I’m re-reading Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn. I had forgotten how good a book it is for someone not well-versed in the biological sciences. If I recall, Wade was criticized for being a bit direct and dry in his presentation. These things are a matter of taste, of course. I find it to be a great way to present the material, but I tend to prefer the plain over the fancy. If he larded his narrative up with colorful imaginings about early man, I don’t think I would enjoy it very much. There’s a place for everything and population genetics is not the place for imaginative narrative.

Anyway, the point of re-reading the book is in preparation for his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The race realist crowd has been talking about it for a while now and many of the usual suspects got early copies to review.HBD Chick has a useful collection of links to reviews from the sort of people who can be trusted to understand the material.

One review has been rolling around in my head for a while. Charles Murray did a very long write-up in the Wall Street Journal, touching on something that has been lurking at the edges of genetics for a while. That’s the challenge it poses to social science, specifically the Standard Social Science Model.

The problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don’t yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that “race is a social construct” in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality.

After laying out the technical aspects of race and genetics, Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.”

It is the central debate in human science. Are we what we are because of a vastly complex number of environmental variables that shape out characters? Is it just an accident of birth that makes a Nigerian a Nigerian and a Brit a Brit? Or, is there something else? Have these populations evolved long enough in isolation to be different in ways that run much deeper than skin color and hair type? Real science is pointing at the latter answer, while the soft sciences and the progressive holy men insist it is the former.

All of which will make the academic reception of “A Troublesome Inheritance” a matter of historic interest. Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them—it gives them cover to write more openly about the emerging new knowledge. It will be unequivocally welcome to medical researchers, who often find it difficult to get grants if they openly say they will explore the genetic sources of racial health differences.

The reaction of social scientists is less predictable. The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. Social scientists can still treat culture and institutions as important independent causal forces, but they also need to start considering the ways in which variations among population groups are causal forces shaping those cultures and institutions.

I’m a long fan of population genetics and that means I have read more about the topic than most people. I’m also an empirically minded person for whom mathematics is a naturally inclination. I mention it only to point out my bias. I place fields like economics and psychology in the same bucket as philosophy and religion. They may use the tools of mathematics to build their arguments, but ultimately they rely on faith. Therefore, in the great battle between science and the blank slate crowd, I’m on the side of science.

That said, I would not bet on science. People are not moist robots. At least we don’t see it that way. We very well may be moist robots, but our complexity is beyond out ability to comprehend. That gives social science the edge. Peddling hope in the form of self-help and the quackery of Malcolm Gladwell is always going to trump the appeal of sterile materialism.

Then there are the vested interests. Most of our institutions are built on the blank slate orthodoxy. The keepers of the flame are not giving it up just because science contradicts their faith.

How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, “Consilience,” predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. “The Bell Curve,” which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn’t. David Geary’s “Male/Female,” published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn’t. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate,” published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn’t. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.

That’s the lesson of Galileo. The real lesson, least ways. The contemporaries of Galileo knew he was right. His inquisitors knew he was right. That was not the point of contention. The fear of the Church and the defenders of the established order was simple. Pulling the legs out from under current understanding of the world was a threat to that order. The vested interests had, therefore, a natural advantage. Without something readily at hand to replace the current order, the bias was against any knowledge that threatened the order.

If you’re looking for a bright side it is that Galileo foreshadowed the collapse of the Catholic Church as the organizing entity of western civilization. Soon after Galileo, Europe was devastated in the Thirty Years War. That was the end of Christianity as the organizing philosophy of western elites. In many ways the Progressive Church appears to be similarly exhausted and headed for a breakup. The axioms of Western Liberalism no longer square with known reality and they no longer address the problems faced by modern man. Something has to give and history says wishful thinking eventually yields to objective reality.

I’m not good at predicting the future so I don’t know what happens. I do know we have reached a point where you cannot be counted as an empirically minded, educated man and not embrace the growing body of evidence from population genetics.

This post has already been linked to 1162 times!

I’m a big fan of archeology, but there’s a certain about of bullshit that comes with it. For example, we know with a fair degree of certainty about the people living in New England in the 18th century. They left lots of written records, physical evidence and their bones. We don’t know everything.

The people in 8th century New England are a different story. They left little evidence, far fewer bones and not much of a record, written or otherwise. The further you go back, they less evidence we have to go on and that means lots of speculation. There’s nothing wrong with speculation as it can lead to discovery. A good narrative that incorporates the available evidence can lead researchers to troves of new evidence. Or, it can be complete nonsense.

This story is what I mean.

Concentric stone circles near rocks weighing more than a ton — apparently aligned to mark solar events — are believed to be part of a Paleo-Indian site in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Clarke County that an expert has dated to about 10,000 B.C.

The complex along Spout Run has 15 above-ground stone features. Though still under study, it could be one of the oldest man-made structures in North America still in existence and twice as old as England’s Stonehenge.

Christ and Rene White, who own the property near Bluemont and made the initial discovery, credit their Native American heritage for the finding.

When Chris White, who is of Cherokee descent, was building a home for himself and his wife — who is a Lumbee Indian — on the wooded land, he said he often took a break to walk by Spout Run, which tumbles downhill in its rocky bed across his land.

Something told him that the area was important, and he decided to create a stone medicine wheel on the 20-acre property below Bears Den Trail Center — a lodge owned by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

To his surprise, he realized the area across the stream already had a stone circle. In fact, it had several concentric stone circles.

The first red flag is the Indian heritage stuff. I guess we’re supposed to believe that Indians just know how to recognize Indian stuff. And of course, he is Cherokee. They always pick the cool tribes. The Fake Indian from Massachusetts, who is really a WASP, claims to be Cherokee. I bet if we learn that the Cherokee were cannibals the number of people claiming to be Cherokee would suddenly plummet. Anyway, the medicine wheel nonsense is a nice touch.

For a professional opinion, the Whites contacted retired archaeologist Jack Hranicky of Alexandria, who had investigated five other Paleo-Indian sites in Virginia.

It was Hranicky who realized that the rocks in and outside the circles aligned with special features on the Blue Ridge.

A line from a center rock, over a specific boundary rock, intersects the feature called Bears Den Rocks on the mountain. Standing on that center rock, looking northeast, a viewer can see the sun rise over Bears Den on the day of the summer solstice in June.

Moving around the circle, another set of rocks points to Eagle Rock on the Blue Ridge, and also to sunrise on the day of the spring and fall equinox in March and September.

Yet a third points to a saddle in the mountain, where the sun rises at the winter solstice in December.

This could be true or it could be nonsense. Almost everything we “know” about Amerind people is speculative. We take what we know about Native Americans and work backward, trying to explain the fossil record and archeological evidence. Genetic evidence confirms the very broad outlines of how and when people entered North America from Eurasia. The mass of knowledge that is confirmed is a drop in the ocean of what is speculative. Again, nothing wrong with it, but this news story makes it sound like we know that these people had a high level of sophistication.

To date the age of the site, Hranicky excavated an area of five square feet, carefully numbering every rock and setting it aside, to be replaced later. He wanted to create as little disturbance as possible in hopes that future technology will have better methods of studying the site. His digging exposed three artifacts — a thin blade of quartzite, a small piece of jasper and another piece of the rock that had been shaped to be used as a small scraper.

Hranicky believes the jasper ties the Spout Run site to the Thunderbird Archaeological District, an intensely excavated Paleo-Indian site on the Shenandoah River in Warren County.

There, 9,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians — who Hranicky calls Virginia’s first engineers — quarried jasper from the river’s west bank to make tools.

Hranicky suggests that after quarrying jasper for tools at Thunderbird, Native Americans walked down the Shenandoah River and held some sort of cultural ceremonies at the Spout Run site. Rock engravings in the shape of footprints could be intended to mark where to stand to observe an equinox.

To get some idea of the site’s age, a section of jasper from the Spout Run site was sent to James Feathers, who runs the Luminescence Dating Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This, said Feathers, is a dating method based on solid-state physics. Materials absorb energy from natural processes and can store that energy for indefinite periods of time. Exposure to heat can release energy.

According to Feathers, the piece of jasper found along Spout Run was heated, perhaps in a campfire, and it’s possible to determine by the proportion of luminescence when that occurred.

“The method has been in use for more than 30 years,” Feathers explained, “and has been shown to be accurate against independent dating evidence. Precision is usually 10 percent or better.”

The date when that piece of jasper was burned on the Blue Ridge, Chris White said, is about 10,470 B.C.

This is consistent with other evidence. Humans entered North America roughly 10,000 years ago. The dating method is reliable and the types of tools would be consistent with hunter-gatherer populations.

I think this stuff is interesting, but I hate the way it is reported in the press. The desire to deify the Native Americans gets the better of them. The truth is the Amerind people were not very advanced, even by the standards of the world 10,000 years ago. These stones could very well just be cool looking stones. Anyone who has spent time in the wild has run across some amazing looking stuff created by Mother Nature.

The Soviets were fond of forced confessions.  New Left types in the 60’s and 70’s were fond of self-criticism sessions as a way to brutalize heretics. Today’s fascists have combined the two. The heretic is forced to both confess and undergo self-criticism sessions!

The Miami Dolphins swiftly and publicly reprimanded Don Jones late Sunday for his Twitter remarks critical of Michael Sam, fining him and barring him from team activities until he undergoes sensitivity training.

In a statement released by the team, Jones apologized for tweeting “omg” and “horrible” after seeing Sam sharing a celebratory kiss with his partner on national TV Saturday evening. Sam had just been drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh round, becoming the first openly gay player selected by an NFL team.

“I want to apologize to Michael Sam for the inappropriate comments that I made last night on social media,” said Jones, a backup defensive back. “I take full responsibility for them, and I regret that these tweets took away from his draft moment.

“I remember last year when I was drafted in the seventh round and all of the emotions and happiness I felt when I received the call that gave me an opportunity to play for an NFL team, and I wish him all the best in his NFL career. I sincerely apologize to Mr. (Stephen) Ross, my teammates, coaches, staff and fans for these tweets. I am committed to represent the values of the Miami Dolphins organization and appreciate the opportunity I have been given to do so going forward.”

Although the Dolphins did not disclose the amount of the fine, the fact that they made the punishment public was significant. Dolphins coach Joe Philbin rarely discusses internal discipline with reporters but made it a point to condemn Jones’ words on official team letterhead Sunday night.

For the crime of stating an opinion, this guy gets fined, publicly scolded and send off to a labor camp. Welcome to America baby!

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/12/4112204/dolphins-fine-suspend-safety-don.html#storylink=cpy

[subscribe2]For the most part, I’m in favor of suicide. If you don’t want to live, go ahead and get it over with and leave the rest of us to bugger on with our lives. My only other suggestion is that you do it before reproducing and you don’t take anyone with you. Otherwise, Godspeed. That’s never the way it works these days. We have Muslim lunatics trying to blow up the world and liberal fanatics trying to destroy western civilization. The modern human urge to wipe out the species is the great puzzle of our times. Perhaps it is the answer to the Sapient Paradox.

Anyway, the Internet brings word that the GOP is determined to commit suicide this summer. Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart is promising to pass amnesty by the fall.

The deadline to pass immigration legislation is this August, said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., who is part of the effort to develop an immigration bill that could pass the House.

“The legislative process in essence, frankly, has to work on deadlines. There’s a deadline. And the deadline is that if we don’t get it done by August it doesn’t happen,” Diaz-Balart told CQ Roll Call at the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute’s awards gala Thursday.

“If Congress doesn’t act by the August break, the president is going to do something. And once that happens, two things happen,” said Diaz-Balart. “No. 1 is that the possibility of any further negotiations — of any — disintegrate.”

This is a classic gambit. Martin Luther King played this card repeatedly. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a legendary example. He offered the choice to white America. They could either deal with him and his demands or they could deal with an army of rioters in the streets. His calculation, a correct one, was middle-class white people did not want to see the cops shooting black people on television. Diaz-Balart is doing the same here. Either pass his amnesty scheme or something worse will happen in the fall. What could be worse than flooding the country with illiterate Mexican peasants is Obama flooding the country with illiterate Mexican peasants. Yeah, right.

Then we have the increasingly bizarre Rand Paul making crazy sounds about voting.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky broke Friday with fellow Republicans who have pushed for stricter voting laws as a way to crack down on fraud at the polls, saying that the focus on such measures alienates and insults African-Americans and hurts the party.

“Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.”

Mr. Paul becomes the most prominent member of his party — and among the very few — to distance himself from the voting restrictions and the campaign for their passage in states under Republican control, including North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, that can determine presidential elections. Civil rights groups call the laws a transparent effort to depress black turnout.

This, of course, is completely insane. Everyone with an IQ above room temperature knows liberal democrat groups work hard to pollute the ballot in America. The one chance to clean this stuff up is requiring a valid ID. In states like North Carolina, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, well orchestrated vote fraud can swing an election. Al Franken is in the Senate because of vote fraud.

Then we come to the final bit of insanity from the weekend. Republicans now want to lesson the penalties on illegal immigrants.

Republican Rep. Raul Labrador on Thursday offered a potential immigration deal to the White House, saying the GOP would agree to loosen penalties on illegal immigrants if President Obama would agree to increase visas for foreigners who work in high-tech fields.

Mr. Labrador suggested dropping the penalty period that bars illegal immigrants from reapplying to enter the U.S. legally after being deported, a period that now lasts for between three and 10 years, depending on how long they had first remained in the country illegally.

“I think most Republicans agree that the 3- and 10-year bars have to go away because right now the people that are here illegally, they have to go home to become legal, but then they have to remain home for ten years,” the Idaho Republican said. “We remove those bars from them, you could fix the status of about 25 percent of the people that are here illegally right now if they return to their home country and then they come back legally.”

Under current law, those that leave the U.S. after living here illegally for six months or more cannot return for three years. Those who lived here illegally for at least a year cannot return for ten years. That has served as an incentive for many illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. rather than return home and face years long bans.

Mr. Labrador, who dropped out of a bipartisan group last year that tried to strike a broad immigration deal, made the overture at a forum of House conservatives hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

He said in return for dropping the bars, Democrats should agree to boost legal immigration by granting green cards to foreigners who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in the fields of science, engineering, math or technology.

Think about this for a second. This cocksucker wants to cut the legs out form under working class Americans by bringing in foreigners to take their jobs. Then he doubles down. He wants to gut the market for tech workers, letting proven criminals Apple, Google and eBay slash the pay of their workers by hiring foreigners on visas.

Raul Labrador hates America. Specifically, he hates Americans. Even more precisely, he hates the people who are inclined to vote for him and his fellow Republicans. He has to know that there is zero chance this scheme helps his party. Every bit of data we have shows that immigration hurts Republicans. Pushing these polices guarantees the defeat of his party. What strange virus has gripped the minds of these men leading them to advocate suicidal policies?

As I said earlier, the best course is to stand aside and let the suicidal get on with it. I will not be voting for any Republican this fall or ever. The best thing that can happen is for the party to collapse. The last several elections suggest I’m not alone. Political parties are not permanent and the best thing, it seems, is to have one go bust once in a while in order to send a message.

It appears that Pinch Sulzberger asked, “Who will rid us of this troublesome heretic” ” and his knights fired Nicholas Wade. I suppose this is once again shows Thomas Pinker to be correct. Not so long ago heretics were burned. It is not for the lack of desire. I’m sure the Cult would be running the ovens 24×7 is they thought they could do it. it is just no longer acceptable to kill heretics.

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians.

Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment.

Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in bookstores on Tuesday, May 6. In excerpts from his book posted by Time.com on Friday, he is identified as a “former science editor” of the Times. Until then, coverage of his book called him a current Times journalist.

This was entirely predictable. Any deviation from orthodoxy is met with the maximum amount of force the Cult can muster. As race realism goes, Wade’s book is mild stuff and well within the bounds of scientific debate. But, it is not permitted and that means the heretic has to go.

Update: It looks like the Daily Caller got it wrong. That happens a lot with them and appears to be intentional. I’ve noticed this is a trend with them some time ago. I had reservations with posting about it for that reason. Charles Murray correct things here.

In John Derbyshire’s latest transmission to the faithful, he mentioned this story from Britain. The short version of it is Britain is slowly going halal. The pansies that occupied the island for thousands of years are allowing Muslim fanatics to colonize the place and add it to the caliphate. OK, I made that last part up, sort of. For reasons no one knows, they have imported skads of Muslim crazies, who now make up 4% of the population. The results are predictable. Bombings, consanguineous marriages resulting in a rash of pinheads and, of course, demands for special rights.

Anyway, doing some looking into it, searching for some blog material, I find this story. One of the things I’m making an effort to do lately is challenge my own opinions and biases. By that I mean fully understand the alternative opinions and biases of others. It is easy to get sucked into believing things that you want to believe. A good antidote to that is to assume everyone is yanking your chain and check out their story. In this case, the New Statesman is a Cult site  and the headline promised an alternative to what I’m inclined to believe.

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

At this point, my bullshit detector is flashing. One of the oldest gags the Left employs is to conjure the too good to be true example that just happens to prove their point. In this case, the choice of this one restaurant is supposed to be emblematic of the market at work. I suspect if the “market” resulted in a refusal to go hala, the author would have an entirely different view of the “market.”

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise and rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Now my bullshit detector is flashing so much it is starting to smoke. The fake outrage is an old standard from lefty. If you want to know when he is about to slather on a layer of bravo sierra, look for the mock outrage. That’s the tell. That was also the point where I stopped reading and decided to find out something about Mehdi Hasan. The brief bio says he is a regular around Fleet Street. Google tells me he is writer for the Greek sociopath, Arianna Huffington. Then I found this bit from the Spectator.

As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.”

How the audience clapped and cheered. How they loved the sight of a principled left-wing journalist taking on the “Daily Hate” without fear of the consequences. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the Mail showed within a day that Hasan’s outrage was phoney: a piece of cynical crowd-pleasing by a manipulative hack. He had sent Paul Dacre a begging letter asking for work. Although he was on the left, Hasan said, he admired the paper’s

“passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists.”

The Mail attracts writers, who ought to oppose it, because it pays them top rates on one condition only: they say exactly what the editor wants them to say. You can get at least £1,000 for a morning’s work, and Dacre will fill your pockets even if he decides not to use your piece. Writers will bark like a performing seal for money as easy as that. My colleague Polly Toynbee once revealed that Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an author she regarded as a friend, produced a “stinking” attack on her at the Mail’s behest. He then “had the nerve to write me a cringing [private] letter claiming his copy had been doctored and, anyway, he had a lot of little Wheatcrofts to keep in shoe leather”.

Wheatcroft was being too modest. If you obey orders at the Mail, you can keep them in Louboutins.

But leftists should pause before denouncing Hasan as a charlatan and a sell-out. They are the purer hypocrites and greater fools. Hasan is from the Islamist religious right. He disputes how closely he has pushed up against the extremes – ever the politician, he says that old clips of him denouncing non-Muslims as “cattle” have been “taken out of context”. But he was being sincere when he told Dacre he was

“attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies”.

Of course he was attracted. He is a religious reactionary. I have no doubt either that if Dacre had offered him work, he would have taken it and the opprobrium that would have followed, not only for the money but for the love as well.

Just when I was thinking Mehdi was nothing more than a liberal crank, I learn he is something worse. He was born in Britain and lives there now. He passes himself off as a moderate Muslim adapting well to life in a civilized country. In reality he is loyal to Islam above all else. According to his Wiki, he has been caught, in unguarded moments, saying the sorts of things one expected from Muslim lunatics.

It is why no civilized country should permit the entrance of citizens from Muslim countries, outside of diplomatic delegations and narrow business reasons. Allowing any settlement of Muslims in your lands is asking for trouble. They simple refuse to adapt or get along with non-Muslims. What they believe, what Mehdi Hsasn believes, is incompatible with western liberal democracy. Why on earth would sane people is a western democracy invite these people to settle in their lands?

This story in The Cult’s paper of record is a hilarious example of Stalin-esque pamphleteering.

The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.

Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.

The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.

In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.

Such rhetoric makes taking over the debates easier to sell to the committee’s more conservative members. But what party leaders are principally concerned about is reducing the number of debates to avoid a repeat of the 2012 campaign when a series of insurgent candidates used the forums — 20 in all — to draw attention to their candidacies. Some party leaders say they believe that the number of debates pushed Mitt Romney to the right in a way that contributed to his loss to President Obama.

Look at all the scary words. The Cult sees what is a minor change in the debate schedule as some dark, malign conspiracy to blot out all that is holy and good. What makes it even more hilarious is the GOP establishment is clearly taking the advice of The Cult and trying to shed their conservative supporters. Yet, The Cult still find it a foreboding sign of a new dark ages.

I like the last line about “Some party leaders” saying Romney was too far right. This is what is called in the business “an imaginary source.” They believe they exist, but like elves and wood nymphs, there’s no evidence. This is a part of the new mythology of The Cult. They keep making claims about how the GOP has gone way over on the right, when the opposite is obviously the case. The center of the Republican party is at least one giant step to the left of where it was two decades ago. Maybe two. I can name a dozen Democrats from the 1980’s who would be considered extreme right-wingers today.

Living near the Imperial Capital, I am quite familiar with the joys of a vibrant and diverse culture. One bit of that vibrancy is the massive number of Spanish speaking peasants that have crowded into areas around the capital. Hyattsville Maryland, for example, looks like Tijuana. The store signs are all in Spanish and the streets are littered with little brown people who look like extras from a documentary on the Mayans. Any large parking lot features numbers of loitering men, waiting for day work. Treasonous contractors will pull up in trucks and a few men will jump in the back, after some brief negotiations.

Another feature of our new vibrantly diverse future is organized crime. In Northern Virginia, MS-13 has setup a base camp. I guess like all major businesses, they feel the need to be near the center of world power. If the Fortune 500 can keep offices in DC, MS-13 can keep space in Northern Virginia. They were, after all, created by the US government. Our tax dollars trained them in El Salvador and then we imported them into Los Angeles as part of our open borders policy.

This new vibrantly diverse future is not without some small downsides. Take, for example, this story out of Minnesota.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area is a long way away from the home turf of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, but that didn’t stop three cartel enforcers from making their way up the region in an attempt to hunt down two teenagers they accused of stealing drugs and money from a stash house.

The three enforcers were allegedly sent from Los Angeles to St. Paul on orders from the Sinaloa cartel to find the people who stole 30 pounds of methamphetamine and $200,000 from a stash house in St. Paul. The two teens that the cartel hit men snagged were tortured, had their lives and that that of their families threatened and were told to find the missing drugs or come up with $300,000 to compensate the cartel, according to court documents obtained by the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune newspaper.

“The kidnappers told [the 19-year-old] that if he didn’t return the drugs or come up with the money, he and his entire family would be killed,” according to court documents.

In case you are curious, this is what diversity looks like:

Here’s something else to get used to:

Despite indictments pending and two of three enforcers taken into custody, the story has people in the Twin Cities area shocked and worried as law enforcement deals with a spike in drug trafficking and heroin overdoses.

Federal authorities told the Star Tribune that they are not shocked that the Sinaloa cartel would go to such lengths to retrieve their money and drugs, especially in the lucrative Midwest heroin market. What worries them is that instead of using their own people, the cartel apparently hired the hit men from the feared Mara Salvatrucha 13 street gang (MS-13).

The phrase “not shocked” means “thinks it is hilarious” in federal law enforcement language. This is the sort of thing that makes their work interesting. Properly enforcing the borders and sensibly dealing with drug gangs is hum-drum stuff. Chasing down murder-torture around the country, while giving interviews to the press is fun. It makes their work fulfilling, which is the only reason our betters hold jobs these days.

When I was a boy, my grandfather used to lament the growing influence of circus performers in American life. By “circus performers” I mean the whole class of people who perform tricks for a fee. Actors, jugglers, singers, dancers, bearded ladies, the whole range of people we lump into the bucket labeled “entertainers.”

Calling them entertainers disguises a bit of reality. Calling them artists is lunacy on stilts. My grandfather would say, “It used to be understood that these people were the scum of the earth, a necessary evil. They stayed on the fringes of society with whores, pimps and gamblers.”

The one reason to bring it up is to equate entertainers with pimps and whores. The other reason is it strikes me we have a similar problem with lawyers. it is not that they exist, it is that they exist in great numbers and seem to have over run the place. Anyway, that came to mind while reading this piece over at The American Thinker.

With much disgust, I discovered that National Review Online has officially mainstreamed Holocaust denial. By publishing Charles C.W. Cooke’s blog that pronounces that it “is a damn shame” that a California school district caved to pressure and withdrew an assignment requiring students to argue that the Holocaust did not occur, NRO is supporting the dissemination of an unbelievably offensive ideology that was formerly only espoused by psychotic tyrants such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Unlike the vast majority of respected opinions on the subject, Cooke bases his abhorrent position on claims that “There really is no better way of teaching critical thinking” than allowing debate on whether or not the Holocaust in fact occurred. Seriously?! As a practicing attorney for 26 years who developed critical thinking skills throughout my education, I feel confident in asserting that Holocaust denial has absolutely no place in the development of that skill set. And it certainly has no place in any classroom that desires to teach anything other than perverted ideologies and anti-Semitism -– period.

For starters, I’ve grown weary of this over the top drama queen act. I tend not to read much written by women for exactly this reason. If you have been made physically ill by an objectionable opinion, you should probably just kill yourself. Then we have the strange use of scare words. “Unbelievably offensive” is supposed to be a click past “really offensive” but could mean anything. It is scary sounding gibberish

Putting aside the ticky-tack complaints, what made me laugh is the the bit about being a practicing attorney for 26 years. This appears to be her, but I’m not positive. Lawyers have a habit of referring to themselves as authorities on things well outside their area of expertise. Entertainers suffer from this same defect. They think pretending to be others on stage makes them experts on everything. In most cases, they are uncommonly stupid. Lawyers think that passing the bar adds a dozen points to their IQ.

Lauri with an “I” is one of 1900 attorneys at her firm and she is not a partner nor is she on partner track. I make that assumption based on her title and the bio. Big shot attorneys I know tell me that when you’re on partner track, you get the flowery bio on the website. Plus, she is a woman. A woman attorney? Really? I’m sure she is a great gal, but she is not spending her day splitting atoms or solving complex puzzles. She pushes paper around an office and fills out forms.

Now putting aside these mean things I just wrote about poor Lauri, she is bragging about her critical thinking skills in the middle of committing a common logical fallacy, argumentum ab auctoritate. In addition to that, she is wrong. If you want to teach people how to puzzle through arguments, you give them tough arguments, maybe even impossible ones. The Kobayashi Maru is an example. Of course, she also commits the most common logical fallacy, which is argumentum ad populum. The “vast majority of respected opinions on the subject” can be wrong. Just ask Galileo. It’s why we don’t put math up to a vote.

I doubled over laughing at this bit of dimwittery:

And he does so in a completely inane way. 

Great debate topics start from the other side of the status quo:  “The United States should be a communist country”; “The eugenicists had a point”; “Sharia law would be good for the West”; “War is always wrong”; “9/11 was an inside job.”  Why would we exclude one of the most significant events of the twentieth century from the rule?

Why? Because the Holocaust is not up for debate!

I think if I were running White & Chase, I’d demand she stop writing for publication. My fear would be that our clients would read it and realize we have hired an unlettered dufus. Cooke is British and he is talking about the traditional way of debate taught to British school boys. Staking out ludicrous or absurd positions goes back to what I mentioned above with the Kobayashi Maru. By giving students an impossible position to defend, you force them to exercise those, wait for it, critical thinking skills.

Shakespeare has Dick the Butcher utter the famous line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” in ‘Henry VI. It is often repeated as an insult to lawyers, but it was actually a compliment. Without lawyers, you can not have the rule of law. But, there’s a limit to everything. Just as having some jugglers and bearded ladies is necessary to the running of a sane and civil society, you need to have some lawyers to administer the law. Things start going wrong when you have too many of these people and that’s where we find ourselves.

All that said, I don’t think we should be having primary school children debate the Holocaust. They are not ready for it and the teachers, in this case a Muslim fanatic, are not qualified to manage it. You also have to throw in the fact that Holocaust deniers are deeply weird people. The Holocaust Industrial Complex has warped a fair bit of thinking in America, but the antidote to that is not embracing the batshit crazy ideas of Holocaust deniers.

Somehow, this guy got a good reputation amongst the Dark Enlightenment types. I suppose it is entirely do to his willingness to post “racist” rants. I’m using the quotes around the magic word to emphasize the magical form of the word. There’s a very weird and disturbing back story, but I’m not sure of the accuracy. His new blog is mostly Panda-man posing, as best I can tell. Reviews of beard oils and ironic eye wear seem likely. He does, on occasion, post a link to something interesting. What I find most interesting is the weird otherness of his posts. The culture gap is so wide that a 30-something hipster living in one of the coastal hives is no longer identifiable to a typical American.

Example:

The NY Times asks why “Americans are far less concerned about global warming than people in the rest of the developed world.”

But none of the panel of “experts” have any clue.

Climate change is like a religion. So a large percentage of Americans don’t care about climate change because they believe in Jesus.

In other developed countries, a much lower percentage of people believe in conventional religions, so they are seeking something bigger than themselves to believe in and to be passionate about, and the secular religion of climate change (which is a subset of Gaianism) fills that void in their lives.

People in coastal hives, particularly young ones, have a strange paranoia about Christians in the hinterlands. I guess ignorance is the root, as few people in these areas know much about religion or any particular sect. New York state has a church attendance rate of 33%, according to reliable studies. In the city, the rate is probably in the single digits. Christianity has just about died out in the Northeast of the United States. Therefore, they associate religion with backwoods hillbillies handling snakes and yelling about Jesus.

As to the puzzle, Americans are suspicious of intellectuals. It is one of the few traits that has held up under the liberal onslaught. When they intellectuals get caught lying, the typical American turns them off completely. Europeans are much more comfortable with intellectuals running their lives. To the typical Continental, it is the natural order so they accept all of the latest fads. in other words, Europeans accept the latest fads because they are European. That’s what they do.