James Flynn on 2007 Blacks vs 1957 Whites

Repost from the old site.

Note: this post is both lengthy (64 pages) and highly complex. I have tried to make it as understandable as possible, as this blog is geared towards the general reader, but some stuff is just inherently complex. If you think you can’t handle it, you might just want to bail out now; life is difficult enough as it is without me donating a frustrating reading and thinking experience to you.

If you want to sally forth, anyway, go ahead. Meantime, here is a good introduction by James Flynn that is fairly brief and easy reading. In particular, he deals with Jason Malloy’s notion that the Flynn Effect is worthless and not a rise in intelligence since it lacks a g-factor load. If you enjoy that, come back here and spear some of the red meat:

In recent days a particularly forceful assault has been leveled against my post, The Skyrocketing Black IQ, by Jason Malloy on the Gene Expression (GNXP) blog. Please see both of the linked articles above to get a background on the highly complex issues involved in this debate.

I first saw Malloy in the comments on the Dienekes blog.

Malloy hides his de facto racist message with various pretensions and obfuscations, perhaps unconsciously.

An artist from Madison, Wisconsin, he fashions himself an autodidact scientist and mathematician, and in my opinion, he and his ilk are among the most dangerous de facto racists on the Internet, mostly because they seem so reasonable and non-racist about their message. We need to take on him and his ilk with everything we’ve got.

The Malloy line is that environment does absolutely nothing and genes are everything. His political views? He says he is a liberal Democrat. I don’t understand this at all, but I’ve seen stranger things. To me, the politics he says he has and the politics he promotes in his writings are contradictory, but whatever.

He is neither a scientist nor a mathematician, has no degrees in either field, and has no peer-reviewed publications, yet used to go around to science blogs lecturing actual scientists on how to do science.

Real researchers have a skeptical attitude. Molloy does not.

After making comments on my post on Dienekes’ superb blog, Malloy then reiterated his rejoinders in a new post on the ultra-racist, super-arrogant, disturbing, childish and downright embarrassing GNXP blog.

Malloy insists he is not a racist; he is just dispassionate scientist without a science degree who is looking for the cold, hard truth. After some emails with him, I do not think he is consciously racist, but he is pushing a de facto racist message whether he intends or not.

A lot of these guys fashion themselves as “scientific martyrs” – a modern day Galileo. If only people would realize the unpleasant truth: Blacks are stupid, permanently so, and apparently nothing short of gene therapy will change this sorry state. I’m sure just about every Black person around is dying to believe such wonderful things about themselves.

There is no scientific consensus for such a painful conclusion, so there is no reason for any non-racist or Black-friendly person to take that line. The words of Malloy and the many like him amount to psychological warfare against Blacks. At the end of the day, it is more than that: it is a declaration of de facto racial warfare on every Black person on Earth hiding behind the lab coat of science.

Malloy has some charming things to say about US Blacks in that widely-linked piece. He ridicules their mental skills by calling them “story-telling ability IQ”. Their ancestors in Africa have a high “mosquito-dodging IQ“.

He disagrees with my suggestion that the Whites of the Greatest Generation have lower IQ scores than Blacks, remarking that 1945 Whites could not possibly be “even less intelligent” than our considerably dense Black citizens.

Malloy also claims that modern science proves Blacks are much more inferior as workers than Whites, that this is a serious drag on any employer of Blacks, and that the reason for this is their incurable genetic stupidity. The implication is that Blacks simply should not be employed in any sane workplace.

A White friend of Blacks can make sometimes-painful impressionistic observations about Black culture, without being nasty and racist-sounding about it. See here for an example. Malloy and those like him forgo that route and just slam away at Blacks, then are stunned when people note the racism, intended or not, that shines through loud and clear.

GNXP is a Social Darwinist blog where conceited, know-it-all, rude, immature young upper class “intellectual elitist” manchildren make asses out of themselves, and in so doing, idiotically try to poison their future careers. The racism and general elitism, especially the leaderships of South Indian high caste elitists Newamul Khan (Razib) and Paul Wickre (Godless) of GNXP has been cataloged on the Net in many places.

What’s ticklish is that if US Blacks are idiots, what does that make Razib’s Desis, who are apparently even dumber than the Blacks he scorns? Don’t ask. Like so many insecure narcissists, Razib attacks those above him (in this case Blacks and Hispanics) while projecting his inferiority complex on them. It’s Psychology 101, and it would be funny if it was not so pathetic.

GNXP is a hangout where petulant, conceited, condescending, basically immature cranks can pitch their atavistic and nihilistic misanthropy couched as “science” while they cheer themselves on.

Malloy’s debating and authorial style is sledgehammer-like. I have yet to see him concede a point, and he typically refers to opponents as ignorant. Not a good way to win friends and influence people, and it won’t fly in any peer-reviewed journal.

Malloy’s counterattack has been widely linked around the blogosphere, usually in a laudatory way, and was even discussed in a widely-read NY Times article. Unfortunately, instead of being the tour de force it appears to be, this carefully-penned attack is a de facto racist screed.

The author takes as face value that US Whites have higher IQ’s than US Blacks, that this difference is largely genetic and therefore unalterable by any environmental means (except presumably gene therapy) for at least the next century, and that the Flynn Effect (see below) is not an intelligence gain at all and has no bearing on the Black-White (B-W) IQ gap.

Furthermore and most importantly, Malloy seems to take utter delight in all of the above positions.

Except for the italicized first one, none of these positions are supported by scientific consensus, to put it mildly. Even the first position is widely disputed, at least in the popular press most folks read. Even the US Federation of American Scientists disagrees, though I think they are wrong on that. Bottom line: this debate is very much an unsettled issue, for better or worse.

Anyone who has gleefully taken such an extreme position and argues forcefully against all contrary evidence should have their motives questioned. The truth is that anyone staking out such an intellectual space is arguing from a de facto racist point of view, and unfortunately, Malloy’s widely hailed post is a tour de force of de facto scientific racism.

The real danger in this stuff (there are many more like Malloy out there) is the fact that it is very well researched and written and sounds quite convincing and reasonable. A maniac in a sheet or giving a Seig Heil can be scornfully dismissed. The de facto racism of a mild-mannered, reasonable-sounding liberal is much more frightening in its allure and potential to intoxicate.

The reason this is a racist position is that there is as yet no scientific consensus whatsoever about the B-W IQ gap. All we know is that it exists. All else is pretty much up for grabs right now (for exhaustive overviews of the state of the enormously complex debate, see here and here).

Many libertarians and extreme rightwingers are now taking a hardline, “Blacks are stupid” line on the B-W gap. That few Western Blacks or Mulattos, Hispanics, Amerindians, Polynesians, Black Africans, Southeast Asians or Arabs, not to mention Leftists, Liberals, Centrists or even mainstream conservatives take this position is telling.

This hard line is both unwarranted and unproductive.

On the other hand, it is important to not go to the other extreme. Pointing out the verifiable fact that IQ scores are low in Africa or there is a Black-White gap in the US is not racism at all, yet Western society seems to treat it as if it is. The treatment of James Watson’s basically reasonable remarks (other than the remarks about Black employees) is a sad testament.

And those of us opposing scientific racism need to come up with better arguments than, “No such thing as race,” “No such thing as intelligence”, “No such thing as IQ”, “IQ does not measure intelligence”, and on and on.

For instance, IQ is positively correlated with glucose metabolism, frontal grey matter and cerebral blood flow in the brain. A brain that works more, faster or better is likely to use more glucose and blood and to have more tissue than one that does not. This would hardly be the case if IQ had nothing to do with intelligence.

My post cited a phenomenon of rising IQ’s in the West for 80 years called the Flynn Effect (FE – named after James Flynn, the man who discovered it)¹ and claimed that Blacks today have the same IQ score as Whites in 1957. 2007 Blacks also have IQ scores four points higher than Whites in 1945. If 1957 Whites were not stupid and did not have low IQ’s, neither are Blacks today stupid, nor do they have low IQ’s.

Here are Malloy’s complex charges:

He first asserts that there is something called g, or general intelligence factor (conceived by Charles Spearman)², and that this is pure, or real, intelligence. Everything not g is not real intelligence. Instead, it’s just garbage, test-taking practice, “bias”, cultural bias, statistical noise, nothing at all, this or that, or whatever.

Then he asserts that FE rises are not on g, twisting and misrepresenting (Apparently deliberately!) several statements by Flynn. Malloy says they are not on g because the rises are not something called factor-invariant. On the other hand, Malloy notes the fact that the B-W gap is factor invariant.

In fact, Malloy is conflating two different ways of measuring g-factor here, one elaborated by Arthur Jensen, and another way of measuring g, called factor invariance, used by a team out of the Netherlands in 2004 (N2004)³.

The Spearman-Jensen g -factor (SJGF) does indeed correlate with the FE as shown by Flynn in a counterargument to Jensen who said his g-factor did not correlate with FE (the highest FE rises have been on the most SJGF-loaded tests of them all – see Raven’s Progressive Matrices⁴).

However, there is no correlation between the FE and the N2004 factor-invariance method of measuring the g-factor (but see here ³ for quotes from the study that imply that the authors felt there was some correlation).

Also, note that the same authors issued a paper three years prior in which they called into question Jensen’s prize argument, that the B-W gap was due to g and that it was genetic and irremediable – i.e., Blacks are doomed to be stupid forever.⁵

It’s confusing, and overviews of several studies indicate that whether or not the FE is correlated with g is still very much up in the air, in part due to varying ways in measuring g. A cautious conclusion is that the FE shows a fluid-g gain but not a crystallized g gain.

Fluid intelligence is a rough measure of how fast and efficiently one’s brain works, and tends to decrease with age. Crystallized intelligence is more what you know, rather than how fast or well your brain works. It is also the sum total of life experience that we call “wisdom”. As one might expect, crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age, and even aged people can score very high.

The FE is not about knowing more stuff (young people today often seem strikingly ignorant to me, at the same time that I am shocked by how well their brains seem to work), nor is it about wisdom (see my post here that shows that Black pathology in the US increased wildly in the past 50 years while Black IQ’s went through the roof due to the FE⁶).

Malloy concludes that FE gains are not real intelligence gains since they are not g gains (but see above), and hence are worthless. He also states that 2007 Blacks do not have the same IQ scores as 1957 Whites, nor do their scores surpass 1945 Whites. Flynn disagrees.

There is indeed a paradox between the FE and the B-W gap. The B-W gap shows the stereotypical g-factor pattern – that is, the g-factor will measure the degree to which superior test-takers will tend to have a score lifted across all subtests, or across the board.

We could say that they seem smarter in an “across the board” way. It is true that the Blacks of today are not smarter “across the board” than the Whites of 50 years ago, but neither is the converse true, as Malloy implies.

Flynn and others offer some intriguing theories on the differences between g and the FE, and Flynn suggests that the g construct is not terribly important. Flynn suggests that the FE shows gains in intelligence within groups over time, like a movie. If you stop the movie at any time and take a snapshot, you see g. Start the movie again, and you see the FE.

Therefore, it seems wrong for Malloy to bash the FE on the basis that it is not on g, since the FE and g seem to be two entirely different things.

Put another way, we are comparing apples and oranges. It is true that apples do not correlate well with some hypothesized “orange factor”, but they need not and should not, and anyway, the fact that they do not does not imply that an apple is not fruit. It’s just that there is no reason to be comparing them.⁷.

Furthermore, Malloy and Jensen have problems when trying to say that the more a test taps g, the more genetic it is. B-W differences are highest on the subtests that are greatest in g, and the more a test taps g, the more genetic it is. How then to explain the massive FE, which is mostly on the most heavily g-loaded tests of all?

Malloy is also incorrect to imply that non-g FE gains are “hollow”, worthless, or not “real intelligence”. For instance, Malloy repeatedly states that IQ differences between ethnic groups (he often compares Blacks and Whites) are g-based, hence real, genetic and irremediable.

However, comparisons of Whites with some 3rd World groups show that the difference is on non-g. Hence, it follows that these 3rd World groups have the same intelligence as Whites.⁸.

A hallmark of the B-W gap genetic theorists rests on the scores of US Blacks, who strangely score 85, while African and Caribbean Blacks score 67 and 71 respectively. The hereditarian notion is that White admixture is what raises the US Black score, since African Blacks are pure Black and Caribbean Blacks are mostly Black. There are serious problems with this approach.⁹

Malloy is fond of several other claims.

Foremost, they believe that the B-W gap is wholly genetic, and hence cannot be remedied by any environmental factors or interventions. Blacks are hopelessly stupid forever, and the implication is that all money spent trying to give them a brain is down the drain.

They are doomed to wail, “If I Only Had a Brain“, in the wilderness forever, like the Strawman in the Wizard of Oz. The implication is that, as a hopeless race, Blacks must be cast off onto the proverbial ice floe as in the Eskimo custom, set free to fail and die as evolution deems fit.

In particular, Malloy attacks adoption studies, saying that adopting Blacks into White homes failed to raise their IQ’s. However, the evidence from adoption studies is far more complex than that, and many have shown gains for Blacks in these situations.¹⁰

Furthermore, even the model that holds that IQ scores within families are heavily genetic and owe almost nothing to shared home environment has been challenged, with radically different loadings for poor and high-income households on these factors.¹¹

An anomalous study in Germany (Eyferth 1961) based on the children of Black and White soldiers and White German women found no differences at all in IQ among the White and Mulatto children.

Note that many pushing a hardline “Blacks are forever stupid” line today are extreme rightwingers or libertarians. They are almost all Whites, and, in particular and creepily, Northern European Whites. There are a few high-caste South Indians and a Chinese here and there.

Jensen’s first article in 1969 stated that Blacks were dumb, that it was genetic and permanent and that Head Start should therefore be abandoned.

There is a reason for this political stance and there is a reason that almost everyone saying this far to the Right politically. There is an agenda being pushed here. If we can prove scientifically that Blacks are a hopelessly moronic race, and that their stupidity is embedded in their genome with no way of fixing the matter, we can cut off Blacks of any and all social programs designed to help them, educate them or make them smarter.

More savagely, the implication is that they are a useless evolutionary dead end that needs to be “phased out” in the frightening words of Richard Lynn. All money spent to help this dead-end hopeless race of idiots, either in the US or in Africa, is down the rathole. We should not give them medical care, income, rent, welfare, food stamps, disability, WIC or any other assistance or help in any way.

Africa, a continent reeling in disease and poverty, needs to be thrown out of the nest like a baby bird and told it is on their own, cutting off all food, medical and developmental aid. The result will be massive death and suffering in Africa. In the US, similar policies will be less severe but still frightening and tragic.

It is important to see the cruel and deadly racist motives behind scientific racism, even when promoted by consciously non-racist people. Even if their arguments are correct, the prescriptions most of them are pushing, if adopted, will mean chaos and widespread death and suffering for countless Blacks. It amounts to a declaration of war on Black people everywhere.

Scientific racism also claims that evidence shows that educating Blacks is useless, and most are ineducable. Many point to an set in stone “achievement gap” to show that Blacks are permanent dolts and need to be cut off. However, there is impressive evidence that the achievement gap is closing and that spending money on Black education does improve Black scores,

From Malloy’s piece:

An additional popular argument is that the Flynn Effect, the observed rise in IQ scores over time, is evidence that African-Americans or African countries will eventually reach parity with white norms. This typically includes the premise that white intelligence in the recent past was even lower than modern black intelligence. A typical example:

US Blacks, with an average IQ today of 85, have the same IQ as US Whites with an IQ of 100 in 1957. If 1957 US Whites were not stupid, then neither are US Blacks today. It’s time to shut up about the “low Black IQ”, since by any reasonable standard, it is not really low at all.

These arguments are wrong for the simple fact that the Flynn Effect is not a gain in real g factor intelligence, while the differences between nations and ethnic groups are differences in g factor intelligence. These findings led a 2004 team to state:

It appears therefore that the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of B-W [Black-White] differences in the United States… [so] implications of the Flynn effect for B-W differences appear small…

James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, reiterates (DOC) these points:

Factor analysis is a way of measuring this tendency of some people to do better or worse than average across the board; and it yields something called g (a sort of super-correlation coefficient), which psychologists call the general intelligence factor…When you analyze IQ gains over time, you often find that they do not constitute enhancement of these latent traits — they do not seem to be general intelligence gains, or quantitative factor gains, or verbal factor gains (Wicherts et al, in press).

In the language of factor analysis, this means that IQ gains over time tend to display ‘measurement artifacts or cultural bias’. For a second time, we are driven to the conclusion that massive IQ gains are not intelligence gains or, indeed, any kind of significant cognitive gains (pp 27-28).

Flynn believes the secular increase represents important changes in specific narrow aspects of developed cognitive style, but not a rise in g intelligence. It is therefore incorrect that 1945 US whites were less intelligent than 2007 US blacks. The Flynn Effect has little apparent bearing on racial intelligence gaps.

A brief perusal of the Flynn links that Malloy provided above showed clearly that Malloy grotesquely took Flynn’s words out of context, possibly deliberately.

For one, Malloy implies that Flynn concedes that FE gains are not gains in any kind of real intelligence. For years Flynn did think that the gains were a practice effect or test artifact, but in recent years, he has changed his tune, and now really does believe that we are smarter in some ways. Even racist blogger Steve Sailer agrees.

Further, even scientific racists Steve Sailer, Richard Lynn and his co-author Tartu Vanhanen believe strongly in the FE, Lynn so much so that Sailer calls it the Lynn-Flynn Effect.

Malloy has been staking out this extreme scientific racist stance for years now – see here from 2003. Ole Eichhorn, a colleague of his at GNXP, does not share his views and believes strongly in the FE. Malloy at times parrots scientific racist hardliners Jensen and Charles Murray. Murray is a libertarian and Jensen is apparently an extreme rightwinger.

In a recent paper with fellow scientific racist Rushton, Jensen laid out his position: that an acceptance that Blacks are genetically less intelligent than Whites should logically lead to an end to anti-discrimination lawsuits. The burden of proof in such cases would fall on the plaintiff in proving that the employer was motivated by bias and not by Blacks’ scientifically proven genetic intelligence deficits.

This is the brave new world that the scientific racists have in store for us: where Blacks are forever resigned to much lower socioeconomic, health and educational status, with no way for them to equalize things even a bit. It’s this, and not “search for truth”, “science” or Galileo-martyr complexes, that motivates scientific racism, and it is for this reason that we must fight it with all we have.

I sent Flynn an email linking both my post and Malloy’s counterattack. He emailed me back¹³. Flynn made three rather confusing points, quoting from a book of his now on sale at Amazon:

• The FE gains are on g but at the same time they are not on g.
• The FE gains are real intelligence gains in spite of the fact that they are not factor-invariant.
• Flynn agreed with me that Blacks today have the same IQ’s of Whites of 1957, but he made a confusing statement that seemed to imply that Blacks may continue to gain on Whites, and possibly even move to close the gap.

Here is the statement for you to play around with: Blacks do match the whites of 50 years ago but that does not settle the debate. It can be argued that they are the beneficiaries of the effects of modernity over that time and this could be either more or less than the environmental disadvantage they suffer at any given time.

According to this mail, Flynn disagrees with Malloy’s assertions above and also disagrees with all views that Malloy has attributed to Flynn above. However, in a recent email, Malloy agreed that he and Flynn disagree about the meaning of the FE.

There are a lot of confusing terms in here – g factor, factor invariance, etc. See the footnotes and click some of the links to try to understand it better, but this is stuff is not easy going.

Notes

1. The FE in the US shows a 18 point gain over the 70 years from 1947-2002. In my opinion, Blacks have scored higher, reaching 23.5 points.

There are many possible causes of the FE in modern life. According to Flynn in his new book, they may be: Increased demands from more professional, technical, and managerial jobs; increased leisure time; changing cognitive demands of personal interactions; or changing attitudes toward intellectual activity. Nutrition, better schooling, video games, television, computers, cell phones and the increased complexity of modern life are all thought to play a role.

2. The g-factor is best thought of as a correlation coefficient that shows the extent to which superior test takers, if they score better on one test, tend to score better on other tests across the board. It indicates a brain that works “better all across the board” than others with lower g.

A group higher in g than another group will tend to score better than the lower group in an across the board kind of way. Like IQ, g also correlates with quite a few correlates of intelligence such as increased grey matter in the brain.

Jensen’s original extension of Spearman’s g involved the concept that that g-factor is what he called “Level 2 conceptual learning” – the ability to solve problems = conceptual learning = synthesizing ability. Non-g factor was conceived by Jensen as a “Level 1″ type of learning, and is roughly the retention of input and rote memorization of simple facts and skills = associative learning = memorizing ability.

Most IQ subtests would appear to measure Level 2 conceptual learning quite well. Actually, by Jensen’s own reasoning, he felt that the B-W gap was only 60% in g.

3. Raven’s, the most g-loaded test ever made, shows the largest FE of any test. The test was in fact specifically designed to measure g-factor intelligence only. The test has more predictive validity than any other test used in occupational groups and especially predicts mobility in jobs. It measures ability to “make sense out of the buzzing confusion of life”.

Scientific racist Philippe Rushton shows that Raven’s has no cultural bias whatsoever.

4. This extremely complex paper notes: gains cannot be explained solely by increases at the level of the latent variables (common factors), which IQ tests purport to measure.

In other words, according to this study, some of the:

…inter-generational difference in IQ is attributable to bias or other artifacts, and not real gains in general intelligence or higher-order ability factors…A cautionary conclusion would be that part of the gains (excluding the sub-tests Similarities and Comprehension) could be explained by genuine increases in intelligence.

Whereas implications of the FE for B–W differences appear small, the implications for intelligence testing, in general, are large.

As we can see, even Malloy, Jensen and Rushton’s favorite study indicates that part of FE gains could be on their version of g.

5. Dolan and Hamaker 2001 reanalyzed the data from several earlier studies and concluded that Spearman’s hypothesis is not an “empirically established fact” (i.e., that Black-White IQ differences may be due to differences in common factors other than g) due to insufficient power in the data to choose between alternative models.

The paper said:

This leaves the validity of Spearman’s hypothesis, considered a central justification for the genetic explanation, an unresolved question…

However, they did confirm that the Black-White IQ gap is not due to measurement artifacts, and is instead due to some measured factor that varies both within and between groups. These same people stated that the g factor did not explain the B-W gap as it was not explanatorily accurate.

The paper reanalyzed the data from several previous studies (Jensen and Reynolds 1982; Naglieri and Jensen 1987) that used the statistical method invented by Jensen (the method of correlated vectors – g factor) with a more recent and improved method (multigroup confirmatory factor analysis).

Quote:

On the basis of the present, as well as other results (Dolan 2000), we are convinced that the Spearman correlation cannot be used to demonstrate the importance of g in b-w differences with any confidence…

It is possible that the analysis of all available data sets (perhaps using an appropriate meta-analytic procedure) will demonstrate that a model incorporating the weak version of Spearman’s hypothesis provides the best description of the data. However, until this work is undertaken, we cannot accept Spearman’s hypothesis as an “empirically established fact [139]

6. There is quite a bit of existing evidence suggests that FE gains across subtests may indeed be positively correlated with g loading. See Colom 2001 for good correlations between FE and g, and Juan-Espinosa 2000 for much stronger correlations between g loadings and FE gains.

Jensen’s The g Factor, pp. 320–21, reviews a number of studies of the relation between FE subtest gains and g loadings, all of which show weak positive correlations. However, Rushton 1999 finds that a measure of g developed on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) has loadings that are negatively correlated with FE subtest gains in several countries.

Yet this was challenged in Flynn’s new book, Extending Intelligence: Enhancement and New Constructs, where he makes the argument that FE gains are greatest on tests of fluid g rather than crystallized g. Flynn finds a positive (though statistically insignificant) correlation between a measure of fluid g he develops and FE gains in the data used by Rushton.

Two tests in Estonia did not find a correlation between g loadings and FE gains on those tests, but these are achievement tests with a strong crystallized bias. See Must 2001 and Must 2003.

7. For an introduction to Flynn’s new book in which he explores the various paradoxes of the FE, see Amazon’s page on the book. For a much more complex take on how FE gains can be on g but not on g, see this paper.

From the paper:

Numerous studies indicate that measures of intelligence reliably produce a latent general factor, referred to as g, which is associated with real world competence and is highly heritable (see Jensen 1998).

However, analysis of measurement invariance between normative cohorts in gains on five standardized measures of intelligence indicated that IQ gains cannot be attributed to change in a general latent factor but primarily reflect systematic variation in specific aspects of cognition leading to bias between cohorts on a number of subtests of intelligence measures (Wicherts et al., in press).

Something in the experience of successive generations is bringing about changes in aspects of cognitive functioning that are associated with g within but not between cohorts.

See also Flynn’s superb but hard to follow lecture (based on his new book) at the Psychometrics Centre in Britain where he made fascinating points and intriguing allegories while offering fascinating examples. From the lecture:

(1) The factor analysis paradox: Factor analysis shows a first principal component called g or general intelligence that seems to bind performance on the various WISC subtests together. However, IQ gains over time show score gains on the WISC subtests occurring independently of one another.

How can intelligence be both one and many?…

(1) The WISC subtests measure a variety of cognitive skills that are functionally independent and responsive to changes in social priorities over time. The inter-correlations that engender g are binding only when comparing individuals within a static social context…someone who tended to be superior on any one would tend to be above average on all.

Let us assume that the 100 meters, the hurdles, and the high jump all had large and similar g loadings as they almost certainly would. A sprinter needs upper body strength as well as speed, a hurdler needs speed and spring, a high jumper needs spring and timing.

I have no doubt that a good athlete would best the average athlete handily on all three at a given place and time. However, over time, social priorities change. People become obsessed with the 100 meters as the most spectacular spectator event (the world’s fastest human). Young people find success in this event a secondary sex characteristic of great allure.

Over 30 years, performance escalates by a full SD in the 100 meters, by half an SD in the hurdles, and not at all in the high jump. Although average performance has risen “eccentrically” on various events, the following is still true: superior performers still do better than average on all 10 events and are about the same degree above average on various events as they were 30 years before.

Arithmetic, Information, Vocabulary, and Similarities all load heavily on g(IQ) and on a shared verbal factor. Despite this, Americans gained 24 points on Similarities between 1947 and 2002 (1.6 SD’s), 4 points on Vocabulary, and only 2 points on Arithmetic and Information…

To sum up. Factor analysis and g(IQ) describes a static situation where individual differences are compared and social change is frozen. The degree to which superior people are above average on the various subtests sets their respective g loadings.

IQ gains over time describe a dynamic situation in which social priorities shift in a multitude of ways. No better math teaching, more leisure but with the extra leisure devoted to visual rather then verbal pursuits, the spread of the scientific ethos, and a host of other things all occurring together.

The average on Similarities rises but the average on Arithmetic and Vocabulary does not. How odd it would be if social trends mimicked factor loadings in determining what real world cognitive skills progress and which mark time! If they did so, IQ gains would appear factor invariant, but that would be purely accidental (Wicherts et al 2004).

Although radically different trends alter average performances on various WISC subtests between Time 1 and Time 2, note that this leaves a certain stability untouched. Superior performers are much the same degree above average on each and every subtest at both Time 2 and Time 1. Therefore, much the same g will emerge.

Our first paradox is resolved. At any particular time, factor analysis will extract g(IQ) — and intelligence appears unitary. Over time, real-world cognitive skills assert their functional autonomy and swim freely of g — and intelligence appears multiple. If you want to see g, stop the film and extract a snap shot; you will not see it while the film is running. Society does not do factor analysis.

It is a juggernaut that flattens factor loadings and imposes its own priorities. Similarities requires you to solve problems on the spot without a previously learned method. The Performance subtests… require … arranging pictures to tell a story.

General information, math and vocabulary show only small gains on most tests, though the Dutch scored high gains. There have also been IQ identical rises in NAEP tests. Children are learning to read at an earlier age, but they are no better at reading adult literature than before. Basic math skills have shown impressive gains, but mathematical reasoning has been flat.

That means people are no better at geometry and algebra than they were in the past. Ability to solve problems without a previously learned method will be good for managerial, professional, and technical jobs to fill — jobs that often require decisions without the guidance of set rules. We are better at solving novel problems verbally, visually and abstractly.

Previous generations were more rule-governed and less likely to “think outside the box”. Previously, people engaged in pre-scientific, more concrete operational thinking. Now, they are post-scientific and more abstract.

What do dogs and rabbits have in common? They are not retarded, they use syllogistic logic, but they will appear retarded on Similarities. There is more lateral thinking now, and the human mind has been liberated – the liberation of reason from the concrete. There has been the spread of the language and categories of science and on the spot problem solving has been enhanced.

So, Flynn shows that IQ gains are real and that they are the result of environmental progress. The artifact, test taking or bias options cannot be supported by evidence. Test sophistication shows a particular pattern that is not present in the Flynn Effect. Flynn also resolutely shoots down cultural bias.

A series of studies were undertaken by a Russian researcher in first decade of the 20th Century amongst Siberian peasants. He was studying their cognitive styles. Looking at their test answers today, we can see how they were not retarded at all, but would have scored retarded on some of our modern IQ tests.

From the lecture:

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?

A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.

Q: But what do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

This indicates that the Siberian peasant uses syllogistic or concrete logic that was useful for him at the time. As you can see, the questioner tries to get the peasant to think scientifically, but the man stubbornly refuses to, possibly because he is not able to. Not because he is stupid, but because he has never learned how to think this way.

If you tried to explain to the peasant the more abstract and rational way of looking at the problem, he might have argued with you, but more likely he would give you a look that says, “Why do you think that is important?” There was little use in his world for abstract thinking.

Again, in the lecture, Flynn shows that if you asked a boy in 1920 what dogs and rabbits have in common, he would probably have given you an “odd” answer like, “You use a dog to hunt a rabbit.” Nowadays, if someone gave an answer like that, people would crinkle their eyes, look puzzled and say that that answer was “Idiotic!”.

This means it shows contempt for scientific norms, not that it is incorrect – one may indeed use a dog to hunt a rabbit – but modern science does not deem that relationship the most important one between the two animals.

Even a youngster in the ghetto with poor grades nowadays may be able to give the answer we deem “correct”: “Both dogs and rabbits are mammals”. The boy in 1920 is not slow or retarded, he is just using concrete and pre-scientific thinking. The boy in the ghetto, despite his gangsta language and clothing, may at least be able to think like a scientist.

Flynn also shows how Rosenau and Fagan (1997) compare the 1918 debate on women’s suffrage with recent debates on women’s rights and make an excellent case that the latter shows less contempt for logic and relevance. This shows that we are becoming less illogical and irrelevant in our thinking over time.

That our ancestors were illogical or irrelevant in some aspects of their thinking does not mean they were retarded or slow. Illogicality and irrelevance were useful to them in some ways as argumentation styles and in making sense of the world in pleasing and comforting ways; they were culturally sanctioned and incurred little to no penalties.

The Darrow Trial in the 1920′s is another example. They were not retarded or stupid, just unscientific.

8. For instance, B-W IQ differences in South Africa are not factor invariant, so according to Malloy, these differences are not real at all. Malloy’s position would have to be that there are no differences between White and Black IQ’s in South Africa, despite a White score of 100 and a Black score of 67. Is this a position that he is willing to take?

Furthermore, in his book, The g Factor , Jensen himself says that White – South Indian IQ differences are not based on g. Therefore, according to both Jensen and Malloy, Whites and South Asians score the same on IQ tests, despite a White score of 100 and a South Indian score of 81. Is Malloy willing to concede this?

9. Clearly, US B-W differences compared to US White – African differences cannot be explained by the European admixture in the blood of US Blacks. US Blacks are 17.5% White on average. Adding 17.5% White (IQ 100) to the African IQ of 67 gives us 67 + 6 = 73. Instead of the expected 73, we get 85. Clearly, something other than genes is raising US Black IQ.

In addition, numerous studies have been done to try to determine whether or not White admixture in Blacks is correlated with IQ. These studies have found nothing – there is little or no correlation between the degree of White blood in a Black and their IQ score.

Since the US B-W gap is said to be based on g and purely biological, yet there is no difference in Black IQ based on White ancestry level, this takes apart Jensen’s notion that both the B-W difference and g are biological.

10. For instance, Tizard 1974 showed that the Black orphans raised in an orphanage were smarter than the White orphans. Moore 1974 and Willerman 1986 found that Blacks adoptees raised by White mothers had higher IQ’s than adoptees raised by Black mothers.

Scarr and Weinberg (1976, 1983) in a study of Blacks adopted into upper-income White homes in Minnesota, showed that Black children benefited by adoption into high-income white families. Black children had IQ’s of 94 (5 pt gain) and mixed-race (mulatto) adoptees had IQ’s of 99.

The effect wore off by late adolescence and adulthood, but this just shows that home environment only benefits Black children, and the effect wears off by late adolescence to adulthood. But late adolescent to adult Blacks may need a new sort of stimulating environment to maintain their gains from childhood.

Most adoption studies, as noted by the Minnesota trans-racial study above, show gains only in childhood, with gains wearing off by adulthood. However, one study did find lasting gains into adulthood. This effect lasted into adulthood.

11. For instance, from Turkheimer 2003: The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.

12. Huang and Hauser 2000 show that, controlling for social background, Blacks made significant gains in closing the Black-White achievement gap from 1974-1998. Since then, they have begun to lose ground as rightwing policies to cut back on education funds for Blacks have taken hold, harming Blacks. Boozer and Cacciola 2001 show that reducing class size caused an impressive increase in achievement test gains.

13. It is normally a violation of netiquette to print private emails without someone’s permission, but the folks at GNXP demanded that I post Flynn’s letter in its entirely. I do not reprint the whole letter, but I do reprint the parts that are important.

I bold the parts of his letter that are at least a bit confusing to me. A characteristic of the narcissistic young men on GNXP is that they never admit that there is anything they don’t understand, and they never concede a point. Being a grownup and all, I do both.

You raise three questions and my current book (What is intelligence?) illuminates all three. You can get it from amazon.com for $14.96 or probably from a Border’s bookstore:

(1) IQ gains are significant despite not being factor invariant – see chapter 2;

(2) Black gains on white are gains in g even though they are not g gains – sounds odd but true – see pp 60-63;

(3) Blacks do match the whites of 50 years ago but that does not settle the debate. It can be argued that they are the beneficiaries of the effects of modernity over that time and this could be either more or less than the environmental disadvantage they suffer at any given time.

References

Blair, C., Gamson, D. Thorne, S., Baker, D. “Rising mean IQ: Cognitive demand of mathematics education for young children, population exposure to formal schooling, and the neurobiology of the prefrontal cortex”, Intelligence 33 (2005) 93–106.

Boozer, Michael A. and Cacciola, Stephen E. “Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Project STAR: Estimation of Peer Effects Using Experimental Data,” Discussion Paper 832 (Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 2001).

Colom, R., Juan-Espinosa, M., and García, L.F. “The Secular Increase in Test Scores Is a ‘Jensen effect,’” Personality and Individual Differences 30 (2001): 553–58.

Klaus Eyferth “Leistungen verschiedener Gruppen von Besatzungskindern in Hamburg-Wechsler Intelligenztest fur Kinder (HAWIK),” Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie 113 (1961): 222–41.

Flynn, James R. “The History of the American Mind in the 20th Century: A Scenario to Explain IQ Gains over Time and a Case for the Irrelevance of g,” in Extending Intelligence: Enhancement and New Constructs, edited by P. C. Kyllonon, R. D. Roberts, and L. Stankov (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, forthcoming).

Huang, Min-Hsiung and Hauser, Robert M. (2000) Convergent Trends in Black-White Test-Score Differentials in the U.S.: A Correction of Richard Lynn

Jensen, Arthur The g Factor: The Science of Mental Abilities, pp. 320–21. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1998)

Juan-Espinosa, Manuel and others “Individual Differences in Large-Spaces Orientation: g and Beyond?” Personality and Individual Differences 29 (2000): 85–98.

Moore, Elsie G. J. “Family Socialization and the IQ Test Performance of Traditionally and Transracially Adopted Black Children,” Developmental Psychology 22 (1986): 317–26.

Must, O., Must, A.. and Raudik, V. “The Flynn Effect for Gains in Literacy Found in Estonia Is Not a Jensen Effect,” Personality and Individual Differences 33 (2001).

Must, Must, and Raudik, V. “The Secular Rise in IQs: In Estonia the Flynn Effect Is Not a Jensen Effect,” Intelligence 31 (2003): 461–71.

“Myth: Social intervention cannot raise IQ;”, in “Intelligence Quotient”, chapter in The Encyclopedia of Adoption.

Rushton, J. Philippe “Secular Gains in IQ Not Related to the g Factor and Inbreeding Depression—unlike Black-White Differences: A Reply to Flynn,” Personality and Individual Differences 26 (1999): 381–89.

Scarr, S. and Weinberg, R. A. “IQ Test Performance of Black Children Adopted by White Families,” American Psychologist 31 (1976): 726–39.

Scarr, S. and Weinberg, R. A. “The Minnesota Adoption Studies: Genetic Differences and Malleability,” Child Development 54 (1983): 260–67 .

Tizard, Barbara “IQ and Race,” Nature 247, no. 5439 (February 1, 1974).

Turkheimer, E., Haley, A., Waldron, M., D’Onofrio, B. and Gottesman, I. I. “Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children”, Psychological Science 14 (6) (2003), 623–628.

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., Hessen, D. J., Oosterveld, P., Baal, G. C. M., van Boomsma, D. I., & Span, M. M. “Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect.” Intelligence 32 (2004), 509–537 .

Willerman, Lee and others, “Intellectual Development of Children from Interracial Matings: Performance in Infancy and at 4 Years,” Behavioral Genetics 4 (1974): 84–88.

Rubio Willing to Shut Down Government if Obamacare Not Defunded

Insane Republicans threatening to shut down the US government again. How many times have they threatened this so far? And how many times have they actually done it? Americans are pretty much the most insanely reactionary people on Earth. No population on Earth would tolerate shutting down the national government, and certainly no people anywhere would actually think it was a good idea.

The reason Americans think shutting down the government is cool is because Americans are basically a Libertarian people. That is, the average Moronican hates the government so much that he is actually opposed to the very existence of the state. Therefore, shutting down the government is not only not a bad idea but it is a pretty damn good idea. The less government the better, and no government at all is the preferred solution. This is how the insane American thinks.

It is true that in most of the world, especially the 3rd World, the rich have little to no need for the state, even the 3rd World rich would not tolerate shutting down the national government. That is because the 3rd World rich are not really Libertarians. Instead, they like the state because they have captured it. The rich own the state and use it to their advantage. In the 3rd World, the rich use the rich-controlled state to help them make money and to keep the working classes down and repressed where they belong. To the 3rd World rich, shutting down the government in general would be a bad idea.

In a few places, there is a large wealthy class but the state is in the hands of the working classes. States like Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela come to mind. However, even here, the rich have not tried to shut down the state altogether.

Shutting down the state is not only insane but it’s also very irresponsible if you think about it. It’s definitely a uniquely American form of insanity.

In some ways, US politics may well be the worst politics on Earth, and the political views of the average American are near the bottom of the barrel compared to the politics of citizens of most other countries.

PROGRESO WEEKLY

Rubio Willing to Shut Down Government if Obamacare Not Defunded

By Sy Mukherjee

During an interview on conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio program [last week], Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined fellow Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in demanding that a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.

Over the course of the program, Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild – and widely debunked – conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamacare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamacare implementation is halted completely:

HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy.

You’re already starting to feel the outer edges of that… I already am running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring people or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely. And we’re not spending enough time talking about that.

Later on, Hewitt asked if Rubio would settle for partially defunding Obamacare – specifically, by repealing a provision levying a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices – in exchange for funding the government. Rubio replied, “I don’t know if that alone would be enough” to secure his vote for the continuing resolution, but that he “certainly would support that amendment.”

Defunding the health reform law would devastate tens of millions of Americans who would no longer receive federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance or have expanded access to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. It would also fly in the face of public opinion, since the majority of Americans believe that implementing Obamacare should be a “top priority” in their state. And contrary to some Republicans’ claims, a government shutdown would be a decidedly bad development for essential government services and the American economy at large.

Wind Power Kills Birds!

Click to enlarge. Cats kill far more birds than wind turbines do.

Disgusting rightwing idiots on Fox News have been going on an on about wind power lately. They have suddenly become environmentalists. They are really fake environmentalists, because they are opposed to environmentalism almost 100% of the time and only support it cynically when it suits their needs. Anyway, these fake enviros have been going on lately about wind power and how bad for the environment it is. Why is it bad? Because it kills birds! Since wind power kills birds, it’s bad for the environment and we should all oppose wind power!

One wonders why idiot rightwingers even oppose wind, solar and other energy in the first place. I mean, energy’s energy right? Are there not capitalist enterprises utilizing wind, solar and other forms of energy to make a buck? Ok, so why are they bad then? Turns out that all conservatives are whores for the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry is opposed to alternative energy because they don’t like competition! Real simple. That’s all it is. We need to keep on burning fossil fuels until we burn the whole planet down with our global warming.

Wind turbines do kill birds, especially in certain locations like Altamont Pass. Last time I drove there, I saw quite a few dead birds of prey like owls and hawks dead by the side of the road. A sorry sight.

However, as you can see, the number of birds killed by turbines is vastly surpassed by the number of birds killed by cats. 5,200 times more birds are killed by Killer Kitty than by turbines. Cats are an extremely serious problem in terms of killing mammals, birds and rodents. You really ought to keep your cat inside. If you do let it out, put a bell on it. A belled cat will almost never kill a bird. Not so sure about other animals. Cats will kill wild animals no matter how well they are being fed. You can’t feed a cat enough to make him stop killing. Killing is in his blood, in his nature. He simply can’t stop. He’s addicted to killing.

Some Saturday Thoughts on the Jews

A Jewish visitor writes:

Robert:

I’ve read a lot on your blog and I appreciate that you can talk about race, ethnicity, Jewishness, and Zionism without necessarily being racist and anti-Semitic. I think one of the reasons why there is no discourse on Israeli policies in the U.S. is because, as you pointed out, the people who tend to be anti-Zionist also tend to have outright anti-Semitic views, which to us Jews is frightening.

But a few thoughts: when you say “holocaust porn” that’s a little bit offensive. It’s one thing to claim that we still perpetuate a victim mentality despite being successful, but out of respect to the survives and the 5.7 million slain and those who survived, you shouldn’t make a joke of what happened.

When you talk about the influence of Jews in the politico-economic and media spheres, I think what you have to say isn’t too far off, but that the “tribal mentality” and “ethnocentrism” happens on an individual level rather than a group conspiracy. I know a lot of prominent Jews and I can swear there are no secret synagogue meetings in which we malevolently plot to hurt gentiles.

It’s just that from a young age we’ve been taught that yes, we consider ourselves special, and that as a people, we should look out for one another. This may be a form of ethnocentrism, but as you yourself as stated, you take pride in being white, so why shouldn’t we take pride in being Jewish?

I also wonder what your theories as to Jews’ relatedness to the rest of the Caucasian population. Jews suppress white nationalism because it often turns populations against us, and until ’48, we had no place to go.

Ashkenazic Jews look white and resemble their European populations because of intermarriage. But we were told we were “Semitic” and “non-Aryan” and thus non-desirable to White nationalists. Yet recent DNA tests have shown that the Y-chromosomes of Ashkenazic Jews (these lines were generally unbroken) are closest genetically to Greeks and Italians, which maybe hints that we share a common pre-Indo-European (maybe Hittite?) ancestor.

Does this make any sense, and would this mean that Jews should stop advancing our own interests and instead join forces with our fellow white populations? I do think that the sense of Jewish victim mentality is calming with my generation and that besides intermarrying, we’re much cooler-headed on other Jewish issues.

I also read somewhere (maybe on the Occidental Observer) that the Jewish drive and Protestant work ethic have converged in America so that we find ourselves fighting on the same side as our Caucasian brethren against radical Islam and China. So maybe perhaps there is hope for Western Civilization, and perhaps some of that hope lies with the Jews.

First of all, welcome to the site! Jews are always welcome to this website.

As far as his first sentence goes, that’s one of the main things I am trying to do on this site.

Jewish ethnocentrism becomes a problem when they discriminate against non-Jews in hiring, promoting and whatnot. That’s not ok. It’s also pretty sickening that the Jews who helped write the Civil Rights Act tried to make it so Jews could continue to discriminate without running afoul of the Act.

There are some anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semitic, but as they get deeper and deeper into it, many anti-Zionists just get worse and worse that way. Also, anti-Semitic stuff is always infiltrating anti-Zionist sites in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Zionist folks who are acting like such bastards over there are indeed a bunch of Jews, and their crappy behavior is all wrapped up in Judaism and Jewish culture.

Nevertheless, US Jews are not stealing Palestinian land, beating up their kids and whatnot, so why not let them off the hook? Any chance I can get to take the non anti-Semitic side, I will gladly do that. We can blame US Jews for supporting Israel to the hilt, but then many Gentiles are supporting them to the hilt too, so it’s not fair to single out US Jews for this abuse.

Truth is that a lot of countries around the world act just as shitty as Israel, and a lot of their co-ethnics in the US support the crappy behavior of their co-ethnics abroad, so there’s nothing unusual about Jews and their ethnocentrism and tribalism.

One problem with Jewish ethnocentrism is that, in a word, that is what all the horrors of Zionism are all about. Zionism is simply Jewish ethnocentrism writ large and encompassed in an entire state and society. It’s Jewish ethnocentrism on steroids. And the most ethnocentric of US Jews are also the “Jewiest” (the most unpleasant to us Gentiles in their stereotypical ways) and also, surprise, surprise, they are also the most Zionist!

The Y-DNA probably comes from the early migrations of the Israelites after the fall of the temple in 0-500 AD. The first places they went to after leaving Israel were places like Greece and Italy.

My understanding is that there is a also a strong line in the Ashk Jews that is related to Kurds, Turks and Armenians. These are probably the ancient roots of the Jewish people, a Semitic people from northern Iraq. Semitic in language, Anatolian in genes. If you look at Armenian people, you will often notice that they look a lot like Ashk Jews. Look at them closely!

Joining forces with your fellow Whites is probably a good idea. Jews always oppose White interests because they think it will lead to some form of White nationalism or White ethnic nationalism which historically turns on the Jews as aliens and non-Whites or non-ethnics. Certainly Jewish movements against White interests dredge up a whole lot of antisemitism among a certain segment of the population. But one might argue that the type of White who gets so upset about these Jewish behaviors doesn’t like Jews much anyway, and even if Jews stopped their nonsense tomorrow, these ethnocentric Whites would just fish around and find some other reason to hate the Jews.

I really believe that these folks need to hate the Jews for some reason, and I am not sure that there is anything that Jewish people can do to win your favor. At some point, you just have to write certain folks off as lost causes.

The new generation of young Jews is ok. I don’t mind them too much. The problem once again is anti-Semitism. As soon as any significant anti-Semitism gets riled up in US society, those very well-behaved Jews will quickly become the Jewiest Jews you have ever met. Besides being anti-humane, anti-Semitism is bad for the Jews in other ways. It tends to bring out the worst most stereotypical behaviors in Jews, which of course causes even more anti-Semitism, which makes Jews act even Jewier, which causes more anti-Semitism, well, you get the picture. You probably know how this story ends, too, and it’s not a pretty picture.

True the Jews are lining up with White interests somewhat against China and against radical Islam. However, most Jews don’t care about China. Only Jewish neocons want to fight China. And I don’t think most Whites care about China either. Yes there is a marriage of interests against Islam or against radical Islam as you put it, between the Jews and the rest of US Whites. This is not a very pretty marriage though. A lot these folks make no distinction between Islam and radical Islam. To them, all Muslims are radical.

That Long Newspaper Spoon

Repost from the old site.

Let’s see what’s on the end of that long newspaper spoon… William Burroughs, “Naked Lunch” (1959).

This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way.

On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.

Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.

The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.

Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, “Comida, si. Dinero, no.” In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.

US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.

One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.

After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.

All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.

Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?

Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.

Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!

File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.

Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!

We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.

The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!

The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.

But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?

Because capitalism doesn’t necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it’s sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that’s all it is. That’s the cause of your $4/gallon gas.

Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.

On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.

Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.

It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it’s the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.

We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!

We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!

We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.

The line goes like this:

-Oil is high!
-Why is it high?
-Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)!
-Why not?
-Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They’ve made it impossible to build new refineries!
-(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries!
-Yes, yes, yes!

The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.

The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.

This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon – it is already – and it is not going to be pretty.

It’s looking ugly and it’s going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.

My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.

I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.

I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.

Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!

To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!

Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2.

This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.

The Holocaust traumatized them, but they’d already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!

The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.

You can’t understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It’s not just his own death; that’s bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.

Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.

How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.

Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to “destroy Israel” = code for kill all the Jews.

Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.

For Chrissake man, it’s porn! It’s Holocaust Porn! It’s a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.

What’s a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hardon . Seems every year there’s more and more Shoah tales.

I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean – Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria’s nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.

This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.

Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he’s under house arrest.

So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about “this close” to building a nuclear weapon.

Anti-neocon Book Scuttled

According to the rather dubious Wayne Madsen Report, planned English and French editions of a book written by German journalist Jürgen Cain Külbel, “Mordakte Hariri,” (first published in German, then in Arabic) have been scuttled after it was attacked by Tony Blair, the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL) and various Israel Lobby-linked groups in the US, Britain, Israel.

The USCFL is a neoconservative-funded organization with strong links to the Israel Lobby. Its main players are Lebanese Maronites who have fled Lebanon and are linked to the former Phalangist Catholic fascist forces in Lebanon. When one talks of the “poor Christians in Lebanon” it is useful to note who exactly we are talking about.

Unfortunately, many of the Lebanese Catholic Maronites are associated with a reactionary, fascist-like grouping called the Phalangists. This group is loosely modeled after Mediterranean-style Catholic blood-and-soil nationalist fascism of the Greek, Mussolini, Salazar and especially Franco types.

As the Angry Arab said of one of the most prominent Phalangists, Pierre Gemayal, who was recently assassinated, his family (the founders of the Phalangists) did more than anyone else to bring fascism to Lebanon.

The Maronites are apparently not descended from the ancient Phoenicians as their blood and soil crap would have it but instead are descended from an Arab tribe that resisted the conversion to Islam and moved to Lebanon around 700 years ago. Although they are culturally Arabized and speak Arabic, they often refuse to be called Arabs and regard it as an insult.

Many of them spoke Aramaic until 200 years ago or so. They tend to live in the mountainous center of Lebanon. Centuries of resistance while hiding in their mountain roundabouts, against Muslim aggression and attempts at forced conversion have radicalized them in an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim manner.

When the Crusaders invaded the region centuries ago, tragically, many of the Maronites sided with the invaders against their Arab brothers. And so it has been ever since. The Maronites have always looked West, not East, and saw themselves as part of Europe, not the Arab World.

This shows even in their religious affiliation – linking with Rome instead of the Eastern Orthodox as many Eastern Catholics have done. The arrival of Israeli Jewish settler-colonial invaders in Palestine was cheered by many Maronites, as they were seen as a European colonial group injecting European culture and values into the Arabized and Islamicized region.

Many Maronites, instead of resisting the colonization of Lebanon by the French, sided with the colonizers along with many other Christians and Jews in the Arab World. The very state of Lebanon was lopped off of Syria by the French in order to create a fake “Christian state” where one had never existed.

Syria and pan-Syrianists have resisted this severing of the motherland ever since. The purpose of this diversion about the Maronites is not to bash them, but instead to regard them as the inevitable victims of history. There is another way to be a Christian in Lebanon, and not all Maronites have gone the way of the Phalange.

Other identities are possible – it is not necessary to wallow in fascism. The Greek Orthodox have embraced a form of pan-Syrianism that, while problematic, is at least anti-imperialist, pro-Arab and patriotic.

Anyway, back to the book. Külbel’s book strongly suggests that former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated not by Syria but by neoconservative elements trying to spark a civil war that in Lebanon that would ultimately benefit both Israel and the pro-Israeli Phalangists.

This theory is highly dubious. No one knows who assassinated Hariri. The killing is being blamed on an obscure radical Islamist – and a strange Islamist group claimed responsibility for it – but the argument is that the Islamist was duped by Syrian intelligence. This “patsy” argument is currently not proven.

Possibly Syria did it – I would not put it past them – but the evidence is not really there yet. Hariri signed on to the imperialist and Zionist plot known as UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which threw Syrian forces out of Lebanon and more importantly, demanded that Hezbollah disarm its forces.

Syria has one main objective in the region – the return of the Golan Heights illegally stolen by Israel in the 1967 War. In pursuit of that goal, it funds Hezbollah as a means of keeping up the heat on Israel.

Syria will sell out everyone and everything – Arabism, the Palestinians, the works, to get the Golan back. 1559 would have resulted in the loss of Syria’s last card in its deck to get back the Golan. By signing onto 1559, Hariri may have signed his death warrant.

Madsen reports that neoconservative propaganda efforts against Western journalists are run out of numerous blogs. In particular, GIYUS (Give Israel Your United Support), funded by the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) was singled out.

A pro-Israeli Lobby cabal has also been revealed as operating in the German media, including Der Spiegel, Die Welt, and the NTV network (a CNN affiliate). Victims of their character assassination charades include Elfriede Jelinek (a Nobel laureate for Literature), actor Sir Peter Ustinov, and singer Cat Stevens.

For Starters, Let’s Have a ‘Reality Show’ That’s Really About Reality

Repost from the old site. This is basically a guest post by a young female college student in the US. It takes on Jews in a pretty serious say, so prepare yourself. My comments in bold brackets.

I Don’t Hate the Jews, I Hate Everyone, published in February on this site, was one of the most widely read and linked articles to have appeared on this blog so far. It’s been read over 2000 times so far.

Although it was published seven months ago, I continue to get hits for it to this day, and it is still being linked. Hotly controversial, the piece was vilified by many as anti-Semitic, while others praised it as anti-racist.

This dual view of the piece was exemplified by a spate of recent Indymedia posts of the article. Some of the commenters praised it as an anti-racist piece, and it was filed under “Anti-Racism” at one Indymedia site. Of course, that is how the piece was intended.

On another Indymedia site, it was attacked as “racist garbage” (probably by a Jewish commenter) and it was placed in the Hidden category as a violation of the terms of the site.

The fact that a single article can be portrayed as either anti-racist or racist, depending on one’s POV, illuminates how hard it is to for humans to objectively define anything, which is exactly what semiotics, poststructuralism, Derrida and the rest were getting at.

The article focused on a group of British former liberals and Leftists who have formed a movement that I called the “Pro-War Left”. Basically, the PWL is a British corollary to the US neoconservatives, albeit with some differences in etiology, political orientation (more leftwing), trajectory and history.

To this day, interestingly, there has not been one other article anywhere in the worldwide media that has explored the “British Pro-War Left” as a corollary grouping to the neocons.

I continue to receive mail about this piece. I don’t usually publish mail, but a recent mail I received about the piece had so many nice points that I have decided to publish it, albeit with my own comments interspersed. I will call the author “Anonymous”, since I don’t know if she wants her name published. The author is a young female US college student.

Here goes:

In regards to race, I personally don’t believe in the concept. There is no defined line along the spectrum of people to warrant such a dangerous theory, really. We could even go so far as to say each one of us is our own race making the whole point moot, and it is.

[RL: I don't agree. Clearly, one can make a case for 12 different races: Asian, East Indian, Caucasian, American Indian, Black, Pygmy, Hottentot, Negrito, Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and Aborigine. Really, we could probably make even more if we want to start splitting.]

The concept seems to have been invented by some Europeans to make it easier to gain support in order to colonize, subjugate and enslave people.

[RL: Whether or not the modern concept of race was invented by Europeans in the 19th Century or not is not all that relevant, as humans seem to have been making distinctions like this for thousands of years.]

However, whether it’s a fact or not, we must acknowledge it because it’s with us, and I refuse to play the game that we should remove say, Affirmative Action, in an effort to erase the concept of race. That’s ridiculous. White men have had Affirmative Action since day one in this country by default, so it’s only fair that people of color and women have that protection as well.

[RL: This blog takes a nuanced stance on Affirmative Action. While I think it is necessary, it is not acceptable for less qualified members of certain races to be promoted over more qualified members of other races. And yes, this has been done a lot by the AA system.]

But back when race was being defined, with it came racism.

[RL: I will disagree and say that humans have always been racists; in fact, that the natural, normal state of man is a racist state.]

As race is a concept invented by “whites”, naturally the victims have always been people of color.

[RL: The victims of human racism have always been simply the "Other", which often was something as simple as the "tribe over that hill over there".]

The people of color also happened to live in lands the “white” people found attractive, and the darker folks seemed easier to enslave or conquer because of their lack of guns, germs and steel (yes, Jared Diamond).

And that byproduct called racism created movements like White Supremacy, Zionism, etc. All of these theories appeared noble and even Biblical, and all were based on the belief that the favored people were supreme in some way. The supremacism was portrayed in various ways, biologically, or even as victims (the “worst victims in history” theory used by the Jews, even though Zionism began long before WWII).

Americans, Israelis, Australians, white Africans, etc., are all just upholding the ideals of what is actually ongoing colonization. I do believe people are basically good, and the imperialists know this, so they must invent something that good people would support.

If you can tell a compelling enough story, and you know the components that are needed to make the story work, people will believe it. Religions are a testament to that.

Most people can’t or won’t believe their leaders are so capable of evildoing that they’d actually lie and kill for imperial reasons rather than “innocent” self defense. I mean, who wants to wake up one day to discover mommy and daddy are criminals?

I personally hated the day I woke up and realized that my leaders were doing this, although it didn’t actually happen in one day, but the realization built up to the point where there was one day when it all hit me. It dragged on for days, and now years – this realization that our government is an evil empire has made life very difficult for me to live here.

A pure capitalist society – a byproduct of ongoing imperialism and colonization – is absolute Hell. I feel that pain everyday, and most Americans feel it too yet they don’t realize that pure capitalism is the culprit. They think it’s just life. Capitalism is sold to us as one of the freedoms of democracy!

Funny thing is, you cannot have individual freedoms and democracy at the same time. If the majority doesn’t like your idea of freedom, you can’t have it! But any extreme system like pure capitalism is bound to be problematic.

People complain about dealing with bad customer service, or lack of choice of cable telephone services, or DSL/Cable connection, or bad customer service from conglomerates, or the loss of funding for social programs, the arts, education, or not having health care if they’re not employed by a corporation, or the ridiculous cost of college.

All of this is a product of pure capitalism, where maximizing profits goes above all else, even if it means people have to live in poverty or die. Oh well. They are just casualties of life, I guess, but as long as the corporation is making a profit, it’s all worth it, right? It gives people jobs, right? Except how do these corporations explain themselves when suddenly they send most jobs overseas?

Bizarrely, people still support that in some way or another, defending the company’s right to maximize its profits because, that is the American “dream” right? If only people would just stop and listen to themselves. They’ve been convinced that they don’t even deserve to be employed because it might get in the way of a company’s bottom line! That’s one amazing campaign!

I do want to preface the rest of this by saying that I don’t believe Jews would be naturally imperialistic or controlling if it weren’t for Israel.

[RL: Unfortunately, I am not so sure about that!]

The diamond industry is another story.

But support for Israel is one of those “things” that push most Jews to believe they are superior in some way, or at least more deserving. The campaign to support Israel is very well-done and extremely powerful.

In my efforts to learn more and more about Palestine/Israel, I discovered the fundamentals of colonization. They’re always the same, for the most part, so much so that it makes you wonder if there isn’t a book out there called Colonization Cookbook, Land Grab in Ten Easy Steps, and they’ve all used it.

They all do and say the same things – the European Christians said there were no people here in the Americas because they didn’t consider the natives human, the European Christians said what became Australia was terra nullius for the same reason, and the European Jews said that Palestine was a land without people for a people without a land, and on and on.

The colonists raised themselves to a higher status as a “race” and went from there. Agreements/treaties with the native people were continuously promised, then made, and finally broken.

The natives were eventually corralled into camps, reservations, Bantustans or ghettos, and the colonial violence against the natives continued until protests or a native insurgency eventually put a stop to it. But even after the colonization was halted, there was a tendency to start it back up again somewhere else, especially if our military-industrial complex is having a bad year or two.

Then the colonists either discover a new enemy or invent one. I do not believe Arabs/Muslims are behind the majority of our present day “terrorism.”

[RL: I respectfully disagree, but it depends on how you define terrorism.]

Regarding South Africa (SA), I have definitely studied that case. I was fortunate enough to meet a South African man who fought in the struggle and he told me lots of interesting stories. I also believe that the system of Apartheid and the State of Israel’s founding, both in 1948, is only slightly coincidental.

Cecil Rhodes and Herzl communicated and swapped colonization tips. And the largest stockholder of Rhodes’’ company, the DeBeers precious metals company, was Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. DeBeers is still owned by the Oppenheimers.

South Africa’s main industry at its founding was diamonds, and the diamond industry is now controlled almost entirely by Jews in diamond districts in New York, Amsterdam, Israel (20%), and other parts of the world. So the similarities between Israel and SA are no coincidence, it just remained hidden. Sadha, my South African friend, told me that it was the Zionist Jews who made dismantling Apartheid the most difficult.

I mean, why else did the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith work with and help the SA Apartheid government by spying and sabotaging anti-Apartheid movements in the US for many years? How did that help Jews fight “anti-Semitism”?

Of course, Israel and SA were partners for many years – note the arms deals, nuclear weapons, diamonds, etc. My theory is that Zionists finally agreed to let Apartheid fall because they needed the bodies to populate Israel, in order to fill the place because of the impending “demographics” issue.

[RL: Dubious. I realize that Jews have a lot of power in this world, but I don't think they have THAT much power, thank God, and it is not helpful to ascribe more power to the Jews than they already have. Anyway, I am not aware that a huge number of South African Jews headed off to Israel after the fall of Apartheid.]

A special city project was developed in Israel for the SA Jews, and many moved there. The SA Jews acted like desperate white folks, left to live amongst the now-freed savages.

[RL: It's a fact that many SA Jews, despite the fact that factions in their community played a significant role in dismantling apartheid, headed right out of SA as soon as Black rule took over.]

And despite the fall of Apartheid, the diamond industry is still exploiting Africans all over Africa.

Another issue is that Jews still control many industries that have immense power in this country and elsewhere.

For instance, they control the Entertainment Industry, the Mass Media, the Marketing of the Holocaust Industry, and US Middle East foreign policy (though not an industry per se). Such control is mostly to keep people’’s attention away from Israel until Israel carries out its goal of ethnically cleansing all non-Jews from Palestine, to make way for greater Israel.

[RL: I doubt it. The takeover of US mass media and entertainment by the Jewish elite (mostly accomplished from 1900-1930) was done for other reasons, not to keep people's minds off of Israel. In fact, at the time of the takeover, there was no Israel!

As far as why the Jewish elite decided to take over these industries and engaged in actual conspiracies to do just that in the US, that is a complex issue that is the subject of an entire post itself.

Jews took over the Holocaust Industry for a variety of reasons. Number one, clearly this is an issue of prime concern to almost all Jews. Another reason is more cynical - to facilitate Gentile support of Jewish causes and to perpetuate the notion of Jewish victimhood. Control over US Middle East foreign policy is simply being done out of sheer Jewish self-interest.

That's because Israel, the Jewish state, is central to US ME foreign policy. And let's not forget that the simple goal of making money for the Tribe runs like a river through each of these projects.]

Of all these industries, the Entertainment Industry shapes American opinion above and beyond any other. Just look at the way Arabs are portrayed in American films, or read the book Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Shaheen to see it spelled out for yourself.

Arabs are almost never portrayed in a positive light; the Arab is always a dirty, thieving, polygamist subhuman. Nowadays, he often plays the role of token terrorist. I am now taking a class called History of Film. In the reading for the class I came across this text:

Interestingly, the men who founded these companies (which are obviously still the major powerhouses in Hollywood) had a lot in common. They were all originally independent producers and distributors who climbed the ladder from nickelodeon operator and eventually outlasted the powerful MPPC.

Interestingly, they were all first generation Jewish immigrants with little education, yet in charge of the most significant form of mass entertainment in history enjoyed by a vastly Christian population.

Hollywood is still controlled primarily by Jews who are almost all Zionists, both liberal and right wing.

[RL: Actually, the Hollywood Jews are overwhelmingly male, secular, hedonistic, irreverent, and liberal to Leftist. Rightwing Jews are almost nonexistent in Hollywood.]

Take a look what happened to Vanessa Redgrave because of her part in the 1977 film, The Palestinians.

[RL: She was effectively blacklisted in Jewish-controlled Hollywood].

Due to Jewish control over Hollywood, that film was never shown here. Just try to get a Palestinian art exhibit or film shown in a major US city and see how far you get.

Paul Findley’s book They Dare to Speak Out deals with the Jewish Hollywood angle and many taboo topics along similar lines. The Jewish – Israeli Lobby is extremely powerful in the US. Recently, AIPAC has targeted college campuses. They are working closely with Hillel, the US Jewish college student organization. Both groups are promising to really ramp up the pro-Israel position on campuses this fall.

No group is perfect, and any group can be supremacist because we are all human; and I know that Palestinians are no angels, and neither are Muslims.

As an atheist, I could go on and on about the problems of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But let’s take a look at another imbalance: note that people have no problem discussing Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism, but why the taboo about Jewish Fundamentalism?

Jewish fundamentalism – that’s exactly what Zionism is!

[RL: I don't really agree. There are many types of Zionism - secular Zionism, religious Zionism, ultra-Orthodox Zionism. It doesn't make sense to wrap the entire Zionist enterprise in the Jewish religion.]

You can’t even mention the phrase “Jewish fundamentalism” without getting horrific looks; nevertheless, Jewish fundamentalism surely exists. The dirty looks are testament to the power of the Holocaust Industry. This Jewish special privilege is allowing Zionists to get away with murder.

Right now, the Palestinians are absolutely the victims of Judaism as an imperialist, supremacist movement AKA Zionism, just as the native peoples of the Americas, Australia, Africa and parts of Asia were victims of European Christianity as an imperialist, supremacist movement.

The native peoples of those lands did not leave their lands to colonize, subjugate and ethnically cleanse people on another land.

They didn’t steal others’ land and then deny it, claiming the land was vacant or, if caught in that lie, try to justify it by calling it bringing democracy to the natives or civilizing the savages, or, best of all, claim that God had given them the land, as both the European Jews and European Christians claimed!

[RL: I have to disagree here. The notion that only European Christians and Jews have been colonizing other people is an especially pernicious myth that is drastically in need of busting.

Fact is, colonization has been going on all over the globe for, as best we can tell, 1000's of years. The examples of non-Judeo-Christian colonization and ethnic cleansing are voluminous and cannot be summarized in this comment bracket. Perhaps a subject for another post?]

So at least since history has been documented, the Europeans have had the upper hand in conquest and destruction, whereas others were simply either fighting back or left in the wake and rubble of former colonization efforts. Examples of this can be seen in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Asia, various oceanic islands, and of course the US.

[[RL: Well, I would agree that Europeans have been doing some of the more prominent colonizing in the past 500 years, but the rest of the planet has been colonizing away on their own during this same period; it's just that their efforts were usually on a smaller scale.]

The American people have an obligation to focus on Israel right now, to bring it to the top of the list as the worst atrocity being committed on this planet side by side with the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, even above Darfur.

[RL: I am going to strongly disagree. If the Israelis had treated the Palestinians in the past two years as the Arabs are treating the Africans in Darfur, the following a catastrophe would have occurred.

A catastrophe that looked like this: 1.3 million out of the 3.9 million Palestinians in the Territories would have been ethnically cleansed to Egypt or Jordan or wherever. The Israelis would have killed 120,000 Palestinians, often with extreme cruelty.

The Palestinians would have been herded into horrible refugee camps, where scores would have died every day of hunger and disease while the world dithered and Israel deliberately obstructed relief supplies.

Israeli soldiers and armed civilians would have gone a mass raping spree. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Palestinian women would have been raped in this mass Rape-a-Thon. Many Palestinian women would have been murdered by the Jews after being raped.]

Zionists love to put the spotlight on Darfur because it helps their cause by pointing out that Muslims are always the bad guys, as though Christians and Jews have never done anything bad in the name of their religion.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is of prime importance to Americans – the Iraq war is Israel’s war, and we’re fighting it for them and with them.

[RL: True in part, see my comments here on whether the Iraq War is "all about Israel" or not.]

US support is the only thing that keeps Israel afloat. By natural selection, Israel would have been gone by now if it weren’t for the extremely expensive American life support system and the very powerful Jewish Lobby.

So, although I hear people say Jews do not control the world, they do control as much of the world as they want.

[RL:I don't agree with that. My God, if the Jews were that powerful, God help us all!]

They don’t want the whole world, they just want Israel and they will work through the power of the US to hold back the world whenever it gets in the way. But what they do control is all it takes to control the world – America, America’s opinion, and America’’s veto.

As columnist Tony Judt wrote recently in the New York Times Review of Books, Israel is an anachronism, since colonization itself is archaic, yet there the Israelis are, milking an archaic system that should have been defunct by now.

And Americans are falling for it, because most have no idea what’s really going on over there. Why? Because of Zionist control of Americans’ opinions on Israel and the Holocaust by way of the Entertainment Industry, the media, and our Middle East foreign policy.

Because the Israel’s colonial system is an anachronism, we are starting to see some desperate measures by the Israelis. Like a passengers on a sinking ship, Israelis won’t give up the Israel ship until there is nothing left to hold on to, and they’’ll lie, kick, scream, and kill as it goes down, taking a lot of innocent people down with them.

And this scenario I cannot accept. Just as I would not have stayed silent during the Holocaust, or during the French colonization of Algeria, or during the US slavery or Jim Crow eras, or during Apartheid, neither will stay silent now in the face of Zionism, nor will I accept that Zionism is simply an aspect of human nature.

At some point, we humans to learn from past mistakes and rise above such greed and hate and become a better species, shouldn’t we? We have the capacity to do so; we just all need to take an active interest.

It’s unfortunate that politics has been lumped in with religion as a subject not fit for polite discussion. This is nuts. One of them, politics, represents direct reality.

[RL: Well, potentially, anyway. The Bush Administration has shown us that the marriage of surrealism and politics is feasible.]

The other, religion, actually represents mythology, not direct reality. But politics’ place as a taboo subject is certainly by design, and undoing that edifice may be the hardest task of all.

To start, I suppose we could have a reality TV show that is actually about reality.

Answering the Libertarians and Their Lies

Repost from the old site.

I decided to make a post about libertarians, radical free market fundamentalist religionists, and Far Right economics in general.

On Libertarianism, I think it is very important to answer some of the nonsense that is being parroted nowadays by the free market fundamentalists – libertarians – right wing extremists – amongst us. As the center of the US Right has gotten more and more extreme since the 1970′s, their arguments and policies have gotten more and more insane, irrational and ideological.

With the Right nowadays we are dealing with a nation of robotic ideologues – they no longer care anything for fact, theory, or science. Rightwing doctrine, more and more, resembles a kind of religion for its ideological adherents, and in that way it is similar to the leftwing orthodoxy that continued to enrapture some the Left in recent decades, even as it developed serious problems before their very eyes.

Into the 21st Century, the Right is bolder and wilder than ever. Formerly, the more honest ones at least used to acknowledge that socialism was better at providing for basic needs, health care, education and social support than capitalism. No more. Now total libertarian free market capitalism has become some sort of miracle nostrum that will cure all ills.

Poor health figures, health system doesn’t meet the needs of the people? No problem, just totally privatize the health system and all the problems go away. Problems with distribution of water, electricity, sewage, roads, parks, day care? Not a problem. Just get the state out of the way, deregulate, and let the corporations run it all.

The debacle of electricity deregulation in California is simply the typical result of privatization and deregulation of electricity the world over, for decades now, since the 1930′s.

We have case study after case study, with predictable results each time the “new experiment” is tried. The California experiment saw service plummet and investors get screwed, precisely the failures that led to the creation of public utilities in the 1930′s.

Utility companies maliciously rigged markets, cut off supplies to the starving state, formed monopolies and engaged in gleeful price-gouging of helpless consumers.

Deregulation of the financial industry and stock market is likely to cause financial panics, stock crashes and both economic recessions and depressions. It has in the past, it will in the future.

Deregulation of telecommunications in the US put the public system into the hands of a fewer and fewer people and sent cable prices through the roof.

It has facilitated a wild crime spree by major telecom firms, as these firms engaged in an orgy of out-and-out robbery of consumers, blatantly deceptive and unintelligible calling plans, deliberate over-billing, bumping consumers into other calling plans without telling them, and other outrages.

Privatization of water in Bolivia was a catastrophe – prices shot up, service was terrible, and many lost access to water.

Airline deregulation saw massive concentration in airlines, many cities lose air coverage and service go into the gutter. The price structure of airline flights became seriously disturbed to where a flight to a city 350 miles away might cost far more than a trip all the way across the country to a major hub.

Deregulation of trucking saw prices climb, service suffer, safety regs get tossed out the window, the accident rate go up, roads get destroyed by overloaded trucks and thousands of small firms get wiped out while a few super-firms took their place.

The last effect caused the peonization of the US independent trucker, a cultural icon. Self-regulation of any industry has meant no regulation, and consumers, workers and society are harmed every single time it’s done. Every time, every place, no exceptions. Got it?

The much-maligned OSHA regulations save 10,000′s of lives every year and we can prove it. Pollution regs do the same and clean up the planet besides, and we have the darn statistics to prove it.

Reducing environmental regulations dealing with water, air and toxics means lots of injuries and deaths, time after time, in place after place, in society after society. We are talking about effects so predictable here that if we were scientists, we could almost describe them as natural laws.

The latest insanity is the line that the way to solve health care problems is to totally privatize the health care system, because, as we all know, “socialism fails”.

This slander, this canard, against socialist health care, that it fails to meet the basic needs of human beings, needs to be answered forcefully, for the Libertarian Big Lie continues, ranting louder and louder, despite figures all over the world that conclusively show “socialized medicine” outperforming more private systems time after time and place after place.

In Nicaragua, after the Sandinistas took power in 1979, the health figures showed great improvement (along with education and literacy figures). When the Sandinistas were thrown out of power in an election cheered by liberals across America, the first thing the liberals’ hero, the ultrareactionary Chamorro, did, was wipe out government health care and free education.

At $30 a year, many parents could not afford to send their kids to school, so the kids dropped out. The health figures started going down right away. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

Cuba’s health figures have long been tops in Latin America and in 2002, for the first time, Cuban infant mortality figures actually beat US figures, where income is 20 times higher. The Latin state that often comes closest to Cuba is Costa Rica in health, education and housing figures, and as such, Costa Rica is bandied about by enemies of the Cuban Revolution.

But Costa Rica’s figures are due to the fact that Costa Rica has the most highly-developed social democracy in all Latin America, which it seems to have retained, despite frantic, bullying efforts, starting with Reagan’s orders to Arias in the 80′s, by the US to force Costa Rica to dismantle its social programs. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

In India, the state of Kerala, run by Communists off and on for the last 30 years, has developed a good state health system compared to the rest of India. When comparing Kerala to the rest of India as a whole, Kerala’s health figures are much superior. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

The social democracies in Europe have the best health figures on Earth, due to their evil, failed, inferior “socialized medicine”. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

Japan’s high health figures are accounted for by the fact that Japan has long had a virtual social democracy, with a lifetime employment system and generous benefits, including health care, taken for granted by Japanese corporations. “Socialized medicine” fails again.

And on and on and on and on.

The fact is, capitalism is bad for your health, period, exclamation point. It’s a rule of nature, like gravity or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

What would a libertarian health care system look like? Simple. Like the health care system we had in most of the past few centuries on much of the planet, where only the well-off could afford to go to the doctor or buy medicine and the poor were left to beg for succor or sicken and die, which they did, by the hundreds of millions.

Want some examples, close to home? I know a number of folks who are disabled and therefore simply cannot work at any real job in the real world (they could maybe get by on a severely pampered part-time job with friends or family, but that’s not real life). Their disability check every month is the only thing that enables them to survive at all.

Without that check, they would need to depend on the kindness of friends or family, or, lacking that, they would go homeless, live on the streets, lack for food, shelter, medical care, etc.

I have known many poor workers who lacked for health insurance and had such a low income that they felt they could not afford to go to the doctor. So, they ignored health problems until they got worse and worse, and now they have chronic health problems.

One of them was thrown off Medicaid when he and his wife (both workers) earned just over the limits. Consequently, he stopped going to the doctor for months and felt he could not afford to buy his prescriptions. He lacked his meds, including a blood pressure drug and a blood thinner needed for a blood clot, for 5 months.

Another railed against “socialized medicine” but felt she could not afford insurance so she never went to the doctor or dentist. Now she has severe chronic knee problems and serious teeth problems.

She may need to have all her teeth pulled since she never went to the dentist because she felt she could not afford it. The knee problem may also have been exacerbated by lack of medical care. The reality is that this is what will happen to many people if we do away “state health care”.

This is what happens all over the world. I have friends in the Third World who tell me stories about their countries. It’s clear that people are dying in these places all the time because they cannot afford doctors or medicines. Their stories are true; I hear them with my very own ears.

What would a radical free market system do for education? Prices would go through the ceiling and quality would go down in many cases. Every teacher I know who taught at both private and public schools told me the quality of the program was much worse at private schools, where the owners scrimped on everything and shafted the teachers while flying around on their private jets.

I suppose the radical free-marketeers would like to get rid of public roads too. Let me tell you a story about roads. Up here in the mountains, we have private and public roads. Every single private road is utterly terrible and many are outright dangerous.

They are full of potholes, if they are paved at all. Why? Because in order to fix the road, each homeowner on the road would have to pitch in to fix it. No one wants to pay, so the road never gets fixed. Never, ever.

If you want to know what the libertarian vision looks like, just go to the Third World, where the state doesn’t pay for anything and the public sphere is decrepit, abused, nonfunctional, dangerous, inadequate, nonexistent or for the rich only.

Look at America pre-1900, where schools, doctors, hospitals, roads, electricity, sewage, and old-age supports did not exist or were luxuries for the moneyed only. The elderly, sick, poor and jobless simply sickened or died, in huge numbers. Tens of millions of Americans never went to school.

That’s the libertarian dream, or nightmare. We know what it looks like because it’s been tried in the past for centuries, the world over, in culture after culture. We can see its devastation in the 3rd World as we speak.

There need be no illusions at all about what radical free market fundamentalism will really bring, and we need to shout down the free-market ideologues and religionists with every lie they shower us with. Loud. Often. In their face. And never stop until we turn their dishonest roar into a whisper in the background.

The Problem with HBD

Most folks who are against HBD theory are opposed to it on theoretical grounds. That is, they agree that while there are obvious differences between the races, they disagree that there are differences in complex traits like intelligence and aggression.

I actually think that races do differ on complex traits like aggression and intelligence on average. But I don’t like to talk about it too much. Why? Because it’s gross and disturbing, and there’s not much to be done about it anyway assuming it’s true, which I think it is.

What is to be gained by discussing such things even if they are true. If these differences are genetic, then there is probably not much to be done about them, right? Ok, so what to do? Exterminate the inferior races?

Furthermore, almost all HBD’ers are far rightwing White people, Republicans to Libertarians, who love the rich and hate the poor. Think about it. How many folks espousing HBD are liberal or even leftwing people? How many are even moderates. Most of them are the most ferocious sorts of reactionaries. Screw that. There is just nothing here for a leftwing person.

This all backs up into standard conservative to reactionary thinking. If Blacks are naturally inferior, then it’s a waste of money to spend any money on them, especially on education. Intellectually inferior Blacks obviously benefit little if at all from education due to genetic inferiority.

It gets worse than that, and almost all HBD’ers argue that not one single dime should be spent on the inferior races for any reason whatsoever. What this means is why should the superior race, Whites, spend one nickel on the inferior race, Blacks? And it gets even worse than that. Many to most HBD’ers also want to get rid of integration altogether, wipe out the civil rights and housing rights laws, etc. Why should superior Whites be forces to hire inferior Blacks? Why should superior Whites be forced to live with inferior Blacks?

Also, all such HBD discussions degenerate into talk to superior races and inferior races. While appears to be true that some races are more or less intelligent (therefore superior or inferior on that one trait) or more or less aggressive (superior or inferior depending on how one values aggression) it’s simply gross and disturbing to talk about whole races as being superior races or inferior races. You start talking like that, and most folks either tell you to shut up or leave the room. There’s no reason to use terms like that when talking about whole races of people. It’s rude.

Look at the ferocious reaction to my meager attempts to delve into HBD with the Blacks-testosterone theory. That piece was written as sensitively as possible, but almost every Black who has come here and commented on it has been so angry and mean that they had to be banned instantly. The same is true for most White liberals who commented on the piece. As it stands, the piece has generated very little to no serious discussion and it’s simply been relegated to flame-bait. I almost wonder what the point of even writing it was. Any further articles I write along HBD lines will simply promote more armies of angry Blacks and White liberals who need to get banned. Why bother?

As an obvious corollary, most HBD’ers are the most vicious of racists against Blacks and the other “inferior” races (nastily referred to as NAM’s). For those of us who object to racist thinking, what’s in this for us? Truth is that HBD is just another way to beat up on Black people. People have been beating up Blacks forever. Why join in on the pummeling? My bullying phase ended in high school. It’s also a very lame way for most young White STEM types, probably failing in almost every other aspect of life, to feel better about themselves as members of a superior race who are better than the lowly inferior NAM’s.

Bottom line is it doesn’t even matter if this stuff is true or not. If it’s true, there’s nothing to be done about it anyway, so there’s no point talking about. The size, shape and smell of the shit I took this morning is a fact too, should I discuss it with everyone I meet? Why talk about it? Why talk about HBD? Problems are only worth discussing if you can do something about ameliorating them.

If it isn’t true, which seems unlikely, you simply end up in a debate that goes on forever with no end in sight.

What the Hell Is with Eric Cantor?

Eric Cantor, Tea Party Jew!

Tea Party Jew?

What the Hell is that? What the Hell is a Tea Party Jew anyway? That’s so weird. I can barely even comprehend something like that.