Selective attention to the facts from the Left once again

Another gout of anger just out in the latest edition of Australia's far-Left "New Matilda" webzine.  Leftists sure are unhappy people.  I'm glad I'm not one of them.  There's not much "new" about the webzine that I can see so "Angry Matilda" would be a more fitting name for it. 

I rather enjoy reading "New Matilda".  It's amusing. In order to give their readers the emotional feed they need, they regularly resort to all sorts of evasions and distortions, if not outright lies.  Ask any reader of New Matilda who ended the White Australia policy and he/she will reply like a shot:  "Gough Whitlam".  It was in fact conservative Prime Minister Harold Holt.

In the screed recycled below they refuse to distinguish between an inadvertent gaffe that was rapidly apologized for and a deliberate and sustained tirade of extreme abuse.  Well done!

Regarding the Samantha Armytage matter:  I gather that the comment was directed at the problems of fair skin which Armytage shares -- sunburn etc.  It's only commenters who saw it as racial. The TV presenter was in fact trying to console the fair girl but did not choose her words with the precision that is required of  public figures these days.

We also read:  "Mixed race twins Lucy and Maria Aylmer have defended Samantha Armytage's comments about their skin colour on Sunrise last month, which were dubbed 'racist' by some viewers. On Tuesday Lucy, 18, released a statement on Facebook on behalf of her sister and mother, saying, 'we believe she did not meant this as a racial comment and we have taken no personal offence to it (sic)...  Lucy and her family believe Armytage's comments were misinterpreted by viewers and what was made as a remark of solidarity has been perceived as racially offensive."

Regarding the Scott McIntyre matter: There is an extensive coverage of the free speech issues involved here but it seems to me that any business is entitled to fire employees who insult its customers -- and in this case the Australian public who pay the broadcaster's bills were very insulted.  ANZAC day is Australia's remembrance day for its war dead and is Australia's most solemn day of the year.  

Leftists are always trying to disparage ANZAC day but it goes from strength to strength despite them. The anti-Anzac play "The One Day of the Year" by Alan Seymour was written way back in 1958. It was at times set as reading in Australian High Schools -- but with no apparent effect

I note that New Matilda actually has a number of articles on the McIntyre affair. They just can't get enough of that wonderful feeling of being bravely dissident and persecuted.  It gives them the feeling that their lives have significance and merit.  For more on the psychology of Leftists, see here


White good. Black bad. So says the smiling, congenial host of Channel 7’s Sunrise. And yes, she still has her job.

As most would now know, Scott McIntyre, former journalist for SBS, has been sacrificed to the Gods Of Anzac Myths.

On Saturday, McIntyre, a sports journalist, chose the holiest of Australian days to send a series of tweets opposing war. Some of them were, well, rather brutally honest about his views on the Anzac myth.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull objected, tweeted… and the rest as they say is history. SBS sacked McIntyre immediately, and a media storm has since ensued… most of it attacking McIntyre.

Which begs the question, why does Samantha Armytage, the smiling co-host of Channel 7’s Sunrise program still have her job?

In March this year, Armytage and David Koch (better known as Kochie) were presenting a quirky story about two twins from a mixed race family in England, Lucy and Maria Aylmer.

According to ‘Kochie’, the Alymer twins, due to a “rare genetic quirk” turned out quite different - one of the sisters is “obviously black, the other is white”.

Over to co-host Samantha Armytage, who proceeds to explain why that is a good thing… for one of them.

“Maria has taken after her half Jamaican mum with dark skin and brown eyes and curly dark hair, but Lucy got her dad’s fair skin, good on her, along with straight red hair and blue eyes.”

As she says ‘it’ - replete with a tip of her head and a wink - Kochie turns to Armytage with a look of ‘nervous stunned mullet’. Armytage also appears to have shortly after realized what she’s let slip.

“Now Maria… gulp… Maria….” stumbles Arymtage, with a look on her face that equates to either constipation, or the sudden realization that she’s just ended her career.

Cue the tumbleweeds blowing through the Channel 7 studio. And cue the ensuing media outrage.

Oh wait… no outrage. Guess the rules are different if you only insult black people, and not Anzacs.

So move along people, nothing to see here… unless you want to watch the video repeatedly, and share it. Which we hope you do.

SOURCE



More Leftist rubbish about immigration

I reproduce below the beginning of a deliberately deceptive screed from the Fairfax press about immigration to Australia.

The author, Julian Cribb, pretends to compare a legal immigrant who came to Australia after meeting official criteria with illegal immigrants forcing themselves on us who would mostly not pass official immigration criteria.

So his claim: "If Bernard Katz tried to get into Australia today, we'd probably lock him up on Manus Island or Nauru and forget about him" is a deliberate lie. Katz actually came to Australia on an academic fellowship. He was NOT "seeking work". He already had an appointment.

People who invade your house and people who are a guest in your house are of course treated differently. Legal immigrants these days are actually given more assistance than they were in the mid 20th century.

And the author has the brass to praise the Snowy river hydroelecric scheme, with its building of vast dams such as Blowering. It was for a start a huge political boondoggle that could never have been justified on economic grounds.

But that is not the only thing he "forgets" to mention. He fails to admit that his Green/Left chums of today would have screamed blue murder over those dams if they had been around then. In their atavistic way, Greenies hate nothing so much as a dam. Since Cribb is also an environmentalist, his praise of the Snowy is blatant hypocrisy


In 1939 a young, stateless refugee stepped off a ship in Australia, seeking work as a researcher at Sydney University. Five years later he had a country – for the first time in his life – had served in the RAAF, had wed an Australian girl and had started on a career that would reward him with the world's highest science honour, the Nobel Prize, for explaining how the human brain works.

If Bernard Katz tried to get into Australia today, we'd probably lock him up on Manus Island or Nauru and forget about him. Instead of earning a Nobel Prize and advancing human wisdom, he would go quietly insane, be beaten and brutalised, remain stateless, homeless, hopeless, become an un-person.

Katz is far from the only refugee to have made a mighty contribution to this country and humanity: during the 1950s and '60s, tens of thousands of people fleeing scores of war-ravaged lands helped create our nation-building masterpiece, the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. Half a century on, Snowy Hydro continues to quietly churn out clean, safe energy for the national grid while Australia and its leaders cling desperately to the climate-wrecking, planet-polluting, child-poisoning, farm-despoiling fuels of yesterday: coal, oil and gas.

Clean energy isn't the Snowy's only legacy. As author Brad Collis reminds us in his history Snowy: The Making of Modern Australia, released on May 1, "The construction of the Snowy Scheme changed Australia from a country that was agricultural and British to a country that was industrial and multi-cultural ... The Snowy was unique in bringing together people of every creed and culture and calling them all Australian. The lesson of the Snowy is that when the dispossessed are given the chance to rebuild their lives, they enrich and advance their host society."

More HERE




Why The Fate Of The World's Climate Is Largely In Australia's Hands (?)

I fairly regularly read the  Australian far-Left publication, "New Matilda".  Not being a Leftist, I like to see the opposite point of view. The opposite point of view gives them the horrors, judging by the way they try to suppress it.

The rave excerpted below is one of their latest.  Their argument is as usual very long-winded but is nonetheless a brilliant example of Leftist over-simplification.  They seem to think that a torrent of words will disguise the shallowness of the thinking. Their argument could be condensed into just one sentence as follows:

"Australian mines supply a significant fraction of the world's coal so Australia should stop doing that to prevent global warming".

That there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 18 years somehow goes unmentioned.  I would be rather surprised if the writer knew what "statistically significant" meant.  But you don't need knowledge to be a Warmist. You just have to have faith in your prophets

Be that as it may, what the article overlooks is that Australia is only the world's fourth-largest coal producer, after China, the United States, and India. And there are also in Africa and elsewhere mines from which production could easily be ramped up. And Britain almost floats on coal, though it is rarely mined there these days. And lignite ("brown coal") substitutes readily for thermal coal -- and Germany has masses of that, which it is already making extensive use of. The list of alternatives goes on .... Coal is superabundant. Even such unlikely places as Japan and New Zealand mine some coal. So if Australia impoverished itself by stopping coal exports, other countries would rapidly take up the slack -- meaning that coal usage would continue much as before.

One really does wonder what Thom Mitchell and his American friend use for brains.  I suspect they just like sounding dramatic. Leftists are big on ill-founded drama.   It seems to give them a desperately-needed feeling of importance



We're told Australia's contribution to global warning is minimal. A report out today proves that's a dangerous lie. Thom Mitchell explains.  As American academic Bob Massey put it, “Australia now holds the fate of the world’s climate in its hands”.

In its pursuit of a solution to the ‘budget emergency’ Australia is using up the ‘carbon budget’ at a rate incompatible with the global goal of limiting temperature rises to below two degrees, a Climate Council report out today has demonstrated.

While Australia is under increasing pressure to announce an ambitious target to limit emissions at home, the report makes clear that it is our reliance on fossil fuel exports that is doing the real damage.

By actively seeking to prolong the dying revenue stream, which has buoyed the economy through the past decade, the Australian government is doing massive damage to the remaining ‘carbon budget’.

At a recent talk in Sydney, Massey was blunt.  “If your government and mining companies decide to develop all of the coal and gas currently planned, already on the books, our children will be forced to endure a world very different from what we know,” he said.

To avoid such a world, scientists have developed the ‘carbon budget’ which, put simply, is the amount of carbon dioxide humans can emit into the atmosphere before temperature rises reach two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

On that basis, if all of Australia’s coal were burnt, it would use up two thirds of the ‘carbon budget’. Effectively, 90 per cent of the continent’s coal must stay in the ground.

Not all of that coal is technologically and economically viable now, but even if we burnt only the nation’s ‘reserves’, a 19 per cent bite would be taken out of the carbon budget.

If we burnt the total ‘resources’ - coal known to exist but not necessarily recoverable at this point - it would constitute a whopping 67.7 per cent of the carbon budget.

Yet despite the increasingly gloomy outlook for the commodity – the price of which has collapsed by around 60 per cent in the last five years - mining companies continue to explore for it and develop new mines. Australian governments are not only approving them, they’re promoting them.

More HERE




Predictions of doom scaled back

The authors below rightly point to the fact that there is a great and unpredictable variability in climate events and say that natural variability is enough to account for the recent "pause" in warming.  They also point out that only the more modest predictions of doom fit in with what has actually happened.

So they show that the models are not necessarily wrong but can offer no evidence that they are right.  To do that they would have to dig out some of the mythical warmth from the deep oceans.

They do not face the fact that their research shows that all the climate variations to date fall within the range of natural variability -- so manmade CO2 effects do not need to be invoked to explain any climate events so far

I have appended the journal abstract to the article below.  I have paragraphed it in the hope of making it more widely comprehensible


Global warming more moderate than worst-case models, empirical data suggest

Summary:

A study based on 1,000 years of temperature records suggests global warming is not progressing as fast as it would under the most severe emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Natural decade-to-decade variability in surface temperatures can account for some much-discussed recent changes in the rate of warming. Empirical data, rather than climate models, were used to estimate this variability.

We are seeing "middle of the road" warming. Natural variability in surface temperatures -- caused by interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, and other natural factors -- can account for observed changes in the recent rates of warming from decade to decade, new data suggests.

A new study based on 1,000 years of temperature records suggests global warming is not progressing as fast as it would under the most severe emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Based on our analysis, a middle-of-the-road warming scenario is more likely, at least for now," said Patrick T. Brown, a doctoral student in climatology at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. "But this could change."

The Duke-led study shows that natural variability in surface temperatures -- caused by interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, and other natural factors -- can account for observed changes in the recent rates of warming from decade to decade.

The researchers say these "climate wiggles" can slow or speed the rate of warming from decade to decade, and accentuate or offset the effects of increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. If not properly explained and accounted for, they may skew the reliability of climate models and lead to over-interpretation of short-term temperature trends.

The research, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, uses empirical data, rather than the more commonly used climate models, to estimate decade-to-decade variability.

"At any given time, we could start warming at a faster rate if greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere increase without any offsetting changes in aerosol concentrations or natural variability," said Wenhong Li, assistant professor of climate at Duke, who conducted the study with Brown.

The team examined whether climate models, such as those used by the IPCC, accurately account for natural chaotic variability that can occur in the rate of global warming as a result of interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, and other natural factors.

To test how accurate climate models are at accounting for variations in the rate of warming, Brown and Li, along with colleagues from San Jose State University and the USDA, created a new statistical model based on reconstructed empirical records of surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years.

"By comparing our model against theirs, we found that climate models largely get the 'big picture' right but seem to underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate wiggles," Brown said. "Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013."
Further comparative analysis of the models revealed another intriguing insight.

"Statistically, it's pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections," Brown said. "Hiatus periods of 11 years or longer are more likely to occur under a middle-of-the-road scenario."

Under the IPCC's middle-of-the-road scenario, there was a 70 percent likelihood that at least one hiatus lasting 11 years or longer would occur between 1993 and 2050, Brown said. "That matches up well with what we're seeing."

There's no guarantee, however, that this rate of warming will remain steady in coming years, Li stressed. "Our analysis clearly shows that we shouldn't expect the observed rates of warming to be constant. They can and do change."

Journal Reference:
Patrick T. Brown, Wenhong Li, Eugene C. Cordero and Steven A. Mauget. Comparing the Model-Simulated Global Warming Signal to Observations Using Empirical Estimates of Unforced Noise. Scientific Reports, April 21, 2015 DOI: 10.1038/srep09957

SOURCE
Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise

Patrick T. Brown et al.

Abstract

The comparison of observed global mean surface air temperature (GMT) change to the mean change simulated by climate models has received much public and scientific attention. For a given global warming signal produced by a climate model ensemble, there exists an envelope of GMT values representing the range of possible unforced states of the climate system (the Envelope of Unforced Noise; EUN).

Typically, the EUN is derived from climate models themselves, but climate models might not accurately simulate the correct characteristics of unforced GMT variability. Here, we simulate a new, empirical, EUN that is based on instrumental and reconstructed surface temperature records.

We compare the forced GMT signal produced by climate models to observations while noting the range of GMT values provided by the empirical EUN. We find that the empirical EUN is wide enough so that the interdecadal variability in the rate of global warming over the 20th century does not necessarily require corresponding variability in the rate-of-increase of the forced signal.

The empirical EUN also indicates that the reduced GMT warming over the past decade or so is still consistent with a middle emission scenario's forced signal, but is likely inconsistent with the steepest emission scenario's forced signal.

SOURCE




Explaining terrorism

Below is an excerpt from "The Metapolitics of Terrorist Radicalization" by British academic Roger Griffin.  As a former inhabitant of academe, I am well aware of the way little isolated worlds of discourse arise among academics that are virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. They largely have a private language -- rather reminiscent of how identical twins speak to one another in their early years.  And Griffin inhabits such a bubble. One feels that he couldn't speak plain English if he tried.

Since the topic he addresses is an important one, however, it would seem important to see if he actually has something useful to say.  I therefore offer below what I think is the most lucid part of his offering on the topic.

In case even that bit is too obscure, however, perhaps I should have a stab at summarizing it.  And one reason why I am summarizing something from the way-out-Left is that what he says does have a certain amount in common with what conservatives say.  So let me put in my own words what I think he is driving at:

We all have two problems:  We need to makes sense of our world and we need to be close to at least some other people. To begin with the first of those:

We very much seek to understand what is going on in our world and why.  Religion is the clearest example of that.  It answers the big "WHY?". And when there is no clear answer that does make us uncomfortable.  And in the modern world with its many competing theories about everything it is hard to find clear answers.  All answers are under challenge. So that is a problem

The second problem is that people need connections with one-another.  And an important form of connection is having language, customs, beliefs, remembered history, traditions, tastes and attitudes in common.  We call that culture.  And we get on best with others with whom we have a common culture.

But the modern world has so much change in it that culture is constantly being destroyed.  One half of politics is in fact devoted to change and that has some effect but the major source of change is technological progress.  Just look at how interpersonal interactions have been transformed quite recently by the arrival of social media.  And look at how books have become a niche product.  One Kindle machine can replace them all.

The area where the Left have been particularly successful in culture destruction has been the way they have severed our connections with our past.  Kids now graduate from school with virtually no knowledge of what happened before they were born.  The Leftist domination of education and the media ensures that. And the history we get from movies and the like is often a substantially false one.

Yet people have a strong need for connection with their past.  We see that most vividly among the children of adoption.  They routinely move heaven and earth to find out what they can about their natural parents.  Being cut off from your past is distressing.  The way older people often develop an interest in genealogy and family history is a related phenomenon.  Yet the Leftist attack on anything traditional means that much of our past is swept away.

And a frustrated need for connection with our past explains something that is happening in my town even as I write.  A vast parade is winding its way through the streets of Brisbane.  It is the ANZAC day parade.  ANZAC day is Australia's day of remembrance of our war dead.  And people are thronging the streets to watch it, even though it also continuously broadcast on TV.  And what is probably most interesting is that the commemorations get bigger year by year -- with not only the old but also the young taking part.  It is in no danger of dying out.

So why do the young people go?  Very few of them have known someone who died in war.  They go because ANZAC day is the one day of commemoration of our past that the Left have not been able to ridicule out of existence.  So ANZAC day is the big chance for young people to connect with the past and those who went before them.  It is their chance to connect with something less transitory than their own lives.  They can feel part of a larger whole.  They can feel belonging.

So ANZAC day is a way that people can cope with change.  The past and the present reach out hands to one-another then.

We live in a world that is constantly being dislocated but somehow we mostly manage to cope with it.  ANZAC day is a peculiarly Australian custom but other countries have their own traditions that perform a similar function of remembrance.

But there are some people -- marginal people -- who fail to cope adaptively with the lack of social anchors.  They find or invent new anchors that connect them to other people.  And adopting beliefs that unite them with other people is a mainstream way of doing that. Shared beliefs both provide answers and provide connections.

The oldest such unifying belief is antisemitism.  Saying that the Jews are responsible for all ills is something that many people have been able to agree on for centuries.  It gave a sense of meaning and a feeling of understanding.  I spent some years on an up-close study of Australian neo-Nazis and something that stands out from that study is the way they identified one another.  A fellow antisemite was always described as someone who "knows the score"  -- i.e. someone who was part of a specially knowing circle having rare insight into the influence that Jews wield.  So it is no surprise that antisemitism is also a major feature of Islamic agitation.  It helps them to make sense of their own chaotic and oppressive civilization and makes them part of an agreed culture.  Whatever is wrong is the fault of the Jews.

And Islam does have a very strong and pervasive culture of its own. It answers the need for connectedness very well.  So it is no wonder that it attracts people who need that.  For people who feel left out for some reason, Islam offers an alternative home.  So it attracts converts among both Africans and, mainly in England, redheads.

Red hair is an accepted normal variation of hair color in most countries of Northern European origin but in England it is stigmatized -- probably because it is associated with the Scots and the Irish.  And the informal stigmatization of it is no mean thing.  Some redheads have been distressed enough to commit suicide.  So, again, marginality, disconnection from other people, is distressing and any possible solutions to the problem are eagerly sought.

So terrorism is a cry of both pain and anger -- pain at being poorly connected to other people and anger that most of the rest of the world does not share the beliefs that make sense of the world for the terrorist.

But, like much else, it is all a matter of degree: One has to feel REALLY alienated and REALLY dependent on a minority worldview to launch into terrorism.

And the role of social support is telling.  Homicidal and suicidal attacks by Muslims in the Western world are actually quite rare -- while they happen on a large scale more or less daily in the Islamic world.  If you are a Shi-ite among Shi-ites your loyalty to your particular belief system is enormously strengthened and can readily lead to the sacrifices ordained by that belief system when you confront Sunnis.  Social support is needed for Jihad as for much else.  Connectedness again rears its head.

In the West that degree of connectedness is absent but can be provided to a degree by the local mosque and living in a self-segregated Islamic bubble generally.

So, having identified the problem, how can we cope with it? It's rare for me to think that do-gooders actually do good but some  do-gooder approaches already underway are probably the only hope.  Drawing young Muslims into some sort of group activity could provide them with the fellowship they need and make them feel that the world is not too awful and worthy of destruction.

And Christian outreach could also play a part.  The more fundamentalist Christian groups such as Pentecostals and Jehovah's witnesses are good at outreach and provide a strong sense of fellowship to their members.  It's conceivable that they could draw in young Muslims who are searching for meaning and for social anchors. Let's hope for more Christian activity in that direction.

A probably more effective but unacceptable approach would be to apply to Muslims living in the Western world the sort of rules that are applied at present to Christians in Saudi Arabia -- ban Islamic literature, including Korans, and forbid any sort of Muslim gathering or meeting.  That should destroy the social support needed to develop Jihadis.

But the anger and dissatisfaction that drives Western Jihadis does not wholly come from within the Jihadi or even from his local mosque.  It comes from Western  Leftism.  Islamic teaching is intrinsically antagonistic to non-Muslims but Islam was fairly quiescent for a long time, with the Armenian genocide being the last twitch of it until recently. So why has it suddenly had a great eruption in recent years?  It was the influence of the Left.  It took the Left a long time to throw off patriotism, with JFK probably the last sincere patriot from the American Left in public life.  But once the dam was broken, the Leftist critique of modern Western life has been both scathing and extensive. And that gave new life to semi-somnolent Muslim rejection of Western ways.  The Leftist critique of Western civilization became incorporated into the Muslim critique and gave new life to it

And the Leftist really is in much the same boat as the Jihadi.  He finds his disconnectedness with his country and much else distressing and often expresses that as anger towards others. Conservatives all know the fury that Leftists evince in responding to any criticisms of their claims.  The fury is so great that if you publicly reject global warming or are critical of homosexualiy, you are likely to be forced out of your job.

And there have of course been Leftist terrorists -- particularly in Germany, Italy and Japan. The Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army were all alienated and deeply fanatical young people, quite like Jihadis in many ways.  Such groups are unlikely to re-emerge now because of the friendliness of the Left towards Muslims.  Murderously motivated young men and women of the Left these days would find it most convenient to join some Muslim cell.

Conservatives, by contrast, are under no such stresses and strains.  They feel connected with much around them. They feel connected with their family, their community, their churches and service organizations, military involvements and of course their country.  And they are proud of what their forebears have accomplished.  It is no wonder that in surveys of happiness conservatives always show up as much happier than Leftists

I expand on the importance of connectedness and the Leftist lack  of it here Below is an excerpt that shows how disconnected and marginal was one convert to Jihad:

The Islamic State recruiter cited as the inspiration of the alleged Anzac Day terror plot was an ­apprentice motor mechanic who was bullied and called “black boy”’ at school.

Before he was a high-profile member of Islamic State, Neil “Chris” Prakash was a paint-­sniffing, high-school dropout who was easily led by others and “scared of his own shadow”.

Throughout his teenage years, Prakash, whose mother was schizophrenic, lived off and on in the spare room of a friend’s house in a Melbourne bayside suburb, listening to rap music and tinkering with his prized Nissan Skyline.

His adopted family describe him as a social outcast who drifted from entry-level jobs to TAFE courses before his abrupt conversion to radical Islam.

“It was a complete shock,” said David, a father of four who ­befriended Prakash as a troubled teen. “The kid was so fragile, he was scared of his own shadow.”

SOURCE

And on a personal note, although my service in the Australian army was completely undistinguished, I am pleased to say that I have worn my country's uniform.  That is connectedness too


Culture imparts to individual lives a sense of purpose deriving from the certainty that they are ‘capable of transcending the natural boundaries of time and space, and in doing so, eluding death’.1 Threats to cultural integrity, whether endogenous or exogenous, can thus create the conditions for extreme violence. Assaults on the integrity or self-evidence of the nomos, for example, the challenge of radically conflicting conceptions of reality or insidious cultural colonization by another society or other ethnicities, ‘threaten to release the anxiety from which our conceptions shield us, thus undermining the promise of literal or symbolic immortality afforded by them’.2 This, the authors add, can lead to the response of ‘trying to annihilate’ those who embody divergent beliefs, an impulse fully enacted in ethnic cleansing (which frequently involves terrorism) and genocide (which cannot, since there is no third party to be terrorized by the killings).

A similar conclusion is arrived at by Jessica Stern in Holy Terror as the result of numerous in-depth interviews with ‘religious’ terrorists to establish patterns in their motivation:

Because the true faith is purportedly in jeopardy, emergency conditions prevail, and the killing of innocents becomes, in their view, religiously and morally permissible. The point of religious terrorism is to purify the world of these corrupting influences. But what lies beneath these views? Over time, I began to see that these grievances often mask a deeper kind of angst and a deeper kind of fear. Fear of a godless universe, of chaos, of loose rules and loneliness.3

Modernity, she realizes, ‘introduces a world where the potential future paths are so varied, so unknown, and the lack of authority so great that individuals seek assurance and comfort in the elimination of unsettling possibilities’.4

‘One-worlders, humanists, and promoters of human rights have created an engine of modernity that is stealing the identity of the oppressed’. Extremism is a response to ‘the vacuity in human consciousness’ brought about by modernity.5 In The Blood that Cries out from the Earth, James Jones stresses how modernization and globalization have failed to create a satisfying culture for millions in developing countries, such as Indonesia and the wider Islamic world generally, and has thus created a ‘spiritual vacuum’ which is the source of the appeal exerted by religious extremism.6

In the anomie of our postmodern, global society with its smorgasbord of options and lifestyles, a religious conversion provides clear norms, a preordained answer to the postmodern dilemma ‘who am I?’—and a sense of rootedness in a timeless tradition that transcends and feels more substantial than the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of contemporary communities of reference.7

It is significant that none of these authors distinguishes between the nomic crises emanating from the breakdown of an existing nomos and inspiring what we have termed Zealotic forms of defensive aggression, and the type of nomic crisis into which the denizens of modernity are born and which they sometimes go to extreme lengths to resolve by converting to violent forms of programmatic Modernism. Nevertheless, there is a significant degree of convergence between our approaches.

The fruitfulness of this line of inquiry into the roots of fanaticism is further reinforced by Eric Hoffer’s slim but ‘classic’ treatise on political and religious fanaticism, The True Believer, written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when the memories of the mass rallies of Hitler and Stalin were still vivid. This offers a number of insights into the intimate relationship between anomy and blind faith in mass movements and in their leaders—that apply just as well to the commitment of disaffected individuals to terrorist causes also.

For example, he writes that when ‘people who see their lives as irremediably spoiled’ convert to a movement ‘they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body’.8 The drive to belong to a community of faith, secular or religious, which provides a sense of ultimate purpose missing from an atomized, anomic individual existence leads to the ‘selfish altruism’ described by Dipak Gupta as intrinsic to the terrorist persona, and epitomized in the members of the jihadi movement whose ‘acts of self-sacrifice transform them into god-like creatures, much beloved by God himself’.9

Hoffer goes so far as to relegate the importance of ideology to a secondary factor, stating ‘a rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence’.10 He sees all forms of self-surrender to a political cause as ‘in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoilt lives.’11

In the more clinical discourse of the post-9/11 social sciences, Arie Kruglanski endorses Hoffer’s assumption by arguing that extremist ideologies exert a particular fascination on individuals suffering from inner confusion and a troubled identity because they are formulated ‘in clear-cut definitive terms’ and offer a sense of ‘cognitive closure’.12

They thus provide an antidote to what we have called the liquid, liminoid quality of modernity. In an era where all certainties are in meltdown, extremism offers a protective shelter from what Walter Benjamin called ‘the storm of progress’. Kruglanski also contributed to an important multi-author paper which views ‘diverse instances of suicidal terrorism as attempts at significance restoration, significance gain, and prevention of significance loss.

More HERE


Multiculturalism is a racist ideology

Below is a rather intellectual essay from Britain.  I will try to give the gist of it in plain words:


Extensive immigration of incompatible minorities makes middle class people uncomfortable but they are heavily into righteousness so regard racism as immoral and cannot express the discomfort and alarm that they really feel. They need to deny that there is anything problematic about the incomers.  But they have to have some outlet for the real discomfort and anger that they feel so displace that anger on to those who do not share their unrealistic beliefs.  They blame those who DO express discomfort with the immigrant influx and and who thereby upset the middle class denial that anything is wrong.  They vent their anger on more natural and straightforward people.

And those who express discomfort with mass immigration and a longing for the pre-immigration state of affairs are mostly the working class, who are less uptight about righteousness.  So the former Leftist glorification of the workers is all gone now.  The workers are now the despised enemy.  They have lost their bourgeois Leftist defenders and champions.

But there is a lot to deny -- such as the high rate of black and Gypsy criminality and the high rate of Muslim hostility, so the preoccupation with denying racial differences becomes a daily  obsession. It is very race conscious and is therefore racist in that sense alone.  Their avowed belief that all races are equal is itself a racist belief -- or at least a rigidly held and race-obsessed belief. Stereotypes are normally very flexible and responsive to new information, but when they are driven by emotional needs, they can become very rigid indeed.

And, like all racism, it has its victims -- it is just that the victims are not minorities but rather the straightforward people who are not so uptight about racial righteousness. It is as hostile and intolerant as any other form of racism.  The slightest deviation from the middle-class norm is punished.  The desperate middle class need to think well of themselves leads them to despise others.  And in England the working class has always been looked down on anyway.

While I mostly agree with that account, I think it does not go deep enough.  I think we need to ask WHY some people have such a powerful need for an appearance of righteousness.  And since the hard core of the people concerned are Leftists, I think the answer is obvious.  They need an appearance of righteousness and compassion as camouflage for the real evil and hostility of their actual intentions and wishes  -- evil very plainly seen when they gain unrestricted power -- as in Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the French revolution etc.

Note that "indigenous" is used below to refer to the English


by Stephen Moriarty

We live in a world in which ethnic conflict is a problem of immeasurable seriousness. Swift had it right when he hinted that humans would fight over which end of their boiled eggs they broke first. How do we explain this? Most arguments make out that ethnic conflict is either inexplicable or immoral or both. Yet there must be an explanation, and since such conflict is conducted by human beings, there is clearly a point at which people overcome their scruples about it.

I think one of our difficulties is that it is usually assumed that a persuasive moral case is a persuasive political case, but it is not, as Machiavelli pointed out long ago. People do not act in line with even their sincere moral beliefs. We fully accept this with regard to things. We know the world would be a better place if possessions were shared and cared for by everyone, but we also know that our sinful nature makes us incapable of this. Capitalism is founded on this concession to “sin”. Marriage and “just war” are similar concessions by Christianity.

The conviction that human nature is essentially good, or can be made so, is a “bourgeois ideology” in the Marxist sense. Sensitive people who live in comfortable circumstances can benefit from the exploitation of those less fortunate with an easier conscience when they believe that life in poorer parts of society is only poorer, rather than also more vicious. This is important because it is difficult otherwise to understand the actions of the Left in destroying the only practical basis for socialism – national identity – by its actions after 1997. The answer is that it was never genuinely socialist in the first place. Its socialism was a bourgeois pose, a display of status by those who never wanted to face its consequences.

Indeed Marxism is a bourgeois ideology in the Marxist sense: the insight was hardly new that people tend to believe what suits them, and Marx excluded sexual motivation and thus relieved prudish people from having to think about the intractability and universality of human evil. This unwillingness to face the reality of universal evil leaves Marxists (and we are all Marxists now) prone to believe in evil in a religious sense (as supernatural) and therefore also prone to witch-hunting and wishful thinking.

The blogger Steve Moxon says that the PC project is a reaction to the failure of the Marxist prophesy of a proletarian revolution. The proletariat, stereotyped as white working-class males, has been rounded-on by its erstwhile champions (a Marxist/Dickensian sentimentality about the working-class was widespread until very recently), who now fetishise anything that is notwhite, working-class, or male, he says. Nevertheless low-status males remain, he says, the least privileged group in all societies; he says there is now a “runaway” bias against them such that their manifestly rough deal, in particular with regard to access to sex and reproduction, is not addressed. I think it is interesting that the two groups involved in the “grooming gangs” were low-status males and white girls from the British underclass.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the “grooming” cases was its show-casing of anti-white prejudice, although one should also mention the long paralysis of the authorities in the face of the problem. Such prejudice is common, as I once heard a brave black caller to BBC Radio 5 attest. The existence of this prejudice is like the existence of Saturn’s moons: it blows a whole world-view to pieces. As Albert Memmi describes in his book Portrait du colonise, portrait du colonisateur, the indigenous population becomes stereotyped as lazy. This is partly because indigenous people have usually established a civilisation in which there is some room for leisure and sharing and because they make up a full spectrum that includes the old, the sick and the feeble, whereas immigrants are obliged to work very hard (and all due credit to them for this) and are almost by definition dynamic. They also often have an ambassadorial pride in their birth-identity.

Furthermore, civilisations have strong hospitality codes that dictate self-effacing generosity to newcomers. Thus it tends to be the host civilisation that breaks down when confronted by mass immigration, because this self-effacement interrupts the normal process of inter-generational acculturation (see the “diversity agenda” in schools and on the BBC, for instance). Yet, in the unconscious of the colonisers, a people who have allowed themselves to be colonised are contemptible, all the more so perhaps when they have previously dressed up their cowardice as charity and thus insulted everyone by condescension.

The black lady who responded calmly to Emma West said that she was here to do the work people like Emma West didn’t want to do. This opinion is understandable because it must be difficult for immigrants to find an explanation for their being invited here in such numbers and under so little compulsion to assimilate if it was not because there was something wrong with the indigenous population. Many immigrants must have the impression that the British ruling class has decided to replace its people despite all the obvious risks, and that therefore the English working-class must have been truly useless.

The English working-class are thus in grave danger of becoming the “Other” to the “British”. They are, to many, the main moral, ideological and practical obstacle to the New Britain (Peter Mandelson’s phrase). They are subject to negative stereotyping on the grounds of culture, class, race, and “loser” status in the current colonial process (and as the descendants of the foot-soldiers of imperialism). The less the New British have in common (and multiculturalism is an ideology that celebrates division), the more they need a scapegoat; and the more the English attempt to resist, the more they will prove their savage incompatibility with modernity.

It is this that partly explains the oft-noted anomaly of greater hostility to immigration in low-immigration areas. In a society based on the notion of relatedness, inherent but taboo negative qualities are projected onto outsiders (“the Other”). When there is sufficient immigration, this ideology becomes untenable, not so much because it has been debunked (which it is to a degree), but because it becomes taboo: people suppress their fear in order to be able to go on with life. It becomes necessary to believe that the new situation is alright, that a society without kinship bonds is not less secure than one with them, and that the enemy is now those atavistic individuals whose persistence in regretting the change is a painful reminder that all may not be well. These become the scapegoat for all the fear and repressed “longing for the tribe”. They become the Other onto which the new taboo of racism can be projected. Racism becomes almost the only sin (and it is indeed a kind of original sin because it is inherent in all of us – we have an instinct to preserve local adaptation by mating with people like ourselves) because, in the effort to believe everything is alright, newcomers are sanctified, and since they are really normal, sinful, people, this means that much normal human sinfulness is placed beyond criticism. Only racism remains as “wrong”. This is “liberalism” and “multiculturalism”.

Thus the natural tendencies of human beings are inverted, rather as gravity holds up the arch. Perhaps societies always function in this masochistic way. As Roger Hicks has pointed out, we can see parallels with the Communist taboo on possessiveness, the Catholic taboo on sex and the general religious taboo on reason: they all use “prestige suggestion”, the bold denial of obvious truth, combined with Girardian group-psychology, to instil guilt and fear. While societies based on kinship can scapegoat outsiders (harmlessly?), those based on “anti-racism” (see below for why this is in quotation marks) will always need an internal scapegoat because they are based on the idea that there is no such thing as an outsider.

I am trying not to romanticise tribal society here. It is probably true that scapegoating was a normal part of tribal life, and an individual or group within the tribe might have found themselves accused of treachery, of being an Other, but in general the natural function of Othering was probably to keep the tribe alert to the very real danger that other tribes posed whilst maintaining “civilised” behaviour within the tribe. I suppose I am trying to trace out what happens when this natural function of Othering is frustrated by the guilt-mechanism of “anti-racism”.

While multicultural societies intend to treat all groups equally, in fact it is the indigenous population, as a consequence of its nostalgia, which provides the scapegoats. In practice it is only the indigenous population, initially in the majority, that has to adopt the new paradigm: in-coming groups, whilst ostensibly treating “racists” as the Other just like everyone else, remain able to “to other” foreigners, since they are one and the same people: indigenous individuals.

Thus the culture of indigenous population comes under an intense assault. Any attempt to maintain that culture is rejected by many of the indigenous because such loyalty is implicit evidence that the ideology of multiculturalism is flawed and that the new structure is dangerously unstable. Unable to face their situation, they instead redouble their efforts to believe that everything is alright: there occurs a frenzied fetishisation of the foreign and a further stigmatisation of the domestic culture, bringing about its collapse.

Thus what appears to be the apogee of progressive politics – multiculturalism – is in fact its nemesis. Every progressive cause is sacrificed upon its altar: manners, feminism, gay-liberation, child-welfare, animal-rights, rationalism, free-speech, economic equality and, most ironically of all, anti-racism. The mechanism by which (admittedly limited) progress is possible – rational debate leading to consensus – is wrecked by the apparatus of multiculturalism (which is, of course, merely relativism writ large): speech laws (they “creep” because any controversial opinion is a metaphor for the taboo); patronising, indeed racist, sensitivity to “cultural practices” (which become totemic – provocatively assertive); the fragmentation of the demos.

At the bottom of this catastrophe is hypocrisy. Richard Millet has quoted Moliere: “L’hypocrisie, c’est un vice a la mode, et tous vices a la mode passent pour virtus.”

Multiculturalism is a racist ideology.

SOURCE


Are women who don't want children blue lobsters?


I probably don't need to say so but lobsters are normally red

A long but amusingly uninsightful essay below.  It appeared in "The Atlantic" under the heading "Why Women Aren't Having Children".  The author, Sophie Gilbert,  praises the attitudes and feelings of women who do not want to have children -- without apparently realizing that she is praising destruction of the attitudes concerned.  Attitudes and personality are highly hereditary so what is happening is that non-maternal women are breeding themselves out of existence.  With no children their particular genes will perish.

There have always been some non-maternal women, some of whom became the well-known category of "maiden aunts".  But, in the absence of contraception and amid social pressures to marry, many did reproduce and passed on their anti-survival instincts.

So it is surely a very good thing that non-maternal women now feel free to breed themselves out of existence.   Future generations will look back on them with wonder and pity.

So an apt reply to the disturbed Shulamith Firestone, who believed that “childbearing was barbaric and pregnancy should be abolished”, is surely that she is more than welcome to abolish herself -- which she duly did in 2012, leaving no-one behind like her

Women who don't want children are evolutionary duds  -- and we are now seeing the last of them.  They are a "sport" (a genetic accident).  They are not as unusual as blue lobsters but result from a similar process.

A methodological note:  With regard to the fact that highly educated women are less likely to have children, one must offer the classic caution that correlation is not causation.  Not having children is not the same as not wanting them and for the subset who actually do not want them, it must be allowed that such women may be more likely to fill their lives with extra education.  The direction of the causal arrow between more education and childlessness is not in general known and subjective reports may be unreliable

A personal note:  What I have said above is undoubtedly politically incorrect and, if I were in employment, attempts would probably be made to get me fired.  What I have said is, however, I believe, entirely objective and, as such, is not intended to hurt,  offend, disparage or condemn.  And it is undoubtedly scientifically accurate. I cheerfully admit however that I have a great love of children and had a great time helping to bring up four of them. I am not a blue lobster


Pope Francis is widely believed to be a cool Pope—a huggable, Upworthyish, meme-ready, self-deprecating leader for a new generation of worshippers. “He has described himself as a sinner,” writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Pope Francis’ entry on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world,  “and his nonjudgmental views on … issues such as sexual orientation and divorce have brought hope to millions of Roman Catholics around the world.”

But there’s one issue that can make even Cool Pope Francis himself sound a little, well, judgy. “A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society,” the pontiff told an audience in St. Peter’s Square earlier this year. “The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: It is enriched, not impoverished.”

Not Wanting Kids Is Entirely Normal

Ignore the irony of a man who’s celibate by choice delivering a lecture on the sacred duty of procreating, and focus instead on his use of the word “selfish.” This particular descriptor is both the word most commonly associated with people who decide not to have children, and part of the title of a new collection of essays, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, by 16 different writers (both female and male) who fall into exactly that category. While the association appears to be so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that it’d take dynamite to shift it, if the book reveals anything, it’s that there’s an awful lot more to not wanting children than the impulse to put oneself first. “People who want children are all alike,” writes editor Meghan Daum in the book’s introduction, with apologies to Tolstoy. “People who don’t want children don’t want them in their own way.”

The 16 essays—variously funny, devastating, infuriating, insightful, and, yes, occasionally smug—not only dismantle the assumption of selfishness, they shed light on a stigma that’s remained stubbornly pervasive well into the 21st century, even as other formerly taboo lifestyles have become thoroughly mainstream. In 2015, thanks in no small part to the success of various works of fiction, it’s more acceptable to talk about wanting to be beaten by a sexual partner than it is to express honestly and openly a deliberate intent to not procreate.

“Shame,” writes the psychotherapist Jeanne Safer in one essay, “—for being selfish, unfeminine, or unable to nurture—is one of the hardest emotions to work through for women who are conflicted about having children.” In 1989, Safer wrote a magazine article about her “conscious decision not to have a child,” but was so aware of the thorny territory she was wading into that she published it under a pseudonym. The article became a book, Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life Without Children, and Safer became a figurehead for all the likeminded women who felt, she writes, “that someone was speaking for them at last.”

"I don't really want to have a baby. I want to want to have a baby."
Twenty-six years later, the women Safer interviewed tell her they’re more than happy with their choices, but still the shadow of shame lingers. “Any person who marries but rejects procreation is seen as unnatural,” writes the author Sigrid Nunez in another essay. “But a woman who confesses never to have felt the desire for a baby is considered a freak. Women have always been raised to believe they would not be complete and could not be thought to have succeeded in life without the experience of motherhood.”

The concept of the innate biological desire to have a baby is a familiar one, repeated throughout books and television shows and emotional anecdotes about how friends and family members were suddenly gripped with a burning desire to get pregnant. But for women who’ve never felt such an urge, and who keep waiting for it to happen without ever experiencing any such stirrings, the notion can be alienating. “I finally said to myself, I don’t really want to have a baby, I want to want to have a baby,” writes Safer. “I longed to feel like everyone else, but I had to face the fact that I did not.” If you're of child-bearing age, it can indeed feel like Facebook feeds are flooded with bump selfies and sonograms and baby pictures. In the 1970s, one in ten women reached menopause without giving birth to a child. But by 2010, it was one in five, according to data gathered by the Pew Research Center, and one in four for women with a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of educated American women are getting through life without ever having children.

The inextricable links between increased education and intelligence, and opting out of procreation, are underscored by Laura Kipnis, a cultural critic who writes one of the more explicitly feminist essays in the book. Referring to the activist Shulamith Firestone, who believed that “childbearing was barbaric and pregnancy should be abolished,” Kipnis ponders the value of equating motherhood with “such supposedly ‘natural’ facts as maternal instinct and mother-child bonds,” which, she writes, “exist as social conventions of womanhood at this moment in history, not as eternal conditions.” The concept of profound maternal affection, she argues, was invented in the 19th century after both birth and child mortality rates started to decline. Before that, women couldn’t afford to get attached to infants that had a 15 to 30 percent chance of not reaching their first birthday. Ditto the concept of mother-child bonding, which coincided with the rise of industrialization, “when wage labor first became an option for women” and it became important to impress upon them the significance of staying home. The reason why fewer women are giving birth in Western countries, Kipnis says, is education.

Though no one exactly says it, women are voting with their ovaries, and the reason is simple. There are too few social supports, especially given the fact that the majority of women are no longer just mothers now, they’re mother-workers. Yet virtually no social policy accounts for this. Interestingly, women with the most education are the ones having the fewest children, though even basic literacy has a negative effect on birthrates in the developing world—the higher the literacy rate, the lower the birthrate. In other words, when women acquire critical skills and start weighing their options, they soon wise up to the fact that they’re not getting enough recompense for their labors.
That critical thinking plays a role in falling birthrates is backed up by a study conducted at Kansas State University, in which researchers found that “people’s desire to have children is most influenced by the positive and negative interactions, and the trade-offs.” These are detailed elegantly in an essay by Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a book in which a mother’s life is ruined by her psychopathic son. “I could have afforded children, financially,” Shriver writes. “I just didn’t want them. They are untidy, they would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned away too much time from my precious books.”

Shriver acknowledges that this attitude could be interpreted as selfish. But, it seems, her feelings are indicative of “a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for.” In other words, she's saying, an existential shift in the way educated humans approach living—a switch from living for the (possibly celestial) future to enjoying the present—has led humans to think much more carefully about having children, since the drawbacks tend to outweigh the benefits. “As we age,” she writes, “we are apt to look back on our pasts and question, not, did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but whether they were interesting and fun.”

That attitude might indeed be selfish, but is it any more selfish than bringing ever more humans into an overpopulated world? Is it more selfish than having a baby simply because you want to, which is often the case? Has anyone in recent memory declared that they were procreating out of a selfless desire to perpetuate the human race, when the human race has never, ever, been less in need of perpetuation? The sense that having children is the most worthy of human activities is questioned by the writer Tim Kreider, who argues that it’s “a pretty low-rent ultimate purpose that’s shared with viruses and bacteria.” Ditto Geoff Dyer, who writes in his very funny essay that “not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species, and fill up this vast and underpopulated planet.”

Has anyone in recent memory declared that they were procreating out of selfless altruism?
Not having children isn’t selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

Maybe the world would be a better place if fewer women weren’t compelled to have children while their resources are stretched unreasonably thin. Maybe fewer sweet, chubby-cheeked toddlers would grow up to be surly, resentful adults because they always had the lingering sense their presence wasn’t wanted. Many of the writers in Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed discuss their own traumatic childhoods, and how they were made to feel responsible for their parents’ failed careers, or failed relationships, or unhappy lives. But there should be no shame attached to the decision not to participate any further in the great human experiment, whether or not it comes from the fact that that experiment has failed a person in the past. “To me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate,” the Fusion culture editor Danielle Henderson writes. “It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am, and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify.”

As a compilation of writing, Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed is generally very strong, bringing together a diverse range of voices and styles to riff entertainingly on a subject that has seemed, up until now, unriffable. But as a collection of manifestos, it’s hugely significant. It won’t influence anyone hell-bent on children away from having them, nor will it dissuade people who feel eternally conflicted about the subject. But what it does, more crucially, is refuse to accept the perpetuation of the myths that have surrounded childbirth for the last 200 years—that women have a biological need to procreate, and that having children is the single most significant thing a person can do with his or her life, and that not having children leaves people sad and empty. Try telling that to Oprah Winfrey, or Ellen DeGeneres, or Jane Austen, or Queen Elizabeth I. Or George Washington, or Nikola Tesla. The argument that lingers after having read the book is that the sooner having children is approached from a rational standpoint rather than an emotional one, the better for humanity, even if the result is that there are slightly fewer people left to enjoy it.

SOURCE




Jesus Christ Superstar

I saw a live performance of A.L. Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Sydney back in the '70s.  Many church people were critical of it at the time but I thought then, as I still do, that any promulgation of the Gospel message was valuable.  It is a great message of hope and kindness. I no longer share the hope but perhaps some of the kindness has stuck.

So when I recently saw in Target a DVD of the show for $5, I thought it a good purchase.  It is the Universal Pictures movie version from the year 2000.

And I can see nothing wrong with the story in the show either theologically or exegetically.  There are even correct quotations from the scriptures at crucial points.  The main emphasis of the show is on the passion, the times immediately leading up to his execution.  And the mental agonies that he is portrayed as undergoing at that time are perfectly scriptural, though much enlarged on.  Read Matthew chapter 26 if you doubt it. My old Bible opened at that spot very easily when I went to check it.

So I think Webber has done the world a service in introducing the Gospel story to a "rock" audience.  He must have reached many that the churches did not.

The casting: Political correctness was already alive and well in the year 2000 so the cast included a lot of blacks.  Maybe there were a lot of Ethiopians in the Jerusalem of Jesus' time that we have not heard about.  There are certainly a lot there now.

But the times seem to get ever more sensitive so I imagine that if the movie were a current release it might get some flack over its casting of a black as Caiaphas. According to the Gospel accounts, Caiaphas was the major antagonist of Jesus. He was the villain of the piece, in short.

And the casting of Jesus was unrealistic too.  He was cast as a tall, well-built man with flowing and curly red hair.  In life he would have been a short, stocky man with black hair, dark eyes and swarthy skin, as most Middle-Easterners are to this day.  But the casting was pretty close to traditional depictions of Jesus.  It was rather odd that he was the only one wearing a nightgown, though.

I must confess that I found the casting of a light-skinned "black" woman (Renee Castle) as Mary Magdalene rather jarring.  I can take only so much anachronism.  And her rendition of "I don't know how to love him" amazed me by its poverty. She had a very weak and girlish voice.  I would have liked to hear that aria from a soaring operatic mezzo. Helen Reddy did it pretty well, though.





Social co-operation

I put up a post recently in which I looked at the now generally accepted sociological finding that social homogeneity promotes interpersonal involvement and trust.  Most notably in multicultural communities, social harmony and co-operation is damaged.

I thought therefore that I might add to my remarks on the subject by way of an anecdote. The report is from a wise young mother who left the big smoke to live in a small country town in New Zealand. There is one well-liked Chinese family there but everyone else is of British or Northern European ancestry. Many families have lived there for generations. It could reasonably be described as a Kiwi monoculture. Nobody has to press "1" for English there. The young mother and her husband are well settled there now and both are greatly pleased by the move. She writes:

Last Thursday I returned home from swimming with H** [young daughter] when only 20 minutes after my return there was a knock at our door. It was one of the mum/swimming instructors at my door returning my phone that I had accidently left behind at the pool.

She told me one of the girls picked it up, gave it to her and she recognised the photo of H** on the phone and popped over to drop it off. Of course I was grateful and thanked her, I also told her I hadn't yet noticed that I had even lost the phone.

She saved me the stress and panic of realising I had lost it and it left me thinking about how wonderful living in a small town is. It is a lovely thought that H** will be under the watchful eyes of the people around us as we all know and look out for each other's kids.

Would that it were like that everywhere! Anyone for New Zealand? I have another favorite New Zealand story here.



Anaesthetic is WARMING the planet: Gases used to knock out patients during surgery are contributing to climate change (?)

We're used to being nagged about gas concentrations in parts per million but now we are being nagged about gas concentrations in parts per trillion!  We didn't even get to stop on parts per billion. And the idea that the anaesthetic gases are much "stronger" in their effect than CO2 ignores completely that the magnitude of CO2 effects is very unsettled (The "climate sensitivity" debate).  There is reason to believe that the effect of CO2 is real but negligible.  The same may be true of the anaesthetic gases.  Theories take you only so far and can be too simplistic.  Certainly in the last 18 years the theoretical effect of the trace gases has not accorded with reality

Anaesthetic gases used to send patients to sleep during surgery are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere where they are contributing to climate change.

Scientists say they have detected the gases used in anaesthetic as far afield as Antarctica and concentrations have been rising globally in the past decade.

The gases - desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane - are potent greenhouse gases that have 2,500 times the impact on global warming compared to carbon dioxide.

Dr Martin Vollmer, who led the study at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology in Dubendorf, Switzerland, said the anaesthetic gases were capable of storing far more energy from the sun than carbon dioxide.

He said: 'On a kilogram-per-kilogram basis, it's so much more potent.  'Modern halogenated inhalation anesthetics undergo little metabolisation during clinical application and evaporate almost completely to the atmosphere.'

The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that concentrations of desflurane reached 0.30 parts per trillion in 2014.

Isoflurane, sevoflurane and halothane have reached 0.097, 0.13 and 0.0092 parts per trillion in the atmosphere respectively.

By comparison, carbon dioxide gas currently makes up 400 parts per million in the atmosphere.

However, one kilogram (2.2lbs) of desflurane produces the same greenhouse effect as 2,500 kg (5,512lbs) of carbon dioxide.

The researchers estimate that anaesthetic gas emissions currently combine to produce the equivalent effect in the atmosphere of 3.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

The research team did not examine the impact of nitrous oxide, another major component of anaesthetic, as it is released by many other sources.

The researchers have been taking air samples from remote sites around the Northern Hemisphere since 2000 while they have also obtained air samples in the North Pacific and the South Shetland Islands in Antarctic.

The team also used two hourly measurements at a high altitude observatory at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland since 2013 to track anaesthetic gases.  They then used computer modelling to produce global estimates for the concentrations of these gases.

However, Edmond Eger, an anaethesiologist at the University of California San Francisco, said: 'What the report fails to note is that a major factor determining the environmental effect is the manner in which the anesthetics are used.

'Many anesthetists deliver sevoflurane or isoflurane in a two - three liters per minute flow but deliver desflurane in a lower flow - 0.5 to one liter per minute. 'Some believe that desflurane has clinical advantages that argue for its continued use.'

SOURCE



Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, study finds

The report below is a summary of research by two minority  psychologists, Eberhardt and Okonofua.  In the study, "Two Strikes: Race and the Disciplining of Young Students",  the authors tried to pin more frequent punishment of black students on inaccurate "stereotypes" held by teachers.

It is not completely clear what view of stereotyping that the authors adopt.  To be a bit paradoxical about it, stereotyping is often stereotyped. By that I mean that the old 1930s view of stereotypes as fixed, rigid and impermeable to evidence seems still to be widely held, even among psychologists, who should by now know better.  There is a massive body of research findings (a summary from some time ago here) to show that, among most people, stereotypes are the exact opposite of that -- i.e. they are highly and rapidly responsive to evidence and change readily as new evidence becomes available.  They tend to be valuable generalizations

There are of course some extremists who hold to their beliefs so rigidly that no evidence can dislodge the beliefs concerned.  A good example is the way committed Green/Leftists cling to their global warming beliefs, despite the only global temperature changes over the last 18 years being in hundredths of one degree Celsius -- change which is insignificant both statistically and in every other way.

At any event, the authors below were unable to exclude the very real possibility that blacks students simply behave more disruptively and are therefore seen accurately to be more likely to be a continuing problem.  Insofar as it is a stereotype, the stereotype could be an accurate one.

This is very naive research that proves nothing. The press release is here.  The journal article is: "Two Strikes: Race and the Disciplining of Young Students"


Teachers can judge the behaviour of black students more harshly than while pupils, new research has suggested.

A study by researchers at Stanford University examined the reaction of secondary and primary school teachers in the United States to student race.

They found that the teachers were more likely to view youngsters who they thought were black as troublemakers than those they thought were white.

The researchers say this may go someway towards explaining why black children are often disciplined more at schools compared to other pupils.

Professor Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychologist at Stanford University, said: 'The fact that black children are disproportionately disciplined in school is behind dispute.

'What is less clear is why. We see that stereotypes not only can be used to allow people to interpret a specific behavior in isolation, but also stereotypes can heighten our sensitivity to behavioral patterns across time.

In their study, which is published in the journal Psychological Science, Professor Eberhardt and her colleagues presented teachers with fictional school records.

These records described two instances of misbehaviour by a student. The teachers were asked about their perception of the severity, how irritated that misbehaviour would make them and how the student should be punished.

They were also asked whether they saw the student as a troublemaker and if they could imagine themselves suspending that pupil in the future.

The researchers randomly assigned names to the student records, in some cases suggesting the student was black with names like Deshawn or Darnell and in others suggesting they were white with names like Greg or Jake.

The researchers found that racial stereotypes had little impact on the teachers' views of the pupils after one infraction.

However, the second piece of misbehaviour was seen as 'more troubling' when committed by a black student rather than a white one.

The teachers also tended to want to discipline black students more harshly as they were more likely to see the misbehaviour as part of a pattern.

The researchers suggest that psychological interventions could be used to help change the stereotypes of black students influencing the way teachers treat pupils.

SOURCE



Sustainability Gone Wild in colleges and universities

In a world of ever-increasing plenty, sustainability is irrelevant.  And plenty is created, not discovered.  It is created by human inventiveness, which has never been greater than now.

An example of how ingenuity creates resources:  Bauxite is an extremely plentiful mineral.  You can find it just lying on the ground as a sea of little red pebbles in some places.  But it was not a resource until Hall and Heroult discovered how to extract aluminum from it.  The Hall and Heroult process is now virtually the only source of aluminum and has made aluminum very cheap.

As aluminum foil it is now so cheap that it is routinely put out with the garbage. Yet once it was up with silver and gold for rarity and value


Syracuse University alumni are new additions to the lengthening list of persons who can stop contributing to their alma maters. The university has succumbed — after, one suspects, not much agonizing — to the temptation to indulge in progressive gestures. It will divest all fossil fuel stocks from its endowment. It thereby trumps Stanford, whose halfhearted exercise in right-mindedness has been to divest only coal stocks. Evidently carbon from coal is more morally disquieting than carbon from petroleum.

The effect of these decisions on consumption of fossil fuels will be nil; the effect on the growth of institutions' endowments will be negative. The effect on alumni giving should be substantial, because divesting institutions are proclaiming that the goal of expanding educational resources is less important than the striking of righteous poses — if there can be anything righteous about flamboyant futility.

The divestment movement is a manifestation of a larger phenomenon, academia’s embrace of “sustainability,” a development explored in “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism” from the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The word “fundamentalism” is appropriate, for five reasons:

* Like many religions' premises, the sustainability movement’s premises are more assumed than demonstrated.

* Second, weighing the costs of obedience to sustainability’s commandments is considered unworthy.

* Third, the sustainability crusade supplies acolytes with a worldview that infuses their lives with purpose and meaning.

* Fourth, the sustainability movement uses apocalyptic rhetoric to express its eschatology.

* Fifth, the church of sustainability seeks converts, encourages conformity to orthodoxy and regards rival interpretations of reality as heretical impediments to salvation.

Some subscribers to the sustainability catechism are sincerely puzzled by the accusation that it is political correctness repackaged. They see it as indisputable because it is undisputed; it is obvious, elementary, even banal. Actually, however, the term “sustainable” postulates fragility and scarcity that entail government planners and rationers to fend off planetary calamity while administering equity.

The unvarying progressive agenda is for government to supplant markets in allocating wealth and opportunity. “Sustainability” swaddles this agenda in “science,” as progressives understand this — “settled” findings that would be grim if they did not mandate progressivism.

Orthodoxy was enshrined in the 2006 “American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment.” Since then, the NAS study concludes, “the campus sustainability movement has gone from a minor thread of campus activism to becoming the master narrative of what ‘liberal education’ should seek to accomplish.”

Government subsidizes the orthodoxy: The Environmental Protection Agency alone has spent more than $333 million on sustainability fellowships and grants. Anti-capitalism is explicit: Markets “privilege” individuals over communities. Indoctrination is relentless: Cornell has 403 sustainability courses (e.g., “The Ethics of Eating”). Sustainability pledges are common. The University of Virginia’s is: “I pledge to consider the social, economic and environmental impacts of my habits and to explore ways to foster a sustainable environment during my time here at U.Va. and beyond.”

Sustainability, as a doctrine of total social explanation, transforms all ills and grievances into environmental causes, cloaked in convenient science, as with: Climate change causes prostitution (warming increases poverty, which increases … ). Or the “environmental racism” of the supposed warming that supposedly caused hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately impacted New Orleans blacks.

The same sort of people — sometimes the same people — who once predicted catastrophe from the exhaustion of fossil fuels now predict catastrophe because of a surfeit of such fuels. Former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado, divestment enthusiast and possessor of astonishing knowledge, says: If we burn all known fossil fuels, we will make the planet uninhabitable, so, “Why should any rational institution invest in further exploration and development when we already have at least three times more than we can ever use?”

There is a social benefit from the sustainability mania: the further marginalization of academia. It prevents colleges and universities from trading on what they are rapidly forfeiting, their reputations for seriousness.

The divestment impulse recognizes no limiting principle. As it works its way through progressivism’s thicket of moral imperatives — shedding investments tainted by involvement with Israel, firearms, tobacco, red meat, irrigation-dependent agriculture, etc. — progressivism’s dream of ever-more-minute regulation of life is realized, but only in campus cocoons.

College tuitions are soaring in tandem with thickening layers of administrative bloat. So here is a proposal: Hundreds of millions could be saved, with no cost to any institution’s core educational mission, by eliminating every position whose title contains the word “sustainability” — and, while we are at it, “diversity,” “multicultural” or “inclusivity.” The result would be higher education higher than the propaganda-saturated version we have, and more sustainable (!).

SOURCE




Quick thinkers are born not made: The speed at which we process new information is written in our genes

The journal article is: "GWAS for executive function and processing speed suggests involvement of the CADM2 gene".  Processing speed is one aspect of IQ so this is another genetic contribution to IQ identified.

It has long been agreed that IQ is affected by many genes but an earlier article in the same series ("Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (N=53949)" shows that 28% to 29% of the genes affecting IQ have now been identified:  "The proportion of phenotypic variation accounted for by all genotyped common SNPs [single-nucleotide polymorphism] was 29% and 28%"

The first article in the series was "Genome-wide Studies of Verbal Declarative Memory in Nondemented Older People: The Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology Consortium".  It isolated genes for memory performance, also important to IQ

"General cognitive function" is basically just a euphemism for IQ  -- less likely to frighten the horses. It is encouraging to see the long list of academics involved in the studies above.  Interest in studying "general cognitive function" is obviously widespread, despite its political incorrectness. Layman's account of the first study mentioned above given below


Quick thinkers are born not made, claim scientists.  They have discovered a link between our genes and the ability to remain mentally on the ball in later life.  It is the first time a genetic link has been shown to explain why some people have quick thinking skills.

Researchers identified a common genetic variant – changes in a person’s genetic code – related to how quickly a person is able to process new information.  The researchers say the finding could help understand how the brain works, and why some people develop mental decline, while others do not.

Professor Ian Deary, director of the centre for cognitive ageing and cognitive epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author on the study, said: ‘Processing speed is thought to be a core capability for preserving other mental skills in older age.

‘This inkling into why some people's processing speed is more efficient than others is a small but encouraging advance in understanding the biological foundations of more efficient thinking.’

Professor Deary said the study found one variant with a relation to processing speed.  He said: ‘The genetic difference that was significantly related to slight slowing of processing speed was one that about one third of the population have.’

The Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium, which includes experts at the University of Edinburgh, brought together data from 12 different countries on 30,000 people, aged more than 45 years old.

The participants – none of whom had dementia – took cognitive function tests that included tests of simple, repeated coding under pressure of time.

Researchers then processed the results alongside details of each person’s genome to identify genetic variants or changes associated with speed of thinking skills.

People with slower processing speed overall were found to have variants near a gene called CADM2.

The CADM2 gene is linked to the communication process between brain cells - the gene is particularly active in the frontal and cingulate cortex in the brain, which are areas of the brain involved in thinking speed.

Professor Deary said the study examined the genetic contribution to processing speed differences among middle-aged and older people.

‘This is important because, as people age, when processing speed slows down there tends to be reduced efficiency of other thinking skills too, like reasoning executive functions, and some aspects of memory,' he said.

‘So it is important to understand the mechanisms by which people differ in their processing speed.'

Lead researcher Dr Carla Ibrahim-Verbaas, resident in Neurology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, said: ‘We have identified a genetic variant which partly explains the differences in information processing speed between people.

‘Our study confirms the likely role of CADM2 in between-cell communication, and therefore cognitive performance. It is of interest that the gene has also been linked to autism and personality traits.’

The study complements two other recent discoveries by the CHARGE team, which identified genetic variants associated with memory performance and general cognitive functioning in older adults.

The study, published in Molecular Psychiatry journal, involved researchers in Australia, Austria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US.

SOURCE



Love that chartmanship!

Chartmanship is a sub-branch of how to lie with statistics.  In the example below the trick is to put up a long series that makes recent years look trivial. You are supposed not to notice that, while there was some warming in the 20th century, temperatures in the 21st century have been flat.  The facts are there in the chart but are swamped by other details.  But you can see it if you look carefully.

And note that the "record" temperature is only higher than the previous "record" by three one hundredths of one degree.  Utterly trivial and highly artificial.  The accuracy of global temperature measurement is just not that good.  Warmists are very devious folks



Global temperature records keep melting as Japan declares March the hottest on record

The average air temperature over land and sea was 0.31 degrees above the 1981-2010 average, eclipsing the previous record anomaly of 0.28 degrees set in 2010.

Compared with the 20th century, temperatures last month were 0.76 degrees above average, the agency said.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is likely to release its March readings in coming days. Last month, the agency said both the first two months of 2015 and the 12 months to February were the hottest in 136 years of records.  [But by how much?  By less than one degree]

SOURCE


It's not poverty after all!

The Left's all-purpose explanation won't do for sex crimes. Latest academic findings below. And it's "whole of nation" data, not requiring sampling, which makes the findings exceptionally firm. Sex offending is 40% genetic and only 2% related to home background. 58% is all other causes -- so the genetic influence stands out.

As findings in the life sciences go, the effect of genetics reported below is huge. Medical researchers greet odds ratios of less than 1.00 with celebrations and ululations (e.g. here). The odds ratio of 5.1 reported below would leave them gasping. Many would never in their entire research career see a ratio that high

So let me summarize the findings below in plain language: Some people are born bad

Out of political correctness (All men are equal, you know), the authors below would no doubt object to that formulation -- but that is what their numbers show


Sexual offending runs in families: A 37-year nationwide study

By Niklas Långström et al.

Abstract

Background: Sexual crime is an important public health concern. The possible causes of sexual aggression, however, remain uncertain.

Methods: We examined familial aggregation and the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to sexual crime by linking longitudinal, nationwide Swedish crime and multigenerational family registers. We included all men convicted of any sexual offence (N = 21,566), specifically rape of an adult (N = 6131) and child molestation (N = 4465), from 1973 to 2009. Sexual crime rates among fathers and brothers of sexual offenders were compared with corresponding rates in fathers and brothers of age-matched population control men without sexual crime convictions. We also modelled the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors to the liability of sexual offending.

Results: We found strong familial aggregation of sexual crime [odds ratio (OR) = 5.1, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 4.5–5.9] among full brothers of convicted sexual offenders. Familial aggregation was lower in father-son dyads (OR = 3.7, 95% CI = 3.2–4.4) among paternal half-brothers (OR = 2.1, 95% CI = 1.5–2.9) and maternal half-brothers (OR = 1.7, 95% CI = 1.2–2.4). Statistical modelling of the strength and patterns of familial aggregation suggested that genetic factors (40%) and non-shared environmental factors (58%) explained the liability to offend sexually more than shared environmental influences (2%). Further, genetic effects tended to be weaker for rape of an adult (19%) than for child molestation (46%).

Conclusions: We report strong evidence of familial clustering of sexual offending, primarily accounted for by genes rather than shared environmental influences. Future research should possibly test the effectiveness of selective prevention efforts for male first-degree relatives of sexually aggressive individuals, and consider familial risk in sexual violence risk assessment.

SOURCE