What's The Use Of Happiness If It's Just A State Of Mind?

This is an except from "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse":

Sternberg's basic idea, that emotions play a biological regularity role, hearkens in some way to the three psychologists' "general theory of love". More importantly, it hearkens to Darwin. Roughly since the Enlightenment, study of the mind had been flavored by the Cartesian contention that abstract thought is the calling of the brain, it's high function; emotional states are low functions, base handicaps people should work to overcome. This view was challenged by Darwin who, in the years after publishing On the Origin of Species, became haunted by the notion that if physical characteristics evolved, then emotional states may have evolved too. Darwin spent a decade on this question and the result was his last work, a little-known book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.

Darwin speculated that moods, feeling, and psychological qualities must possess some or national selection would have eliminated them. Being afraid of packs of wolves holds an obvious survival benefit. Loyalty, for instance, could have improved the survival chances of early humans by causing them to care for one another. To Darwin, the idea that psychological states evolved was a hopeful one, helping explain why there was goodness in the world. The admirable emotions, he assumed, had been rewarded by national selection.

But while Darwin's views on biology conquered the intellectual landscape, his views on emotions were quietly dismissed by tastemakers. Freud was about to propose a much more negative interpretations, that consciousness is steeped in self-delusion and that human emotions are the repellent byproduct of infantile sexual compulsion. This view has not stood the test of time; much of Freud has been discredited by subsequent research. But the sheer pessimism of Feud's thinking-he once memorably said that the most the typical person could hope for was to rise from crippling neuroses into-"ordinary unhappiness"- appealed to the negative intellectual Zeitgeist that prevailed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Darwin's more affirmative take on emotions was forgotten.

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The Black Death Was Different Than Low Birthrates

Note: I certainly agree with Brimelow that the Japanese are and will be better off than they would've been without their highly restrictive immigration policies. However, I disagree with his theory that Japan's low birthrate could be in any way beneficial, and find his analogy to the Black Death to be profoundly invalid.

Peter Brimelow writes on VDARE:
Japan’s population may or may not decline (demographic projections are notoriously uncertain) but declining populations are not neccessarily bad. Here’s Wikpedia (July 28 2010) on the economic consequences of the Black Death:

In many ways the Black Death and its aftermath improved the situation of surviving peasants, notably by the end of the 15th century. In Western Europe, labourers gained more power and were more in demand because of the shortage of labour. In gaining more power, workers following the Black Death often moved away from annual contracts in favour of taking on successive temporary jobs that offered higher wages.

Statsaholic:
One thing that really needs to be borne in mind here is that the Black Death killed young people AND old people.
 
In contrast the low birthrate of the Japanese today is the demographic equivalent of only killing the very young, while leaving the old alone.
 
For this reason it may well be that all the extra money made by the young due to labor scarcity, and then some, will be eaten up by the old.  They will thus almost certainly be far worse off due to the low birthrate.
 
This is especially the case given that the young will have even less voting power than they have now.
 
If the young are handing over a massive percentage of their earnings to the old now, can you imagine how much they'll be handing over once their relative voting power is even smaller than it is now?
 
The birthrate in Japan is low enough at 1.2 children per woman that each generation is significantly smaller than the generation that came before it.
 
This means that even if even if the life expectancy stays the same over time, each new Japanese generation is more outnumbered by its elders than the last.
 
Now because of their restrictive immigration policies and relatively high population the Japanese have a lot of time to reverse their birthrate problem before they go extinct.
 
But the problem is that as long as they stay a Democracy, a Country where the young refuse to have children unless they have a lot of money, and a Country with cheap and legal birth control, the low birthrate seems irreversible in the absence of significant and effective state intervention.

The only other possible hope is if the fertility suppressing forces of technology, feminism, and materialism are somehow rejected and/or overthrown.

In other words if they go back to being patriarchal primitives, incipient rebels against the modern World like we now find so often in the Islamic World.

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"Some People Had Doubts, But Now They're All Dead"

Year of the woman in politics?

ALBANY -- Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat in charge of recruiting candidates to expand her party's majority in the state Senate, had a simple message for the crowd of party brass, labor leaders, lobbyists and political consultants: "I believe this is actually the year of the woman."

They all clapped, including U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand -- who was being feted at the June 14 "Women for Gillibrand" luncheon of Caesar salads and chocolate mousse at the Crowne Plaza -- and Ellen Malcolm, the founder of the national group EMILY's List, which funnels money to female Democratic candidates.

As did three other women in the room: Didi Barrett, Susan Savage and Joanne Yepsen. The three are part of a class of 10 women challenging state Senate Republican incumbents -- all of them older men -- and join 10 women already in the chamber. Eight of them are Democrats.

Eric Blankenbaker, a spokesman for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, said that in a year in which Democrats -- who control all the levers in Albany, including the Senate -- are running a slate to bring a "fresh perspective" to Albany.

But why so many women running now, and why are Democrats -- anxious to grow their razor-thin 32-30 majority in the Senate -- turning to them as insurgents?

"The guys kind of screwed things up a bit for all these years, and maybe they're realizing that," said Liz Abzug, founder of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, an organization named after her mother, a former congresswoman. "When you see now how it's fallen apart, and how nothing passes through, and you see the three guys in control, it shows that you're not moving forward. We're not moving. So why not? It's a perfect time for women to seize the reins."


"A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered."
-Andrea Dworkin
_______________________________________________

Golden Dawn is a political party in Greece that seems to be refressingly free of Feminist cant.

Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Bradley Manning, I Salute You

June 25th was a good day.

Leaks create fresh doubt about Afghan war, secrets

The monumental leak of classified Afghan war documents threatened Monday to create deeper doubts about the war at home, cause new friction with Pakistan over allegations about its spy agency and raise questions around the world about Washington's own ability to protect military secrets. [This is important.  It is especially valuable to help people in foreign governments realize that this nation of idiots called America has bred a government of idiots, and that they are showing this government of idiots FAR more deference and respect than is deserved or necessary.]

The White House called the disclosures "alarming."

The torrent of more than 91,000 secret documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history, sent the Obama administration scrambling to assess and repair any damage to the war effort, either abroad or in the U.S. The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war's opponents in Congress that one of the nation's longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated.

The leaks come at a time when President Barack Obama's Afghanistan war strategy is under congressional scrutiny and with polls finding that a majority of Americans no longer think the war there is worth fighting.

Still, the leaks are not expected to prevent passage of a $60 billion war funding bill. Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.

The Pentagon also was looking at possible damage on the ground in Afghanistan.

"Someone inadvertently or on purpose gave the Taliban its new 'enemies list,'" declared Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who said the White House indicated the disclosures compromised a number of Afghan sources.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs emphasized that the documents covered the period before Obama ordered a major increase in U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, and the administration denied they would cause any policy shift in the fight against Taliban insurgents.

[Just as well. We need the military ground down to dust in Afghanistan to reduce the chances of an invasion of Iran. The good thing about these leaks is that they're important enough to significantly damage US morale, while not being important enough to cause the pig-headed types running the war to actually withdraw.]

Indeed, despite the furor over the publication of the reports on the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, the information did not reveal any fundamentally new problems in the war effort. Military officers, current and former, described the documents as mostly tactical spot reports, including hunches about possible suspects and bomb plots that couldn't be verified. Some of the reports contain errors; others appear to be based on flimsy evidence.

Still, much of the material is anything but encouraging.

Underscoring the difficulties the U.S. faces, the documents include the first publicly released indication that the Taliban has used portable surface-to-air missiles against U.S. helicopters. One report on a June 2005 incident said a Black Hawk helicopter used evasive measures to avoid getting hit east of Kandahar by what its crew chief identified as a portable missile.

The documents also report potential Iranian support of an Afghan terrorist group.

They said that on Jan. 30, 2005, Iranian intelligence agencies brought the equivalent of $212,800 in Afghan currency across the Iranian border and transferred it to a 1990s-model white Toyota Corolla station wagon occupied by members of Hizb-i-Islami, a Taliban-allied insurgent group led by former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Good for Iran, this is wise of them.] The money trail was lost.

Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military would probably need "days, if not weeks" to determine "the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the release of documents was just the beginning. He told reporters in London that some 15,000 more files on Afghanistan were still being vetted by his organization.

The documents are described as battlefield reports compiled by various military units that provide an unflinching view of combat operations between 2004 and 2009, including U.S. frustration over reports that Pakistan secretly aided insurgents fighting U.S. and Afghan forces. [Good for Pakistan.]

The material portrays Pakistan as playing a double game when it came to the struggle against Afghan militants, with security officials secretly providing insurgents with aid. Both the U.S. and Pakistan say that view is outdated, but one American analyst said it probably is correct.

"The Pakistan government gave up claiming that it could control its intelligence agencies around the time they invented them. I don't think they even try," said Paula R. Newberg, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the leaked documents "misplaced, skewed and contrary to the factual position on the ground." And it said that U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation against "our common enemies" will continue.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley argued that there is a "new dynamic" in the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan since the period covered by the leaked documents. He acknowledged, however, that the U.S. remains concerned about weaknesses in the relationship, including the problem of corruption in the Afghan government.

WikiLeaks, a self-described whistleblower organization, posted the reports to its website Sunday night. It did not say who provided the documents.

Crowley said it was unclear whether the leak was related to a U.S. military intelligence analyst who is being held in Kuwait, on charges of mishandling classified information on military computers in Baghdad.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said the documents released so far "reflect the reality, recognized by everyone, that the insurgency was gaining momentum during these years while our coalition was losing ground." [And I suppose the insurgency isn't gaining ground now!]

The Taliban's resurgence led Obama to announce in December 2009 a major increase of forces to Afghanistan as part of a new civil-military strategy, Lieberman pointed out. [It's so stupid how Lieberman is trying to spin this.]

Shortly after the documents were posted on the Internet, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said they raised questions about whether the U.S. was pursuing a realistic policy with Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said they showed the urgency of making the "calibrations" necessary "to get the policy right."  [Whatever that means???]

Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the leak disturbing.

"The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won't stop until we see more perpetrators in orange jump suits," Bond said. [Visit Guatenamo Bay, Kit. You'll see plenty of perps in orange jumpsuits and then everything will be okay again in your empty skull.]

The military has detained Bradley Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst in Baghdad, for allegedly transmitting classified information. But the latest documents could have come from anyone with a secret-level clearance, Lapan said. "These documents highlight issues we've long known about," Crowley said.

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Francis Parker Yockey And The Big Picture

Yockey & Russia, by Mauryk2

Nothing separated Francis Parker Yockey more from the primitive-minded American Right than his position on Russia (& the USSR). Yet it’s essential to his thought & practice. Dr K R Bolton, in this essay from the late 1990s, provides the necessary overview. Dr Bolton is a Far Right, conservative and Social Credit researcher based in New Zealand. The entire essay can be downloaded at Kerry Bolton Collection.

YOCKEY & RUSSIA by Dr K R Bolton (excerpts)

Russia is pregnant with meaning for our own time. The actions of Russia are pivotal for the future of civilization against the globalizing tendencies of the USA and international finance capitalism. Russia has undergone a brief interregnum of subordinate status to liberal-democracy and oligarchy inaugurated by Gorbachev and maintained by Yeltsin. The rise of Putin was something of a partial coup at least against plutocracy and globalism.

American-born Western Destiny philosopher Francis Parker Yockey was one of the seminal Thinkers to ascertain the situation of Russia from the perspective of realpolitik at a time when the American Right was serving globalizing and cosmopolitan interests by lining up behind the US Establishment to beat the war drums against the USSR with the the advent of the Cold War.

Yockey from the start of his post-war ideology seems to have considered Russia to be very much of secondary concern in relation to the liberation and destiny of Europe, in contrast to the USA. The first was seen as representing the crass impacting on material existence; the second as a virus eating at the very soul of Europe through pervasive culture distortion.

Yockey reiterates that Russian occupation of Europe would be less harmful than American. Like the barbarian invasions of other Civilizations, Yockey believed that the superior Western culture would be resistant to military occupation and the Russians would eventually succumb to a symbiotic relationship, which would open the way for the European culture-bearing stratum to infiltrate the Soviet bloc at all levels and into the Kremlin itself. The occupation of Europe by Russia would not result in Russification, but the Europeanization of Russia resulting in a peaceful new Europe-Russia Symbiosis.

Another significant positive factor Yockey saw in Russian occupation in preference to America, is that Soviet occupation would mean the elimination of the inner-traitor, the class of politicians epitomized by Churchill, who while being part of the Western cultural inheritance, acted against European interests.

Yockey correctly perceived that the USSR had changed orientation since the ouster of Trotsky. He correctly identified two ‘bolshevisms’ in the sense that ‘bolshevism’ in Yockean terms means an attack on the Western cultural organism: that of Moscow and that based in Washington and New York. He saw the militaristic ‘bolshevism’ of ‘Russian barbarism’ as less dangerous in the long term to the Western cultural organism than the ‘cultural bolshevism’ emanating from America.

On hindsight it would seem that the Yockeans of the time underestimated the power of Culture Distortion. One needs only to consider the global ramifications of George Soros for creating a subversive network pushing everything from the ‘color revolutions’ in the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere to feminism and marijuana liberalization. Soros would today be considered by Yockey as perfectly epitomizing the Culture Distorter.

Yockey however was correct in considering the enduring religious and land-based soul of the Russian, as virile and ultimately having the potential to throw off this global spiritual and cultural contagion. Russia is yet to fulfill an historical mission that might liberate the Western Cultural organism and create a new symbiosis of Russia and Europe (and those cultural colonies further afield) predicted by Yockey but on terms that would now recognize the Russian People-Culture-Nation-State as by no means inferior to that of the West.

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The Front Line Of An Inevitable War

Note: This important exchange occured in response to Mark Hackford's recent AltRight article "The Rape of Europa."

Bogolyubski Writes:
As Dr. Phil likes to ask: "How's that workin' out for ya?" The Poles and other Eastern European countries would be better off allying with Putin's Russia than joining the prison of nations headquartered in Brussels. Unfortunately, the lingering bad taste in their mouths from 45 long years of being Soviet client states prevents a realistic assessment of what the EUSSR actually is. They merely left one prison of nations to become inmates of another, far more destructive and deadly one.

LH Responds:
Good comment. The top nationalist parties in Hungary (Jobbik), Slovakia (Smer, SNP), Bulgaria(Ataka) are all against further surrender to the EU and on the record for closer alliances with Russia. Poland has actually improved relations with Moscow. There are other good signs here and there. Russia is still a long way off from what passes today for Western "cultural" domination, which frankly means the ghetto/gay vomit out of America.Will the aptly named EUSSR collapse? Very few people really ever thought the USSR would and now you can buy your very own Lenin Medals on E-Bay. And to think it might all start in Greece again....
___________________________________________________

An addendum to this entry: Since this post it has come to the World's attention that the top nationalist party in Greece, Golden Dawn, is also in favor of closer relations with Russia:

"Remember that until recently, before the Memorandum, we had one of the most powerful air forces, with highly trained pilots. Another issue raised by the Golden Dawn today, which is included in our program, is the reversal of our geopolitical orientation. That must be a shift in energy and defense to Russia. We must start a deal of energy and a defensive alliance and from there to expand the alliance to other fields." -Ilias Kasidiaris

Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn NYC's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Getting Our Money's Worth?

Increasing Number Of Americans Unable To Point Out Map

WASHINGTON—-An alarming new study released Tuesday by the Department of Education found that nearly 70 percent of Americans are incapable of pointing out a map when presented by researchers with a map. "Not only did a majority of people just stare blankly ahead, but nearly half pointed to nearby desk lamps in their attempts to guess correctly," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who called the findings endemic of the nation's failing school system. "In fact, 14 percent of all Americans claimed they had never 'even heard of no map,' and asked if being prompted to locate one was some kind of trick question." According to Duncan, the Department of Education has suspended all further studies and will instead be spending the next six months just screaming into a pillow.

H/T: The Onion

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Why Females Are More Likely To Be Bastards

This is really interesting.

It turns out that someone did a working paper where they looked at whether a woman not living with a spouse or partner before the conception of her child increases or decreases the chances that it will be a son.

"In a sample of 86,436 human births pooled from five US population-based surveys, I found 51.5% male births reported by respondents who were living with a spouse or partner before the child’s conception or birth, and 49.9% male births reported by respondents who were not (v2 ¼ 16:77, d:f : ¼ 1, p < 0:0001).

The effect was not explained by paternal bias against daughters, by parental age, education, income, ethnicity, by year of observation, and was larger when comparisons were made between siblings. To my knowledge, this is the first direct evidence for conditional adjustment of the sex ratio at birth in humans, and could explain the recent decline in the sex ratio at birth in some developed countries."
-Partnership status and the human sex ratio at birth

This makes sense to me because when it comes to perpetuating your germline into the future girls are the safe bet and boys more the cocksure gamble.

Reproductive variability is much greater with males than females. If you produce a son you're more likely to hit the jackpot in terms of getting lots of biological grandchildren, this is true, but the trouble is that you're also more likely to come up snake eyes.

If you're a man who's going to stick around and invest a bunch of time and money raising your children, it seems to me it would be more adaptive to produce sons.

At least this is the case if by sticking around it had the effect of improving your child's reproductive chances.

Better to improve the reproductive chances of a son than a daughter, considering there's more potential upside there.

But if you aren't going to invest time and energy into helping the child out, better to have a daughter. Even if it hurts her reproductive chances, the lower variability of female reproductive success means there's a better chance she'll produce children than a similarly neglected son.

Therefore I'd say this sex ratio pattern may represent an adaptation to a time period, possibly still ongoing, where having a father in the household had a mortality rate independent positive effect on a child's chances of reproductive success.

Note: All the above reasoning also applies from the perspective of the mother.

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I Blame Larry Gelbart

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Attitudes Toward Mel Gibson in Los Angeles

SurveyUSA just did a poll of 500 adults in LA on their attitudes toward Mel Gibson.

There's a consistent pattern of LA Whites hating on him more than anyone else:

Mel Gibson Favorablity Rating
Whites -41
Blacks -18
Hispanics -4

Will Mel's image forever be tarnished?
Whites      +8
Blacks      -20
Hispanics -45

Also those under 34 are less likely to disaprove of Gibson than the old:

Mel Gibson Favorablity Rating
18-34  -14
35-54  -27
55+     -26

I'm not sure what's driving these patterns.  Maybe because of this being LA the poll picked up a lot of Jews who don't like Mel for pointing out how they cause all the wars in the World.

And maybe the LA Hispanics tend to live in close enough proximity to Blacks to take an understanding attitude toward Mel's concerns about what packs of them are capable of doing.

But what I find most interesting is the Blacks being less offended than the Whites, even though the media's only really attacked Gibson for "Anti-Black racism."

They don't care about the whole allegedly punching his girlfriend in the face thing, and I doubt many of the people polled were aware of that aspect of the story.

Anyway, I think this may indicate that the really liberal type of Whites you have in LA are more hostile to race realism than actual Black people are, and ironically enough this may especially be the case with forms of race realism that make Blacks look bad.

The thing is that I checked and Jews are only about 5.9% of the LA population, so even if 100% of them disapprove of Mel Gibson it still means the White gentiles polled in LA disaprove of Gibson more than the Black gentiles, assuming a representative sample.

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Computers and Education

Given the recent ramdomized study showing a negative effect from video games on academic achievment, I thought this article from the NY Times was interesting:

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.

“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professor Malamud and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.

The program provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government program

This a good example of a randomized study, even though I should double check exactly how much of an average income gap there was.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.”

Aha!

...The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

That makes sense, but there's also the issue that children from lower-income households might have less of the mental discipline required to avoid using the computer as a distraction from schoolwork.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups.

Okay, here's the Liberal idea that it would've been great if something had an equally negative effect on ALL the students, and that making the lowest aptitude students do worse is only bad because it increases inequality.

H/T: Auster

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Samuel Johnson on the Masses

When man sees one of the inferior creatures upon a tree or basking in the sunshine without any apparent endeavor or pursuit, he often asks himself or his companion, "on what that animal can be supposed to be thinking?"

Of this question, since neither bird nor beast can answer it, we be content to live without the resolution. We know not how much the brutes recollect of the past or anticipate of the future; what power they have of comparing or preferring; or whether their faculties may not rest in motionless indifference till they are moved by the presence of their proper object or stimulated to act by corporal sensations.

I am the less inclined to these superfluous inquiries because I have always been able to find sufficient matter for curiosity in my own species. It is useless to go far in quest of that which may be found at home; a very narrow circle of observation will supply a sufficient number of men and women who might be asked with equal propriety, "on what they can be thinking?"

It is reasonable to believe that thought, like everything else, has its causes and effects; that it must proceed from something known, done, or suffered; and must produce some action or event. Yet how great is the number of those in whose minds no source of thought has ever been opened, in whose life consequence of thought is ever discovered; who have learned nothing upon which they can reflect; who have neither seen nor felt anything which could leave its traces on the memory; who neither foresee nor desire any change of their condition, and therefore neither fear, hope, nor design, and yet are supposed to be thinking beings.

To every act a subject is required. He that thinks must think upon something. But tell me, ye that piece deepest into nature, ye that take the widest surveys of life, inform me, kind shades of Malebranche and of Locke, what that something can be which excites and continues thought in maiden aunts with small fortunes; in younger brothers that live upon annuities; in traders retired from business; in soldiers absent from their regiments; or in widows that have no children?

Life is commonly considered as either active or contemplative; but surely this division, how long soever it has been received, is inadequate and fallacious. There are mortals whose life is certainly not active, for they do neither good nor evil, and whose life cannot be properly called contemplative: for they attend neither to the conduct of men or the works of nature, but rise in the morning, look round them till night in careless stupidity, go to bed and sleep, and rise again in the morning.

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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsor...

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My Word! Ann Coulter Makes an Irrational Foreign Policy Argument

In her latest column Ann Coulter writes:

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there.

In the entire seven-year course of the Afghanistan war under Bush, from October 2001 to January 2009, 625 American soldiers were killed. In 18 short months, Obama has nearly doubled that number to 1,124 Americans killed....

Statsaholic responds:

We can't give Obama all the credit for this, though.

According to Wikipedia: "Deployment of additional US troops continued in early 2010, with 9,000 of the planned 30,000 in place before the end of March and another 18,000 expected by June. The Pentagon anticipates that US troops in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq for the first time since 2003."

So at the absolute most Afganistan has had 27,000 extra US Troops thanks to Obama's delightful idiocy, or only 37% more than there were when Obama took office.

And yet according to Miss Coulter in 87 months under Bush 625 American troops were killed, for a kill rate of only 7.2 a month, but under Obama we've gone up to MUCH higher kill rate of 62.4 a month.

That's a 767% improvement in kill rate!

Clearly this 767% improvement in kill rate can't be explained merely by 37% increase in US Troop levels.

What could be happening here?

I really don't know, but saying the increase in US Troop fatalities in Afghanistan is being caused by Obama's troop surge is clearly incorrect.

And then there's the issue that Ann Coulter is comparing LBJ's 2,400% increase in US Troop levels in Vietnam to Obama's mere 37% increase in US Troop levels in Afghanistan!

Try to get your facts straight next time, Ann Coulter.
______________________________________________
Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Alvin Greene on Job Creation (America as the New Mauritius)

Alvin Greene on job creation: Produce Alvin Greene action figures

The buzz surrounding surprise Senate nominee Alvin Greene has gone international as Republican incumbent Jim DeMint's Democratic challenger described an unusual plan for job creation to a British newspaper this week.

Calling Greene "America's most unlikely politician," a reporter from the Guardian of the United Kingdom traveled to South Carolina to interview the mysterious candidate who came out of nowhere to beat former judge and state legislator Vic Rawl in the June Democratic primary.

The result was a standard "who is Alvin Greene" article similar to what many news organizations have written since Greene's perplexing victory. However, one thing that stood out in the Guardian's story was Greene's interesting plan to spur job growth in the Palmetto State.

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays," described Greene. "Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an Army uniform, Air Force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That's something that would create jobs."

Greene knows most politicians wouldn't list personalized action figures at the top of their economic plan, but he says that's what makes him a good candidate. "I think out of the box like that," Greene told the Guardian.

"It's not something a typical person would bring up. That's something that could happen, that makes sense. It's not a joke."

Greene will face DeMint and Green Party candidate Tom Clements in the November election. According to a June poll released before Clements entered the race, DeMint led Greene by 21 points. Greene has said he is planning a debate with DeMint, though exact details have not been released.

Wednesday afternoon, the Manning NAACP announced Greene will be the guest speaker for their monthly meeting on Sunday, July 18 at 4:00pm at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church.

NAACP, have you no standards whatsoever!

I mean, the guy was credibly accused of shocking acts of sexual harressment against a college student, plus he's clearly not even close to being right in the head, and yet you want him representing your org and race?

I guess too many decades of Whites refusing to judge American Blacks, partly to avoid being called racist, has allowed even the Black leadership to give up on even trying to project a positive image.

It's like how the Dodo lost the ability to fly on that Island where there weren't any predators.

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But will it play in Peoria?

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Human Ingenuity

A serious barrier to properly countering an American attack on Russian interests or the likely complicity of a future American President in an Israeli attack on Iran is that US Government agents go around all over the place checking for radiation patterns which would be consistent with the presence of a Nuclear Bomb.

Once they even stopped a lady for a radiation pattern which turned out to just be her cat, which had recently received chemo therapy.

In the view of many counterterrorism experts the most logical way around this would be to use the sorts of Submarines employed by Narcotics Trafficers to sneak the Bomb up to the US shore, and then detonate it in a harbor.

On this front it is interesting to report that Narcotics Trafficers have managed to build, without any help from a Government, a submarine capable of just the sorts of transoceanic voyages which would be needed to pull this idea off.

DEA: Seized submarine quantum leap for narcos

A 100-foot (33-meter), twin-screw diesel submarine seized at a jungle shipyard in Ecuador marks a quantum, if anticipated, leap in drug-smuggling evasion technology, the top U.S. counter-drug official for the region said Sunday.

"It is the first fully functional, completely submersible submarine for transoceanic voyages that we have ever found," Jay Bergman, Andean regional director for the Drug Enforcement Administration, told The Associated Press.

Until now, all the smuggling vessels seized on the high seas or at clandestine shipyards built to haul multi-ton loads of cocaine under the Pacific's surface were semi-submersibles. They typically unload off Central America and Mexico drugs destined for the United States.

Equipped with air intake and engine exhaust pipes, none of those craft were capable of fully submerging so they could evade radar and heat-seeking technology of drug-interdiction aircraft.

The camouflage-painted vessel seized by Ecuadorean police Friday appears by contrast to be capable of long-range underwater operation — a development U.S. analysts have long expected, Bergman said.

Acting on a DEA tip, the Ecuadoreans found it at a sophisticated shipyard with living quarters for at least 50 people on a jungle estuary several miles from the Colombian border, he said. It had yet to make a voyage.

Built of fiberglass and other composites, it has a conning tower, periscope and air conditioning system and measures about 9 feet (2.7 meters) high from the deck plates to the ceiling, the DEA said. Ecuadorean police told the DEA the vessel has the capacity for about 10 metric tons of cargo, a crew of five or six people and the ability to fully submerge, Bergman said.

Compared to semi-submersibles, which cost less than $1 million each to build, "this is in a new maritime drug-trafficking class of its own," Bergman told the AP.

He said U.S. nautical engineers would be taking the submarine apart in the next few days to determine its dynamics.

The regional head of Ecuador's anti-narcotics police, Maj. Enrique Bautista, would not offer details of the sub when contacted by the AP. He referred calls to the national anti-narcotics police chief, who did not respond to messages left on his cell phone.

Bautista said the seizure was "in preliminary stages of investigation."

Bergman said one man was arrested in Friday's raid on the jungle shipyard and said it was hoped he would shed some light on how long it took to build the submarine and who engineered it.

He said authorities are still investigating who financed the sub's manufacture and which trafficking organization intended to use it.

A number of illegal armed groups operate in the area, including the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Authorities say drug trafficking is now the movement's chief source of income.

The commander of Pacific operations for Colombia's navy, Adm. Hernando Will, told the AP on Sunday that Colombia seized 22 semi-submersibles along its coast last year but only one so far this year.

In the cat-and-mouse game that law enforcement has played for three decades with drug traffickers in Colombia — the origin of some 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the U.S. as well as heroin — the smugglers have continuously adapted to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.

The introduction of transoceanic submarines — given the major investment they represent — amounts to raising the stakes ever higher, Bergman said.

"A lot of thought, a lot of resources, went into this."

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Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Stength

Except for the whole letting their Country be flooded with non-Europeans thing, in some ways the Ultra-Leftism of the Swedes can seem relatively harmless.

For example, I agree with their Feminism driven decision to outlaw the buying of sexual services.

The best way to fight an industry is to cut off its funding, and the people who bare the blame for an industry being funded are the people who pay money for what the industry is selling. 

It is therefore far more efficient to go after the men who buy prostitutes, thereby leaving the minority of women open to becoming prostitutes with no choice but to find a better mode of employment.

But now the Swedes have gone and done something that is really frightening in its perversity and in the utterly Orwellian title they've given it:

Sweden Bans Homeschooling, Religious Instruction

The Kingdom of Sweden took a dramatic turn toward totalitarianism with the adoption of a sweeping new education “reform” package that essentially prohibits home schooling and forces all schools to teach the same government curriculum.

The draconian 1,500-page law — deceptively referred to by the Swedish government as “The new Education Act - for knowledge, choice and security” — was approved by Parliament last week amidst strong criticism and opposition. When it goes into effect next year, the entire educational system will be transformed, and alternative education abolished.

So-called “independent schools,” already financed and largely controlled by government, will now have to submit to the same regulatory framework as regular government schools. They will also be required to follow state-issued syllabi and curricula.

“[Religious schools] can’t make any children to pray or confess to the God, but they will still be allowed [to exist],” Education Ministry press secretary Anna Neuman told The New American in a telephone interview. Essentially, there will no longer be any difference between “private” schools and government schools, she explained. And there will be no other option.

In addition to abolishing any remaining distinctions among schools, the new education act also prohibits home schooling for religious or philosophical reasons. Home education can be allowed only in “exceptional circumstances” like extreme bullying, Neuman explained. Lawyers have said the new condition basically means never.  

Regulation of home schooling was already impossibly strict in Sweden, where, as reported recently by The New American, social service workers took a seven-year-old boy from his parents because he was being educated at home — even when it was technically legal. But under the new rules, home education will be all but done away with.

“It’s a fear that [home schooling] doesn’t work appropriate[ly],” press secretary Neuman explained, though she admitted there was no report or evidence to back up the fear.

My head is going to explode.  They take away all choice in the Swedish Educational System, and then put in the title of the Bill that it's "for knowledge, choice and security".

And then there's the part saying "Religious schools] can’t make any children to pray or confess to the God".  This is the philosophy of Richard Dawkins (in his capacity as a professional Atheist as opposed to his capacity as a Scientist) taken into the real World.

What Dawkins says is that teaching religion to your children is "child abuse".

Never mind that we try to force unprovable beliefs onto our children all the time without Dawkins calling it child abuse.

Never mind that the same Swedish Government that now stops Religious Schools from requiring their students to pray forces children to parrot the most vile and disproven Leftist Propaganda.

But the even more important issue is that Sweden is trying to make it so there's simply no way for Swedish parents to protect their children from being indoctrinated into the tenets of the State, tenets that are profoundly hostile to anyone unlucky enough to be European, a Man, or to believe in an insufficiently exotic religion.
 
A lot of Countries in Europe have Homeschooling banned in them, all too many of them do, but what's so out of the ordinary about this Swedish law is that it neuters and enslaves all religious and private schools.

Even Germany, where Homeschooling has been illegal for an unusually long time, has Schools which are outside the control of the State:

The largest network of private schools in Germany are the Waldorfschulen. These ‘alternative’ schools are run based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, known as anthroposophy. Similar in many aspects to the Montessori schools and normally offer schooling from kindergarten through to the early years of secondary education. Waldorf schools emphasize the importance of developing a child’s creativity and the curriculum places considerable emphasis on arts.

Can you believe it! They actually let the Private Schools be based on a Philosophy, and to have a curriculum, different than that of the Public Schools.

That's far more than they're going to have in Sweden now.

It just goes to show that the Ultra-Leftists running Sweden are out for blood, and that it's essential to get the less evil and insane nations of Europe out of an EU which seeks to Swedenize the entire Continent, to take them beyond mere Socialism and into the realms of the most extreme forms of Bolshevism.

The Swedes actually took a seven year old boy away from his parents because they tried to teach him at home.

At least when the North Korean Government pulls that sort of thing it's in the context of them protecting their land from invaders, which is far more than you say for the Swedish Government.

Уважаемые России,
Святая Россия,
Пусть ваши танки крен в Стокгольме!
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Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Explicit and Implicit Processing (Interaction)

This interesting comment left was on Lawrence Auster's Blog:

In our society, women appear not to have been trained to identify potential sexual predators, and you often comment on the racial aspect of this phenomenon. I think of the case where a research doctor in Atlanta who wanted to sell her condomnium allowed a young black man to come unescorted to her apartment because she did not want to appear (to herself, it seems) as a racist. Is it possible that women have lowered their guard -- and excised their judgment -- for anti-racist reasons?

It also seems true that society as a whole has lowered its standards to accommodate the common dysfunctions of black American culture. We Americans are egalitarians, and it pains us to set different standards for blacks. Thus, in the name of equality, we lower standards for everyone.

If we combine the two factors, then we may see another aspect in the Holloway case. If women refuse to acknowledge strange black men as potential predators, then they cannot allow themselves to see strange white men as such. Indeed, in the subconscious of these young women likely lies the belief that black men are dangerous. They are not able to accept such a racist and offensive thought, but it may make them more trusting of strange white men when they come along. It perhaps floated through Miss Holloway's mind that she would be safe with van der Sloot, even if he was with the Kalpoe brothers. Dutchmen cannot be dangerous when we cannot even allow ourselves to perceive feral Oakland "youths" as threats.
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Note: Golden Dawn is a political party in Greece, it's against the idea that European people should risk getting themselves killed just to not be thought "racist".

Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Afganistan

In Steve Sailer's post responding to the Randy Thornhill's strange idea that low IQ in a Country is caused by disease, he called Afghanis "Knuckleheaded".

One his main reasons given for saying this is the high infant mortality in the Country.

But what Sailer doesn't seem to get is that it's FAR smarter for a Woman to have seven pregnancies leading to seven births, with one of the children dying in infancy, than it is for a Woman to have two pregnancies leading to one abortion and one live birth.

From the standpoint of group selection, from the standpoint of advancing one's genetic fitness, it is much more important to minimize birth control and abortion than it is to minimize infant mortality.

It is a better to have too few doctors than too many feminists.

Not that it isn't important to minimize infant mortality, but to put things in perspective the infant mortality of Afganistan today (about 15%) is lower than it was in Mid 19th Century America (when it was about 25%).

The 2008 Total Fertility Rate in Afganistan was a remarkably high 6.601 children born per Women.

Also, in the last 50 years or so the population of Afganistan has very nearly tripled! 

(This in spite of Afganistan not getting anything resembling the amount of aid from outside sources that Black African Countries receive.)

Though the Afghanis do not seem to a be a high IQ population, at least in comparision to Europeans and East Asians, the fact remains that their mode of life has the enduring wisdom of tradition behind it.

In a way I think not being overly intellectual has been a protection to them. They have that ancient rural distrust of technology, of cities, and of modernity.

I wonder if on some level they have an intuitive understanding that the greatest advantage of doing things their way is that their descendants will always have Afghanistan, that they will endure long after those who torment them are nothing but dust and ashes.

Now the empire of Alexander the Great did leave something of a genetic fingerprint, there being a degree of Macedonian/Greek admixture found in some Afghanis of today.

But of the American Empire not so much as a rack will remain.

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IQ and the West Nile Fever of Nations

This is an article from the Guardian.

Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim

People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.

The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.

Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.

Note that IQ Tests, unlike a lot of tests, are only effected by education and SES to a profoundly limited degree.

Attempts to measure intelligence around the world are fraught with difficulty and many researchers doubt that IQ tests are a suitable tool for the job. The average intelligence of a nation is likely to be governed by a complex web of interwoven factors.

The latest theory, put forward by Randy Thornhill and others at the University of New Mexico, adds disease to a long list of environmental and other issues that may all play a role in determining intelligence. Thornhill made the news in 2000, when he coauthored a provocative book called A Natural History of Rape in which he argues that sexual coercion emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.

Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Thornhill and his colleagues explain that children under five devote much of their energy to brain development. When the body has to fight infections, it may have to sacrifice brain development, they say.

To test the idea, Thornhill's group used three published surveys of global IQ scores and compared them with data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how badly infectious diseases affect different countries.

The list included common infections, such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.

The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation's IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.

So he's saying that too much disease leads either to the evolution of lower IQ, or the failure to evolve high IQ.

This hardly seems like a politically correct idea given that this theory predicts that Black Africans will be the genetically least intelligent group in the World, due to there being more infectious diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else.

But how does this theory explain the Europeans being much higher IQ than the American Indians, and yet it was the American Indians who turned out to have the weaker immune systems!

It just doesn't make sense.

And then there's the Australian Aboringenes.  They were so sparse in their population until very recently that they almost certainly have very weak immune systems, and yet contrary to what Thornhill's theory would predict they are easily one of the lowest IQ groups known to Science.

"The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at," said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. "Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly."

He's misusing the word "effect".  We don't know in which direction the arrow of causation points in this case because it seems so logical that lower IQ people would do a poorer job of avoiding infections.

"The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease," Eppig added.

And then wait hundreds of generations for the population to evolve toward weaker immune systems and higher IQs.

"It's an interesting and provocative finding," said Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "It explains about 50 to 60% of the variability in IQ scores and appears to be independent of some other factors such as overall GDP."

"The authors suggest that more infectious disease could lead to lower IQ scores through an impact on brain development. This is an interesting speculation, but the data don't prove it one way or the other," he said. "A bigger problem is that it might be driven by a third factor, that affects both infectious disease prevalence and IQ test scores."

For reasons that are unclear, IQ scores are generally rising around the world.  Thornhill suggests monitoring rates of infectious diseases in nations as they develop, to see if they decline and IQ tests scores rise.

Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, and author of the 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said disease and IQ is a two-way relationship, with low national IQs being partly responsible for widespread infectious diseases.

"In recent decades, HIV has been a serious infectious disease, and it has a high infection rate in low IQ countries, especially in southern Africa, where it is present in around 30% of the population … This is attributable to the low IQ of the population who do not understand the way the infection is contracted, and have erroneous beliefs about how to prevent infection.

Yeah, anyone can see that Black Africans were at least as low IQ before HIV came along, thus proving that if there's any cause and effect relationship between this malady and low IQ, it's simply that having a lower IQ makes you more likely to catch it.

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