and I didn't speak out because I'm not a puppet fox...."

It does explain, though, why Christians have recently become such big fans of freedom of speech—you know, now that they're the ones being unfairly silenced.

"And yet it moves...."

Also just saw this:

Ride a bus at your pe[r]il in Downtown Baltimore. White people get beat up all the time for that der[e]lection of prot[o]col.

Wow. I've never seen anything like that in Toronto. Just when I thought my opinion of blacks couldn't get any lower....

This is what Rosa Parks was fighting for? The right of blacks to beat up whites just for being on the bus at all?

Update: Welcome, scientifically illiterate, holy-cracker-eating Protein-Wisdomers! Gord Bless!! Keep your dumbfuck, abortion-protesting, Imaginary-Friend-in-the-Sky-believing religion away from my science, you witch-burning God-botherers! Only children believe in Santa Claus; so, too, for the Jesus Claus. ATHEIST OUTLAW!! JOHN 3/16 (CARPENTER)!! CLOUSEAU!!

Conservatives don't have a snowball's chance of cracking the liberal academic monoculture until they stop spouting garbage science.

That's the libertarian-conservative Steven Dutch speaking, and he's talking to you. 'Cause so long as you're bound hand-and-foot to any religion (or simply too clueless to know the difference), you'll continue spouting garbage science, and tolerating reason and science only insofar as they don't conflict with your fairy-tale belief system—and that ain't very far at all. Conversely, the only things you can really be rational about in life are those where religion doesn't apply, or where, by coincidence, logic happens to agree with (or at least doesn't disagree with) your Holy Book. That's just the inherent nature of the devout believer.

And that, you see, is what I meant about believers "burying/burning" science and reason. No religious nut can tolerate either of those, as soon as they start to conflict with what he/she desperately needs to believe is true, e.g., the infallible Word of God. And it's only because Catholics, in general, no longer have much of a say in the matter, that the book- and witch-burning isn't still being done literally, today.

Sure, you can be "logical" in reasoning clearly from utterly misled premises (cf. Thomas Aquinas, or even Isaac Newton's writings on theology, etc.), but don't you dare try and tell me there's any value in that except as an academic "practice exercise," okay? It doesn't count for shit in real, reality-tested life, and it sure as hell doesn't count as being a "rational human being" when the most-cherished ideas, upon which you build your worldview, are derived from Mesopotamian and classic Grecian myths.

And that is also why, when Dan 'n' Darleen carp (what time they can spare between their pro-life postings) about the political Left not being "logical" enough for their liking, it's just too fucking rich. They're adults who believe, devoutely, in fairy tales; and it's not as though those fairy-tale beliefs don't shape their politics, too (e.g., in terms of the abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and capital-punishment debates—not to mention the use of contorted, implicitly religion-driven arguments against gay marriage, where "immoral" is never explicitly said, but is always an obvious subtext [how could it not be?]—if not necessarily toward the Left in general). Plus, the Christian belief that God has given humans "dominion" over the world absolutely leads, quite "logically," to a rape-the-environment and use-it-all-up-before-the-Apocalypse approach to even the most obviously finite natural resources. And then if you object to that, just trying to get them to see that they're shitting in their own nest and that they can't go on doing that forever, you're "part of the godless-liberal problem."

Magical-thinking Catholic "cannibals" bitching about how the political Left doesn't meet their standards of "logic." Gotta love it. Might as well believe that the world is pink, based on the divine revelation granted to someone on the road to Damascus two thousand years ago, derive a worldview (with impeccable logic) accordingly, and then carp at anyone isn't just as logical as you are in adhering rigorously to that derived worldview, while expecting the rest of the world to not merely respect your delusions but conform to them "for the good of society."

"After all, laws exist to keep order in society, and we like our society the way it was in the good old days, even before we managed to, thankfully, be born ass-backwards into the One True Religion—phew! what are the odds? And if we allow gays to get married, that will further the disintegration of Christian society into hedonism, which is something no Catholic grandmother wants to see. (Get off my lawn!) And if marriage comes to be seen as just a contract between consenting adults, rather than one man and one woman being united in holy matrimony in the eyes of God, next thing you know polygamy will be legal, and everyone will be getting married to everyone else, including animals. It's just logical. Plus, homosexuality is immoral!! God says so in the Bible!!! You're not using your parts for what God made them for!!"

How is the attempt, "for the good of society," to restrict others in exploring, celebrating, and openly living alternative sexualities, more acceptable than the social engineering of the Left? It isn't, of course—it's just meddling with other people's lives in a slightly different and even more intrusive way, which you have no fucking business doing. Dennis Prager, as quoted by Darleen:

Perhaps the most important argument against same-sex marriage is that once society honors same-sex sex as it does man-woman sex, there will inevitably be a major increase in same-sex sex. People do sexually (as in other areas) what society allows and especially what it honors.

And that, you see, is why all that un-Christian, devil-inspired, rectal hanky-panky must be stopped, first at the altar and then in the college dorms. It's not just that they don't want gays to be allowed to get married; rather, they're concerned that gay marriage will lead to even more homosexuality in the world, as if that's any of their damned business. And so, in part to forestall that increase in gay sex, they fight against legalizing gay marriage! That's pretty damned close to using the court system in the attempt to control other people's sex lives ... and then they complain about the "socialist gubmint" restricting their freedoms! (If these people were honest with themselves and with others, I think they'd openly lament the repeal of past laws against sodomy in America. After all, those laws were very much a part of the "Christian values" on which the country was founded, weren't they? With Biblical support for the same "laws of God" even, eh? In which case, no God-fearing Christian could have been happy to see those laws struck down, regardless of how much they might otherwise trumpet the idea that government shouldn't be interfering with one's private actions. After all, if it's the laws of God versus the laws of gov't, God wins.)

If you're not reality-testing your beliefs, you're not being "rational," by any meaningful use of the term. You are, however, very likely being "religious," in all meaningful senses of the term.

And anyone who "inherits," into adulthood, the "one true religion" of his parents, without pondering that oddity to the point of realizing, even without any additional research, that there can be no such thing—i.e., that either all religions are more-or-less equally true, or that none of them are—has no claim to being a thinking human being.

Cracker?

(You see, I'm even worse on my own turf. Do you forgive me? What Would Jesus Do?—assuming, that is, that he ever actually lived, even as nothing more than a minor historical figure, which is actually quite unlikely.)

You don't have to believe any of that. But if you can't see that it is indeed the promotion of "garbage science" and religion-inspired positions on important issues that makes it impossible for scientifically literate intellectuals to vote conservative/Republican, there's truly no hope for you. Whenever I, for one, warm up to voting conservative, for the "tough love" economics, sometimes-tougher-than-liberal (but still nowhere near tough enough) stance on immigration, and their greater intolerance for mindless political correctness and "hatespeech" laws, I get hit with a batch of scientific illiteracy and Christian/religious idiocy ... and decide to just stay home on election day and read instead.

P.S. Yes, I know your content-management system logs the IP address for each comment, regardless of the email address given by the commenter; and that, if that address is static, you can call up all comments submitted from it, even if they've been done under different names and emails. If I was really trying to remain anonymous, I wouldn't have given this link here, would I?

I can't stand proud scientific illiteracy, or God-bothering in the guise of politics. And so often, the two of those go together—a sad fact which is seriously compromising what would otherwise be far-and-away the best classical liberal site on the Internet. (Dan and Darleen have so little insightful to say, you'd be better off dumping them.)

Aye chihuahua, Hispanic Math:

[T]he University of Arizona has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to come up with more culturally-sensitive math instruction for Hispanic students....

Latino youths, especially those from low-income or working-class families, tend to score lower on standardized math tests than their white counterparts and are among the lowest of all ethnic groups.

When you combine the fact that 'spics can't do math (or perform competently, on average, in any intellectually challenging field) with the fact that (IIRC) more than half of the preschool kids in America are now Hispanic (and "over 90 percent of this population is estimated to live in metropolitan areas") ... well, holy guacamole, you can really see where the U.S. is headed. And it ain't pretty, unless your goal really is to turn a former world-leader into a third-world Taco City.

Mexican Americans are the least well educated group among both major Hispanic groups and among the total U.S. population. The dropout rate among Mexican-American students is estimated at 40 percent or more (Valdivieso & Davis, 1988). In addition, a large majority of the group's recent immigrants have come poorly educated to this country. In 1989, the Mexican Americans in the 25 to 34 age bracket were almost five times as likely not to have completed high school as non-Hispanics (50 percent to 11 percent). These adults, unfortunately, are those most likely to have school-age children. Only 6 percent of those in this age group have completed 4 years or more of college, compared to 26 percent for non-Hispanics (U.S. Census Bureau, 1990). Similarly, only 50 percent of Mexican Americans in this age group have completed high school. This rate is the lowest for all Hispanic groups, substantially lower than the 89 percent high school completion rate for non-Hispanics (U.S. Census Bureau, 1990).

Likewise for Anti-Racist MultiCultural Math - Part Two (Zwei, Dos, Deux, Due, Dois,..).

As far as I know, Canada hasn't suffered any comparable multiculturalism-based dumbing-down of the secondary-school curriculum. Either way, it's funny: We were one of the first countries to enact "hatespeech" laws, but in spite of our reputation for politeness, the most-prominent people who have been prosecuted under those laws (Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, Kathy Shaidle) are doing exactly what needs to be done to force a repeal. That is, they're refusing to apologize, and are rather escalating their rhetoric, i.e., "living as if the revolution has already been won."

And although we've already, very stupidly, imported way too many goat-fuckers, they're nowhere near a majority (yet).

So, in spite of the fact that we've played multiculturalism to the hilt, we're still in a better position than the United States (even aside from President Oreo's turning of their economy into an increasingly government-owned one), never mind Europe. Of course, that's more thanks to the fact that we don't share a border with a third-world country than it is to our own smartitude. Also, because we've imported a wide range of too-stupid-to-live immigrants, in a mad obsession with "diversity," we at least don't have any single group dragging us down (yet). And just about any group you can import, aside from African blacks, is less stupid and culturally destructive (goat-fuckers excepted) than are Speedy Gonzalez & Co.

We also never had to deal with the after-effects of slavery ... except for being the end of the Underground Railroad. You'd think that would make a difference to the attitude of blacks towards whites here, wouldn't you? Y'know, that the ones whose ancestors came over to a generously offered safe refuge from the U.S. would be grateful to Canadian Whitey for that, as would the more recent racist, savage escapees from the Dark-As-Shit Continent.

Yeah, dream on....

P.S. Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

I still think that Palin was "playing to the gallery" when she spoke out against elitism, and about an "elite" person being anyone who thought he was better than anyone else. And while I'd have to look it up, I'd bet dollars to Krispy-Kreme donuts that that statement, more than anything else, caused Ophelia Benson to crap herself about the anti-intellectual Right, and get her Palin-hatred on, when Palin was truly the most-palatable of the four candidates for POTUS/VPOTUS. But it's true: conservative intellectuals, much less non-religious conservative intellectuals, have no party in the States. Or in Canada.

So what is it, anyway, that causes religious wing-nuttery to cluster on the right side of the political spectrum? I know that conservatives in general have lower fear-thresholds than do liberals, and fundamentalist religion is certainly based on a hell of a lot of fear. Could it be as simple as that—that just as they need a strong president and strong military to protect them from other countries, they also need a strong God to protect them from Evil? That is, that the people who see the most danger in this world also perceive the most danger in the (imaginary) "world hereafter," thus needing the most protection, by the U.S. Army and the Army of God? And that it's equally fear of change (i.e., the unknown) that makes them socially/culturally conservative ... and fear of being cast into the (social) out-group that makes them so damned conformist, just as to be cast into the religious out-group would equate to eternal damnation?

If they're seeing the most danger in this world, they would naturally see the most danger in other (imaginary) worlds too, wouldn't they? How could they not? It's not a separate set of cognitive processes for the two: it's the same brain, and the same neural wiring. And there's nothing that binds an in-group into rigid conformity like paralyzing fear of being cast out of that group, into the out-group, as a liberal/heathen.

Man, turns out I had already figured most of that out last September.

Well, to get any further on that, then, I'd need to read through the neuropolitics.org site....

Well, this is interesting:

I clicked on my browser shortcut to the Little Green Footballs site today ... and got a "403: Forbidden" error. So I tried accessing LGF through The Cloak. And sure enough, the site is up.

And yet I, and only I, am not allowed to access it.

What this means, I think, is that, after my first comment on LGF, Charles Johnson is not content to prevent me from posting on LGF, he doesn't even want me reading it. So, he's blocked my IP address.

Oh. My. Fucking. God. I knew the guy was an out-of-control control-freak, but this is beyond the pale! This isn't just "under the LGF bus," it's ... it's ... well, I don't even know what it is!

It's like I've been banned from even looking at the Lizard Highway, much less driving on it!!

What kind of a twisted, paranoid, dictatorial dumbfuck-loser blocks you from even reading his site?!! Someone who really would make a good cult leader (no joke), that's who. Or a good Party member in China, in my opinion. (Remember search engines blocking "offensive" sites, there?)

He's also deleted my one-and-only posting. Fortunately, I saved a copy, for just such an occasion as this:

I don't know of any examples in history where mass deportations weren't cruel, brutal and just plain evil.

There are other alternatives, such as those which are currently being implemented by the Japanese, in dealing with their own (non-Muslim) issues: Japan to Foreign Workers: 'Here's Money, Now Go Away'.

Descendants of Japanese emigrants from Latin and South America, namely Brazil, are being told by the government of Japan that they will pay them to leave and go back to their home countries. Many of these people were born by Japanese emigrants who moved abroad in the past for work, and so have direct ties to Japanese culture through their families.

Now they are being told, thanks for playing, here's a little coin for airfare, have a nice life. And if you take the door prize, your visa is void. So you can't ever come back to work here. Thanks for playing!

One Japanese government official, Jiro Kawasaki, a senior lawmaker of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was quoted in The New York Times as saying: "We should stop letting unskilled laborers into Japan. We should make sure that even the three-K jobs are paid well, and that they are filled by Japanese," he said. "I do not think that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society."

The same non-cruel, non-brutal, and (IMO) non-evil approach has been advocated by Steve Sailer: A Buyout Option For Europe's Muslims?

Incidentally, Bernie Planck (bernieg1) has a post up with regard to his experiences on this thread, earlier today: Kicked Off Little Green Footballs after One Comment.

This is also my first comment. (Well, technically the second, since the way your Ajax keeps grabbing control caused me to accidentally press the "post this comment" button earlier, when I was trying to click on a page in a different browser instance. I build software and websites myself, and I have to tell you: "Cool" is no substitute for "usable.") It doesn't really matter to me whether or not it's also my last comment, as this is the only point I particularly want to contribute to the discussion.

The primary reason I have kept LGF bookmarked is for your postings on evolution and against Intelligent Design, which are truly valuable. Aside from that, I personally am just as happy under the LGF bus, as on it. :)

If I were you though, Charles, I'd read what Bernie has written, and then go take a good, long, hard look at myself in the mirror.

So I guess this means the cowardly "lizard-cult leader" won't be taking a long, hard look at himself in the mirror, eh? That's a shame.

Because, you know, all I was doing was suggesting that we follow the lead of the Japanese. And if the "Japs" are doing it, it can't be racist, right?

Right? Help me out here, Charles.

If he wanted to delete my posting, that would be "understandable," given his state of mind. If he wanted to close my account, that would also not be unexpected. But to block an IP address, so that the "offending party" can't even access your site ... even to view the genuinely valuable anti-ID postings ... is, I think, past the point where you've genuinely lost it.

P.S. Web-2.0 "cool" really is no substitute for "usable." And no real programmer would get so excited about simple JavaScript toolkits and the like as CJ periodically does.

Also, while I happen to be subscribed to an Internet package which involves a modem (and thus presumably a static IP address), my ISP also offers wireless USB packages (which would surely have their IP addresses assigned dynamically). So, if I was subscribed to the latter sort of package, Johnson could actually end up blocking access to his site, not for me specifically, but rather for random users (on that wireless network) in Toronto!

It was for exactly that sort of brain-fart that the phrase "Nice going, Einstein" was invented. Amateur.

No doubt it's worth it to Control-Freak Johnson though, to ensure that I can't access his site, except through a proxy....

So what if, by 2020, Rotterdam is a majority Muslim? We already have an answer.

For Ephimenco, part of the problem is the de-Christianization of society. "When I arrived here, during the 1960s, religion was dying, a unique event in Europe [?], a collective de-Christianization. Then the Muslims brought religion back to the center of social life. Aided by the anti-Christian elite."

That's actually a fairly idiotic position: It's not as though Muslims would have been less religious if they were surrounded by devout Christians, and the problem ain't that Enlightenment thought has created a "secular vacuum, into which Islam has rushed," as these people simple-mindedly imagine.

What these people (from the God-bothering dumbfuck and barely competent [in non-fiction or poetry] writer Kathy Shaidle on down) never seem to understand is that the "anti-Christian [liberal] elite" are the same people whose freedom of speech and expression have long been most threatened by the Christian churches.

If the Catholic (etc.) Church had in any way been been content to "live and let live," atheists like myself would have had little reason to want to see it destroyed: If psychological children need desperately to believe in fairy tales, and are able to just do that on their own time without fucking up the lives of others, who would give a damn? (Alright, even then they'd still also be fucking up the lives and minds of their children; but anyway.) But their history, from well before the time of Galileo until the present day (when The Life of Brian is still banned from public showings in certain areas of Britain), has been one of trying to crush and/or burn people who disagreed with their literal and metaphorical pontifications. They've "reformed" only because of the Enlightenment and the corresponding secularization of the world around them—if they could get away with it, they'd still be burning people at the stake today. They've never changed of their own accord; they've rather been forced to change by the more-enlightened world around their primitive, cannibalistic, death-and-resurrection cult.

Why do liberals naïvely take the side of Muslims in the West, today? Simply because they know very well how brutally oppressive Christianity can be ... but have no experience with the much-worse contemporary oppression and savagery of Islam. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," right? And "All us minorities/underdogs [incl. scientists being hassled by religious nuts] are in this together," right? You can't blame liberals for passing "hatespeech" laws left, right, and center, when you've already proved that in the absence of those laws you'll discriminate against and otherwise harass them equally left, right, and center. You've pushed us into that position, you homophobic, blindly pro-"life," science-hating Christian morons! So how do you like the monster you've created with your prejudices, and inability to just let others live their own lives?

Centuries of brutal religious oppression on the part of Christianity, and then these half-wits think that the de-Christianization of the West is the problem, and that the Muslim menace wouldn't exist in our own cities if only Christianity was a stronger force in society? Not even close.

today's residents of europe no longer know or remember how they got to be free and they need to be taught to fight for freedom and human rights again. this will either happen when they are subjugated, or won't happen at all, in which case they don't deserve anything better than living under sharia.

something similar happened during the nazis: initially they all appeased. then they had to fight for their lives. i don't recall christianity or judaism doing any better than the secular forces which ultimately defeated the nazis and in fact, the most shameful response was that of the church.

The only way to prevent Muslims from demographically taking over the West eventually, would have been to never let even a single one of them in, in the first place: In the long run, whoever reproduces the most can vote for whatever their group wants (including a theocracy), and they will get it. You can argue about how long it will take for that to happen, but it will happen. And immigration has always been driven as much by conservative business owners wanting cheaper labor, as by liberal politicians wanting a larger voter base: the Almighty Dollar has always meant more to the average "good Christian" business owner than the long-term welfare of his country.

If it wasn't for loud-mouthed, science-hating, reason-violating, Abrahamic-morality-pushing God-botherers like Shaidle, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, there wouldn't be a "liberal elite" in our universities or cities. 'Cause even when smart people generally agree with conservative economics and politics, they are driven to vote liberal in no small part precisely because of the pro-Bible/anti-science/anti-reason worldview of such idiot God-botherers. We already know what will happen to science (in funding, in the classroom, and in allowed subjects of [e.g., stem-cell] research), and to any freedoms that aren't compatible with the teachings of the Bible, if "good Christians" are left in charge of the country. That is, we already know that we, along with the knowledge and freedoms we value most, would be thrown to the lions....

had the church continued the same role to its present, we would live under sharia, but still under inquisition [too]. it was knowledge and reason which got rid of the role [of the Church]—good riddance—and only adherence to them can protect from encroachment of the role of another religion.

P.S. WWOOF.

Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World:

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them.... Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer's sweater, believing that "evil" is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers's cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor's personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. [This is the type of pattern-finding which underlies sympathetic magic (e.g., voodoo), where the cause resembles the effect.] Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.

And Race differences in IQ (Summary).

And from A Conservative Conservationist? Why the Right Needs to Get Invested in the Search for Climate Change Solutions:

[C]onservatives must reframe the environmental discussion by replacing the political left's scare tactics with conservative principles such as responsibility and stewardship. Stewardship—the idea that we need to take care of what we've been given—simply makes sense. It makes dollars as well, for the simple reason that our economy is founded on natural resources, from tourism and manufacturing to real estate and agriculture....

Second, conservatives must reclaim lost ground from far-left interest groups by showing how environmental conservation is as much about expanding economic opportunity as it is about saving whales or replanting rain forests. When corporations such as BP and Shell America pursue alternative energy sources, they not only cut carbon emissions but help cut our petroleum dependency on OPEC nations. When South Carolina restaurants recycle their oyster shells, they not only restore shellfish habitat but take a job off local governments' plates and ensure continuing revenue streams for local fishermen.

Third, conservatives must respond to climate change with innovation, not regulation. This means encouraging private research and implementation of more eco-friendly construction, more energy-efficient workplaces and more sustainable ways of going about life—all of which cuts costs and protects God's creation. It means looking past the question of whether your car's exhaust melts polar ice caps and instead treating our environment as an investment our future depends on....

I am a conservative conservationist who worries that sea levels and government intervention may end up rising together. My earnest hope going forward is that we can find conservative solutions to the climate change problem—ecologically responsible solutions based on free-market principles that both improve our quality of life and safeguard our freedoms.

P.S. Bernie Planck, Kicked Off Little Green Footballs after One Comment.

I have an account at LGF too. Or perhaps that's now had an account there....

If you wonder where the neighborhood has gone, from "Europe's Formerly Majority-White and Once-Pleasant Land," this basically explains it: Fear Masquerading as Tolerance.

Postwar Europeans behaved as if no one's culture was better than anyone else's. In 1996, the Dutch cabinet held that "the debate over multi-culturality must be conducted starting from the principle that cultures are of equal value." [Note that that's an actual quote from the Dutch cabinet!] The state would confront matters of immigration and ethnicity with a scrupulous neutrality, aided by a set of "universal values" supposedly common to all cultures. It seemed inappropriate to force—or even to persuade—immigrants to assimilate into the old nationalistic loyalties that Europeans themselves were abandoning....

In the name of liberal universalism, many of the laws and customs that had held European societies together were thrown out the window. Tolerance became a higher priority than any of the traditional preoccupations of state and society—order, liberty, fairness, and intelligibility—and came to be pursued at their expense....

The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was "ethnic pride" [for non-whites] a virtue and "nationalism" a sickness? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it was considered a citizen's duty to ask ten years ago?....

The virtues of the multicultural era were elite virtues. The British sociologist Geoff Dench suspected, with good reason, that favouring elites was a large part of the point of multiculturalism. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy, he noted "can probably be managed more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities"....

Diversity described both a sociological reality (there were more foreign-looking people around) and an ideology (there ought to be more foreign-looking people around). The ideology was perfectly in tune with the neutrality among cultures espoused by the builders of the European ideal. Diversity, though, could never really be a stable or neutral ideal because Europeans did not know enough about other cultures to make it one. While Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally, invisible to them.

Europeans who considered churches houses of stupidity, sexism, and superstition didn't know enough about mosques or ashrams to form a judgment, and left them unmolested. They abolished the old and much-mocked nationalistic school lessons about the virtues of nos ancêtres les gaulois, but absorbed the new lessons about the virtues of other cultures, and the justice and nobility of exotic political causes, with a childish credulity. Immigrants could indulge certain comforting prejudices and myths that natives would be disciplined, chastised, ostracised, or jailed for indulging. Effectively, diversity meant taking old hierarchies and inverting them.

Yes, and what to do now that the inmates are on the verge of running the asylum? Do you honestly think they'll have any affection for the old, white "doctors" who have foolishly turned over that power, trusting that it would be wielded wisely?

The European obsession with third world "causes" was a function of Europe's new, guilt-based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people in a way that European natives were not.... The only national [or racist, or xenophobic] claims that could be made without provoking accusations of nationalism, racism, or xenophobia were those of [i.e., made by, or on behalf of] foreigners.

"Many of them [not] Hungarians...."

Non-European immigrants may not have been enviable in a socioeconomic way, but they were enviable in an existential way. They were cooler. They were aristocrats of identity....

By now it is almost second nature for westerners to assume that anything familiar, traditional, and western is to be opposed; and anything discomfort-inducing and foreign is to be protected. So in 2006, Nadia Eweida, a British Airways stewardess and an Egyptian Christian, was suspended from work without pay for wearing the cross, although the airline permits Muslim employees to wear hijabs....

The German jurist Udo di Fabio warned in 2005 that the language of multiculturalism and diversity "opens the gates to a new middle ages, in which the model is not the human individual but the harmonious ordering of groups"....

Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born sociologist in Germany, suggested that German culture be understood as the main, or leading, culture (Leitkultur) in Germany's pluricultural society. Tibi was pilloried for the suggestion that Beethoven and Thomas Mann deserve a larger role in shaping the national consciousness than foreign voices.

P.S. "The fatter wog said to the skinnier wog...."

Irish Savant quotes the black American author and Washington Post journalist Keith Richburg, from the latter's book, Out of America:

I'm tired of lying and I'm tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who've never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the corpses.

Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I'll throw it back in your face, and then I'll rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh....

[H]ad my ancestor not made it out of here I might have ended up in that crowd...maybe I would have been one of those bodies, washing over the waterfall in Tanzania or maybe my son would have been set ablaze by soldiers. Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them [Africans]. In short, thank God I am an American.

Wow, that's pretty close to suggesting that slavery was a good thing for American blacks in the long run, isn't it?

Lucky for him he's black. 'Cause otherwise, that's racist talk....

P.S. Irish Savant and his Lady have lost their doggie.

How likely is it, you may ask, that two such ... substantial people, would ever even meet, much less hook up?

Well, given the gravitational fields involved, I suspect it was well-nigh inevitable. No more could the Earth escape the sun....

And, what makes the Hottentot so hot? Nothing: they're fuckin' ugly (middle photo).

Absolutely butt-fucking ugly.

Well, it's finally gone and happened: I've lost all respect for the scientifically illiterate, conservative-learning classical liberal Jeff Golstein, just as I did for the leftward-leaning, Palin-hating classical liberal Ophelia Benson back in October. First, he quoted this from a Washington Examiner piece, at Protein Wisdom, on cap-and-trade with regard to global warming:

Were I a cynic, I might note that the endgame of "climate change science" is not the negligible drop in temperature climate scientists forecast as a result of these kinds of superficial [and yet too extreme?] carbon-emission reductions, but rather to destroy civilization altogether in order to really protect the earth.

Goldstein is a cynic—and his saying that is either ironic or passive-aggressive, take your pick. But if he's suggesting that the logical outcome of "climate change science" (i.e., of measures to curtail and even reverse the increase in the temperature of the Earth) is the destruction of civilization, even in the presence of future environmentally friendly technologies with low greehouse-gas footprints to meet our energy needs, that's not merely cynical or paranoid, it's just plain stupid.

By contrast, here's what the libertarian-conservative scientist Steven Dutch has to say about environmental conservation measures:

"Conservatism" and "conserve" come from the same root. You don't unnecessarily squander limited resources you may need later. In fact you don't unnecessarily squander anything—period. You keep your debt limited to the minimum necessary. You pay your bills. If you get an unexpected windfall, you manage it carefully to stretch it out. You treat things in your care like they're your own.

So completely apart from global warming, fossil fuels are finite and will have a finite lifetime, and we have no practical substitute ready to replace them. Therefore we need to manage them carefully to maximize their lifetime. First we need to extend the lifetime of the resources themselves, and second, we need to buy time to develop alternatives and bring them on line. Doing so will reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a side result.

It's a painfully amusing irony that most of the people who are lambasting Republicans for abandoning their traditional fiscal restraint, simultaneously pretend that finite resources are not a problem. We would have neither an energy crisis nor a global warming problem if conservatives treated fossil fuels the way they claim money should be treated. (For that matter, we wouldn't be reeling from the collapse of the sub-prime lending market if conservatives had treated money the way they claim money should be treated.)

You plan for the worst case. You don't necessarily assume the worst case, but you have a plan if it happens. So even conservatives who regard the war in Iraq as a fiasco nevertheless tend to advocate gritting our teeth and slugging it out, because the worst case scenarios from losing or retreating are much worse than the present mess.

But when it comes to climate change, the same people see nothing but rainbows and fuzzy bunny rabbits, or warm beaches and palm trees. Terrorist attacks and global Sharia law? Well, those are likely outcomes of retreating from Iraq. Sea level rise, more droughts and severe weather from global warming? That's just fear-mongering.

As Dutch further explains:

Want to blunt the power of unions [as a business owner]? Offer workers better protection than unions offer. Want to weaken the teachers' unions? The biggest single driver of teacher unions is that sacred cow of conservatism, local control of the schools. When teachers can teach interesting and provocative material in class and be sure the administration will back them against dimwit parents, then conservatives might just catch a break among teachers.

Want to keep government regulations to a minimum? Have safety and environmental practices [as a business owner] so squeaky clean that government regulation would be seen as a step down. [And that, of course, will simultaneously, as a side effect, reduce the "external (health and cleanup) costs" of pollution, which are otherwise hidden in the low cost of goods and energy ... and which are exactly what carbon taxes or cap-and-trade are designed to compensate for.]

The problems with health care are obvious. It's increasingly too expensive for employers. Insurance mires patients and doctors in paperwork. Insurers and drug companies want returns on their investments. Want the government out of health care? Come up with something better. People who claim to be brilliant enough to know that biologists are wrong about evolution and climatologists are wrong about climate change ought to find this a piece of cake....

Dan, Darleen, and Goldstein at PW, should have no problem at all with that one, eh?

I once submitted an essay to the conservative blog site American Thinker arguing that conservatives had no chance whatsoever of being taken seriously in academia as long as they kept pushing bankrupt environmental positions and were identified with anti-evolutionism. The editor recommended I check out all the "expert" sites challenging global warming and read Michael Behe....

Conservatives don't have a snowball's chance of cracking the liberal academic monoculture until they stop spouting garbage science.

And yet, Protein Wisdom is hard-set in full, heroic defense of exactly the same "garbage science," convinced that its "end game" is the destruction of civilization, to save the Earth. You can't get much more scientifically illiterate and politically paranoid than that.

Also, there was recently an article on CBC about the Canadian health care system, versus the American one, from someone who's lived under both (also with comments from people who have lived under both). Turns out our "socialized medicine" isn't as bad as you might have been led to believe. "Surprise."

Dutch again:

So lots of Republicans are saying "Change or Die" but like liberal denialists, most are looking only at the most superficial cosmetic changes. Try some real reform.

First, admit to being wrong about evolution. [And abortion, I would add, since in the absence of fairy-tale religious beliefs about imaginary souls being joined to physical bodies at the moment of conception, there's not a reason in hell to object to the Roe v. Wade decision and its end-of-second-trimester limit—as Carl Sagan has demonstrated.]

Second, admit to being wrong on the environment. All of it. Every single major issue. Peak oil, endangered species, climate change, and especially the voodoo economics used to justify opposition to environmentalism. Trillions of dollars to implement Kyoto? Terrible. Trillions of dollars to bail out the architects of crackpot investment schemes? Meh. We can do that.

And, the piéce de rèsistance:

Once upon a time white people insisted on the right to restrict blacks. They couldn't sit in the front of the bus, go to the same schools, stay in the same hotels. Finally enough people got angry enough to demand an end to that freedom. But it didn't stop there. Soon there were restrictions on all sorts of other decisions, then even on forms of speech....

The other end state [of the freedom question] is to accept that maximum freedom for ourselves demands that we allow maximum freedom to others. This means we will have to accept things we disapprove of vehemently in order to have the freedom to do things the other side disapproves of equally vehemently. For example the Religious Right regularly circulates the bogus rumor that the FCC is planning to ban religious broadcasting, but at the same time they demand that the FCC crack down on content they deem objectionable. Maybe the way to secure freedom for religious broadcasting is to strip the FCC of the power to regulate content? Conservatives value property rights. Liberals value behavioral rights [which is why they keep passing laws to restrict the ability of conservatives to discriminate against others on the basis of race, sex, and lifestyle]. If conservatives want freedom to use their property without restrictions, they're going to have to allow liberals minimal restrictions on behavior. And if liberals want behavioral freedom, they're going to have to allow conservatives to have maximum freedom with their property. If liberals want the right to burn the flag, they're going to have to tolerate expression they find offensive, like so called "hate speech." And if conservatives want the right to express things that come under the rubric of hate speech, they're going to have to allow liberals the right to express unpatriotic things. What part of "no law" in the First Amendment is hard to figure out? If liberals want to liberalize drug laws, they'll need to accept that they don't have the right to tax conservatives to pay for the consequences....

It may even mean that conservatives will have to tolerate abortion as a necessary evil in order to prevent the state from invading other freedoms. Not accept it morally, but recognize that it may be too dangerous to allow any government to control behavior to that degree. [Of course, the God-bothering Catholics Dan and Darleen will never agree to that! No, the state must be allowed to invade whenever the moral sense of the God-botherers is offended! And, in fact, for them to not insist on that would be to betray the tenets of their own religion, in allowing innocent souls to die. So they will never be able to be truly rational about the freedoms of others: No religious nut can be.] Liberals, in turn, may have to tolerate some kinds of discrimination. The logical end point [i.e., the "end game"] of increasing liberty is to declare that the government has no authority to restrict any liberty [including access to abortion in the first two trimesters] unless it can demonstrate a pressing need to do so.

In a competitive market, discrimination is costly to the discriminator [but pollution isn't unless, you know, it's actively killing off your customer base, e.g., Chernobyl]. An employer who refuses to hire workers because of race, religion or ethnicity restricts his own choices and imposes a disadvantage on his firm. Meanwhile, his competitors gain by being able to hire from a larger pool. The same logic applies to restaurateurs turning away potential customers, or landlords refusing to lease to people of particular categories. (I'll never forget the experience of owning rental property in the recession of the 1980s; I would have rented to Martians if they had showed up with a damage deposit.)

The argument applies no matter how rampant prejudice and discrimination may be. Those who discriminate impose burdens on themselves and confer advantages on their competitors. Competitive markets don't immediately abolish discriminatory practices, but they tend to erode them, not by trying to enlighten bigoted people, but by making discrimination unprofitable.

Well, count me in! With pollution and all of Dutch's points about global warming above, however, reasonably constituting a "pressing need" for government intervention. As he puts it:

[W]e should sign the Kyoto Accords. As an intrinsic part of the plan, we enact measures to help business deal with the costs and protect workers from job loss. We meet the Kyoto standards. Then we hold the EC's feet to the fire, all the way up to the knees. They don't meet the standards, they lose access to U.S. markets. Only one economy in the world is big enough, robust enough and innovative enough to pull this off—us.

By contrast to Goldstein's moronic approach to this subject, here's a damned fine post on a very different topic, including reference to my favorite social-psych study, Robbers Cave:

[B]randing serves to mark members of ethnic groups (broadly construed). In this way, the logos on their clothing, the decals on their car windows, etc., are just pieces of a composite of markers that include non-consumerist choices such as what accent or which slang words to use. They allow people to quickly and faithfully tell who belongs to which group....

[A] narcissistic obsession with broadcasting their intelligence and personality is not the reason that teenagers, or anyone else, are so crazy about brands....

Instead, teenagers are so neurotic about brands because they are in the most tumultuous stage of their social lives—groups of friends form and disband within a few years, especially during middle school, unlike the longer lasting relationships that adults have with each other. When social life often seems like a game of musical chairs, of course you want a simple way to keep track of who belongs to which group at the moment.

Also, a good little post from Miley Cyrus, on the topic of bullying:

Cyrus ... posted an angry tirade on her Twitter web page following a flurry of criticism about her weight after she joked about her thighs jiggling.

"Talk all you want. I have my flaws. I'm a normal girl there's things about my body I would change, but stop calling me f*t in post," she wrote.

Miley Cyrus is not fat. She's not legal, either; but she is not fat. And I say that as someone who likes 'em thin—the skinnier the better. Willowy, even. Miley is not fat. Good Lord!

Cyrus said people spending too much time on gossip websites should read their Bible and also stories or articles about the consequences of cyber-abuse and name calling

Oddly enough, she's quite right. And Radiohead were a bunch of dumb pricks to dis her at the Grammys: She's a fan who wants to meet you, and you blow her off? WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? YOU'RE THE ONES SUFFERING FROM AN OVERBLOWN SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT! (Note: I dislike Radiohead's sterile crap almost as much as I hate R.E.M.'s whiny lead singer. As bands, they're both completely overrated. By the way, my own album's coming out in June. If you recognize good folk/rock music and great lyrics, augmented with phenomenal musicianship from my producer, you'll get what it's about.)

P.S. Time Table Schedule of 2nd Islamic Solidarity Games 2009.

From p. 83 of Twilight of the Clockwork God, Lynn Margulis, on Rupert Sheldrake:

I think he's wrong [about morphogenic fields, etc.]. I have read only a part of one of his books, A New Science of Life. I'm very sympathetic to the criticism he raises against scientific oversimplification. He is a charming, and very nice person. He has a good background in traditional anglophone biology that claims to understand evolution by a mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. The biologists gave him these answers as if they are absolute truths, which they are not. His criticism are accurate. However, he lacks the chemistry, the microbiology, the environmental science, the geology, and details in other fields of science that could help him understand what he wants to know. Instead he makes up "theories."

And (p. 81), on why Gaia is an ecosystem, not an "organism":

To me the personification is nefarious and mischevious and I don't like it at all. It's very simple to see why: a single organism—and it doesn't matter what it is, animal, plant, fungus, protoctist, bacterium, it doesn't matter—any single organism cannot cycle its own waste. It can't eat its excrement, nor drink its liquid waste. All individuals require appropriate delivery of good, water and gas. All live organisms produce and remove some gas. They all become food or remove food or mineral nutrients or other material substances from the others. Any single organism is limited with respect to carbon, nitrogen and other element cycling. Gaia as an organism is an utterly inept analogy because no single organism can cycle elements. The definition of an ecosystem is the minimal unit that cycles all the carbon, from carbon dioxide to organic fixed carbon to protein carbon back to carbon dioxide.

She also provides (p. 82), quite incidentally, a very good, concise definition of the scientific method:

Is it not ironic that in order to do anything at all in science one must hold the rest of the world constant and concentrate intensely on some tiny detail? One must control the variables one at a time.

Separately (p. 172):

The great German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, in his still untranslated book Unknown Africa, gave an account of a hunting ritual he witnessed one morning amongst the pygmies. Three men and one woman went out to a clearing before dawn and drew an image of an antelope on the ground. When the first rays of the sun struck the drawing, one of the men stepped forward with his bow and shot an arrow into the neck of the antelope as the woman shouted something in her native tongue. Then the men went off to hunt and came back later in the day with an antelope which they had shot through the neck in exactly the same spot as in the diagram. They returned to the image and poured some of the animal's blood on it, then erased it, lest its unpropitiated ghost take vengeance on them and cause a hunting accident.

It seems to me that I read a while ago that the idea of cave paintings (e.g., at Lascaux and Les Trois Freres) being made as part of hunting rituals hasn't been taken seriously by anthropologists for quite some time. But if so, why the heck not? (The book didn't give a reason.) From what Frobenius observed, that's a completely reasonable interpretation of the animals drawn in caves—the only thing that's different is that they obviously weren't erasing the cave-wall images afterwards. Not that there aren't form constants involved, too, in the non-animal pictures—e.g., ladders-to-heaven as subsets of lattices, in San (!Kung, i.e., Bushman) cave paintings. But how can scholars have ruled out hunting-magic for the others (assuming I'm remembering that accurately)?

Again separately (p. 164), there's this:

The Jains [of India] envisioned the cosmos as a single, gigantic Goddess from out of whose protoplasmic substance all of creation had come into being. The earth had grown from her navel, and below her waist were stacked various levels of hell, while the heavens rose above like the tiers of a wedding cake. The inside of her skull was thought to be the world ceiling, within which the souls of the released hovered like bubbles of liquid metal in zero gravity.

That was also a common medieval Christian conception—i.e., of the universe being the body of God.

If the star-filled hemisphere of sky visible to us is the inside of the skull of God (for having a similar shape), then the North Star—the stationary "hole" in the night sky—would correspond to the fontanelle in the human body. And what would correspond to the human spine? The Milky Way, of course. (The Milky Way is just how our galaxy appears, from our position in it, when we are looking along the galactic plane, at all the stars in our galaxy. Because the axis of the Earth's rotation is nearly parallel to that same plane, the Milky Way always passes reasonably near to the North Star, and in some epochs actually appears to "touch" it.)

Are you beginning to see how early "spiritual cosmologies," in which the "visible universe" was literally the "body of God," and where the Milky Way was the road used by (shamanic and deceased) souls in traveling to the North Star, became internalized as techniques of kundalini meditation?

Just as the North Star is the only stationary point in the heavens (for viewers in the north hemisphere), each of our heads is the center of our sensory experience of the world: every experience in which we see, hear, smell, or taste anything places us, phenomenologically, at the "center of the universe." (Touch does too, but it's not confined to our heads.) Even visually, when we are standing out in the middle of a vast plain, or atop a mountain peak, or even in having climbed a tall tree, the horizon is equally far away from us in all directions; so again, were we paying proper attention, we could not help but be struck at how we appeared to be, visually, "at the center of the world."

When shamans climbed poles, they were thus not merely engaging in a sympathetic-magical imitation of the flight of souls along the Milky Way to escape through the "hole in the roof" of the universe; rather, in reaching the top of their pole in any environment where the horizon was visible on all sides from that position, they were visually experiencing themselves as being "at the center of the world." In pre-scientific societies which had no idea of how geometry or perspective works, and spent far less time "living in their own heads" than we do, that must have been a powerful "spiritual" experience. These were people, after all, who genuinely believed that they could secure a good hunt by magically acting it out on drawings of animals beforehand.

Further, since our heads are "at the center of the Earth" just as the North Star is at the "center of the heavens" (i.e., all the stars rotate around it, once per day, just as all of our sensory experiences "rotate around" us), that similarity should have provided another reason for pre-scientific people to expect a "magical correspondence" to exist between our microcosmic human bodies, and the macrocosmic universe.

(These are my original explanations, by the way: You won't find them anywhere else.)

The sinuous Milky Way also resembles a River, a Cosmic Sky-Serpent, or a Tree trunk growing out of the horizon. But them's a whole 'nother set of symbolisms, derived from the same astronomy....

From Randel Helms' Gospel Fictions (p. 86):

Elijah's miracle provides flour, not wine. Why the change? It appears that this miracle story [of Jesus turning water into wine] was not only mediated through the story of Moses, where it picked up the concept of a "sign," before it reached John; it also went through one other transformation, influenced by the mythology of Dionysus. As Bultmann has pointed out:

On the festival day of Dionysos the temple springs at Andros and Teos were supposed every year to yield wine instead of water. In Elis on the eve of the feast, three empty pitchers were put into the temple and in the morning they were full of wine.

Very readable book on the inconsistencies in the four Gospels, and the many imaginative uses of the Old Testament, both in borrowing pieces of stories and phrases from it to imagine incidents in the life of Jesus, and in creatively reading the Old Testament to see it as "predicting" the Messiah.

And, from the interview with Lindisfarne-founder William Irwin Thompson, in Ebert's (1999) New Agey "science and consciousness" Twilight of the Clockwork God (p. 161-2):

I think people like Terence McKenna and Ken [Wilber] just grew up in Eastern Colorado and Nebraska in such culturally deprived areas that they get captured by a kind of abstract construction of what they imagine the big European thinker is, or the psychedelic hero in the case of McKenna. And Wilber, as I say in Coming Into Being, is just very abstract but Gebser is an artist.... But when I was teaching temporarily at the California Institute of Integral Studies, all the students didn't like Gebser because they can't remember a painting of Cézanne; they don't read Rilke. They're just into drugs and taking Extasy [sic] and going to Raves, and looking for some kind of psychotherapy technique. And so Wilber is their hero because he just gives them all these maps and charts, this Michelin guide. He's a control freak. There's no sense of humor, there's no sense of art, it's all just sterile and masuline in a very dry and abstract way.

I didn't want to be an egomaniac and say, well, my culture history is better than Wilber's. I didn't want to go into that. So I went out of my way to use Ken Wilber's Up from Eden as a textbook, and had everybody read it in my Lindisfarne symposium at the cathedral. But when I did that, and went out of my way to give equal time and to really be open to Wilber, and read the book, and underlined it, I just thought, God, the difference between this and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light—they cover exactly the same turf—is the difference between a textbook and a work of art!

And then I went back because I wanted to be fair, because I knew Treya Wilber and was corresponding with her when she was going through her crisis. She was also a friend of my wife's, and I had cancer, and so Treya and I were talking a lot about cancer. I've never met Ken face to face, but I knew Treya before she married Ken, and I wanted to go out of my way to be fair to Ken. So I got the new book [i.e., SES], and I thought, God, this is ridiculous! Three-thousand pages that are going to explain everything. You know, that kind of German nineteenth century scholarship, that's over. I don't have the time to read 3000 pages! Then when he kept using this little slogan that his literary agent, John White, put on all his books: "the Einstein of the consciousness movement," I was revolted by the vulgarity of it. And then when he went beyond that to go and put his picture on the front of the book and say, "A Brief History of Everything!" Ken Wilber explains the entire universe to you, everything you wanted to know about everything. And I thought, this is just inflation; this is an ego that's just suffering from a hernia.

The thing about Wilber's work supposedly being driven by "cultural deprivation" is idiotic, as is the criticism of his books lacking humor and art, and Thompson's carping about SES being a "textbook" rather than a work of art; but he sure nailed the "control freak" and egomania things....

Ebert would have included an interview with kw in that book, but his "letter requesting an interview went unanswered." And that surprises you?

Also, turns out that Thompson is/was a kriya yogi. From page 156:

I had been practicing kriya yoga and was involved in a kind of Tantric practice and so the mystical approach to philosophy interested me.

In other news:

In 1981, Jerusalem certainly surmised that a raid against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor could make Saddam Hussein furious and that he possessed conventional and unconventional means of getting even. But they went ahead and destroyed the reactor.

The consensus in Israel is just as widespread about the correctness of last year's strike against the secret North Korean-designed reactor at Dir A-Zur in Syria—a project that may well have had Iranian backing. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered the attack although the Bush administration opposed it. And in 1967, Israelis believed that pre-emptive action saved their nation from an Arab-initiated, multifront offensive that could have proved lethal.

See, this is what I've been saying, about moral philosophy: If you can accurately predict that another person (or group) is going to use their future power to harm you, you're fully justified in taking the initiative to deprive them of that power ... or in hitting them first. Because with their predictable threat of harm, they've already started the fight.

Nightmares last night? Good. Here's fodder for some more:

First, the infamous Shaka Zulu:

Few despots have used terror more effectively to intimidate a people. Followed everywhere by his royal executioners, Shaka needed only to point a finger or nod his head for someone whom he had singled out to be killed. The victim would be bashed on the head or have his or her neck broken before the body was beaten almost to a pulp, and then left for all to see with a sharpened stake driven up the anus, while vultures pecked at the corpse. Fynn, who spent a great many days with Shaka, once saw him order the deaths of sixty boys under age 12 before he sat down to eat breakfast. (p. 94-5)

Slaves were not usually treated as badly by the Asante as they were in the plantation economies of the New World, but they were forced to do most of the agricultural work because so many Asante men were in military service. Slaves were also made to do all of the work in the gold mines. (p. 99)

I was already certain that the only way Africans would manage to get their gold out of the ground would be via slave labor, but this is the first explicit confirmation I've found of that.

When you're sitting, through no grace or intelligence of your own, on mounds of gold, and can get that resource out of the ground through terror and slave labor, you can indeed build a dazzlingly impressive royal city (cf. Kumase)—not from having any creativity or value yourself, but just from being able to buy the result of other countries' work. But in the end, it's just bling. Ponder that: the greatest non-colonial achievement of Africa was nothing more than show-off bling, built on slave labor and "tribute" from conquered tribes:

[The four Englishmen and their interpreters] had to avert their eyes to escape the blinding glare of the sun reflected off gold ornaments worn and carried by the King, his court and attendants, and thousands of soldiers. As the Englishmen stared in amazement at the display of gold, no fewer than 100 bands began to play, alternating between drums and horn on the one hand and softer, more melodic tunes from long flutes and instruments that resembled bagpipes on the other. As the music continued, at least 100 huge umbrellas, each large enough to provide shade for thirty people, sprung open, adding bright splashes of scarlet and yellow to the scene. (p. 97)

A level of Big Man, conspicuous consumption that would make even Diddy and 50 Cent jealous, no?

[T]he Tonkawa Indians of central Texas were cannibals who, like the Aztecs, raided neighboring societies for captives. Unlike most of the North American Indian societies that practiced cannibalism, the Tonkawa ate people without religious justification or ceremonial purpose. The open gusto with which they consumed human flesh was offensive to neighboring tribes, and the frequent Tonkawa raids in search of more captives were so threatening that in 1862 a coalition of six disparate tribes, united only by their detestation of the Tonkawa, attacked them and killed half the people in the tribe. (p. 100)

Yep, that was cannibalism in the U. S. and A., on the part of its "spiritual" aboriginals, less than 150 years ago.

And if it wasn't already obvious, shamans occupy a privileged place even in "non-hierarchical, egalitarian" societies:

Religious specialists such as prophets or shamans were sometimes able to exercise power over a majority of the society for longer periods. A prophet among the Kikuyu of Kenya could achieve a dominant position of authority for a period of years, as could a particularly successful shaman among the Inuit and some Siberian tribes. (p. 88-9)

As recently as 1962, many Pokot said that they revered their prophet and would obey any command he gave, but a previous prophet was killed when his prophecies failed. (p. 156)

It's a fairly short conceptual step from shamans in positions of authority, to the divine right of kings.

As recently as 1961 the Kamba of Kenya still lived in immobilizing fear of many of their taboos. Even people with substantial Western education were fearful of violating some of the numerous taboos that made their everyday lives seem perilous. One such taboo (not of Christian origin) required people to make a gesture roughly similar to the sign of the cross whenever they passed by a crossroads. My interpreter, a dignified, wealthy, and politically prominent man who spoke excellent English, never failed to make this gesture whenever we came to a crossroad until one day when he was distracted by a conversation with me. Later, when I regrettably reminded him of this omission, he immediately looked faint and said that he had to return home at once. The next day he was quite ill, and for several days he lingered, sometimes in delirium. Not until a complex and very expensive cleansing ceremony was performed did he begin to recover. (p. 127)

Another prime candidate for immigration to Toronto, there. With any luck, that vital, life-saving ceremony could be covered by Medicare, too!

The Navaho Indians have been called "perhaps the most hypochondriacal people known to the anthropological literature" because of their obsessive concern with curing ceremonies. Navaho men astonishingly spent between one quarter and one third of their time in "sings," as these ceremonies were called, and women spent only slightly less time. The Navaho had many reasons to fear illness. Illness was caused by witches, and witches were thought to be numerous, as were similarly dangerous ghosts, and there were as well many serious taboos that caused people to sicken. (p. 127)

Whereas we once "took their land" and nearly destroyed their societies, we now respect the cultures of such native peoples, and encourage them in preserving those. Fortunately. 'Cause it would be a shame if the living spirituality of such cultures was to die out in favor of "materialistic Western patriarchal science," wouldn't it?

Sometimes the pressures imposed on a [Hindu] widow to choose sati were anything but subtle; indeed, they amounted to murder. In 1827 a British observer witnessed a sati ceremony in which the fire had no sooner been lighted than the widow leapt off the pyre and tried to flee; several men seized her and flung her back into the blaze. Once again the widow fled, and although badly burned she managed to outdistance her pursuers and throw herself into a nearby stream where she lay "weeping bitterly." She swore that she would not go through with the ceremony. Seeming to take pity on her, a man promised that if she would sit on a large cloth he had spread on the ground, he would carry her home. When she did so, she was once again seized, sewn into the cloth, and thrown back into the inferno. The cloth was immediately consumed by the flames, and the wretched victim once again tried to flee. This time she was beheaded with a sword, and her body was thrown back into the pyre....

In recent years opposition to sati in India has grown, but the ceremony has not been abandoned. In 1987 [!!] Roop Kanwar, a beautiful eighteen-year-old, college-educated woman, immolated herself with her dead husband's head on her lap while a crowd estimated at 300,000 watched in admiration. (p. 137-8)

Ah, the spiritual land of India ... where even a dog born on Indian soil is more holy than anyone born outside of that wretched country.

A useful index of how committed a population ... may be to its traditional beliefs and practices is their reaction to colonial contact. Various ethnographers have observed that people in small, traditional societies may willingly give up one of their apparently important practices after only minimal contact with Christian missionaries or European administrators. Societies throughout highland Papua New Guinea (before Australian contact) required that boys go through initiation ceremonies in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them. These ceremonies were generally thought by anthropologists to play a vital role in these societies; but soon after Australian contact took place, several of these societies gave up their violent initiation rituals without apparent reluctance. (p. 140)

Damned colonists, robbing those people of their cultural heritage!

Other societies gave up traditional practices just as willingly. Although the highlanders of Papua New Guinea were among the most warlike people ever known ... many of these populations gave up warfare as soon as Australian police patrols appeared, and sometimes they remained completely pacified as long as a single European was present. Sterling Robbins has reported that Auyana men freely admitted that they had been terribly afraid when there had been warfare and that their lives were better since the government now prohibited it. Robbins wrote that one man told him that "... he could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot." Similarly, according to Van Baal, the Marind-anim quickly gave up their practice of anal intercourse [in initiation ceremonies, presumably] after Dutch pressure because, according to Van Baal, the Marind-anim themselves found this behavior repugnant. (p. 140-1)

See, sometimes you just need adults around, to set boundaries for what the blindly taboo-following, tradition-bound (psychological) children are or aren't allowed to do. They'll thank you for it later, uh-huh. And then much later, in a "pearls before swine" kind of way ... they'll blame you for every ill that's every befallen them.

[S]ome individuals so dislike a particular custom that they attempt to change it or eliminate it altogether. One of the best-known examples of this phenomenon occurred in 1819 when members of the Hawaiian aristocracy and priesthood intentionally violated some of their most central and sacred taboos.... Subsequent analyses have indicated that although many Hawaiians did find their taboo system to be onerous, complex social, political, and economic factors, including Western contact, were also involved in the decision to abolish it....

The Skidi Pawnee Indians of Nebraska ... like their Caddoan-speaking neighbors to the south, sacrificed human beings for religious purposes [to propitiate the sacred Morning Star, i.e., Venus]....

As courageous, determined, and influential as Knife Chief and his son were, their efforts to put an end to the practice of human sacrifice failed. Led by their priests, the Skidi Pawnee continued to propitiate the Morning Star by sacrificing human captives until at least 1834 and perhaps much longer. (p. 142-3)

People in many societies refer to themselves as "the people" and regard all others as alien and repellent, if not downright subhuman. The Hopi Indians, for example, who have long believed that their way of life is superior to all others, continue to maintain cultural barriers that separate themselves from all other people. Not only the Hopi but many people believe that their way of life is the only one, and in many parts of the world today, commitment to one's ethnic group and religion is growing in intensity, surprising many who in post-Enlightenment optimism expected such devotions to diminish as rationalism grew. (p. 148)

Well, send 'em to Toronto. Thanks to multiculturalism they can enjoy all the fruits of Western scientific knowledge and medicine, while still idiotically believing that their own primitive ways of life are better. They will, truly, fit right in.

[A]ll hunting and gathering societies follow a principle of generalized reciprocity by sharing food.....

[Nevertheless, the] San, for example ... often failed to [share food], and the Siriono of eastern Bolivia, despite their strong cultural emphasis on sharing, rarely actually did so unless food was abundant. It was noted earlier that the Siriono ate food alone during the night or in the forest rather than share it and that women hid food in their vaginas. (p. 154)

"Smells like fish, tastes like chicken," etc.

[S]ome societies lost much of their culture and population before European expansion took place. Like the Tasmanians, various other societies have lost seemingly important aspects of their technology. For example, well before there was contact with technologically advanced people from Asia or Europe, canoes disappeared in various parts of Melanesia to be replaced by less seaworthy rafts. Pottery disappeared as well. In Polynesia, bows and arrows, once important in warfare, became toys for children, and an isolated group of 200 Inuit in northern Greenland lost the ability to make kayaks, the skin-covered boats so important in fishing. (p. 163)

According to [the Australian mainland elder] Gully Peters, there was [a] fundamental reason for the demise of the Kaiadilt. They were killing one another. "Gully reported that a man who came back at night from fishing on a reef might be killed for his catch. The band that killed him would then take his wife and eat his children." (p. 180)

So you can see where legends of trolls come from....

While the guns and diseases of the Europeans undeniably decimated and even annihilated some non-Western societies (the Carib and Arawak Indian populations of the Caribbean Island being well-known examples), the colonial presence may, even inadvertently, have saved some societies as well. (p. 181)

He's writing for a PC crowd that would crucify him if he said more than that, you understand.

The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence, yet as we have repeatedly seen, nonrational beliefs sometimes reduce the efficiency of economic practices in many small societies.... The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics. (p. 196)

Which is one reason why (for example) Catholics today can prosper even while believing in the most idiotic superstitions. They are in no way being "rational" in that; it's just that their irrationalities don't have a big effect on their daily lives (where they wisely rely on science and technology rather than magical thinking).

C. R. Hallpike, among others, has concluded that the thought processes of people in small-scale societies are incapable of comprehending causality, time, realism, space, introspection, and abstraction as these are utilized in Western science. (p. 199)

Okay, now that will definitely get you crucified.

Throughout the world, people who live in small agrarian villages of horticulturalists or "peasants" are supposed to be equal members of the community. In reality, however, these people are notorious for being pitted against one another in perpetual envy, fear, and hostility. Like the Italian villagers of Montegrano, often their only community is the family. (p. 203)

There's also a whole thing about how potlatches really only benefited the chiefs of the participating tribes, and Aztecs having a desire for human flesh that "was so great that many wars were fought for no other reason than the capture of prisoners," but it's long. See pages 90-2.

P.S. As the corpulent Irish Savant notes, in his smart response to a posting by a dumbfuck black-racist contributor to the Huffington Post blog:

Could someone remind him that, had his forebears not been taken to America as [involuntary] guest workers he would now, instead of being well paid by whites to write anti-white bullshit, be scampering around the jungle or begging food from some Western aid agency.

How in God's name do we allow these people get away with this kind of thing?

I agree completely. I know: I'm a Awful White Person, a "hippie racist," and everything in between, but goddammit, I agree completely. Blacks (and most aboriginal North Americans, a.k.a. Injuns) would still be living as literal savages if it wasn't for European contact ... and slavery.

Which, of course, raises the unutterable question as to whether American slavery was, in the long run, actually a good thing for the black race (and a disastrous thing for white people). And you know what? I think a damned strong argument can be made that it was exactly that.

So that's all the more reason to wish history had never happened that way, isn't it? On that much, at least, we can all agree.

My long-awaited copy of Robert Edgerton's (1992) Sick Societies just arrived in the mail this morning. And right there on page 2:

Many [Americans] would surely be troubled by the idea that the political systems of Iraq, Hitler's Germany, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were, or are, as good as those in, say, Norway, Japan, or Switzerland. And they would probably react with disbelief to the assertion that there is no scientific basis for evaluating another society's practice of genocide, judicial torture or human sacrifice, for example, except as the people in that society themselves evaluate those practices. Yet that is exactly what the principle of cultural relativism asserts, and this principle continues to be widely and strongly held.

It still amazes me that anyone (much less a card-carrying liberal) could have been living anywhere but in a cave over the past three or four decades, and honestly not have encountered that truly "widely and strongly held" idea before—never mind countering the claim that the idea is widespread, with the idea that even cultural pluralists recognize that Nazi Germany was not as good as American society (and "therefore" that the idea that all cultures are equally good is just a caricature of the supposed real position). There's no fucking way you can avoid it! Not in dismally multicultural Toronto as it's being overrun by the Third World, anyway—believe me, I try!

For a number of reasons ... many anthropologists have chosen not to write about the darker side of life in folk societies, or at least not to write very much about it. Among themselves, over coffee or a cocktail, they may talk freely about the kinds of cruelty, irrationality, and suffering they saw during their field research, but only a relative few have written about such things or about any of the many ways in which people in various folk societies do things that are seemingly harmful to themselves and others.

This may sometimes occur because anthropologists believe that the cruel, harmful, or ineffective practices they see in a folk society are the result of social disorganization brought upon by colonialism, something that in fact has often taken place. And certain practices, all anthropologists know, are sometimes not reported because doing so would offend the people being described or discredit them in the eyes of others. (p. 5)

Well yes: anthropologists have careers to protect, and a paycheque is more important than the truth, and that paycheque is going to be endangered if other "oppressed people" (and their useful-idiot liberal defenders) start calling them racists for telling the truth, which is exactly what would happen.

This principle [of cultural relativism], or more correctly, this axiom, states that because there is no universally valid standard by which the beliefs or practices of other cultures can be evaluated, they can only be judged relative to the cultural context in which they occur. This idea did not originate in anthropology, although Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University did much to establish its credibility. Montaigne and Hume sometimes espoused a version of cultural relativism, and to some extent, so did Herodotus and the fifth-century Sophists. But the first explicit formulation of the principle probably came, not from a Greek or an anthropologist, but from an American sociologist, William Graham Sumner, in 1906. It was Sumner who memorably said, "The mores can make anything right, and prevent condemnation of anything," and he meant exactly that. For Sumner, who had never done research in a non-Western society, practices such as religious prostitution, cannibalism, human sacrifice, infanticide, and slavery were perfectly reasonable human adaptations to particular circumstances....

In the 1920s and 1930s, owing largely to the efforts of Boas' famous students, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovits, cultural relativism became so fundamental to anthropological thinking that in 1939 Clyde Kluckhohn ... could write that this idea as "... probably the most meaningful contribution which anthropological studies have made to general knowledge." In fact, cultural relativism soon became a taken-for-granted postulate of modern liberal thought....

In general, contemporary American college students so unquestioningly accept cultural relativism that they are quite unwilling to evaluate the customs of other people. In [Allan] Bloom's example, the custom that students refused to judge was the Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow, willing or not, was called upon to join her deceased husband by being burned to death.... Their reluctance to evaluate illustrates the deep inroads of cultural relativism, despite the fact that the rise of totalitarianism, the horrors of World War II, and the tensions of the Cold War had weakened many scholars' faith in the concept to such an extent that by the 1950s it had come under increasingly heavy fire. Along with the related concept, functionalism (which in its strongest version had it that all established beliefs and practices have positive social functions), relativism came to be seen as a conservative doctrine opposed to change in Third World countries that were attempting to gain their independence from colonial governments.

Nevertheless, the majority of anthropologists still accepted the basic idea of cultural relativism, and in the 1970s a far more radical version of the concept came into vogue. Propelled into prominence by such distinguished anthropologists as Clifford Geertz and David M. Schneider, this epistemological form of relativism challenges more than one's ability to evaluate other cultures; it contends that cultures cannot even be compared. [And if they cannot be compared, they are de facto equally valid, to the extent that one can say anything at all on the subject.] Cultures, this new relativism insists, are incommensurable; each one can only be understood, or more correctly, interpreted, in its own terms as a unique system of meanings. What is more, only someone enculturated in that system can comprehend it fully. (p. 25-6)

And so again: How the holy hell could any card-carrying liberal be completely unaware of that "taken-for-granted postulate" (which is heavily incorporated into liberalism today)?

[The] Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ... in its strong version, claimed that the language people spoke had such a profound effect on how they saw the world and thought about it (as Sapir had often declared) they lived in different worlds of meaning. This much-promoted relativistic idea helped to popularize linguistics, and it led generations of students (along with some anthropologists) to believe that language profoundly shaped how people understood the world around them. Benjamin Whorf, a student of Sapir, chose the Hopi language to illustrate this hypothesis. Among other things, he claimed that the Hopi language had no terms for time comparable to ours and also that it had no such tenses as past, present, and future. As a result, he said, the Hopi conceived of time in a manner radically different from and, he added, scientifically more sophisticated than that of speakers of English. Subsequent research proved Whorf wrong on all counts: the Hopi did have tenses and various words for time comparable to those used in English. Also, the Hopi had no difficulty thinking of time in the ways English speakers do. Attempts to show that language had a significant impact on thought in other societies also failed to confirm Whorf's ideas, and his hypothesis has been rejected in linguistics for at least fifteen years. Despite such failed attempts as this, epistemological relativists [following Geertz and Schneider] seem to be gaining ground in numbers and, apparently, in influence as well [as of 1992]. (p. 27)

Ha! "Wrong on all counts"!! Beautiful!!! You can't get more "Wilberian" than that!!

[T]he postmodern relativists ... are asserting far more than the self-evident point that people in different societies live in somewhat different worlds of meaning. They are claiming that each of these worlds is truly unique—incommensurable and largely incomprehensible—and that the people who inhabit them have different cognitive abilities. In what Dan Sperber has referred to as "cognitive apartheid" and Ernest Gellner has called "cognitive anarchy," various postmodern relativists and interpretivists postulate fundamental differences from one culture to the next in cognitive processes involving logic, causal inference, and information processing. (p. 28)

So close to us race-realists ... and yet so far away.

[O]ne would have thought that radical claims of cognitive relativism might have ceased over twenty years ago [i.e., before 1972] when Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that people in different cultures did not divide the color spectrum in arbitrary and untranslatable ways from one society to another, as was then thought to be the case. Instead, Berlin and Kay showed that basic color terms are universally translatable because eleven psychophysiologically defined colors serve as the focal points of all the basic color terms in all the languages of the world. (p. 29)

Hippler ... asserted that Western culture was superior [to that of folk societies] and that most "primitives" find it irresistible. What is more, echoing Freud, he concluded that cultures such as the Yolngu of Australia institutionalize "immature defenses and coping mechanisms." Hippler also concluded that the Yolngu have a limited capacity for reality testing, and that they are "... self-evidently to me, not a terribly advanced group." He saw nothing unusual in their lack of "advancement," because, as he said, entire populations can exist at "... very low levels of cognitive development. All they have to do is reproduce." (p. 37)

Weston LaBarre has provided compelling evidence that the antiquity of a belief is no assurance of its "tested truth," as he put it, nor does its survival demonstrate that it serves any positive purpose. To illustrate these points, LaBarre refers to the ancient and widespread idea that the fundamental source of semen, and thus fertility and life, is the brain. After documenting the importance of this belief from its origin during the Paleolithic to modern times, LaBarre shows that it led countless populations throughout the world to become headhunters in order to eat the brains of others because it was thought that doing so would enhance their own life essence and fertility. (p. 53)

Alright, my jaw dropped at that: I had always assumed that eating others' brains had to do with magically imbibing their intelligence ... but, of course, since even Aristotle thought that the brain was just there to cool the body (sort of like a big ol' radiator, I suppose), there's obviously no way that primitives were eating brains for "intelligence," d'uh.

What do you want to bet that 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?

A classic adaptive interpretation of divination was offered by Omar Kayyam Moore, who purported to show that the Montagnais-Naskapi Indians, who subsisted primarily by hunting caribou on the Labrador peninsula, used divination to maintain the ecological equilibrium between themselves and the caribou. Basing his analysis on data recorded earlier by Frank Speck, Moore argued that the Montagnais-Naskapi use of scapulimancy to tell them where to hunt for caribou (they interpreted the cracks and breaks that appeared in an animal scapula after it was exposed to fire) was highly adaptive. Moore believed that because this procedure resulted in randomizing the areas where hunters searched for game, it prevented them from being so successful in finding caribou that they would overhunt and deplete the caribou herds. Moore's paper soon became widely cited as an example of the adaptive value of divination.

But as a recent reexamination of Moore's analysis has shown, he was wrong on many essential counts. First, according to Vollweiler and Sanchez, he badly misstated Speck's data. Of the thirty-four cases of scapulimancy Speck discussed, only one [!] approximated what Moore claimed was a general practice. Moore also misunderstood how the Naskapi actually searched for game, and he falsely assumed that caribou respond to human predation by changing their location. Finally, he asserted that the use of divination was commonly used by hunters in other societies to locate game. In fact, divination has rarely been used for this purpose. (p. 54)

Anthropologists often agree that there is equality among people in small-scale societies, but by equality (or egalitarianism, as they are likely to call it) they mean the absence of significant distinctions among people except for those based on sex, age, and ability. These distinctions are universal. In addition, some very small societies also make distinctions based on wealth, power, or kinship....

In his influential book, Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins even argued that a lack of exploitation was also typical of some more complex societies such as small chiefdoms, because the even-handed manner in which chiefs redistributed goods and services resulted in society-wide reciprocity,not inequality. Subsequent research has shown that Sahlins's egalitarian vision was idealized. In many small chiefdoms, indeed probably in most of them, chiefs advanced their own interests at the expense of lower-status people. To take a single example, Ifaluk Atoll in the Western Carolines was populated by fewer than 500 people, a small-scale society by any standard. Yet clam chiefs on Ifaluk had a decided advantage over people of lower status. As Laura Betzig has pointed out, chiefs took home almost twice as much fish after a communal catch as others did, and they regularly received food from distantly related person[s]. Instead of redistributing this food among the population, they gave a disproportionate amount to their close kin, from whom they received various goods and services in return. Chiefs were so favored by their positions of power that they spent only about one half as much time in physical labor as other men of the same age, and they were able to have more children than other men as well. (p. 76-7)

It was once thought that small bands of people who lived solely by hunting and gathering—people who may have lived as our Pleistocene ancestors did—made no distinction among themselves in terms of privilege or advantage, but there is growing evidence that (like the Mbuti of Zaire and the San of the Kalahari) even those populations that emphasize egalitarianism recognize some people as leaders, and when the available resources become more abundant, people tend to make even more distinctions among themselves in terms of wealth and authority, including hereditary authority. For example, the Chumash Indians ... had clamshell money, which they avidly sought to accumulate, and their society was dominated by an upper class of people whose power was based on the wealth this money represented. The Chumash also had lower classes, and they kept slaves, as did some other tribes in California, none of which grew any crops. These small societies recognized chiefs who exercised considerable power, they often had social classes, and they all possessed money. (p. 78-9)

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. If this behavior served to deflect aggression from humans onto animals, as [evolutionary] adaptivists might claim, it was not notably successful, because the Inuit were prone to outbursts of lethal violence and in fact killed one another at a very high rate.

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." (p. 79-80)

I gotta get me some a'that aboriginal "attunement with Nature." "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...."

I'm kidding, of course: I have never, and would never, mistreat an animal in the ways in which these "Noble Savages" regularly did. In fact, as penance for even joking about it, I'm going to have extra jalapenos on my nachos tonight.

But you can see how Christian missionaries would have been horrified by the genuine savagery of these truly primitive people ... even while overlooking their own "God-inspired" brutality.

Oh, and of course, it's all really the colonialists' fault (not!):

In many small societies around the world, women were required to carry extremely heavy loads on their backs, heads, or foreheads by means of tumplines. It was not at all uncommon for women to carry loads of wood, water, and other valuables that were in excess of their own body weight. Carrying these heavy loads was mandatory because, men frequently said, it was imperative for men to carry weapons to defend women against enemy raiders. However, women very often carried heavy loads when men were far away guarding nothing and were, in fact, idle. What is more, after colonial governments curtailed warfare to such an extent that there were no more raids by enemies and hence there could be no imperative reason for men to carry weapons, men still did not carry water, wood, or other heavy loads. (p. 82)

The more I learn about colonialism, the more I'm convinced that (on balance) it was indeed the best thing that ever happened to the people in these truly worthless societies. Consider a Gusii (Kenyan) marriage among feuding tribes, in which the bride

found the door to her future mother-in-law's house barred by a crowd of hostile women who ... screamed insults at her, mocked and pinched her, and sometimes even smeared dung on her lips before allowing her inside....

[T]he bride refused to disrobe or go to bed [on the wedding night], and then she did everything in her considerable power (including tying her pubic hair over her vagina [I didn't even know that could be done—what kind of a mane...?]) to prevent her husband from achieving penetration. This behavior was traditional; girls were taught to resist their husbands in such ways, including a practice called ogotega in which the vaginal muscles were kept so tense that penetration was said to be impossible. It was also said that a "fierce" bride might prevent her husband from successfully achieving intercourse for as long as a week, but more commonly, young male friends of the groom (who waited outside the nuptial house) intervened and helped the groom by holding the bride's legs apart.... Once intercourse finally took place, the husband was obligated to repeat it as often as possible that night (six times was the minimally respectable number) and in the process to cause his bride as much pain as possible.

[I]n a custom known as ogosonia, when adolescent boys were recuperating from the effects of being circumcised, adolescent girls from the same clan came to the hut where the boys were secluded. Maliciously, they disrobed, danced provocatively, challenged them to have intercourse, and made disparaging comments about their genitals. The girls were triumphant if their actions resulted in erections that caused the boys intense pain when their partly healed incisions burst open.

Both before and after marriage, Gussi men were said to have been so frustrated sexually that they resorted to rape. Whether sexual frustration was the cause or not, the fact is that the Gusii committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the United States. In 1937, there were so many rapes that the British colonial government had to threaten military action [feminists would have supported this, right?], and in 1950 there were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities to hold the offenders. (p. 84-5)

Wonderful. I suggest we import the entire shit-smeared tribe to Toronto. Those are just the sort of enterprising young men and women this city needs.

Meanwhile, supermodel Iman shares her opinions about the Other Supermodel:

"Mrs Obama is not a great beauty," the Somali-born model and wife of rocker David Bowie tells Parade magazine's Sunday issue....

Iman, 53, also told Parade that her rise to catwalk superstardom did not free her from racism.

"You suddenly represent a whole race, and that race goes, 'Well, that person does not represent our ideals of beauty.' For lack of a better term, it becomes what it was like during slavery," she said.

"One had the field nigger and the house nigger. There was this notion that I was chosen by white fashion editors to be better than the rest, which I am not. I did not like being thought of as the house nigger."

I do hope that we all get that the only negative prejudice which the lady was "suffering" from was coming from her own people, right? And that's all that she was saying, too: It was the Parade "journalist" who turned it into "racism" (on the part of the white fashion editors, one assumes, whose racism was then presumably being directed at everyone except Iman, for not having the right "Caucasian" bone structure).

Hmm, turns out the "ticking time bomb" scenario (with regard to justifying torture) actually exists outside of, say, Sam Harris' imagination:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate.

I've also had to school a certain liberal on what multiculturalism is, and why it doesn't work:

Cultural pluralism (close kin to "multiculturalism") vitally depends on the idea that no culture is better than another.

That is not true. It depends on the idea that various cultures can live together and maybe combine to form a greater whole. "No culture is better than another" is a caricature. Maybe you can find a line saying that in a few books or professors' mouths, but so what? It's obviously stupid and it's equally obvious that it's not remotely necessary for multiculturalism or "cultural pluralism."

From Wikipedia:

"Most contemporary anthropologists subscribe to the methodologic and heuristic research principles established by Frank Boas et al. After the Second World War, when cultural relativism was popularized, Marcus and Fischer said it was misinterpreted 'more as a doctrine, or position, than as a method' of analysis, that it connoted every culture as separate and equal, and that every value system (however different) is equally valid, hence, the erroneous popular usage equating 'cultural relativism' to 'moral relativism'."

So it's not a caricature, JA, to claim that people say that "No culture is better than another." Rather, that is the widespread (i.e., popularized) understanding of the matter. (It's rather amazing that you haven't encountered this, ever, in your own life; it's absolutely pandemic, at least here in Toronto.) And that same attitude is highly inbred into the practical application of multiculturalism.

It doesn't follow though that multiculturalism itself is idiotic.

In practice, encouraging immigrants and non-whites to take pride in their ancestral cultures (rather than assimilate) is a big part of multiculturalism. In that, the same ideology encourages them to draw harder boundaries between their own ethnic in-group, and the out-groups who aren't "like them."

In-groups always elevate their own morality and accomplishments, and denigrate the morality and achievements of their corresponding out-groups. It doesn't matter whether those group boundaries are drawn based on ethnic background, skin color, religion, fashion, beauty, or any of a thousand other potential criteria; this is just how human psychology works.

(You can find details of that in Sherif's classic Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment.)

In that sense, multiculturalism is indeed an idiotic (and utterly unworkable) ideology.

Also, regarding the pleasant idea that "Multiculturalism is just the belief that various cultures can make various contributions and that we can all learn to live together," this is again from Wikipedia:

"The term multiculturalism generally refers to a theory of racial, cultural and ethnic diversity that applies to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the scale of an organization such as a school, business, neighborhood, city or nation."

"Some countries have official, or de jure policies of multiculturalism aimed at recognizing and allowing members of distinct groups within that society to celebrate and maintain their different cultures or cultural identities as a way to promote social cohesion. In this context, multiculturalism advocates a society that extends equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups, with no identifiable ethnical and/or religious culture treated as a single norm to which everyone has to adhere."

You combine that with cultural relativism, and it gets you exactly what Blode0322 has been trying to explain to you (without proper references). That is, you end up with a society that "extends equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups" whether they deserve it or not, and where equitable treatment of minorities is defined by equality of results, not by equality of opportunities.

There are many additional examples/criticisms of why multiculturalism doesn't work, here.

Insightful post on this thread, too:

As these tribal ethic groups become more numerous in America, the economy will become less efficient as nepotism and corruption increase. The tribal groups will come to dominate certain occupations and economic sectors, as they give jobs to relatives and co-ethnics and shut out outsiders. The shrinking non-tribal population will be "stuck" with other sectors and will perhaps become more tribal in attitude as a defensive reaction.

In the long term, as the white population becomes extinct due to its low birth rate, America will consist entirely of these tribal "lumps," each occupying its own geographic and economic niches, and jealo[u]sly guarding its interests against other groups. An example of what the country might look like would be India, with its long history of divisions along lines of ethnicity, language, religion, caste, and probably other factors as well.

I think India is the model for the future of America. To see the future, look East.

Of course, plenty of idiocy elsewhere to balance it off, as soon as you get the religious conservatives at iSteve started on blog-viating with regard to (the "obvious" non-existence of) global warming, which I ("clem") couldn't help but address.

Yes, I know, I consistently "comment/insult and run," rather than engaging in dialogues. But look at it from my perspective: It's past 5 pm, and all I've done today so far is read blogs, and comment. I'm getting nothing done in terms of original work. Plus, I know already that arguing with such people about anything outside of race-realism and politics is a losing battle; I might as well be arguing with Wilberites, for all the good it will do them (or me).

So, as always, "insult the idiots who won't listen to reason anyway, and move on."

P.S. Speaking of time-wasters, I really didn't need to discover this: jailbaitgallery.com.

There goes another five minutes of my life I'll never get back....

You may already know this, but Kermit the Frog once gave a commencement speech to the graduating class at Southampton University:

When I was a tadpole growing up back in the swamps, I never imagined that I would one day address such an outstanding group of scholars. And I am sure that when you were children growing up back in your own particular swamps or suburbs, you never imagined you would sit here on one of the most important days of your life listening to a short, green talking frog deliver your commencement address. All of us should feel very proud of ourselves ... and just a little bit silly....

And so I say to you, the 1996 graduates of Southampton Graduate Campus, you are no longer tadpoles. The time has come for you to drop your tails and leave this swamp. But I am sure that wherever I go as I travel around the world, I will find each and every one of you working your tails off to save other swamps and give those of us who live there a chance to survive. We love you for it. Enjoy life!

Of course, Elmo testified before Congress about music education in 2002, so I suppose one day a Muppet could even be President of the United States!

It would have to be an American-born puppet, though....

P.S. For the next time anyone quotes Christopher Monckton against global warming: Monckton's deliberate manipulation.

And, God-Bothering Dan's at it again; so, so am I.

Here's a good summary of why it really is all fairy tales, i.e., rehashed, pre-Christian fertility myths:

The Biblical accounts of Jesus are clearly an amalgam of much older, pre-Christian myths and stories, and often strikingly so. A number of pre-Christian deities, such as Attis and the Persian Sun god Mithras, were also thought to have been born during winter, often of virgin mothers; these deities died and were allegedly reborn or resurrected. Mithras, known also as "the light of the world," was supposedly born with shepherds in attendance. Attis was known as "the lamb of God" and his crucifixion and resurrection were celebrated annually with communions of bread and wine. Predating Attis is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, whose other names included the word "easter." Even Christianity's iconic trademark, the cross, was a symbol of Ishtar's consort Tammuz (and numerous other deities) centuries before it became associated with Jesus.

Another pre-Christian deity in human form, Dionysus, was also reported to be born of a virgin mother—and in a stable, no less. Dionysus allegedly travelled with an entourage, performing various miracles—among them, turning water into wine. Accused of blasphemy by the religious authorities, Dionysus was tried and executed, before allegedly rising from the grave three days later. All of which predates Jesus' passion story by centuries.

The "Madonna and child"—an icon usually thought of as uniquely Christian—can be traced back to the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus, which, again, predates Christianity by over 1000 years. Likewise, the story of Noah and the flood echoes the fictional flood depicted in the Sumerian novel, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Christianity by some 2000 years. (In Gilgamesh, the gods destroy the ancient Mesopotamian city of Shuruppah in a great flood. But Utnapishtim survives the flood, along with his family and a sampling of animals, by building a great ship. In recognition of his ingenuity, the repentant gods bestow Utnapishtim with immortality.) In terms of its key stories, Christianity is clearly part of a continuum of cults and "mystery faiths"—an embellished composite retelling of much earlier myths and traditions.

Jeff Goldstein, on Next up: Dr Pepper forced by government to change its name to Dr Kevorkian:

If in fact the Democrats manage to push through "universal health care" (or governmental health rationing by way of empowering already petty tyrannical bureaucrats with the power over life and death, as I'm hoping it will come to be known), one thing I've argued that we will almost certainly be in store for is increased taxation on whatever latest scapegoat the government puts forth from which it is socially encouraged to steal money....

Today, soda and junk food. Tomorrow, once the flood gates to such taxation is opened, whatever new or next "vice" the party in power can conjure to socially demonize....

Bad as all that is, though, let's not lose sight of what I've long suggested is the natural endpoint of such thinking: that government, once it controls healthcare and is confronted with the fact that it needs to find ways to cut benefits to stay solvent and continue to overpay "management" bureaucrats, will have every motivation to tell you what to eat, how much to sleep, and when and for how long to exercise.

So really. Can national morning calisthenics be far behind?

And I'm not being hyperbolic, either: when many of us made the arguments that food taxes would naturally follow from the war being waged on cigarettes, we were dismissed with a wave of the hand as cranks engaging in slippery slope fallacies.

It's tough to know whether it would ever get as bad as all that. Granted, the logical chain is there; but we've had Medicare here in Canada—along with "Crown corporations," i.e., government ownership of industry, down to the point where the only place you can buy booze in Ontario is at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario store—for many decades already, with no sign of "sin taxes" on junk food or the like.

Regardless, God-Bothering Dan is at it again, in his otherwise reasonable objections to forced abortions and state killings:

Yeah, yeah, it's stereotypical because I'm a Papist, but this kind of shite really bothers me. Offends my sensibilities, I guess. Especially the patriarchal ones. Like logic.

Right. Logic. From someone who believes that a few magic words uttered over a cracker literally transform it into the body of Jesus.

On the contrary, for any topic covered by the Bible (e.g., morality), logic doesn't enter into it, for any loyal religious believer: Your worldview is rather just based on what the Holy Book says is right. (Cf. Muslim honor killings, which "make complete sense" within their religious worldview.) And what that means is that, for anything that conflicts with "what the Bible says," the logic is just a veneer, which will be readily discarded if need be—it's just dumb luck that logic, here, is telling Dan the same thing as his religion tells him.

Look at it this way: If you believed that the Bible was the Word of God, and you then had to choose between what God tells you to do, and logic, which would you choose?

I get that GBD's "patriarchal logic" crack is just a slap at feminists; really, I do. But as I've noted before, if you can believe that God and the Jesus of the Bible exist(ed), you can believe anything, with no evidence whatsoever being required, and no "logic" or science behind it all except that it's consistent with your fairy-tale system of beliefs (as, for example, Intelligent Design is).

From Arrested adaptation and "diseases of civilization":

If humans had hardly evolved in the post-agricultural environment, we would expect all populations to be equally susceptible to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Instead, we find that different populations have different characteristic rates of these diseases after adoption of a Western diet.

Early Christian Writings.

It's from the same guy who put up the Historical Jesus Theories document and web page.

P.S. Europe is Declining yet its Population is Increasing. Why? In a word: Goat-fucking Muslims, on their way to demographically taking over the world, and forbidding anyone outside of their barbaric religion from even owning property.

There is no region on Earth, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or otherwise, safe from Muslim fertility. Muslims could be easier to contain and isolate if they were not living amongst us. Multiculturalists will shy away from such notions, but that is because they lack perspective and have chosen to ignore the lessons of history. Would we allow Nazis with their vile ideology (to overthrow the US and dominate the world) to immigrate to the United States? Certainly not. And we should bar Muslims for the very same reasons.

I am not advocating any violence or harassment of Muslims already living in dar al-Harb (non-Muslim lands) but we must find a way to stop the importation of peoples who refuse to assimilate into their host countries, demand that we infidels accommodate their religion, and decline to even learn to speak our language. Then we have to devise a way to repatriate them to countries that appreciate their distinctive cultural habits, such as stoning immodest women, hanging gays, throwing acid in a wife's face, the mutilation of female genitalia, honor killings, and hating of Jews, Crusaders, and other infidels.

P.P.S. I was checking out the "Sunshine Girls" for the past week online, and inadvertently started noticing their career goals:

• "She looks forward to a career as a hairstylist and hopes to have her own cosmetic line"

• "Our girl is studying to be a heavy equipment technician [i.e., community-college education, not smart enough to get into university, so average white IQ at best]"

• "she wants to be a model or a vet"

• "hopes [!] to become a graphic designer"

• "hopes to be a nurse or a doctor. Her hobbies include films, literature and shopping. In her free time she likes to party. Her most memorable moment was this photo shoot [OMFG]"

• "is a 26-year-old fitness model/trainer. She has pet bunny named Chuchay and likes to spend her time off motivating people"

I remember reading in a recent comment at iSteve (somewhere) that there was a correlation between high intelligence in men (i.e., geekiness) and low(er) testosterone. (Smart people wearing glasses is equally not merely a stereotype: there are gene[s] that correlate both with higher intelligence and nearsightedness.) And it hit me when I was looking at the pics of these shapely girls, and their embarrassingly modest aspirations in life, that the same correlation must exist for high IQ in women, and low(er) estrogen.

(I'm betting that the one who would like to become "a nurse or a doctor" will settle for scraping by [in grades] and becoming a nurse, and then just marrying a doctor. Why spend a decade accomplishing things with your own intelligence and effort, at the expense of a social life, when you can just put out, and get the same financial rewards ... eh, sugar-baby? Plus, shopping is not a "hobby," by any reasonable definition of the word "hobby." And note how her "free time" spent partying is distinguished from her productive "hobby" of shopping! To live such a life!!)

Few women in academia are much to look at—relatively speaking, the (really) "intellectually scintillating" evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides would be a "10." And many of the physical/biological markers that make women (and men) "hot" are actually fertility indicators, i.e., outcomes of high(er) levels of testosterone and estrogen, and their influence on bone/body structure (in doe-like eyes, narrow waist, square jaw in men, etc.); and thus of the proclivity to (all other things being equal) rear more children than people with lower levels of the same sex hormones.

And with sexual selection and the large numbers of people in today's cities (cf. assortative mating), the not-too-bright buff men end up mating with the not-too-bright hot women, and raising even hotter not-too-bright kids. (Take a look at photos from a century ago, and try to find centerfold-quality women in any of them. They just don't exist, even under all the layers of crinoline.)

If that point is lost, consider that if high levels of reproductivity-enhancing estrogen were to lead to flabbiness, bitchiness, weight-gain and sarcasm in women, those same latter four characteristics would drive men wild with desire. In such a world, Roseanne Barr and Rosie O'Donnell would, quite literally, be "sex goddesses." (Pardon me while I vomit, but it's true: This is what biological fertility markers are about. Or what do you think drives male hippos wild, in female hippopotamuses? It may be lost on us, but for the most part whatever physical and psychological characteristics are the outcome of higher levels of sex hormones in those females, will very predictably be what drives the males to distraction; and vice versa. After all, among chimps—who have a very different and much more promiscuous mating strategy than we bonded, higher primates do—the old, sagging females are the "hot" ones.)

A few years ago, I remember seeing a Playboy Playmate in a photo of a bunch of other buxom babes with Hugh Hefner, where the girl was doing post-grad work in biochemistry. Granted, bio was always one of the easier sciences; but still, babes with brains are the exception, to the same extent as are buff hunks with brains. 'Cause for the most part, for the really beautiful people in this world, their brains are in their pectorals, at best.

Not that I wouldn't give everything I've ever owned (which isn't much at all) for just one night with any of those Sunshine Girls. But good Lord, what would you do beyond that, with women who are truly vacuous airheads, even in their "loftiest" career goals? Like the real genius David Bohm once observed: after the three dates that it takes to get a girl into bed, you've already exhausted all topics of conversation with her. (And Bohm was a man who could discourse intelligently on practically any topic.)

Ah well, back to reading, then....

Ooh, mermaids. Ooh.

And Ireland attempts to outdo Canada in terms of hatespeech laws, introducing a law against blasphemy:

The bill defines (I use the word 'define' in the loosest meaning of the term) the offence as "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage."

With America close behind:

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they "harass" public figures by criticizing them in a "severe, repeated, and hostile" manner, and thereby cause them "substantial emotional distress."

Pretty soon, you won't even be allowed to say stuff like this anymore:

I live in Los Angeles and just observing from our microcosm alone, the media here have made racism the deciding factor in all things "socially unjust." Thirty years or more of non-stop brow beating by elite opinion has worked its goal. The culture here is steeped in a combination of guilt and righteousness that makes for a lot of very angry, ordinary people. The most fervent believers are rabid. This is the end result of a social pendulum that has swung to its maximum leftward amplitude. The dread these two harbor is the realization that because the pendulum is so far out into lunacy, that the swing back will follow the standard oscillation pattern and end up somewhere out in the lunacy of an equidistant backlash.

I can't say I'm looking forward to that. But at the same time, equal correction is the natural course of events, and conservatives certainly did not create the current climate of PC extremism. So I'll shed no tears if a real backlash occurs. The white middle class may not take kindly to the idea that they have been suckered, robbed and abused for half a century or more....

Saletan, in particular, advoc[at]es we just stop grouping any characteristic by race. He says it's unnecessary and only can cause detriment to social progress. OK, then Saletan, let's apply that principle to not only HBD, but other disparities apparent in our society.

So, the liberals should stop complaining about lack of blacks in g-loaded fields and executive positions, about the higher rate of blacks in jail, the lower income amongst blacks, the lower housing loan rates amongst blacks, the lower college educational attainment trends amongst blacks, etc.

I agree. Let's stop being so preoccupied by racial grouping. I think it's pretty obvious which side of the political spectrum will have the most difficulty with that.

And the new Star Trek's almost here:

Zachary Quinto gets nods for Kirk's more passive and logical second in command, Spock. Ditto John Cho as helmsman Zulu, who has some dramatic moments, swordplay included.

Uh, that should probably be Sulu. Unless this is now the starship African-Enterprise.

From Barbara J. King's Evolving God, an updating of Solomon Asch's conformity experiments:

Thirty-two volunteers were tested on a mental-rotation task. These people were asked to decide whether certain three-dimensional objects, when differently rotated, were the same or different.... In the study, the volunteers were informed of the answer selected by four other participants. These other participants, assumed by the volunteers to be their peers, were in reality actors in cahoots with the researchers.

Before actual testing began, the volunteers and the actors informally interacted. This phase was engineered to enhance the social bonding between the two groups. During the testing phase, actors intentionally offered false answers half the time. Previous research had led the scientists to expect that at least some of the volunteers would go along with the actors' incorrect choices. And their knowledge of the brain led the scientists to make some interesting predictions, as follows.

When volunteers echo the actors' incorrect answers, and thus socially conform, the MRI should show activity in one of two brain area, depending on the reason for the conformity. When participants make a strategic decision to go along with the group (despite knowing that the group is wrong), changes should be observable in the pre-frontal cortex. By contrast, when they choose the incorrect answer because they perceive the task itself differently as a result of knowing what others in the group had answered (and do not know that the group is in error), changes in the occipital-parietal area should occur....

[P]eople did conform to the group, and at a startlingly high rate: 41 percent of the time, far more than when computers instead of live actors were selectors of wrong answers. Clearly, the volunteers were swayed by what their human companions had to say, although they had just met these people a short while before!

The most exciting finding is this: people conformed not because they assessed that the clever thing to do would be to join with the others, as a calculated social strategy. No, people's very perceptions of the task shifted simply because they learned how their peers (in reality, the actors) had answered. The MRI results tell this story quite clearly.

Of course, not everyone conformed. What happened to the non-conformists is fascinating: their brains got emotional. That is, the brain activity of these independent thinkers reflected emotional involvement. This is a red-letter finding, because it shows that such independence is linked to an "emotional load associated with standing up for one's belief," as the scientists put it. On two counts, then, this study has wide-ranging implications. Social involvement may alter a person's perception of the world, and it may be emotionally costly for humans to go against the crowd.

Beyond that, it's an extremely unsatisfying and annoying book, for reasons which the commenters at amazon.com cover. If I never hear the word "belongingness" again, it will be too soon.

P.S. A good example of what happens when scientifically illiterate people can't stop themselves from expressing opinions on science, including evolution: Poor Beleaguered Melanie Phillips! (Her hare-brained repetition of "Discovery Institute talking points" is dismantled by at least one commenter, Alan Fox at "May 4th, 2009 11:58pm".)

As I've said in the past, because they've been able to fake their way through economics and politics with simple common sense, they think that they'll be able to guess their way through science with the same "intuition." They are wrong.

P.P.S. Somebody finally put up a Ken Wilber torrent, with eight of his books in electronic format. Plus my "Norman Einstein."

Yes, I know.... But if a mother steals a loaf of bread to feed her starving child, is it really theft?

And Wilber's work is worth a lot less than a loaf of bread, so....

Plus, there has to be some kind of moral waiver for stealing from someone who himself is a scam artist, and has gotten rich by lying through his rotten, integral teeth.

P.P.P.S. The real threat Israel is under: Morris: Running Out of Solutions. Which is again one more reason why it is such a bad idea to have President Big-Man Limp-Wristed Metrosexual and his Supermodel (gag) Wife running America today.

My Christian friend "Bob" has voiced his dissatisfaction with Israel's mandatory military conscription, as supposedly teaching young Israelis to hate their neighbors rather than allowing them to come to their own, more tolerant conclusions. But really, if you were in that same situation as the Israelis, surrounded by violent barbarians who are on record as wanting to wipe your race off the face of the Earth, what would you do?

I recently discovered the blog of one Martin Robbins, the "Lay Scientist."

Martin is the type of person who won't even let the statement that Islam is a backward culture, or the mention of Pim Fortuyn's name, pass by without it provoking a calm and reasoned Liberal Wrath. (He claims that his "politics are neutral," but then he writes a weekly column for the Liberal Conspiracy blog, so you do the math.) He has a dangerously naïve analysis of Muslim attitudes toward us infidels, and of the effects of Sharia law, posted at The Disgusting Misrepresentation of British Muslims.

He does bring up a few good (statistical) points, but they really get washed out by this inexcusable apology:

[Poll question:] Is it ever justifiable to kill in the name of religion?
[Poll answers:] Yes, in order to preserve and promote that religion 4%
Yes, but only if that religion is under attack 28%

While the Mail's headline is technically not a lie, it is clearly a substantial manipulation of the truth. Of the 32% that said it was acceptable to kill in the name of religion, 87.5% said "only in self-defense", while the tiny remainder said yes to an answer that includes the confusing conflation "preserve and promote". I'm curious to know what percentage of Christians would give similar answers, and what proportion of human beings in general if we substitute "religion" for "philosophy" or "way of life". Would you be willing to fight an opponent to the death to protect your family's way of life from attack?

Yes, I would. But what constitutes an "attack" on the Muslim religion and way of life? A few cartoons, maybe? Pointing out that Mohammed was a pedophile? Salman Rushdie blaspheming the same Prophet (Poo Be Upon Him) in the Satanic Verses?

Because, you see, those are the types of trivial "attacks" on their "way of life" that many Muslims are explicitly and provably prepared to kill for.

Plus, what is killing for your religion "in self-defense" supposed to mean? Is that like when someone draws a cartoon of your pedophile Prophet, and you (as a loyal Muslim) confront him with the threat of violence for his blasphemy, and he pushes back rather than apologizing profusely, that you're then entitled (or rather, obliged) to kill him? How the hell else does self-defense have anything to do with attacks on religion? (Lest we need reminding, people have rights, including the right to defend themselves when under attack; religions do not have rights, and if a religion is "under attack," there is no such thing as killing in "self-defense" of that.)

And by the way, Martin: If their "way of life" is really under attack in Britain, they're free to move their goat-fucking asses back to the wasteland they (or their ancestors) came from.

The (useful) idiot goes on to say: "[Radical Islamophobes] are a far bigger threat to British society today than any number of Muslim immigrants."

Really? Any number? Are you sure? Because you're betting your way of life on that. And when the time comes, will you be "willing to fight an opponent to the death to protect your family's [Enlightenment-based] way of life from attack"? Like the useful idiot said more recently:

There is a huge, huge difference between the headline, and the actual data, which simply suggests that some [Muslims] think it's acceptable to kill to preserve your culture—you know, like we Brits did in World War Two.

The difference, old chap—aside from you slipperily glossing an "attack on religion" (the actual survey question, which surely includes "attacks" such as Rushdie's) into a "preservation of culture" in a foreign land where the proper response is to recognize that you are a guest in someone else's house, and thus to behave yourself and assimilate—is that the infidel culture which threatens immigrant Muslim culture happens to be the same culture/society that generously let them into the country in the first place. And one-third of those Muslim immigrants and their descendants are explicitly willing to kill in order to preserve the backwards culture they've transplanted into the civilized but foolishly multicultural West. Not to worry, though: When Muslims in the West have the numbers (you know, "any number" of them) to remake Britain in their own theocratic and Sharia-law image, they will do it democratically ... unless they simply can't wait that long (theirs is not a culture which is big on delayed gratification, after all).

Because whether or not it's acceptable to kill to preserve your culture in someone else's country, it's certainly acceptable to vote to preserve your culture (including leveraging the historic Muslim taxes on infidels). And in a few more generations, thanks to useful idiots like Martin, that's all they'll need to do.

P.S. Joe the Plumber on gays, conservatism, etc.:

At a state level, [same-sex marriage is] up to them [i.e., the individual states]. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary—it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing....

Conservatism is about the basic rights of individuals. God created us. As far as the government goes, the Founding Fathers based the Constitution off of Christian values. It goes hand-in-hand.

Alright, he's a total idiot, but at least he's up-front about how his homophobia (and obvious disapproval of gay marriage, abortion, etc.) is based on what "God wants him to do," rather than trying to coat it in rational arguments. Conversely, you know from the beginning that even if logic dictates the complete opposite answer to what he believes, he won't be moved be it. It's sort of refreshing to know that. Unlike when you're dealing with some people.

From Mark Stavish's The Path of Alchemy (p. 62-3):

[O]ne thing that is strongly encouraged is that each alchemist create his or her own "philosophic" mercury for use in spagyric [i.e., plant alchemy] products through the distillation of alcohol from red wine. According to the doctrines of sympathetic and natural magic, only red wine will do....

Red grapes are considered solar in nature, or having a powerful relationship to the Sun, and they have the ability to convey its life-giving energies more directly than a non-solar plant. The symbolic relationship between red wine and the energies of life is well known in rituals, particularly that of the Christian Mass.

Why would grapes be "solar in nature"? Well, they're roughly testicle-shaped, for one, and only men have testicles; and the sun is regarded as masculine compared to the feminine moon. So if you have a natural object that's obviously testicle-shaped, it's no surprise that it would be taken as "having a powerful relationship to the sun."

Why red grapes/wine in particular? As the passage indicates, it's from sympathetic-magical considerations, i.e., the red liquid wine resembles life-giving blood. And of course, in the Mass, the red wine is specifically the blood of Christ. Further, some writers have seen the Christ figure as deriving from earlier sun gods.

Page 80:

Traditional German folk magic encourages walking barefoot on the morning dew to keep the aura healthy and strong. In fact, in the Medieval and Renaissance traditions, any water that fell from heaven was considered exceptionally beneficial. Where it landed or how it was collected only added to its uniqueness. Water, snow, or even hail collected during the holy seasons, on holy ground, such as a churchyard or cemetery, or inside the hollow of an old oak were highly sought.... Because of its sacramental nature and use, baptismal water also gained favor in folk practices. It was also believed that you could make holy water by placing written pieces of scripture inside previously unblessed or unconsecrated water that had been collected in the above fashions.

On an entirely different topic, Steve Sailer quotes Geoffrey Miller:

Professors and students at elite universities ... socialize only with other people of extraordinarily high intelligence, so the width of the whole bell curve lies outside their frame of reference.

And that, of course, is precisely why they find it so easy to not be "prejudiced," and instead believe that all races have the same cognitive abilities. It's not just the outcome of a "blank slate" ideology, it's rather that the people they meet and interact with on a daily basis have already been pre-selected for high intelligence and high levels of nerdiness (with corresponding low levels of violence).

In their ivy-covered, ivory-tower world, the races and sexes really are more or less equal in abilities (except at the really high end of accomplishment in serious subjects, where the white males and Jews dominate). So all that's needed to make things fairer for the minorities is to let in "more of the same" underrepresented and "discriminated-against" groups, onto the campus ... and into the country.

It's not simply some "Leftist plot" to destroy the country that produces their foolish beliefs. It's rather that they're living so far away from the lowbrow bullying they experienced in junior high school from the envious, macho, utterly unaccomplished "janitors and car mechanics" of the world. They forget so quickly that those same dregs aren't even capable of understanding the work which they (profs) are doing, and that the academic world is a (ultra-competitive) "paradise" only because it doesn't let the same low-IQ dumbfucks in past its gates (except as overpaid unionized janitors, etc., who can, pathetically, then hold the entire institution and its students hostage):

I have met theoretical physicists who claimed that any human could understand superstring theory and quantum mechanics if only he or she was given the right educational opportunities. Of course, such scientists talk only with other physicists with IQs above 140, and seem to forget that their janitors, barbers, and car mechanics are in fact real humans too, so they can rest comfortably in the envy-deflecting delusion that there are no significant differences in general intelligence.

Even within my own field, evolutionary psychologists tend to misunderstand general intelligence as a psychological adaptation in its own right, often misconstruing it as a specific mental organ, module, brain area, or faculty. However, it is not viewed that way by most intelligence researchers who, instead, regard general intelligence as an individual-differences construct—like the constructs "health," "beauty," or "status." Health is not a bodily organ; it is an abstract construct or "latent variable" that emerges when one statistically analyzes the functional efficiencies of many different organs. Because good genes, diet, and exercise tend to produce good hearts, lungs, and antibodies, the vital efficiencies of circulatory, pulmonary, and immune systems tend to positively correlate, yielding a general "health" factor. Likewise, beauty is not a single sexual ornament like a peacock's tail; it is a latent variable that emerges when one analyzes the attractiveness of many different sexual ornaments throughout the face and body (such as eyes, lips, skin, hair, chest, buttocks, and legs, plus general skin quality, hair condition, muscle tone, and optimal amount and distribution of fat). Similarly, general intelligence is not a mental organ, but a latent variable that emerges when one analyzes the functional efficiencies of many different mental organs (such as memory, language ability, social perceptiveness, speed at learning practical skills, and musical aptitude)....

In the 1970s, critics of intelligence research such as Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould wrote many diatribes insisting that general intelligence had none of these correlations with other biological traits such as height, physical health, mental health, brain size, or nerve conduction speed. Mountains of research since then have shown that they were wrong, and today general intelligence dwells comfortably at the center of a whole web of empirical associations stretching from genetics through neuroscience to creativity research.

If you're looking for a good summary of why g is indeed a robust indicator of general intelligence, the comments thread has this:

IQ derives almost all of its validity because it is a good proxy for psychometric g. Arthur Jensen reports (p. 91, The g Factor) a g loading of about 0.88 for most IQ tests. Jensen suggests that the word intelligence not be used in scientific discussions, because it lacks a scientific definition, and that we should instead focus on g, since it is unambiguously defined as the product of a hierarchical factor analysis. It happens that all categories of test items correlate with one another to at least some degree. The ultimate relationship between the various categories of cognitive activity is reflected as g, which is common to all mental abilities. Anyone interested in how g is defined and derived, should consult The g Factor, 1998.

Having narrowed intelligence down to whatever it is that is reflected in g, the next logical question is what is it that causes variations in g? Charles Spearman discovered g in the early 1900s and developed factor analysis, plus a number of statistical methods that are used in psychometrics and other fields. Curiously, Spearman was never satisfied that he understood the nature of g. Today, g remains somewhat difficult to comprehend, but there is now much evidence that it is based in physiology. Psychometric g is substantially heritable (rising from 70% in young adults, to over 80% in older adults). There are some identified genes; one example is Igf2r, which is associated with high intelligence. Although there are various physiological candidates that may account for some degree of what we see as g, two are especially salient: nerve conduction velocity (NCV) and myelination.

NCV correlates to g, with faster NCV in more intelligent brains. This is an area that has been extensively studied and reported by Arthur Jensen. While there may be various ways in which NCV affects mental activity, the one that Jensen most often mentions relates to the high volatility of information held in working memory. Faster movement of the information, implies that it can be used before it is lost.

Ed Miller noted that Jensen's explanation of the role of NCV in intelligence does not explain the observation that the standard deviation of response times to external stimuli correlates negatively with IQ (smaller SD reflects higher IQ). Miller's paper, "Intelligence and Brain Myelination: A Hypothesis," first appeared in Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 17 (December 1994). By assembling a huge number of observations, Miller has been able to support his hypothesis that variations in intelligence is a function of the degree of myelination in the brain. His explanation for this is very lengthy, but is basically that myelin acts as an insulator preventing neural noise from disrupting brain signals in a manner that is somewhat like cross-talk that is seen in electrical circuits. As noise disrupts brain signals, the brain attempts to retransmit the information. If there is a significant loss of transmission integrity, there is a cascading of errors, overwhelming the brain so that it cannot progress. This is apparently what is seen in testing of people by increasingly difficult problems. A point is reached in which the person cannot solve the problem in any amount of time. They simply cannot manage the number of bits of information that must be manipulated for a solution.

Another strong indication that intelligence stems from physiology is that g can be measured passively with results that are as good as standard power IQ tests. This can be done by two quite different methods. One method is known as electroencephalography, or EEG. This method involves a variety of measures which are taken from averaging a large number of brain waves. The test subject need only be connected to the measurement equipment his brain waves are evoked by a clicking sound. Measurements are based on such things as the complexity (string length) of the average signals, and the zero-crossing points of specific parts of the typical response pattern. More intelligent brains produce a more complex form (greater string length). The technique is a completely passive observation of brain activity.

The second method, consists of a battery of very simple tests, known as Elementary Cognitive Tests (ECT). The test subject is asked to press a button when he observes a simple condition, such as the turning on of lights, or the playing of a sound, or the movement of a line on a projection screen. All such tests can be done by virtually all subjects in less than one second. Some of the tests involve comparisons or discriminations, but are not difficult to perform, even by very dull people. Sensors on the scalp measure the brain reaction time for each task. More intelligent subjects have shorter average brain reaction times (this does not include hand movement time). Likewise the standard deviations of higher IQ subjects is lower than for less intelligent subjects. Interestingly, the reaction time correlation is independent from the standard deviation correlation, strongly implying that they have different causes. Each ECT is somewhat g loaded, but when combined, the net measurement correlates to test results by standard IQ tests as closely as one IQ test correlates to another one.

The importance of EEG and ECT testing may extend into many aspects of understanding and measuring intelligence, but the most significant aspect of these modern laboratory techniques is that they seem to be more direct ways of getting to the physiological nature of intelligence. Both techniques seem to give support to Miller's myelination model, and both indicate that it is communication between widely separated regions of that brain that is central to the variation we observe in intelligence. As something of a side note, both EEG and ECT measurements show the same variations between racial groups as are seen with traditional IQ tests.

Among the other interesting aspects of physiological correlates to intelligence, more intelligent brains show the following:

• PET scans show that they are more efficient with respect to glucose uptake.

• MRI shows higher gray-white matter contrast.

• Brain volume is greater (correlation of +.44, after correcting for body size).

• In MRI examinations, there is a phenomenon known as T2 relaxation time, which is shorter. The importance of this is that the T2 relaxation time is an indication of the number of biological membranes in the immediate vicinity of the affected protons (in water).

Discovery's Creation:

In 1998, members of a Seattle nonprofit think tank drafted a secret five-year plan with an ambitious goal: to "defeat scientific materialism" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God"....

So well was the campaign going that in 2004, some of the original antimaterialism advocates were confident enough of eventual triumph to predict in detail a complete meltdown of Darwinian science by 2025—the 100th anniversary of the notorious "Monkey Trial" of 1925.

And, the (NSFW) origins of the swine flu.

And, The Origins of Political Correctness:

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.....

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true—such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. [Obviously, religion is squarely in the same class, of saying on the basis of their holy books that "certain things must be true."] Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn't true. I can see it isn't true," the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology [incl. in religion] invariably creates a totalitarian state [e.g., in witch-hunts and Inquisitions]....

[J]ust as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good—feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism....

[W]hen we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

P.S. Recently discovered the excellent Mind Hacks blog.

And if anyone tries to tell you that factory farming hasn't played a big part in the evolution of the swine flu virus: Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms. From which:

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn't be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed up to 176 people and on Thursday was declared an imminent pandemic by the World Health Organization.

"Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses," said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called "contained animal feeding operations."

From Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion:

Consider a technique used by the legendary [magician] pickpocket Apollo Robbins, another coauthor of the Nature article spearheaded by Macknik and Martinez-Conde. When the researchers asked him about his devious methods—how he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked—they learned something surprising: Robbins said the trick worked only when he moved his free hand in an arc instead of a straight line. According to the thief, these arcs distract the eyes of his victims for a matter of milliseconds, just enough time for his other hand to pilfer their belongings.

At first, the scientists couldn't explain this phenomenon. Why would arcs keep us from looking at the right place? But then they began to think about saccades, movements of the eye that can precede conscious decisions about where to turn one's gaze. Saccades are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, which is why a pickpocket has to trick them: The eyes are in fact quicker than the hands. "This is an idea scientists had never contemplated before," Macknik says. "It turns out, though, that the pickpocket was onto something." When we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point—this is called the pursuit system. A hand moving in a semicircle, however, seems to short-circuit our saccades. The arc doesn't tell our eyes where the hand is going, so we fixate on the hand itself—and fail to notice the other hand reaching into our pocket. "The pickpocket has found a weakness in the way we perceive motion," Macknik says. "Show the eyes an arc and they move differently."

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