Eating Animals

Why do we behave morally? There’s reciprocity and looking out for our genes. For many (most, I hope) of us there’s a natural dislike of cruelty. We try not to be responsible for any extra suffering in the world. Humans also desire approval from others and usually being a scoundrel isn’t good for your reputation.

But imagine a situation where you act cruelly by the decisions you make about what to buy. You don’t have to see the creature being tortured and mutilated for your sensual pleasure. There’s no social censure for your complicity in this evil system. As a matter of fact, 95% of the rest of the world does the exact same thing and the moral 5% are looked upon as eccentrics and weirdos. That’s the situation we find ourselves in today on the issue of meat consumption. A morally responsible being has no choice but to look and see where his food comes from. Eating Animals gives us a glimpse into the factory farm, and it’s not pretty.

Most of us have a somewhat romantic image of the farmer, with his humility, simple down home wisdom and personal relationship with his animals. That world is practically gone. Today 99% of the meat consumed in the US comes from factory farms. In the modern world, the decision to eat meat or not has less to do with an abstract notion of animal rights than whether or not one wants to contribute to the continuation of a hellish system.

On the one hand, the factory farm is a capitalist triumph. The drive to provide consumers what they want at the the lowest possible prices has resulted in modern Americans spending a lower percentage of their incomes on food than any other civilization in history. In 1930, more than 20 percent of the American population worked in agriculture. Today less than 2 percent do. Sixty years ago it took one farmer to supply every 15.5 people, compared to one for every 140 today. But technological and scientific innovation contributing to a higher standard of living is a beautiful thing only when the commodities in question aren’t sentient beings.

At some point, it was realized that keeping animals happy or healthy wasn’t required to profit off of them. We’ll start with the pig, an animal that is at least as intelligent as your dog. The industry journal Hog Farm Management wrote that a pig should be treated “just like a machine in the factory.” So since pigs tend to bite one another when crowded together, within the first forty-eight hours of life their tails and “needle teeth” are pulled off without any pain relief. The piglets are kept in a warm and dark room so they become lethargic and unwilling to fight. At the age of ten days males have their testicles torn off, which somehow improves the taste. 9-15 percent of piglets die before they start weaning.

The weaning begins sooner than it would in nature, since the faster the animals grow the faster they can be slaughtered. Because the pig is eating before it can digest solid foods, drugs are given to prevent diarrhea. They are then taken to “nurseries,” stacked cages, purposely designed so the animal can move as little as possible and avoid burning any calories. The goal is for the animal to gain as much weight on as little food as possible. Pigs that don’t grow fast enough have their heads smashed against the concrete floor. After the nurseries come crowded pens the pigs live in until slaughter. The existence is so unnatural that it requires a cocktail of pharmaceuticals just to keep them alive in such a cramped space.

The female sow usually spends the 16 weeks of her pregnancy in a “gestation crate” so small she can’t turn around. When she’s carrying in nature, she has excessive energy that she uses to build a nest and prepare for her piglets. Here the sow can barely move. There isn’t even any bedding. Chickens and turkeys have it little better; the National Chicken Council recommends each bird get eight-tenths of a square foot (about the size of a sheet of printing paper) to walk around on and many have even less than that.

While the lives of factory farmed cows aren’t as bad as those of poultry or pigs, and this isn’t saying much, the slaughter is about as horrifying an experience as one can imagine. Before the cow is killed, it’s supposed to be rendered unconscious by a stun gun to the head. But it doesn’t always work; an industry-wide audit showed that the majority of slaughterhouses were unable to regularly knock cows out with one blow. In these situations, the animal is “bled, skinned and dismembered while conscious.”

Foer emphasizes that the stories he tells are not unique, but representative of the meat industry. He quotes an animal rights activist who broke into factory farm after factory farm to try to prove to herself that the horrors she saw were unique. I find it entirely plausible that the stories that come from the animal rights activists are accurate; they make too much economic sense not to be.

What is it like to work for the meat industry? I can’t think of a more horrifying job than being an assembly-line killer and people without any other options are the dregs of society (This is my opinion. The author is a liberal and sees poor people as another class of victims). Gail Eisnitz has put together a sort of “encyclopedia of cruelty” made up of worker testimonials in her book Slaughterhouse. One worker tells the story of a stun gun being broken all day and the workers killing the cows while still conscious. Another wrote

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer…You go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and-eerk-cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream.

A USDA inspector found “deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis” at 32 percent of the plants she made announced visits to. If the workers don’t start out as sadistic, it’s hard to see how they don’t become so. Slaughterhouse workers may kill as many as 2,000 cattle a shift. The man who can cut throat after throat or rip open stomach after stomach without going insane is the scary one.

While the government has anti-cruelty laws on the books, many states have what are called Common Farming Exemptions. These declare anything commonly practiced in the agriculture industry to be legal. In other words, corporations decide what rules and standards they have to follow. Labels like “organic” and “free range” are in general meaningless.

The meat industry has done remarkable things in the field of genetic engineering. A special chicken has been bred for laying eggs (layers) and one for meat (broilers). Between 1935 and 1995, broilers increased in weight by 65 percent while their food requirement went down 57 percent. “To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flinstones vitamins.” Modern factory farmed turkeys can no longer even mate naturally. Most new pigs used by the industry wouldn’t even be able to survive outside of their artificial environment.

Foer wants to pretend that there are arguments against eating meat that have to do with health. I don’t believe him, as we evolved as omnivores, and there really aren’t that many good sources of protein that don’t come from animals. He also talks about the impact that factory farming has on global warming, which is probably nonsense. There’s the argument that eating animals is inefficient: much is made of the statistic that the corn and grain fed to farm animals could feed the world’s 1.4 billion hungry people. This is socialist thinking and assumes that as much food would be produced and transported where it needs to go without the profit incentive.

On more solid grounds are Foer’s concerns about diseases caused by mutating viruses. Doctors could potentially give all of us antibiotics. We would be healthier for a while but pathogens would evolve to be much stronger. Thus, the drugs are only prescribed to those who need it. The way factory farm animals are raised requires nontherapeutic use of antibiotics; they’re fed the stuff their whole lives, which keeps them alive as they grow but creates new diseases that could jump to humans.

While all this may increase the odds of a terrible epidemic, in the end, humans are healthier than ever. All the laments about our modern unnatural lifestyle seem to overlook this obvious and inconvenient fact. While we can debate to what extent meat corporations are passing on their external costs onto the rest of us through pollution, our own well-being isn’t an argument against eating meat. The only true case is a moral one.

There are 50 billion factory farmed chickens killed every year. The number boggles the mind. If you think a chicken’s life is worth 1/1000th that of a human, it’s like torturing and killing 50 million people. Even if you think a human life is worth a million chicken lives, that’s 50,000 murders. If China and India ever start eating chicken at the rate Americans do now the 50 billion number will double. Joseph Stalin supposedly said “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” The thought of someone torturing or killing a cat is disturbing, but I have no idea how to react to hearing about 50 billion miserable lives and deaths. The number might as well be 50 thousand or 50 trillion. The ruthlessness of nature, for humanity is part of nature, is a terrifying thing when faced honestly.

I’d like this problem to go away. I’d like to be able to eat my steak and chicken with a clear conscience and not think that humans can be so indifferent to something so cruel. Things that have done so much to bring about advancement and improvements in human well being, business competition, the division of labor, technical innovation, and hard work, have been used to carry out evil on a scale the world has never before seen. William Saletan holds out hope that we’ll eventually be able to grow meat in labs. There will have to be a demand for it though, and that will require a revolution in human thinking.

People tend to get mad at vegetarians. I’ve seen it and it’s very weird. There have been times in my life where I’ve thought deeply about eating animals and periods when I didn’t give the issue much thought. The more I’ve felt a desire to be more humane and live a life that I consider moral the less I’ve wanted to eat meat. There isn’t a philosophical system that allows one to both support factory farms and oppose needless suffering. Most people realize that at some level. Before the author wrote this book he knew that the more he researched where our food came from the more likely he was to become a vegetarian, as did everybody else he discussed his ideas with. We don’t like to be reminded of our own moral cowardice.

We are after all, nothing more than animals ourselves. Humans supposedly have the ability to “choose” to act contrary to our nature, whatever that means, but in reality we’re more complicated versions of the beings we butcher. Let’s just hope a higher life form never discovers our planet and finds us tasty.

HBD Books, March 2, 1010

My point here isn’t to argue that the former vice-president is wrong when he advocates torture of Al-Qaida leaders, though I believe he is. It’s to show how intellectually hollow the modern day conservative movement is. Including the 9/11 attack, terrorism has been responsible for no more than 2.2 percent of the murders in the United States since 2001.  But it’s unlikely that anyone would be named “Conservative of the Year” for his handling of the issue of crime.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

It’s always seemed to me that if human beings were naturally more inclined to buy into a blood based nationalism than some kind of universalistic ideology than this would be strong evidence that racial loyalty had a genetic basis. According to B. R. Myers in The Cleanest Race the secret to the behavior and survival of the North Korean regime can be found in its ideology, one which not only ignores Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy but directly contradicts it.

Both Koreas teach that the peninsula was taken over by the Japanese in 1905 and stayed under the imperialist power’s thumb until the end of World War II. While most historians take the view that the colonized were heavily oppressed, Myers disagrees at least as far as the elites are concerned. He sees the Korean intelligentsia as having been co-opted by the conquerors. The Japanese come across as relatively benign in this book, encouraging the use of the Korean language and even regional peculiarities. To Japanese researcher Yuko Mastumura, on the other hand, the occupation was a classic case of cultural genocide.

For our purposes anyway, what’s important is that the Japanese saw the Koreans as racially similar to them and thus worthy of respect. The residents of the peninsula were encouraged to hold two identities. After the Empire of Japan surrendered, North Korea became occupied by the Soviets and South Korea by the US. In the communist area those that had supported the Japanese were forgiven and became part of the new elite. The Korean war began when the North invaded the South in 1950 and ended with a stalemate in 1953. That’s where we remain until today.

According to the author, the new North Korea intelligentsia knew nothing about Marxism. They were given a crash course in its concepts by the Soviets. Kim Il Sung, a man who according to one diplomat appeared to have never read a serious book, was appointed leader of the country. He had been a resistance fighter against the Japanese.

The author pieced together his picture of North Korean ideology from domestic art and propaganda accessible at the Unification Ministry’s North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. Myers claims that the DPRK tries to hide the racialist aspects of what they believe and that Marxism is a facade. He found that the English language Korean Central News Agency tended to talk about peace, imperialism, and couch its reports in the terms of universal human rights. But the more one gets into what’s meant for domestic consumption the more racialist the material becomes. The author studied North Korean film, news releases, novels, short stories, poetry, newspapers, etc and refers to it all collectively as the Text. He speculates there’s harder stuff that was never made available to researchers.

The Koreans seem to have kicked the Japanese out of their race and held on to their view of themselves as a unique people. They don’t necessarily see themselves as more intelligent or athletic than anybody else, but beings of superior virtue, too innocent to survive in this world without a strong leader. But Kim Sung Il is more of a maternal than a paternal figure. He is always portrayed as caring and showing good cheer, never imparting wisdom, as being too erudite it seen as anti-Korean. Race includes paintings of children gathering around this jolly fat man, holding on to his leg or playing with his shoes. The arts have never attempted to hide the belly of either Kim and even occasionally show one of them smoking a cigarette. After all, a good Korean is spontaneous and in touch with his pure instincts. There is some tension between portraying Sung as a masterful tactician who single-handedly repelled the Japanese and a jolly mother that loves her children. The latter is always emphasized and reinforced while the former image is simply processed at a cerebral level. There’s a picture in the book of a young Sung receiving a gun from his mother. The viewer is supposed to take away the blank expression on his face; he’s an innocent child rather than a soldier deeply pondering the gravity of the situation.

The first leader of the country is said to have invented the ideology of juche, which means something like self-reliance. Myers considers it a tool to justify the continuation of the regime to the outside world. He finds the juche text so convoluted and meaningless that there must be nothing there. Its ideas are never presented in domestic art or the media. As a matter of fact, the nation is far from self-reliant, living off of imports and foreign aid. The leadership doesn’t seem to want to change that. Interestingly there has never been a magnum opus or central text of the philosophy that one can go to to to find what it’s about. The author believes that this is by design. Other Western scholars have taken what the North Koreans have said about themselves at face value.

When Sung died in 1994 his son Kim Jong Il took over. While the father was said to be an expert in all things, the son is presented as a military commander forced to focus all his energy on foreign relations. There is a genre of fiction made up of tales of the Kims that are understood not to be based on real events but reflect the spirit of the men. In a 1999 short story called “Transitions” Kim Jong Il blames hard times on a failure to implement his father’s teachings.

“Long ago the Leader [i.e. Kim Il Sung] was already calling agriculture the foundation of the universe. . . But we have not farmed well in recent years, and we have failed to implement his teachings properly. To make matters worse, we have suffered damages from floods and drought, so that now the people are enduring difficulty because of the food problem. But still no one complains. Even while eating gruel they are steadfastly surmounting difficulties. They’re worried they might otherwise cause me pain, you see. When I think of how much the Leader wanted to give our people white rice and meat soup, I find it hard to bear . . .”

“We have not properly taken on the work you gave us to do, General,” Kyong’u said as he hung his head.

Notice how both North Koreans and their leaders are presented as morally pure. Since the DPRK is no longer a Marxist-Leninist state there isn’t much pressure to increase the living standard of the population. As seen in the story above, economic problems are freely admitted to. All references to communism were taken out of the country’s constitution in 2009 and a military-first policy was enshrined. While in the 70s and 80s the regime could lie and say that the South lived in abject poverty the facade became impossible to maintain in the 90s when North Koreans near the border started watching Republic of Korea television and DVDs were smuggled in from outside the country. The story now fed to the population is that the ROK may be wealthy on the outside but is really crippled by shame on the inside. Some leftists in the capitalist nation even agree with this and see the Spartan existence of their poorer brethren as admirable. Since there are two Koreas, the less wealthy one with a smaller population needs a justification for its existence, which it finds in deriding the ROK as a Yankee colony. In the North Korean novel Encounter, a girl from the South says

(Korea) is making its world debut as the flashiest of American colonies, so much so that the Americans tout it as a model. But look under the silk encasing, and you see the body of what has degenerated to a foul whore of America. Here and there covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, or decaying from where sewage has seeped in. And out of all of that has come a rotten “president,” a rotten “government,” rotten media. . . . (It) turns the stomach just to imagine it.

The DPRK isn’t just worried about political or cultural corruption, but biological. In May 2006 the two Koreas met to discuss the maritime border between the states. Someone from the ROK mentioned that farmers in his country were taking foreign brides. A general from the North replied “Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance. I’m concerned that our singularity will disappear.” His counterpart answered that the unions were nothing more than a “drop of ink in the Han river.” The DPRK representative disagreed, saying that “Since ancient times our land has been one of abundant natural beauty. Not one drop of ink must be allowed.” Lest the reader think this was an isolated incident, weeks earlier the party daily had taken the South to task for the welcome they gave to a half-Korean American soccer player.

Mono-ethnicity is something that our nation and no other on earth can pride itself on. . . . There is no suppressing the nation’s shame and anger at the talk of a “multi-ethnic, multi-racial” society . . . which would dilute even the bloodline of our people.

Women coming back from China are given forced abortions and the state encourages large families in order to eventually be able to match the population of the ROK.

Before reading Race I had high hopes that the racism of the Koreans had a more scientific basis. Maybe locked away and only for domestic reading there are translated works of Rushton and Lynn that North Korean leaders study. More likely this nationalism is the kind of “We are the best!” ethnocentrism found at all times and everywhere before the present era.

The popular 1951 anti-American novella Jackals describes the revolting physical features of Caucasians. The following is a description of an American family.

The old jackal’s spade-shaped eagle’s nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen’s teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just swallowed its skin.

Homosexuality is presented as an American perversion. In 1968 the North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo off their coast. A picture of the American shipmen being taken now graces postage stamps. The 2000 short story Snowstorm in Pyongyang tells of captured soldiers begging the North Koreans to let them engage in sodomy.

“Captain, sir, homosexuality is how I fulfill myself as a person. Since it does no harm to your esteemed government or esteemed nation, it is unfair for Jonathan and me to be prevented from doing something that is part of our private life.”

[The North Korean soldier responds,] “This is the territory of our republic, where people enjoy lives befitting human beings. On this soil none of that sort of activity will be tolerated.”

The survivability of the DPRK seems to stem from the genuine popularity that the regime enjoys. While it’s well known that many citizens flee to China what’s less often reported that 50 percent of them come back. This racialist state has survived while the dictatorships based on communism all collapsed. Unsurprisingly, people like being told they’re virtuous and better than others. They like having a God, or a perfect human being, to look up to. (While it’s been reported in the Western press that North Koreans consider the two Kims magical, in the Text it’s always a foreigner who is so impressed that he attributes supernatural powers to the father or son.) Myers relies on Freudian quackery to explain all this (I felt annoyed until I read the author studied in Germany and felt pity for him) but genetic similarity theory works better. Nothing North Koreans believe comes close to matching the absurdity of Christianity, Marxism, Freudism, Diversityism, feminism or racial egalitarianism. Even refugees who don’t like the North Korean regime express great admiration for the nation’s leaders and tear up when talking about them. As even the author acknowledges, the DPRK has never proposed invading an inch of territory outside the peninsula. But he still takes even the South Koreans to task for their chauvinistic attitudes. Are mentally healthy human beings anywhere too much for the liberal mind to bear?

In the end, the author is a typical member of the globalist elite: horrified that a non-Jewish state could be based on blood or a romantic nationalism that connects the people to the land. He seems to credit North Korea with a degree of cunning that strains credibility: understanding that a racialist state won’t fly in today’s world and inventing an alternative reality to present to other nations. If that’s the plan then there is no way that there will ever be peace between the US and the DPRK. Kim needs a threat to justify his rule and putting the military above all, and the US has a pathological need to bring political correctness to the entire globe. A free and racially pure united Korea will have to wait until the American empire collapses. Best of luck to them. While the DPRK may be an evil regime what they do is none of the business of the United States. How much of the starvation in the DPRK can be blamed on that country’s government and how much on ours? I don’t know, but what I’m sure of is that the future of the Korean peninsula would best be worked out by the people who live there. And if when they are united they choose to reject all aspects of multiculturalism I will be the first ones to cheer them on.

HBD Books, January 29, 2010

The English Defense League: Multi-Racial English Nationalists?

“The Trappings of Right-Wing Culturalism”

In his book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, John Derbyshire lists three ways of looking at the world, making clear his preferences are with the third: religion, culturalism, and biologism.

The religious viewpoint posits that mankind and what happens to it are the product of divine will. Culturalism proposes that differences between human groups are the result of differences in (vaguely defined) “culture” (or sometimes determined by geographical accidents like in Jared Diamond’s works). Biologism sees the world through the lens of an underlying human nature and biological differences between groups.

While most educated people eschew the religious outlook, mainstream intellectual debate in the West is between different kinds of culturalism. On the Left are the most extreme peddlers of White guilt. This seems to be a deformed version of the old Marxist view that says that those who are successful got to be wealthy or even middle class through the exploitation of others. What gives the contemporary anti-White movement a more culturalist feel is the idea that the races currently doing the oppressing are or were arbitrarily chosen at some point. On college campuses, both class and race grievances are alive and well.

The mainstream Right favors a kind of conservative culturalism which has seduced many a White Nationalist. Rather than the West’s success being based on malevolence it comes from a set of positive cultural values that other races would do well to adopt. When Dinesh D’Souza wanted to defend Whites against charges of systematic racism while at the same time refuting us believers in race differences in intelligence, he pointed to migrants from the Caribbean coming to America and outperforming our indigenous Blacks. Unfortunately for him by the second generation this so-called model minority begins to approach African American norms.

Right-wing culturalism is not totally false. Uruguay remains a very poor country despite being about 90% White. Ukraine’s GDP per capita is below even some African countries. But for seeing the general scope of history and present day realities, the White/Asian > everyone else > Black trichotomy of differing biological abilities works extremely well in predicting success or failure (using the terms by the standard of what humans universally desire; see this article for a philosophical defense). There’s no factor that can better predict where a people will end up than biological descent. Openness to capitalism is probably a distant second.

White nationalists and others who are partial to biologism may support many of the same policies of Right-wing culturalists, who they might believe are even “really” on their side. Since racially conscious Whites don’t want to be told that they’re responsible for everyone else’s problems, they find the kind of culturalism that flatters them appealing. But when Right-wing culturalism excludes biologism from public debate it can become even more dangerous than its Leftist counterpart.

The Assimilation Menace

Many Right-wing culturalists join White Nationalists in opposing immigration. To the extent that anybody works towards that goal — and here I reluctantly include feminists worrying about “women’s rights” — they should be supported.

But what policy should the US government take towards the Mexicans already in America? An issue that raged during the 1990s was that of bilingual education. Hispanic children were being taught in Spanish and thus prevented from assimilating into the mainstream American culture. In 1998 Proposition 227 passed in California and largely required students to be taught in English. Opponents of the measure wrote books with titles like At War with Diversity: U.S. Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety and the professional race mongerers threw a fit. Heather MacDonald recently wrote in City Journal that Proposition 227 was a success in “[removing] a significant barrier to Hispanic assimilation.” She further explains,

The early Chicano activists sought the “replacement of assimilationist ideals . . . with cultural pluralism,” writes University of Houston history professor Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. in his book Contested Policy. Bilingual education was the activists’ primary weapon in fighting assimilation because, as they rightly understood, English-language teaching is a powerful tool for encouraging assimilation.

While our first instincts may be to cheer whenever a multiculturalist activist is in pain, if we use our brains, we racialists must part ways with the Right-wing culturalists on the issue of assimilation.

This goes back to our reasons for opposing immigration in the first place. Hispanics are a bad fit for America not because they have the wrong values or are putty in the hands of Leftist activists, as some mainstream conservatives may argue. They simply as a group don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation. Adding Mexicans means the education system suffers, inequalities grow, crime rises and the quality of the culture declines. This happens no matter what language they speak or what kind of religion they follow. The relatively culturally confident Whites in Texas may be managing a large Latino population better than those in California, but eventually the number of Mexicans will simply overwhelm the Caucasians of either state. The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave. If that’s going to happen, we need to hope for bad relations between them and Whites. Not speaking English makes Americans dislike immigrants.

Many White Nationalists support an ethnostate and would be happy to give some US territory to non-Whites in order to insure there own race’s survival. The more the different racial groups in America share a common language and culture, the less likely such a scenario is going to be. Left-wing activists that can make NAMs hostile to White culture are doing half the work for us.

If White Americans do have to permanently live under the same government as NAMs, it’s almost inevitable that the latter will push for policies that hurt European Americans such as more affirmative action and income redistribution. Learning to speak English will only make them better activists. To a Right-wing culturalist the fact that Hispanics vote Democrat is regrettable but can be changed. Those of us who understand biologism know better. If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist.

If we want to see what assimilation can do, look no further than Latin America. South America had 1,500 languages when Europeans first came in contact with the land. The Heather MacDonalds and Dinesh D’Souzas of Catholic Spain surely favored teaching the Indians Spanish and converting them to Christianity. That’s precisely what happened. But race conflict in Latin America never went away (see this video of affirmative action in Brazil, a country traditionally pointed to as an un-racist nation) and anything approaching first world living standards only formed in White countries and regions. Had the European settlers separated themselves from the Indians by cultural barriers they would’ve intermarried less with them and there presumably would be more White oases today.

Modern Anglo-American conservatives are the Spanish priests of today who thought they were doing their posterity a great service by making the Indians more like themselves. Greg Johnson recently summed up the fundamental difference between us and Right-wing culturalists.

The Tea Partiers constantly invoke the US Constitution, but they have a largely mistaken view of its nature and its relationship to the American people. The Constitution did not create the American people, the American people created the Constitution.

Sign of the Times: Even Soccer Hooligans Are Anti-Racist

A recent story about a group of anti-Muslim activists in Britain that call themselves the English Defense League underscores my point.

On Platform One at Bolton station a mob of around 100 men punch the air in unison. The chant goes up: “Muslim bombers, off our streets, Muslim bombers off our streets….”

Their voices echo loudly and more men suddenly appear; startled passengers move aside. The group march forward waving St George Cross flags and holding up placards. The throng of men around me applaud. A train heading for Glasgow draws up on the opposite platform and the men turn as one, bursting into song: “Engelaand, Engelaand, Engelaand.” …

The rise of the English Defence League has been rapid. Since its formation at the start of the summer the group has organised nearly 20 major protests in Britain’s cities, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Luton, Nottingham, Glasgow and Swansea.

Like the American speak-English movement, at first glance a White Nationalist can be fooled into thinking that this organization shares many of his values. But then we get this:

As the EDL gains support across the UK, Muslims have already been targeted in unprovoked attacks. In the worst incident, a mob of 30 white and black youths is said to have surrounded Asian students near City University in central London and attacked them with metal poles, bricks and sticks while shouting racist abuse…

The group’s self-proclaimed leader, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, did most of the talking. A father of two, Robinson explained the background to the rise of the movement.

“For more than a decade now there’s been tension in Luton between Muslim youths and whites. We all get on fine —black, white, Indian, Chinese. … Everyone does, in fact, apart from these Muslim youths who’ve become extremely radicalised since the first Gulf War. This is because preachers of hate live in Luton and have been recruiting for radical Islamist groups for years. Our Government does nothing about them so we decided that we’d start protesting.”

First, there’s the following message that one gets before registering to join the group’s forum.

The English Defence League is not a racist organisation. We have mixed race members, and will not tolerate racist comments.

Please do not join if you have misunderstood this in any way.

And just so we really get it, in the FAQ section they write the following in a sentence that could’ve come from Tim Wise’s website:

We take an actively anti-racist (emphasis added) and anti-fascist stance.

The organization’s home page includes a picture of two Blacks. Those who watched the Tea Party documentary will have seen the same sickening spectacle before.

Anti-racists against Islam, or the EDL

Robinson, the the EDL’s leader, explains when he decided to form the organization.

Robinson could barely conceal his anger as he explained that the spark for him had been the sight of radical Muslims protesting when soldiers paraded through the town on their regiment’s return from Afghanistan in May.

While a White patriot may not appreciate the site of immigrants protesting British soldiers, he should be rallying against any government that involves itself in the Middle East’s wars.

Like the BNP, the EDL is also attempting to ingratiate itself with Jews — to no avail. A couple months ago a controversy erupted over the EDL trying to use an Israeli flag at one of their rallies.

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson said: “It is appalling to see the flag of Israel abused by thugs who stir up violence and tension between communities. Israel’s flag is a symbol of the 2000 year struggle of the Jewish people against racism and should not be manipulated by racists or extremists of any kind.”

Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle, has attacked the EDL as “racists and extremists” and claims that mainstream Islam is “no more of a threat to Western society than the Quakers.” Strange times we live in when an organization that actively fights a positive White identity while supporting a Jewish ethnostate gets branded by the Israelis and Jewish activists as racist!

Too pro-White for the Israelis, “actively anti-racist” according to their website

I don’t mean to make the reader needlessly pessimistic. There are organizations in every White country that deserve our support: political parties like the BNP in England, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, and Rodina in Russia, along with of course magazines and journals like The Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, and The Occidental Quarterly. I’m not even opposed to alliances with mainstream conservatives, as long as they do the things that are important to us and we’ve thought long and hard over whether their policies are good for Whites.

But to blindly support the Right because you think defending the West’s culture or religion is “close enough” to speaking up for the race that created them is a dead end. The Left may even be more useful for White survival.

Ron Unz was the software developer who funded California’s Proposition 227. In his 2000 article in the neo-conservative American Enterprise journal he gushed over the fact the intermarriage rate between Whites and non-Black minorities was so high in California. While liberals may lie and tell us that the White race doesn’t exist, conservatives are out in front with the most effective plans to make that a reality.

Like the EDL, Unz doesn’t hide where he stands. Nipping White nationalism in the bud is behind his assimiliationist goals. Unz wrote:

A future America in which both whites and all other ethnic groups see themselves as minorities will be far different from our traditional majority-white/minority-black society. Since the 1960s, the deepening ideological decay of the American melting pot, especially among the journalists and intellectuals who shape our thoughts, has transformed our official self-image from that of a nation of individuals living in a common culture into that of a nation of groups arrayed against one another in an ethnic spoils system. Multiculturalism and “diversity” thoroughly dominate our nation’s schools and politics and public discourse, encouraging minorities to exercise influence through the mobilization of ethnic or racial grievance. Under this framework, the rise of a similar ethnic-grievance movement among America’s emerging white minority is likely, perhaps inevitable.

Already there are early warning signs of such a movement. Public schools are reporting interest in white student clubs, and white firefighters associations and European-American pressure groups are forming in California. Although so far these developments and others like them are minuscule, and the individuals involved make every effort to avoid even a hint of extremism, evolving white-bloc politics could eventually develop a white-nationalist orientation or fringe. Elements of white nationalism have been the unspoken subtext behind the rise of extremist militia groups and the appearance of populist third parties, and represented the obvious core of the anti-immigration movement of the mid-90s. …

There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.

But he’s wrong. Immigration has already broken America. White nationalism is the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere. All movements and ideologies must be judged from the perspective of what they contribute to the odds of bringing it about.

From The Occidental Observer, January 2, 2010.

How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration?

Bolton’s last two articles for Human Events? “Time for an Israeli Strike?” and “Reinventing Conservatism,” an article with a title that indicates he will be dealing with many topics but in which he calls for a belligerent foreign policy without mentioning any other issue. He gives away what conservatism has devolved into.

The con game works like this. Human Events publishes Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter for social conservatives and those of us who hate political correctness. They publish Thomas Sowell for the small government and libertarian crowd. And they publish foaming at the mouth neo-cons like Bolton. The right wing establishment sometimes even excites us by supporting Charles Murray. But when Bush and the Republicans had power, the neo-cons were the only ones who got what they wanted. I give them credit for Alito and Roberts, but that’s it.

And the right wing masses are no better. Go to Free Republic and contrast how the commentators treat Joe Lieberman and Pat Buchanan. The first is pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, pro-gay marriage, has a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO union thugs, and gets an F from the NRA. But he supports a pro-Israel foreign policy. Buchanan is an anti-war conservative with protectionist sympathies who is the most un-PC person that appears on TV.

In this random post about Lieberman, most of the commentators can’t stop going on about what a great guy he is. Some respectfully pointed out that he’s not actually a conservative, but nobody except one poster who claims Lieberman will weaken the GOP goes beyond that.

Now look at the first ten comments on this thread of an article by Buchanan.

Poster #1

Pat’s stuck in the 1950s.

#3

Pat Buchanan can go…. well, I can’t SAY what he can go do or I’ll get Banned from FR!

#5

When will he just go away…

#6

When will Pat just go away?

We can use Occam’s Razor to understand what’s going on here; everyone with any brains has either been

A) brainwashed by liberalism.

B) become a biorealist or at least a libertarian

The only ones left to post on Free Republic are those too stupid to either be brainwashed or think for themselves.

I’ll also repeat my idea that masses of white people have channeled the anger they have about what non-whites have done to this country towards innocent Iraqis and Palestinians as well as anybody that their government may get their hands on and torture. Still, it’s doubtful that they would be clamoring to defend South Korea against the North if they weren’t led in that direction. The fact that they are so easily pulled wherever the Neo-cons want to go is explained by their low IQs. The leaders are little more than Israeli nationalists and careerists.

From HBD Books, December 23, 2009

we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be describes as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution.

I don’t like government, but one thing it’s proven that it can do for certain is administer objective standardized tests that heavily correlate with g. It would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded. Somebody who wants to argue that he had a bad day would have the right to an appeal, which would consist of another IQ test.

If a libertarian wants to propose that even somebody with an IQ of 90 has rights, they would have to oppose government having the power to lock people up in mental institutions. We already let the state decide that some people aren’t fit to participate in society even if they’ve yet to do anything wrong. This is a system open to abuse, but still a necessary evil. Letting unintelligent breed is as surly damaging to society as letting schizophrenics run loose is. My plan is less likely than the mental health profession to catch someone unfairly as an IQ test is a more certain measure of intelligence than a psychiatrist’s diagnosis is of a mental disorder worthy of institutionalization. Some doctors have been known to disagree over whether someone needs to be locked up, but no two IQ test ever differ much about how intelligent someone is.

The libertarian belief that whenever government acts it violates people’s rights and so it should be kept as small and powerless as possible is for the most part correct. We should abide by this maxim, except in cases where doing nothing means a libertarian society can’t continue to exist: for example, allowing low IQ groups to settle in the country or the unintelligent to keep breeding.

There is another modification I’d like to make of the classical theory. Some groups such as children and the insane aren’t considered capable of entering into contracts or being responsible for their actions and are thus not fully entitled to the rights government grants to competent adults. IQ realism forces us to expand the circle of those that need protection (and from whom we need to protect ourselves). It makes no sense to say that someone with an IQ of 65 is ill and one with an IQ of 75 is a responsible, rational actor. Wherever you draw the line between the free citizen and the unfree is going to be to a certain extent arbitrary, as the definition of retarded at 70 and below is. I’m simply convinced that it should be higher. Whatever we classify as the new retarded, and I think it should be at least IQ 80 and probably 90 and below, we need to make sure that there are less of these people so that a free society can continue to exist.

Ideally it wouldn’t be government that ran the eugenics program but private organizations. But that’s a different post.

From HBD Books

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

If you’re like me and have been through the American education system, you as a child may have never learned a word of Greek or Latin, the history of the Bible or been assigned to read a work by a great philosopher. You probably do remember, however, learning about Martin Luther King, the Klan and the “six million who perished.” What gets placed in a curriculum is a zero-sum game and Western civilization had to lose for the cult of victimhood to win.

But unlike other unfortunates we’re supposed to feel sorry for, the Jews are successful, and the crimes against them didn’t take place in the United States. For them to become a protected class, the holocaust, a historical event, had to be turned into The Holocaust, a religious one. Liberal professor Norman Finkelstein wrote The Holocaust Industry to bring to the world’s attention the exploitation of Jewish suffering in World War II. His book also explains how we got here. Thanks to the Industry, Israel, “one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status.”

This is a recent phenomenon. In 1963 Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the time there were only two other English language scholarly books on the Holocaust. One of them was Raul Hillberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. His thesis advisor at Columbia University told him “It’s your funeral” to discourage him from touching the subject. Until the late 1960s, there was only one university course offering on the holocaust in the United States.

Jews themselves were indifferent to the events many of them had fled. In a 1961 Commentary symposium on the subject of “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” no more that two of thirty-one writers stressed the holocaust. It was almost completely ignored in a 1961 roundtable sponsored by the journal Judaism on “My Jewish Affirmation.” There were no museums, no monuments and no organizations dedicated to keeping the memory alive.

In 1956 after President Eisenhower pushed Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, his support among American Jews actually increased in that year’s presidential election. Attitudes would be different after the June 1967 war with the Arab states. Norman Podhoretz noted that after the conflict Israel became “the religion of American Jews.” To trace this journey from indifference to obsession, Finkelstein informs us that in 1955 and in 1965 the entries for Israel in The New York Times Index went on for 60 column inches. In 1975 the Israel entries filled 260. Now Jews would compare any situation the Israelis found themselves in to the peril Jewry faced in 1930s Germany. They told themselves they wouldn’t be like those that quietly went into the gas chambers.

Unfortunately, Finkelstein’s liberalism distorts his understanding of the change in Jewish activism. According to him, right after World War II talking about the holocaust was taboo due to US support of West Germany. In later years the Arabs would align with the Soviet Union and Israel became an important ally. The Jews were once again “matching in lockstep with American power.” What the author doesn’t admit is that by the 1960s Jews were American power. Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy demolishes the idea that the alliance with Israel provides any benefit for the United States. It is a nuisance at best and bankrupting the nation at worst.

Secondly, Finkelstein doesn’t seem to see the rise in Jewish activism in the 1960s as part of a larger trend in American culture. He points to a few neo-cons who oppose affirmative action and ignores the critical role of Jewish left wing activism in establishing the culture of victimhood — what has become the culture of Western suicide. Finkelstein writes that of “Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Jews alone are not disadvantaged in American society” — as if who gets to play the identity politics game is decided by an objective measurement of who the victims are!

Despite his blind spots, the author does a fantastic job of exposing the gang of charlatans and frauds that constitute The Holocaust Industry. For a fee of $25,000, survivor Elie Wiesel will tell you that the “secret” of Auschwitz’s “truth lies in silence” and that The Holocaust “leads into darkness,” “negates all answers,” “lies outside, if not beyond, history,” “defies both knowledge and description,” “cannot be explained nor visualized,” and is “never to be explained or transmitted.” To him, to compare Jewish suffering to that of others is a “total betrayal of Jewish history.” A parody of a New York tabloid once had the headline: “Michael Jackson, 60 Million Others, Die in Nuclear Holocaust.” The parody included a letter supposedly from Eli Wiesel in which he protested “How dare people refer to what happened yesterday as a Holocaust? There was only one Holocaust.”

Not only does Wiesel think that Jewish suffering is in a class of its own, but he and organized Jewry guard their unique status in a very creepy way. He withdrew from a conference on genocide because the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks would be mentioned. Jewish organizations have lobbied against a day of remembrance for the Armenians.

Predictably, when the victims of violence are the enemies of Jews, compassion goes out the window.” To Wiesel, Arabs hate Jews for their existence. American Blacks are simply a race of ingrates, unable to appreciate what the Jews have done for them.

Wiesel not only appears to suffer from a histrionic personality disorder, he is also an inveterate liar. After surviving a death camp, he claims to have read Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish. No such translation exists. He once met a “mysterious Talmudic scholar” who “mastered Hungarian in two weeks, just to surprise me.” He told The New York Times that after being hit by a taxi in Times Square he “flew an entire block. I was hit at 45th Street and Broadway, and the ambulance picked me up at 44th.”

While there’s a debate over whether Night by Wiesel is a memoir or novel, other writers have been exposed as frauds. Jerzy Kosinski wrote The Painted Bird, supposedly about his time as a young Polish Jew who wandered alone through rural Poland during the World War II. Finkelstein notes that one reader described the book as “the product of a mind obsessed with sadomasochistic violence.” Poles are depicted as pathological torturers of Jews. Kosinski’s work became required reading in many high school and college classes. On the speaking circuit, Kosinski would describe himself as a “cut-rate Elie Wiesel.”

In reality, the author of the book lived with his parents during the war. The Poles whom he had slandered had sheltered his family at great risk to themselves.

Binjamin’s Wilkomirski’s Fragments is a more recent hoax in the field of Holocaustology. According to Finkelstein the book is similar to The Painted Bird in that the author presents himself as a child victim of The Holocaust and “each chapter . . . climaxes in an orgy of violence.” In this book it’s the Germans who are the irredeemable sadists. After he’s freed, young Benjamin goes to Switzerland, where he’s taunted by the kids at school. They point at him “and make fists and yell ‘He’s raving, there’s no such thing. Liar! He’s crazy, mad, he’s an idiot.’”

Turns out the children were right. Wlkomirski spent the whole war in Switzerland and isn’t even Jewish. Nor is his name Binjamin Wilkomirski. It’s Bruno Dössekker. The fraud wasn’t exposed until the author of Fragments had had his book translated into a dozen languages and become a star through his participation in documentaries, Holocaust fund-raisers, and of course, the speaking scene.

Finkelstein says that with all the lies we’ve been fed, it’s amazing that there are so few Holocaust deniers. But he doesn’t cite the worst of the worst. For example, there’s this 1988 story from the New York Times:

Later, [retired butcher Morris Hubert] was sent to Buchenwald. ”In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. ”Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.” ”But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor. ”It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, ”but it happened.”

I’m surprised they’ve yet to find an eagle to put on trial for the crime.

At least authors of Holocaust memoirs provide entertaining stories. Even worse, Jewish organizations have turned the Holocaust religion into a criminal Industry. In fact, they may have pulled off the biggest robberies in human history.

First, it was claimed that Swiss banks were denying heirs of Jewish holders of accounts their money. In 1995 two Representatives of the World Jewish Congress including President Edgar Bronfman met with Swiss bankers. Bronfman would later humbly tell the Senate Banking Committee that he spoke on behalf of “the 6 million, who cannot speak for themselves.” The Swiss could only find 775 unclaimed dormant accounts, holding $32 million. When the Swiss offered this number as a basis to begin negotiations, the WJC rejected it as too low.

The WJC would mobilize the American political establishment to lobby on its behalf. Bronfman recruited Catholic New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato to his cause — a move that assured D’Amato would receive Jewish money and votes. The House and Senate banking committees took up the issue. An aide to D’Amato would later brag that they forced the Swiss “into the court of public opinion where we controlled the agenda. . . . [w]e were judge, jury, and executioner.” A study supported by D’Amato’s office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center would claim that “dishonesty was a cultural code that individual Swiss had mastered to protect the nation’s image and prosperity” and that “Swiss greed was unique.”

In 1996 a parade of elderly Jews gave testimony before the US Congress on the malevolence of Swiss bankers. They presented no evidence that they actually had assents in the banks. To top off the spectacle, D’Amato for some reason brought none other than Elie Wiesel to address Congress. Testified poor Wiesel: “Is there no limit to pain? No limit to the outrage?”

Even before this event, the Swiss had set up a commission headed by former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker with three members of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and three from the Swiss Bankers Association. They would abide by whatever the group decided. Jewish organizations wouldn’t let up in the media, hoping that the Swiss would settle before the commission issued its report. After stories got out of indigent survivors, the Swiss in 1997 put $200 million into a “Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust.”

The commission was dangerous to the Industry for two reasons. First, as with the Holocaust itself, so many ridiculous stories had been told that some of them would inevitably prove to be illegitimate. Second, if the owners of the dormant accounts were identified, they themselves would be compensated, and not Jewish organizations.

When bad mouthing the Swiss through the media failed to extort enough money, the Jews filed class action lawsuits and ordered boycotts of the country. Volcker protested that such actions would interfere with the work of his commission, but that was precisely the point. In January 1997 chair of the Jewish Agency Avraham Burg threatened, “Until now we have held back international Jewish pressure.” New York Governor George Pataki publicly supported sanctions on Swiss banks. Local state governments in Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York passed resolutions threatening a boycott unless the Swiss settled with organized Jewry. The city of Los Angeles was the first to impose sanctions. Other governments followed suit.

In June 1998 the Swiss made a final offer of $600 million. Head of the ADL Abraham Foxman called it “an insult to the memory of the victims.” By August the bankers finally gave in with a $1.25 billion settlement.

A year after the settlement, no plan was drawn up to distribute the money to actual Holocaust survivors. By December 1999 only half of the $200 million originally given in 1997 had reached the victims. Finkelstein’s last edition of the book was released in 2000 but as of 2009 only $490 million of the $1.25 billion had gone to individual claimants. The rest went to such worthy causes as lawyer fees, Jewish organizations, and Holocaust propaganda, presumably to help create a new generation of suckers. Holocaust programs in schools are recommended or required in seventeen states.

Volcker and his committee’s Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks cost $500 million. They took all the accounts found to have belonged to Jewish victims of the Holocaust and modified them to their 1945 value. They then multiplied the number by ten to reflect long term investment rates and came up with a number of $380 million. Moreover, there was “no proof of systematic destruction of records of victim accounts, organized discrimination against the accounts of victims of Nazi persecution, or concerted efforts to divert the funds of victims of Nazi persecution to improper purposes.”

After routing the Swiss, the Holocaust Industry went on to try to steal from the Germans. They demanded $20 billion in compensation from German Industry for WWII slave labor. Full-page newspaper advertisements appeared claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical corporation Bayer “directed” the experiments of Josef Mengele. President Clinton lobbied for restitution. Never mind that monetary agreements reached shortly after WWII already covered slave labor. Germany had given the modern equivalent of close to a billion dollars to the Jewish Claims Conference. The organization characteristically used much of the money for their pet projects. In 1999 German corporations would agree to hand over another $5.1 billion. The country’s government has to date given more than $60 billion to Jewish organizations.

The Holocaust Industry continued East but found it much more difficult to whip up hysteria against impoverished former Soviet countries. The demands against Poland were so great that Jewish Week reported that the parliament was afraid that Jewish claims would bankrupt the nation. The fear of American pressure stops European countries from standing up to this blackmail. A Knesset member recalled his meeting with the uncooperative Prime Minister of Romania: “But I ask one remark, in the middle of the fighting, and it changed the atmosphere. I told him, you know, in two days I am going to be in a hearing here in Congress. What do you want me to tell them in the hearing? Whole atmosphere was changed.” The US is the muscle behind organized Jewry. Bronfman, the WJC president, in 1998 claimed that his organization alone had amassed around $7 billion in Holocaust compensation.

It’s not a coincidence that the only countries who’ve fallen for this scam are White ones, and not Arab nations that expelled Jews in the 20th century. As Kevin Macdonald wrote in The Culture of Critique:

The key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy—a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers.

Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment.

It takes a special sort of goyim to fall for the scam: Holocaust propaganda helps create a people prone to extortion, and the money stolen goes to fund more Holocaust propaganda. Not to excuse the behavior of the thieves themselves, but the success of the Holocaust Industry is simply another symptom of a people that has lost its way.

From The Occidental Observer, December 10, 2009

Atlas Shrugged

Her most famous sentence from the esssay is the first one. “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” She goes on to say:

It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.

Not ascribing moral significance to a man’s genetic line would of course lead one to reject the concept of a family, which the old girl precedes to do.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) — the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) — the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law — the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history — all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

Rand goes on to bash both white Southerners and blacks who demanded quotas as she calls the civil rights bill “the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.” If a battle against racism is to be waged, it should be through social ostracism or economic boycotts.

I don’t remember Rand ever directly addressing the family. Here she is on page 972 of the hardcover 35th anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged, as tycoon Henry Reardon parts ways with his collectivist family.

They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached. They did not know — and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge — that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them — that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless — that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

“Henry, don’t you understand us?” his mother was pleading.

“I do,” he said quietly.

She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. “Don’t you care what becomes of us?”

“I don’t.”

“Aren’t you human?” Her voice grew shrill with anger. “Aren’t you capable of any love at all? It’s your heart that I’m trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about! It’s something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can’t you feel without thinking?”

“I never have.”

An internet search of “Rand on the family” turned up nothing. Her views on everything are found in the book The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. The fact that one has to search hard for her opinion about the most fundamental institution in history betrays a weakness in her thought.

If Rand ever admitted to the legitimacy of loyalty to the family, she would be forced to approve of one preferring his own race. Like the family, racialism is justified from the perspective of genetic interests and their manifestation in inherent preferences.

From HBD Books

The Duggar family: 18 kids, no. 19 due in March 2010, and one grandchild (the first, we presume, of many). Taking the commandment to be fruitful and multiply seriously. See their website: http://www.duggarfamily.com/

Feminism is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.
~Katarina Runske

It’s no secret that Western man has given up breeding. A society needs to have 2.1 births per women in a lifetime if it’s going to maintain a steady population. Besides the U.S. and Iceland, no western nation is even close.

Putting the problem in chart form may help to illustrate its enormity. Here are some of the fertility rates for western countries and their projected white populations by 2050, not counting migration. I estimated 4.9 million nonwhites for the UK and knocked that out of the population, 6.4 in France, 1.7 in the Netherlands, 2.5 in Germany, and 10 million for all other EU countries. The total EU white population is 491.5 million- 25.5 million nonwhites = 466 million. Also, the TFR was adjusted from the official number of 1.51 to 1.45 due to the higher nonwhite birth rate. Canada has around 2.7 million nonwhites. Their overall TFR is 1.58; I estimated the white number at 1.5. Russia is about 20 percent nonwhite.

^EU member
*ex Soviet state, non EU member

It can be projected that the total number of white people lost from the EU, Canada, Switzerland, the Balkans, Norway and the ex-Soviet states including Russia will be around 279,000,000. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the losses due to World War I, World War II, the Nazi regime and all communist governments in history combined. Of course, deciding against having children is not equivalent to starving people in gulags. Still, whatever the causes of the birth slump, the result is hundreds of millions of lives not existing that otherwise would have.

Perhaps low birth rates are not a cultural phenomenon and the number of children people have is based more on economic considerations. Looking at birth rates for the world as a whole casts doubt on that possibility. The top five countries are Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Afghanistan. Not exactly places known for their prosperous middle-classes. Even within first-world countries, if there’s a correlation between wealth and fertility, it’s negative. In the U.S., black and Hispanic households are worth about one tenth of what white household are. But according to estimates, Hispanic women have 3.0 children each, blacks 2.2, and whites 2.0. Ukraine’s nominal GDP per capita is less than $4,000 a year while its TFR is indistinguishable from that of Italy ($39,000), Spain ($35,000) or the Czech Republic ($21,000).

We must conclude that there is something besides economics that is going on here. If you find a white population somewhere, it’s almost certain that it’s not going to be reproducing itself enough to survive.

There is one major exception.

After the 2004 presidential election, Steve Sailer famously analyzed Caucasian fertility rates in Red (those that voted for the Republican candidate) and Blue (those that voted Democratic) states. He found that the top 19 states in fertility (and 25 out of the top 26) voted for George W. Bush. Amongst the 50 states and Washington, DC, the correlation between white fertility rate and the Republican share of the white vote was 0.86 (0.84 in 2000).

Sailer hypothesizes that the lower cost of living in Red States makes child bearing more feasible.

In a tempting contrast, the cost-of-living calculator provided by Realtor.com says that a $100,000 salary in liberal Manhattan buys only as much as a $38,000 salary in conservative Pinehurst, North Carolina. Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah, if the husband can find a $44,000-a-year job—and then the wife can stay home with their children. Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco.

While this kind of thinking is on the right track, it doesn’t address why some women choose carriers and others families as much as it does why those with particular characteristics end up in one place rather than another. After all, those from New York are free to move to Idaho and vice versa. But it does show that we’re dealing with a cultural issue—one of the soul, not the pocketbook. Utah, the only majority Mormon state in the Union, has a 2.45 TFR. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering Utahans watch the same TV and listen to the same music (both of which encourage libertinism and nihilism) as the rest of America. While cost of living considerations may explain some of the difference in TFR between New York and Utah, they do less to shed light on the disparity between Utah and the rest on the socially conservative and sparsely populated heartland.

Taking an international perspective, there seems to be two ways to have a replacement fertility rate in the modern world.

A) Be really religious.

B) Be really r-selected.

Since Europeans aren’t Africans, that leaves option (A) as the only proven method for replacement Caucasian fertility. The potential success in this area of any secular philosophical system is speculative. Remember that next time you see Bill Maher on TV foaming at the mouth about those stupid Christians who won’t bow before the god of evolution. The ultimate irony is that championing Darwinism has, as Katarina Runske wrote of feminism, been a Darwinian dead end.

Put bluntly, liberal secular humanists are on the verge of extinction. . . . Read the whole article.

Sir Francis Galton by Gustav Graef

From The Occidental Observer, October 31, 2009

Folk knowledge that “like breeds like” and theories on heredity have been around since at least the time of Plato. People have tended to notice that children look and behave like their parents. It was only after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species that the question of where contemporary breeding practices could take humanity gained a prominent role in educated discourse.

But before discussing whether eugenics was a good idea, it needed to be determined that intelligence and personality traits are heritable. Polymath Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s half cousin, tried to do just that in his 1869 Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences [here in PDF]. He would coin the term eugenics itself in 1883.

Galton makes clear in the first paragraph of his book the scientific and political aim of his work.

I propose to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations… I conclude that each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth.

What Genius doesn’t do is spend too much time on how we get from point A to point B. To Galton, it was self-evident that if talent is determined by inheritance then what he would later call eugenics is desirable.

Since the author was working at a time before IQ tests and cross-adoption studies, he needed to be creative in showing that nature predominates in determining who we are. Galton pored over the biographies of eminent men and investigated whether their close relatives, defined as a great-grandfather/great-nephew or closer, were more likely than the general population to be eminent themselves. He was the first to use statistical methods to answer questions about human differences.

The first thing that this inquiry needed to do was define “eminent.” Galton found 850 British men over the age of 50 in the biographical handbook Men of the Time. He determined that 500 of them were “decidedly well known to persons familiar with literary and scientific society.” Since at the time there were two million men over the age of 50 living in the British Isles, prominent men are 500 out of two million, or 250 out of one million.

It strikes me as somewhat arbitrary to take the number 500 instead of 850, but the ratio of eminent to non-eminent men derived from the former matches with the numbers Galton acquired from looking at the obituaries for the year 1868 in the Times.

Galton’s three qualities that lead to eminence are intelligence, zeal and capacity for hard work. Galton found that in traits that vary within a population most people cluster around the average. Through statistical analysis, he broke men down into different classes that become rarer the further one moves away from the mean.

Galton’s Classification of Men According the Their Natural Gifts

Since 250/1,000,000 = 1/4,000, Genius includes nobody below class F.  The eminent men aren’t necessarily ones who have one in four thousand IQs (about 150), but those whose combination of intelligence and work ethic is that rare.  If Galton’s three traits combined are hereditary, then it makes sense that each one individually must also be, and that certainly agrees with modern studies of the genetics of personality traits.

Galton rejects the threshold theory of greatness: the idea that after a certain level success is more determined by luck than abilities.

Every tutor knows how difficult it is to drive abstract conceptions, even of the simplest kind, into the brains of most people — how feeble and hesitating is their mental grasp — how easily their brains are mazed — how incapable they are of precision and soundness of knowledge.  It often occurs to persons familiar with some scientific subject to hear men and women of mediocre gifts relate to one another what they have picked up about it from some lecture — say at the Royal Institution, where they have sat for an hour listening with delighted attention to an admirably lucid account, illustrated by experiments of the most perfect and beautiful character, in all of which they expressed themselves intensely gratified and highly instructed.  It is positively painful to hear what they say.  Their recollections seem to be a mere chaos of mist and misapprehension, to which some sort of shape and organization has been given by the action of their own pure fancy, altogether alien to what the lecturer intended to convey.   The average mental grasp even of what is called a well-educated audience, will be found to be ludicrously small when rigorously tested.

A college-educated person may consider a high school graduate simple, while a prominent physician wouldn’t be able to see the difference between the two.  Arthur Jensen wrote in his introduction to a collection of Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley’s articles and speeches that he was often intimidated by Shockley’s intelligence.  Jensen himself was a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and is considered a genius in his own right.  The difference between a remarkable intellect in the social sciences and one in the hard sciences is apparently large enough to be noticed by men at either level.

The Relatives of Eminent Men

Galton has separate chapters as follows: The Judges of England Between 1660 and 1865, Statesmen, Commanders, Literary Men, Men of Science, Poets, Musicians, Painters, Diviners, Senior Classics of Cambridge [i.e., classics scholars], Oarsmen, and Wrestlers of the North Country.  The list of eminent men in each category is taken from ones put together for different purposes in order not to bias the results.

Judges seems a strange category for eminence to us, but in the late nineteenth century they were much rarer than they are today.  Putting some limitations on the inquiry, there were only 286 judges between the Reformation and 1865.  Of them, 109 had eminent relations.  These 109 fit into 85 different families.  Relations were counted from the most eminent judge of the family if more than one of its eminent men qualified.

The same was done for every other category.  The larger the degree of separation from an eminent judge, the less likely a relative is to be eminent himself.  In the 85 gifted families, there are 22 fathers worthy of note, 13 grandfathers and 2 great-grandfathers.  This is despite the fact that a man has only one of the first, but two of the second and four of the third.

The results are similar for each group of men looked at. Each chapter has an appendix that lists the men with talented families and gives a short biography of each along with a list of the eminent relations, each one receiving a biography for his or herself as well.  This makes Hereditary Genius valuable not only for its scientific and historical worth, but also as a reference book.

The English poet John Milton had a talented musician for a father and a judge for a brother.  It is recorded that there were eight generations of musical genius in J.S. Bach’s family spanning 250 years.    They are credited with producing 20 eminent musicians.

Similarly, Mozart’s father was a famous violinist.  The composer himself had only two children who survived to adulthood, and both were known for their musical gifts.  Philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s brother is described in the book as a “mechanical genius” and his nephew was a distinguished botanist.  Six relations of historian Henry Hallam are listed as eminent: his father, his mother, an uncle, two sons and a daughter.

Anybody with the least bit of historical curiosity will find great enjoyment going through the appendixes and looking up the names on Wikipedia.  This work is a wonderful tribute to what European man is capable of.  The author informs us that he wanted to investigate information on heredity from China.  The top academic honor each year in that country was called the “Chuan-Yuan,” described as “of some 400 millions — the senior classic and senior wrangler rolled into one.” (The senior wrangler being the highest scoring Cambridge student on a mathematics exam for the year and the senior classic being its equivalent in the area of classics.) A friend promised Galton that he would investigate whether Chuan-Yuans were ever related to one another but couldn’t get the results to him by the time Genius was published.  However, the author did discover the story of a woman whose two different sons by separate husbands both became Chuan-Yuans.

Galton on Race and Eugenics

Like most hereditarians, Galton took it for granted that the races were not equal.  As a matter of fact, he was led to thinking about families by his investigations into racial differences.  While some might think that observed differences can be explained by the fact that groups differ in access to education, Galton points out that European travelers never reported being intimidated by the mental capabilities of African chiefs, who must’ve gained their positions through political means. The author himself traveled extensively, and while in Africa “the mistakes the Negroes made in their own matters were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species.”

He estimated that the Black classes of E and F correspond to the Anglo-Saxon C and D.  Amazingly, writing almost half a century before IQ tests were invented, Galton wasn’t that far off.  If the White average IQ is 100 with a standard deviation of 15, then one in 16 is around the 94th percentile.  That’s an IQ of about 123.  Blacks in America have an average IQ of about 85 with the same SD.  After we factor out the 25% White blood (which must’ve been good quality, since only a minority of Whites ever owned slaves) we can estimate an IQ of 78 for pure Blacks. That number is about midway between the Black American and Black African averages so is as good an estimation as any.  I give Blacks in Africa some points for illiteracy and subtract some from those in America for the White (genetic and cultural) influence.  Class E is one in 413, which is about a 120 IQ for a population with a 78 mean and 15 point SD.  Once again, that’s the approximate IQ of about one in 16 Whites, or class C.

Galton also estimated that Australian Aboriginals were one level below Blacks.  IQ tests have also confirmed that estimate to be pretty accurate.

The author uses racial differences to illustrate how far eugenics can take us.  “There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest Negro races.”

Nietzsche was even more ambitious when he echoed Galton fifteen years later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “What is the ape to man?  A laughingstock or painful embarrassment.  And man shall be just that to the overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment.”

Galton believed that such a super race once existed.  They were the residents of Attica between 530 and 430 B.C.  Over a hundred years, 135,000 free males lived in the city.  Only 45,000, or one third, survived to 50.  There should’ve only been zero or one men at the level of the modern European G, (one in 79,000) but Galton counts four: Pericles, Socrates, Plato and Phidias (and that doesn’t include Aristotle who lived a bit later and may well have been the smartest person ever).  He estimates that the residents of Athens of that time were two grades above the modern European or “about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro.”

Galton tells us that if we need convincing of that remarkable estimation we could look at the popular art and literature of the time compared to the books being sold at English train stations in the late 19th century.  As Richard Lynn pointed out in Eugenics, one would hate to speculate on what he’d say about today’s pop culture.  After a century and a half of a population explosion without taking care of the quality of our gene pool, perhaps it would be “I told you so.”

What caused European man to degenerate?  The success of the ancient world brought in less intelligent immigrants.  Then the Catholic Church came along and made some of the brightest men and women take vows of celibacy.  Intelligent men who weren’t priests often became heretics and ran afoul of the various Inquisitions that were set up to ensure religious orthodoxy.

Galton could have mentioned the Thirty Years’ War which wiped out 15–30% of the population of Germany.  Those percentages dwarf even the victims of communism in the 20th century.

One could speculate that militant Christianity created a European who has held on to his intelligence to some extent but has lost the ability to think outside the box of what’s socially acceptable.  And if he thinks bad thoughts, he certainly doesn’t express them.

This goes a long way towards explaining the multitude of high IQ Whites who buy into egalitarianism.  When one looks at the simple Christian or PC believer compared to what we imagine the Ancient Greeks were, it’s easy to believe that there’s been deterioration in the gene pool.  I for one can’t imagine Epicurus burning his enemies at the stake.  Hopefully one day we’ll have a breed of Europeans that feels as distant to a Grand Inquisitor or Human Rights Commission bureaucrat as we do to the Ancients.

Galton recommends that a nation attempting to improve its stock take in desirable immigrants.  He points to the positive contributions the Huguenots made to England after they were chased out of France and to the unfortunate existence of the then 8 million Blacks in the US as an example of what can happen when the stock of a nation isn’t considered while making policy.  Marriage should be held in high esteem and people should carefully select their partners for desirable traits.  More detailed recommendations would have to wait until Galton’s later books and articles.

However, here he rejects the concerns of Thomas Robert Malthus about overpopulation. Only an intelligent race would heed such a warning and eventually lose out to those that didn’t. This is quite possibly what happened as a result of books like Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968): The only people to take its warning of overpopulation seriously were intelligent White people.

While the methods used were necessarily crude, Hereditary Genius is an amazing piece of work.  In the same way that Darwin made discoveries that simply needed to wait for empirical proof, Galton’s ideas on heredity and race have stood the test of time.  He was writing not only before The Bell Curve, but even before Mendel’s findings became known.

Later in his life, Galton would invent many of the tools that proved him right.  He is considered the founder of psychometrics and discovered the concepts of correlation, the standard deviation, and regression to the mean — all of which would come to be widely applied to concepts having nothing to do with the distribution of intelligence.

Interestingly enough, Charles Darwin appears in Hereditary Genius, but not as the most impressive man in his family.  That honor belongs to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, “physician, physiologist, and poet.”  Conspicuously missing from his eminent relations is another one of Erasmus’ grandchildren, Sir Francis Galton.  After the members of the Darwin family are listed, the author writes “I could add the names of others of the family, who in a lesser but yet decided degree, have shown a taste for subjects of natural history.”

The author is much too humble.  The social sciences, criminology, meteorology, statistics and a handful of other fields owe much to Galton.  On the most important issue, however, we have yet to listen.

End the Fed

How many politicians are capable of writing a book, nay, a paragraph that would be worth reading? Watching them on TV, they seem the most spineless, uninteresting group of people imaginable. It seems obvious why. In the same way diversity leads to a culture that appeals to the lowest common denominator, a popularity contest involving the general population favors the smallest men imaginable.

An exception is Ron Paul, a man who lives a life of ideas and action, as the Founding Fathers did. The congressman has spent a lifetime as a champion of liberty and his greatest enemy is the Federal Reserve. Fresh off his 2008 presidential campaign he wrote End the Fed.

Our Government the Thief

According to Paul, the best case against the Fed is simply that it’s immoral. When government prints a new dollar, the value of each one in circulation goes down. The government shouldn’t be allowed to print money for the same reason you or I aren’t allowed to counterfeit.

If that’s not enough for you, there is the constitutional argument. The Tenth Amendment to the Unites States Constitution says that whatever powers not explicitly granted to the Federal Government are left to the people or the states. There is nothing in the Constitution about centralized banking. And the states aren’t allowed to declare whatever they want as money either. Article 1, Section 10: “No state shall . . . make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” The economic argument that centralized banking is needed to deal with the boom and bust cycle is like a tobacco company saying that their goal is to fight lung cancer. It’s the Fed which mandates artificially low interest rates and creates imagined wealth in the first place, leading to the bust phase. Unfortunately, Paul doesn’t explain this clearly enough and I think he may expect too much from the casual reader. The author proceeds as if it’s common knowledge what the Fed is and what it does, or even how money works. Had I not read Murray Rothbard’s The Case Against the Fed and What Has Government Done to Our Money? Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar I would’ve been lost. Both books along with those of others by Mises Institute scholars are recommended under suggested reading.

Paul points out that he’s not obsessed with his gold; he’s happy to let the market decide what commodity to use as a medium of exchange. Let the government get out of the business completely. Gold, from Ancient Egypt to the twentieth century, has emerged as the preferred commodity due to its durability, intrinsic value, difficulty to counterfeit, and divisibility.

The state has long understood how its power is threatened by gold. Paul recalls him and his aide Lew Rockwell in 1980 meeting Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker for breakfast. When Volcker arrived, before acknowledging his two eating companions, he turned to his aide and asked, “What’s the price of gold?” The higher it is, the less faith there is in the currency system. It’s no wonder that Roosevelt confiscated all gold in 1933-1934 and the government for the next few decades would try to fix the price of the metal. Nixon in 1971 took the US completely off the gold standard. The commodity once again became legal to own in bullion form only later that decade thanks in large part to the Paul’s efforts in congress. When government isn’t being evil, it’s incompetent. A congressman on a committee dealing with financial matters once asked Paul whether the dollar was still backed up by gold.

Ronald Reagan once told the author, “Ron, no great nation that abandoned the gold standard has remained a great nation.” Gee, if only he was in a position to do something about it! More maddening is the case of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006). Paul remembers reading a 1966 article by him in Ayn Rand’s newsletter The Objectivist called “Gold and Economic Freedom.” Greenspan wrote,

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold…

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.

In 2004 Paul brought the article to Greenspan before a scheduled meeting and asked him to sign it. Paul asked whether Greenspan would like to put a disclaimer on it. “Astoundingly, he answered that he had just recently reread it and wouldn’t change a word of it.” Paul struggles to reconcile this with Greenspan’s tenure as head of the Federal Reserve. He concludes that the chairman was operating under the philosophy of pragmatism, detested by Greenspan’s old idol Ayn Rand. The author provides long transcripts of exchanges he had both with Greenspan and current Chariman Bernard Bernanke. The two men assured the congressman that the financial system was sound as Paul warned that our wealth was artificial and the day of reckoning would come.

The Federal Reserve and the Warfare State

The ability to print money gives the government unlimited power. If you tax the people too much they rebel. But if you declare your paper to be the only thing used as legal tender and allow yourself to print as much of it as you want, there’s no limit to what you can do. The effects of inflation are as real as any tax. It’s just that the people are slower to notice and connect their lower living standards to the actions of the government. The scariest power that the Federal Reserve gives government is that to wage war.

Under a regime of sound money government would have to pay for war, or anything else it did, by taxation. Since war is costly, heads of state tried to avoid it. If war did start, governments would try to settle as quickly as possible. With the ability to print money, the state could finance ambitious projects and scapegoat others when it wrecked the economy. As Paul puts it, “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”

The US Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 and allowed America to enter World War I four years later. It has been estimated that only 21 percent of the war effort was funded through taxation. 56 percent of the spending came from Fed-backed borrowing and 23 percent of the money was created out of thin air. Without centralized banking there would’ve been no World War I, Treaty of Versailles, Russian Revolution, Nazism, or World War II.

Lew Rockwell explained that centralized banking funded Russia’s efforts in the First World War. It “turned a relatively benign monarchy into a war machine. A country that had long been integrated into the worldwide division of labor and was under a gold standard became a killing machine.” The inflation led to massive unrest and eventually, Communism.

Today, the Federal Reserve funds the American empire as it has the wars in Iraq, Haiti, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Serbia, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and bases on every continent but Antarctica. If the American people had to make the connection between the taxes they pay and bases in Kazakhstan or women’s rights workshops in Iraq the beast may be reigned in. This principle not only applies to wars, but everything else that the government spends its money on.

The Current Mess

Paul does not shy away from blaming affirmative action lending and the Community Reinvestment Act for the problems we face. Yet the easy borrowing standards problem is simply a subset of a larger one: a government with unlimited power to inconspicuously steal from the citizen so it can spend on everything from a human rights empire to wasteful education programs for the hopeless.

Without sound money, there is no protection of wealth and thus no freedom. The things that the bureaucrats can get away with are directly linked to there being no check on the state’s power. Ending the Fed should be the goal of anybody interested in restoring American freedom and prosperity. I would’ve never believed that a cause so obscured by the media and requiring some knowledge of economics to understand could gain popular support. But Paul recounts a telling experience he had at the University of Michigan while giving a campaign speech.

. . . it was a very friendly crowd, applauding my comments on government spending and on wars and on foreign policy. But when I mentioned monetary policy, the kids started cheering. Then a small group chanted, “End the Fed! End the Fed!” The whole crowd took up the call. Many held up burning dollar bills, as if to say to the central bank, you have done enough damage to the American people, our future, and to the world: your time is up.

People don’t understand monetary policy and therefore distrust those that make it. This is a healthy instinct and the public should be made to understand that their suspicion of the powerful is justified.

Ron Paul strikes me as a man almost too honest and sincere for this world, or at least this era. The fact that he can have influence says that there is still something good about our system and society. Whether he’s simply the relic of an old civilization in its last throes or the leader of a true revolution remains to be seen.

From HBD Books, October 15, 2009

Frederick Douglass, Republican hero

The Republican party recently came out with a new website. The whole thing, like everything else in this country, pays homage to the God of diversity.  And being an official conservative site, it of course takes the whole thing to a sickening level.  Take a look at the first page of the “Heroes” section.  There’s Ronald Reagan, Susan B. Anthony, a white judge who opposed segregation, a Hispanic and eight Blacks.

The forums were slow and reflected the fact that the site was new.  Interestingly, they’re not moderated.  I took the opportunity to post a link to Jared Taylor’s book excerpt from TakiMag on NAM academic failure.  Needless to say it was deleted, but it at least lasted a good six hours and generated some discussion.  The Republicans haven’t banned my account like Free Republic did, so I will be back soon.

The forums seem structured to avoid talking about anything having to do with race.  The topics are Health Care, Economy, National Defense, Education, Energy, and Courts.  Conspicuously absent are immigration, affirmative action, the homosexual agenda, and abortion.  Still, undoubtedly there are ways to steer discussions towards race.  The most obvious is using Education to talk about racial differences in achievement and then go into IQ, the way I did.  In Economy one can talk about affirmative action lending and our economic future with a less capable population.  There isn’t an issue that can’t be framed in a racial context.

The question is whether we should bother talking to people who go to an official Republican site.  A commentator at my blog doesn’t think so. Admittedly, they do seem pretty hopeless.  Here’s what one writes in a post entitled “African American Heroes.”

It’s great to see so many famous and heroic African Americans in the GOP of yesterday and today.  Now lets all work together and get more African Americans voting!!!  I applaud you all for this website and the focus on black GOP heroes.

Lets support a drive to register the African American votes, especially in the deep Southern states — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, North Carolina!

Why yes, getting out the vote of a group that votes 95 percent against you.  A sure path to victory!  Nobody even points out how absurd this is, or even gives any indication that they have any idea how blacks vote.  A poster responding says that the GOP should stop lionizing Lincoln, not because he killed off a generation of America’s best, but because he was a “white supremacist.”

Despite all that, a pro-white movement needs to start somewhere.  The radical leftists operated outside and within the establishment.  The fact that the homosexualists formed a block within the Democratic Party wasn’t hurt by the existence of queer studies departments and more extreme degenerates.  Ideally, I’d like to see a pro-white movement that stuck to its principles but went out there and tried to find a place in the mainstream Right.  TOQ could exist in its present form while some went and out and debated on mainstream conservative forums.  Dreaming about grand revolutions is fun, but we need not take the Right over.  Blacks get everything they want from the Democrats and live peacefully with the homosexuals in their coalition whom they are antagonistic towards.  We may have to do the same with religious fundamentalists or others.

I believe that the average white person who calls himself conservative, if not one who gains power, does so because somewhere deep down he knows that what is being done to his people is wrong and resents those who are doing it.  He more often than not stumbles upon FoxNews or GOP.com before American Renaissance.  If we’re not going to talk to people like this, who is our audience?

If the GOP website became flooded with White Nationalists, it would either be taken over by them, the forum would be censored or the whole thing would be done away with completely.  The first possibility is the best case scenario and would draw media attention but is also the least likely.  Censorship would destroy morale among those who run the site and may be impractical if the board gets enough members.  If the forums have to be shut down, we may have Keith Olbermann in a few nights foaming at the mouth about how the racist Republicans can’t run a simple website without “Neo-Nazis” taking over.  It would be a symbolic victory and show that we can’t be ignored.  A model should be Ron Paul’s movement, which has gained a following thanks to his energized followers who seem to hijack everything from town hall meetings to blog comment sections.  At the GOP forums they’ve generated a discussion on the Federal Reserve, an issue that mainstream Republicans won’t touch.  The arguments for white preservation are as convincing and just as any out there.  It’s time we took them to the general public.

A Movement from One Man’s Loins

The background of Westboro Baptist is more interesting than anybody would’ve expected. Church founder Fred Phelps graduated from his Kansas high school at the top of his class at the age of 16. He went on to become an influential civil rights lawyer but was disbarred for reasons that the film never makes clear. (According to a Mother Jones article on Phelps, it was for “allegedly being too abusive to witnesses.”) Westboro Baptist was founded in 1955, but it wasn’t until the early 90s that Phelps started to see acceptance of homosexuality as the thing destroying America.

According to critics, the only members of  Westboro Baptist are Phelps, his descendants, and their spouses. The man had thirteen children. According to Mother Jones, eleven of them have law degrees themselves, and as of 1999 there were 45 grandchildren. Of the original thirteen offspring, all but four are still affiliated with the church. Two agreed to be interviewed for Fall From Grace and accuse their father of child abuse. The pastor’s children who are still loyal to him deny the allegations.

The church’s first political battle took place in 1991. They felt that Gage Park in Topeka had been taken over by “fags” and pestered the city about it. Westboro Baptist started protesting locally anything related to homosexuality, like the funerals of people of suspected of dying of AIDS. Picketing Matthew Shepard’s funeral and harassing his parents in 1998 brought the group national attention. The movie shows a page from WB’s website that says “Matthew Shepard has been in hell for 2631 days” with “Eternity – 2631 days = Eternity” under it. Since then, anything that could focus the media on the group has been seen as a good excuse for a protest. Part of the thinking goes that America is a damned country, so anything that causes her people to die is something to celebrate.

The shrewdest PR move, if notoriety is the goal, has been protesting the funerals of US soldiers. Among the signs held up are “THANK GOD FOR 9/11″ and “THANK GOD FOR IEDS.” In the 1990s, Phelps’s church was attacked with an IED. Since the device is now the number one killer of Americans in Iraq, Westboro members are convinced that the wars in the Middle East are God’s revenge on America.

A Wrathful God

The term “hate group” gets thrown around a lot, but in the case of Westboro Baptist Church the term is accurate, as indicated by signs like “IT’S THE FAGS STUPID,” “FAGS DIE GOD LAUGHS,” and the honest “GOD HATES YOU.” Their theology is a form of Calvinism that holds that man is naturally depraved and only a select few are saved. The church’s FAQ answers the question “Doesn’t the Bible say that God loves everyone?” with a “No,” followed by an explanation. Westboro Baptist’s members feel that they are commanded to tell people they’re wrong, even if doing so is useless, since who is saved and who is damned has already been decided from the beginning of time.

Although I lost my faith long ago, I found myself taking a liking to Pastor Phelps and his church. There is something incredibly inspiring and, well, manly about a God filled with such hatred and wrath. Phelps came across as a real man, especially when contrasted with advocates of the hippie Jesus who were interviewed in opposition to him.

It’s pretty remarkable that nine out of thirteen of the founder’s children stayed with the most hated church in America. You usually can’t count on your kids sharing your political and theological beliefs in this day and age. For example, two of Ronald Regan’s four children became liberal activists. Phelps, whether through beating his kids or merely through the sheer force of his personality (aided, perhaps, by genes predisposed to accept authority), made sure his offspring followed in his footsteps. One daughter had ten kids. (Reagan, for comparison once again, had zero grandchildren.)

Phelps is an alpha at an almost supernatural level, akin to Brigham Young or Mohammed. He didn’t even need to find followers; he made them!

At one point Phelps is asked why he protested at the University of Kansas. He replies “Picketing KU at any time is good. I mean, that’s a hotbed of fag (suppressing a laugh) activity.” You get the impression that the Phelps clan is pissing people off because it’s fun and would do the same if they didn’t believe in God. One interviewee sticks out: a young woman named Sara, a granddaughter of Pastor Phelps. A well-spoken, attractive girl, she has a barely concealed smile when talking about the “fags” taking over.

One thing that’s for sure is that Fred Phelps is evolutionarily successful. White culture expects parents to raise their own children, and those who can’t afford kids are less likely than non-Asian minorities to have them. With a religion that boosts the fertility rate of the upper class, there may be eugenic breeding going on in Middle America. And while the theology of Westboro Baptist may alienate many people, I can’t help but consider revulsion towards American culture, no matter how impolitely expressed, as healthy.

As a hereditarian, I believe that my political beliefs are to a large extent genetically determined. Liberals, who think that everything is shaped by the environment, probably have much better stories about how they came to believe the things that they do. I can’t do that. I never was robbed or beaten up by a black person, nor has a Mexican ever taken one of my jobs. If there were a movie made about my life, some bad experiences with NAMs [non-Asian minorities] would have to be put in there, because a story about a guy coming to his life philosophy through reading books and thinking wouldn’t make for interesting viewing.

What is worth writing about is how my personality has interacted with the world around me. Before ever thinking about politics or race, I spent my early teens wondering about religion. A cousin and some of his friends once tried to convert me to their hellfire and brimstone version of Christianity. They told me that the vast majority of the world is damned and only those “saved” would avoid eternal torture. I found this horrifying, but the biblical arguments made sense. The God I found in the Bible wasn’t the friendly man upstairs we know in popular culture. As a matter of fact, he was quite horrifying. But if the Word was the Truth, I would have to learn to love Big Brother. Luckily, I eventually ran across a book called Atheist Universe and have since been free of the cosmic dictator that only existed in my head.

While becoming an atheist gave me peace of mind, it also permanently separated me from the rest of humanity. Ninety percent or so of Americans believe in God, and many of the rest believe in a “higher power.” For better or worse, I simply lack something that the rest of humanity has.

I’m reminded of this at strange moments. One of the biggest stories of the past few weeks has been that of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard, found safe after being snatched almost twenty years ago. Of course I feel for what the family must have gone through, but much of that sympathy went away when I later read that the girl’s mom had consulted a psychic to try to find her daughter. Anyone who could’ve done such a thing is someone with whom I have trouble feeling a human connection.

I should be humble about my atheism. The smartest man in the world believes in God, and I’m not going to argue with anybody who has an IQ several standard deviations higher than mine. But we can say for certain that all religions and claims of humans having supernatural powers are false.

I didn’t think much about politics. I had the vague notion that I was smart, and since all smart people were liberal that’s what I should be. My only philosophical idea was atheism, and it didn’t escape my notice that those who most strongly believed in God tended to be on the right. (Atheist Universe itself is sprinkled with a couple shots at conservatives and just assumes that anyone smart enough to pick up a book is going to be of the left) I was isolated from the masses, but at least there was a minority of college professors, journalists, and intellectuals who were rational and believed in socialism, racial egalitarianism, feminism, and all the other smart people stuff.

I got my first experience with liberals in the flesh when I went off to college. I took a few years of Arabic. It seemed as if everybody in the classes were either those hoping for careers in the Army or CIA or Islamophiles, including white girls who had converted to Islam and were wearing the hijab. I must’ve met more white converts to Islam in my college days than I did believing Christians.

Interestingly, I saw the same professors and students who foamed at the mouth at the “Christian Fundies” treating these confused coeds like they had made a wise and sober decision. (My Arabic professor, a secular Moroccan, was just as disgusted and baffled with the girls as I was.)

I searched for logical consistencies. What led people to at the same time celebrate homosexuality and a culture that stoned homosexuals to death, all while rallying against “homophobia” in America? Nothing but hatred of whites and Western civilization. Behind all the intellectualization, the millions of words in academic journals, the conferences, the class room
discussions, the thousand page dissertations and media coverage that’s all there was.

It’s really not something that takes a lot of brain power to figure out. Just find a liberal (almost anybody who went to college). Ask him if the Tibetans should be allowed to preserve their culture. Then ask him whether whites should be allowed to. Contrast the reactions. Or tell him a story about Christians opposing birth control. Then a little while later bring up a story about Muslims stoning somebody to death. You can also see it in how liberals downplay black crime while their hearts bleed about separate water fountains fifty years ago.

My disgust with liberals grew and grew at the same time I was discovering sociobiology (no thanks to the four year brainwashing camp that I attended!), and my basic world view was formed. Whatever personality trait I had that caused me to reject religion and isolated me from the masses led me to reject egalitarianism and be disgusted with the elite. I eventually made my peace with the religious believers after I saw what those who didn’t believe in God believed in.

I write because I value the search for truth, classical music, freedom of speech, capitalism, beauty, science, and technological innovation. However simple the common folk are, I understand that these things almost exclusively were either created by or exist within the white race.

I go mad when I see those who’ve contributed nothing to human knowledge or advancement demand their “fair share” of what modern civilization produces. And my conscience is clear if I can do whatever little I can to combat the inverted morality of our present civilization.

A movement needs activists and money more than it needs intellectuals. The science on racial differences is conclusive and the moral case for white nationalism can be made in one paragraph. It wouldn’t be worth writing if I didn’t think that my work provided something valuable not found elsewhere.

Whether I’m changing the world on any large scale is doubtful. I’m inclined towards pessimism when it comes to the human condition, but who knows. If the white race ever feels like asserting its right to exist again, I can at least say that I played a small part.

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

Darwinian evolution is seen as a cold, ruthless struggle for survival that shaped what we eventually became.  But, the critic responds, whence kindness, humor, language, playfulness, art and creativity?  Scientists have tried to explain altruism towards relatives as kin selection and other forms of morality as based on reciprocity, but we all often help people who are not related to us when there’s nothing to be gained.  Geoffrey Miller invokes sexual selection to fill the holes in human nature left unexplained by natural selection.

Reproduction Is as Important as Survival

In The Origin of Species Darwin devoted three pages to sexual selection.  In his second most famous book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex published twelve years later he devoted over 550 out of 900 pages to the idea.  What the scientist understood, and what those who followed him over the next century forgot, was that there were two main forces at work in evolution.  An organism needs to survive and reproduce.  A scrooge that stored up resources and survived just fine but had no interest in socializing with others or finding a mate might as well have died in infancy.  The herd could be culled through natural selection, the inability to survive in the environment, or through sexual selection, the inability to find a mate.  As long as our species is not strictly monogamous, and the vast majority of the time it hasn’t been, choice in romantic matters has helped shape evolution.

Before coming up with the theory, Darwin was confused by how wasteful nature tended to be.  He once told his son Francis that “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”  Why should such a thing evolve?  The peacock’s tail is by no means unique.  Across the animal kingdom, males seem to display ornaments that contribute nothing to or even take away from survival.  Some, like the male peacock’s tale, are connected to the body while others are an extended phenotype, something an animal creates.  During mating season, male bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea spend almost every waking hour building elaborate nests.

Males of most species (of bowerbirds) decorate their bowers with mosses, ferns, orchids, snail shells, berries and bark.  They fly around searching for the most brilliantly colored natural objects, bring them back to their bowers, and arrange them in careful clusters of uniform color.  When the orchids and berries lose their color, the males replace them with fresh material.  Males often try to steal ornaments, especially blue feathers, from the bowers of other males.  They also try to destroy the bowers of rivals.  The strength to defend their delicate work is a precondition of their artistry.  Females appear to favor bowers that are sturdy, symmetrical, and well-ornamented with color.

The genetic ability to grow elaborate physical characteristics or drive to create art are usually found in the sex that competes for mates, i.e., males.  Miller hypothesizes that the human brain itself evolved to impress potential partners.  Not only did it help to deal with practical problems of survival, but a good sense of humor and the ability to make interesting conversation were themselves fitness indicators.  The brain, like the peacock’s tale, couldn’t grow and function properly in a diseased organism.  Thus, a healthy and complicated organ shows that an animal is relatively free of harmful mutations.

So why aren’t males significantly more intelligent than females?  Usually when a trait is sexually selected, in this case intelligence, nature ends up with a huge gender gap.  Part of the answer is that women needed to be able to detect mental fitness in males.  A woman would need to be intelligent enough to know when a male was using big words correctly or making logically consistent arguments.  Miller writes:

According to the widely used WAIS-R intelligence test, for example, English-speaking adult with an IQ of 80 typically know the words “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal,” but not the words “sentence,” “consume,” or “commerce.”  IQ 90 speakers typically know “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce,” but not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.”  If you are flirting with someone, and they say they would like to “consume” your body in a passionate embrace, but they do not understand when you say you are “reluctant,” you can probably infer they have an IQ between 80 and 90.  We make these sorts of inferences quite automatically and unconsciously, of course.

Where we do see large gender differences is in ambition.  While women have evolved to appreciate art, in all cultures it’s men who mostly create it.

Another check that has kept men from becoming too much smarter than women has been monogamy.  The more polygamy there is in a species, the greater the gender dimorphism (sex differences).  In the polygamous gorillas for example, males are twice as heavy as females.  Humans are moderately dimorphic.  While men are less picky than women about their flings, when it comes to long term commitment the sexes are equally choosy.    Since males were to a certain extent selecting females too, the latter’s mind also evolved to be a fitness indicator.

Taking sexual selection into account explains all other kinds of seemingly inexplicable phenomena.  The average English speaker knows 60,000 words, but only 4,000 account for 98% of all conversation.  Basic English was created in the 1920s with only 850 words and is sufficient to express everything we can in natural English (albeit less efficiently).  So why do we know so many words?  So that friends and mates may be impressed when we use “azure” instead of blue.  As an African-American subject told a linguist,

Yo’ rap is your thing . . . like your personality.  Like you kin style on some dude by rappin’ better ‘n he do.   Show ‘im up.  Outdo him conversation-wise.  Or you can rap to a young lady, you tryin’ to impress her, catch her action-you know-get wid her sex-wise.

Language may have evolved to its complexity as a fitness indicator.  Prepubescent boys communicate just fine in grunts for all practical purposes.  Once language evolved, those who were more intelligent would’ve had more interesting things to say and introspection would’ve been selected for.

Ideals and Morality

Miller believes that, like art, the things we develop called morality, political philosophy, ideals and religion evolved through sexual selection.  As he points out, 99.9% of animal communication has nothing to do with truth content.  Among the few counterexamples are some chimp calls, bee dances, and (sometimes) human language.  Most communication exists solely to indicate fitness, like a frog’s mating call or the bowerbird’s nest.

Communicating truth can sometimes give us an advantage in terms of survival, but not in the competition for sexual success.  Imagine two cavemen getting into an argument about the purpose of the universe.

The hominid names Carl proposes: “We are mortal, fallible primates who survive on this fickly savanna only because we cluster in jealousy-ridden groups.  Everywhere we have ever traveled is just a tiny, random corner of a vast continent on an unimaginably huge sphere spinning in a vacuum.  The sphere has traveled billions and billions of times around a flaming ball of gas, which will eventually blow up to incinerate our empty, fossilized skulls.  I have discovered several compelling lines of evidence in support of these hypotheses . . .”

The hominid named Candide interrupts: “No, I believe we are immortal spirits gifted with these beautiful bodies because the great god Wug chose us as his favorite creatures.  Wug blessed us with this fertile paradise . . . Above the azure dome of the sky the smiling sun warms our hearts.  After we grow old . . . Wug will lift us from our bodies to join our friends to eat roasted gazelle and dance eternally.  I know these things because Wug picked me to receive this special wisdom in a dream last night.”

Which ideology do you suppose would prove more sexually attractive?

Muhammad and Brigham Young left behind more descendants than any scientist ever did.  We are a species that evolved to care about status, not truth.

People generally do things perceived as moral so people will have a positive opinion of them.  Not only is kindness attractive in a mate, but we can see how the evolution of ethics has worked by invoking the handicap principle.  In addition to the peacock’s tail being visually appealing, it makes surviving more difficult.  The male bird is saying “Not only does this nice tail show that I am mutation free, but I’ve been able to avoid predators will carrying this ridiculous thing around.”

The Israeli biologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi in their book The Handicap Principle talk about a group of birds known as the Arabian babblers.  This species engages in competition to see who can be the most altruistic.  Dominant babblers won’t allow subordinate ones to take the risk of making the alarm call when a predator approaches.  The birds will try to shove food down the throats of non-relatives.  The Zahavis argue that the birds show their fitness by handicapping themselves.  Whether the disadvantage that the animal is trying to prove its fitness with is a physical appendage or an act, the principle is the same.

Excessive altruism in humans can work like this.  “I am so fit that I can afford to give millions to charity (or not worry about affirmative action helping those poor blacks, or whatever) and do it gladly.”   Ted Turner revealed that when he donated a billion dollars to the UN his wife Jane Fonda broke down and cried.  Aid organizations know that they can set off an arms race for donations by attracting a few rich donors.  Next time you see Angelina Jolie with her multiracial brood, you’ll understand why.

Those of us who rally against PC understand the frivolity of the beliefs of most people.  As Miller puts, it:

When individuals espouse ideological positions, we typically interpret their beliefs as signs of good or bad moral character. . . . Political correctness is one outcome of such attributions.  For example, if a scientist says, “I have evidence that human intelligence is genetically heritable,” that is usually misinterpreted as proclaiming, “I am a disagreeable psychopath unworthy of love.”  The arbiters of ideological correctness can create the impression that belief A must indicate personality trait X.  If X is considered sexually and socially repulsive, then belief A becomes taboo.  In this way our sexually selected instincts for moralistic self-advertisement become subverted into ideological dogmas.

He then adds that “I think that human rationality consists largely of separating intellectual arguments from personality attributions about moral character.”  Miller must understand that he’s a Darwinian rarity.

Sexual selection doesn’t care if what it favors is a good long term strategy.  The Irish elk evolved antlers so big that other functions of life, such as maybe reproduction, became impossible.  Any human population that adopts a maladaptive morality will move in a similar direction.

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature

The Mating Mind presents a much more colorful and interesting picture of evolution than what we’re used.  Our appreciation of music, art and oratory are just as natural and purposeful as our enjoyment of food and sex.  Miller hopes that Darwinism and evolutionary psychology will replace Freudianism, Marxism, and culturalism as the center of the humanities.  Truth will always remain as intellectual fads come and go.  If and when it does triumph in the human science, Geoffrey Miller’s theory of brain evolution may very well be a central part of the explanation of who we are.

When a set of beliefs becomes a society’s accepted morality, portrayals of good and evil often take stock forms. I’m younger than the majority of people who will read this, but even I am shocked with how much multiculturalism has replaced the old Ten Commandments morality as the basis of what it’s necessary to believe to be a civilized human. Anti-racism has largely filled the moral vacuum created by secularism and denationalization. Even American “patriots” have adopted a “more multi-cultural than thou” attitude to justifying their allegiances to the nation and traditional symbols like the flag. (just read any George Bush speech defending his Middle East policy).

Today, youths get their values from TV and movies. The reach of the American media truly is global. Tomislav Sunic writes in Homo americanus that “the belated version of Homo americanus appears often unnerving to American visitors in Europe in search of an elusive ‘true’ Frenchman, German, or a Dutchman.” Recently while in Russia I became one of those Americans unnerved. I went to the theater hoping to get a sample of Russian cinema. All the movies playing were dubbed American films.

When non-Americans do produce their own movies, too often the themes they take come straight from the discourse of American race relations. The crimes and poverty of an oppressed minority are blamed on an indifferent or even malevolent majority. . . . Read the whole article.

If there’s a connection between opposing the federal reserve and believing in human biodiversity, it lies in the fact that people who question the conventional wisdom on one topic are more likely than the average thinker to do so on another. Finding out whether the partisans of hard currency are kooks or brave truth-tellers requires looking at their arguments.

Near the end of Murray Rothbard’s life he wrote The Case Against the Fed. His position was that government can not create wealth, it can only redistribute or steal. Also, the creation of the Fed was born from an unholy alliance between bankers and the state. Before explaining what the federal reserve does and going into its history I must explain some things about money.

Economics isn’t my specialty and so the discussion isn’t as thorough as it could be. Much is simplified or left out. Those unsure of something or interested can read Rothbard’s book for free here.

A Short History of Money

Man first began by trading. Somebody would get a fish and give it to a fellow tribesman for a spear. Unfortunately, this was very inefficient. Say Jones has a television but needs a hat, a pet goldfish and some eggs of equal value. The odds of finding another person with a hat, goldfish and eggs that will trade them for a TV is very unlikely. But let’s say that there is a divisible and almost universally desired commodity. In our example, it can be butter. Jones can trade his TV for a certain amount of butter, divide it up how he wishes and trade it to the egg vendor, hat dealer and pet store for what he needs. Some people may very well not have any use for butter themselves, but they will accept it knowing that they can trade it in the future to other producers who themselves will also realize the desirability of having the commodity. There is then a snowball effect, and butter becomes the generally accepted medium of exchange, or money.

Money doesn’t come into existence through government fiat or any kind of central planning. Different commodities have been used throughout history including sugar, salt, beaver skins, and tobacco in the Caribbean, West Africa, Canada and colonial Virginia and Maryland respectively. In German WWII POW camps cigarettes were used as money and traded for CARE packages.

Throughout history, gold and silver have usually emerged as the preferred mediums. They are easily divisible, difficult to counterfeit and have value in and of themselves. Now Jones can sell his TV for 20 gold coins, spend 5 on eggs, 5 on a hat and save the other 10.

The next part of the organic process is the emergence of warehouses to store money. Carrying your gold everywhere is very inconvenient. So Jones takes the 500 oz. of gold he’s saved up and puts it into a warehouse, paying the owner a storage fee. The warehouse gives him a receipt with which he can claim his money. Now if the business is reputable the receipt can function as money. If Jones wants to buy a cow for 100 oz., he doesn’t have to go back to his warehouse to get the payment; he can just give the receipt for the 100 oz. to Smith who can then either claim the gold himself or use the paper in a future transaction.

That’s all fine and good. To see where things go wrong, say that I open up the Hoste Money Storage Facility (the examples used come from Rothbard’s book but with the names and goods changed). So far I’m storing 1,000 oz. in gold and have receipts out in circulation for exactly that amount. But I then realize something. Almost nobody is ever actually coming in to claim their gold. People are happy passing around my notes. There’s nothing stopping me from printing another 1,000 oz. worth of receipts. I can’t go spend it on mansions and yachts or people may get suspicious. Instead I lend my receipts out and profit off the interest. This is called fractional reserve banking. Rothbard believed that it should be treated as fraud

Now I have 1,000 oz. of gold in my warehouse but receipts in circulation for 2,000 oz. If my receipts are the only things used as money in circulation the price of all goods will double. By printing receipts backed up by nothing for 1,000 oz. of gold I didn’t increase the amount of goods or services in the world. The end result is that there is simply twice as much money chasing the same amount of things. So a poor sap whose life savings totaled 20 oz. of gold has seen the value of it halved (if he has it in Hoste Money Storage Facility receipt form. If he kept in gold, or redeemed his HMSF receipt for the 20 oz. his savings would have the same value).

In addition to being equivalent to counterfeiting and thus stealing, this is a very unstable system. If people start to suspect that Hoste is a fraud and can’t really redeem all his receipts there will be a run on my warehouse/bank. After all my gold is gone, anybody still holding the worthless paper I printed is out of luck.

Why wasn’t fractional reserve banking outlawed from the start? After all, if you put a chair in my warehouse I can’t legally give you one that is different but just as good when you come to claim it. Nor can I print tickets for chairs or televisions which I don’t have. To make a long story short, the money changers have always had better lobbyists than regular warehouse owners.

Enter the Central Bank

The bankers have another problem. In our example thus far there has only been one bank in existence. In the real world there will be many who compete. Imagine Jones is a client at HMSF and trades one of his notes to Smith, a customer at Bayside Banking. The latter will immediately come to HMSF to get his gold. And whenever Jones gets a Bayside note, he’ll do the same. The last thing that bankers want is people to actually redeem the notes that they print. The less customers do that, the better. Banks may agree to take each other’s notes for the convenience of all involved. But say Hoste is printing money faster than anybody else. It may seem to be in my interest to do so, but other banks may start demanding redemption for my notes in gold and I would go under. Although it would be in the interest of all banks to work together expanding at the same rate, there will always be cheaters. But say there was a force that compelled everybody in the industry to synchronize their expansions. As Rothbard explains,

In a free market, as we remember, if a Rothbard Bank expanded notes or deposits by itself, these warehouse receipts would quickly fall into the hands of clients of other banks, and these people or their banks would demand redemption of Rothbard warehouse receipts in gold. And since the whole point of fractional-reserve banking is not to have sufficient money to redeem the receipts, the Rothbard Bank would quickly go under. But if a Central Bank enjoys the monopoly of bank notes, and the commercial banks all pyramid expansion of their demand deposits on top of their “reserves,” or checking accounts at the Central Bank, then all the Bank need do to assure successful cartelization is to expand proportionately throughout the country, so that all competing banks increase their reserves, and can expand together at the same rate. Then, if the Rothbard Bank, for example, prints warehouse receipts far beyond, say triple, its reserves in deposits at the Central Bank, it will not, on net, lose reserves if all the competing banks are expanding their credit at the same rate. In this way, the Central Bank acts as an effective cartelizing agent.

That’s where the banking interest in a Central Bank comes from. How about the state? While bakers, farmers, fishermen, bar owners, barbers, and prostitutes make their living by providing people with goods and services they desire, government only exists by taking from the productive in the form of taxes. But people tend to resist taxation (at least they did until the 20th century). How is the government to raise funds for its parasitic existence?

It has done so by giving itself a monopoly on printing money. When government creates its notes out of thin air the effects aren’t as noticeable as taxation. Unfortunately for the citizen, they’re just as real. This increase in prices that results from government printing money is what’s known as inflation. It makes a fool out of anybody who saves their earnings.

The malign impact of the fed isn’t felt equally throughout society. When government prints money, the people and firms it buys from get the cash before prices rise. After all, it takes time for the money to circulate and the inflationary effects to be felt. The next to benefit are the next people to get the new money, and so on, all to the detriment to the rest of the world. In contrast, under a gold standard a dollar is worth say, 1/100th an ounce of gold (the exact amount doesn’t matter and would be decided by supply and demand: both of paper bills and gold itself. Even an arbitrary price of gold could serve as the basis for a gold standard, although that would be a less purely laissez-faire system). The exact amount isn’t important so long as no one is allowed to legally counterfeit. With hard currency the supply of money is stable (the gold presently being mined is small compared to the stock of the metal in existence) and as long as business efficiency increases the cost of living actually decreases. We are so used to rising prices (a dollar is worth less today than it was 50 or even 5 years ago) that this seems hard to believe. But there is nothing inevitable about inflation.

Rothbard spends a lot of time talking about how the Central Bank came to be. Populist politicians long and hard struggled against it. Debates about central banking were central to American politics for most of the Republic’s history.

Throughout the first century of the Republic, the party favoring a Central Bank, first the Hamiltonian High Federalists, then the Whigs and then the Republicans, was the party of Big Central Government, of a large public debt, of high protective tariffs, of large-scale public works, and of subsidies to large businesses in that early version of “partnership between government and industry.’ Protective tariffs were to subsidize domestic manufactures, while paper money, fractional reserve banking, and Central Banking were all advocated by the nationalists as part of a comprehensive policy of inflation and cheap credit in order to benefit favored businesses. These favorites were firms and industries that were part of the financial elite, centered from the beginning through the Civil War in Philadelphia and New York, with New York assuming first place after the end of that war.

Ranged against this powerful group of nationalists was an equally powerful movement dedicated to laissez-faire, free markets, free trade, ultra-minimal and decentralized government, and, in the monetary sphere, a hard-money system based squarely on gold and silver, with banks shorn of all special privileges and hopefully confined to 100-percent specie banking. These hard-money libertarians made up the heart and soul of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican and then the Jacksonian Democratic party, and their potential constituents permeated every occupation except those of banker and the banker’s favored elite clientele.

By the first few decades of the 20th century, however, both parties were firmly in the hands of the bankers. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913. The Senator who pushed hardest for the bill was the son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller. The Bank’s board was stacked with Morgan and Rockefeller cronies.

The US was the last country in the world to adopt centralized banking. Unfortunately, the Bank came just in time to get the country into WWI. If the government could only raise funds for the war by taxation the US would likely have never gotten involved. In addition, some American bankers loaned money to England and France and had an interest in their eventual victory.

As soon as war broke out in Europe, Henry P. Davison sailed to England, and was quickly able to use long-standing close Morgan ties with England to get the House of Morgan named as sole purchasing agent in the United States, for the duration of the war, for war material for Britain and France. Furthermore, the Morgans also became the sole underwriter for all the British and French bonds to be floated in the U.S. to pay for the immense imports of arms and other goods from the United States. J. P. Morgan and Company now had an enormous stake in the victory of Britain and France, and the Morgans played a major and perhaps decisive role in maneuvering thesupposedly “neutral” United States into the war on the British side.

The rush to join WWII was more of the same. FDR would shift the the balance of power from New York to Washington and take the country off the gold standard.

The other major monetary change accomplished by the New Deal, of course, and done under cover of a depression “emergency” in the fractional reserve banking system, was to go off the gold standard. After 1933, Federal Reserve Notes and deposits were no longer redeemable in gold coins to Americans; and after 1971, the dollar was no longer redeemable in gold bullion to foreign governments and central banks. The gold of Americans was confiscated and exchanged for Federal Reserve Notes, which became legal tender; and Americans were stuck in a regime of fiat paper issued by the government and the Federal Reserve.

Over the years, all early restraints on Fed activities or its issuing of credit have been lifted; indeed, since 1980, the Federal Reserve has enjoyed the absolute power to do literally anything it wants: to buy not only U.S. government securities but any asset whatever, and to buy as many assets and to inflate credit as much as it pleases. There are no restraints left on the Federal Reserve. The Fed is the master of all it surveys.

The Money Interests

Rothbard warns us against being uncomfortable taking positions that are outside the mainstream. To believe that the Fed is unjust, all we need is to use our common sense and understand that bankers and state officials are just as self-interested and corrupt as your average citizen.

The Fed has no budget (the great Ron Paul is trying to change that). Nobody in Congress oversees what it does. Even the CIA and Military Intelligence report to elected officials. It’s officials aren’t chosen by the people-the Head is appointed by the President and the Chairs of the regional Federal Banks (the first ones to receive new money) are selected by bankers. Leaders in finance jump into cozy government jobs and vice versa.

Nothing will change until the ruling class is exposed as the gang of thieves that it is. Murray Rothbard was a true crusader for justice and liberty. In our current era we can thank Dr. Ron Paul for bringing this issue to national attention. Intelligent and honorable men are too few.

All this requires a well-oiled propaganda machine to convince the boobs that they’re out fighting for freedom. And, of course, the standard way of saying that the dictator you want to demonize is evil is to say that he is “like Hitler.” I searched for the following phrases in Google with quotation marks to see which government heads are the leading Hitlers.

That’s quite impressive, but as far as Hitlerness is concerned, nobody can compare to the last two US presidents.

Poor Carter became a Hitler for criticizing Israel in that book of his.  It looks like  being president before the internet era took off really hurt Clinton’s and Reagan’s Hitler rankings. Obama has only been in office for 8 months. In another year he will become the all-time leading Hitler.

Interestingly, even entire countries can be “like Hitler.”

Poor Israel is really not well-liked. They’re Hitler, and the people who oppose them are Hitlers too.

From HBD Books, September 5, 2009

The story centers around the white Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson), his black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) and their move into a new neighborhood.  Interfering with their loving relationship is neighbor Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson).  A single father and cop, he seems to take an immediate dislike to the interracial couple.  His disapproval of  miscegenation at first seems to be philosophically grounded.  While on duty, Abel has the following exchange with Clarence, an obese racially ambiguous thug who has just referred to himself as a “brother.”

Abel: Clarence, we ain’t brothers.  We didn’t even crawl out of the same evolutionary gene pool.  What are you anyway?  You know, I’ve always wondered about that.  You’re a Mexo, Japo, Chini, Stymi (?) or what?  You don’t even know, do you?  You’re a weed, that’s what you are.  A junkyard weed.  Spray your ass with some roundup.

Clarence: I’m 1/7th [sic!] Cherokee, bitch!

Abel: And the other 93% [sic!] wigger.

Patrick Wilson with his screen wife Kerry Washington

The point about the racially ambiguous and rootless loser adopting the culture of those isolated from the white majority is never followed up.  Only later do we find out that when Abel’s wife had her fatal automobile crash she was in the car with her white boss, who also died.  So his objection to Chris and Lisa’s marriage wasn’t about race at all.  Nothing ever is, unless it’s discrimination against black people.  Abel lets it be known that his wife died because she was “treated by pigmentation” at the hospital, meaning that her care was delayed because she was black.

Abel slashes the tires of the young couple, shines his security lights into their bedroom at night, and cuts down trees they plant.  There’s no question that Chris and Lisa are supposed to be the ones we sympathize with.  Able at one point has a good laugh with his fellow cops about Berkley alumnus Chris being a Democrat.  The officer even doubts global warming!

But Abel isn’t all bad, despite his conservatism.  The movie even implies that some of his positions have merit.  Abel and his partner get shot at by a maniac whom he eventually subdues.  The officer is then reprimanded by his superiors for verbally abusing and violating the civil rights of the criminal.

Patrick Wilson with his real wife, Dagmara Dominczyk

The director doesn’t take a clear position on climate change, police brutality or anything else that our elites allow debate on.  He has bigger fish to fry.  Cops tend to be conservative and Berkley grads liberals.  But a conservative cop can be black just as easily as he can be white.  People may disagree about how to deal with trouble-making youngsters, but the kids don’t fit any particular profile.  Nor do those who move into high class neighborhoods to get away from the thugs.  Race may be the obsession of old and cranky weirdos (who can at least now be black — maybe that’s progress?), but it means nothing to anybody who is mentally sound.

The world we see in Terrace is the one we would’ve had if the civil rights movement were a success.  There are still rich and poor, law abiding and criminal, conservative and liberal.  But the idea that any of these things would correlate with race?  If that world still existed, then all the marches, laws, half-a-century of totalitarian political correctness, etc. weren’t enough to get rid of it.  A land of hostile tribes is what we’re stuck with.

The message reaches a reductio ad absurdum in a scene where Able is at Chris and Lisa’s housewarming party.  In addition to the three stars, there are two other couples involved in the conversation.  One is a black man with a white woman and the other is a white male paired with an Asian.  There might as well have been a “RACE DOESN’T MATTER” notice flashing across the bottom of the screen.

Another liberal fantasy is that single black women are some kind of scarce commodity that white men need to scoop up. A friend tells Chris that he’s always wanted a black chick but is now on Asians, working his way up.

As we race realists know, black females are along with Asian males one of the two groups most likely to end up single. (This says something good about the taste of males and something ugly about that of females.)  A universe where a white man would “work his way up” to blacks is one that could only exist in the minds of the hopelessly politically correct.

A more interesting movie would be about a white male/Asian female couple moving next door to a virginal Oriental engineer who loses his mind over their presence.  That story might actually be plausible.

Unfortunately, liberals can’t handle too much reality and checked out of it a long time ago.

Taking Sex Differences Seriously

John Adams once famously wrote to his wife that he studied politics and war so his children could study mathematics and philosophy and his grandchildren poetry and music.  Only a man of the Enlightenment could be so naive.  More than two hundred years later some students do study mathematics and music.  But it would’ve probably never crossed Adams’ mind in a thousand years that yet others would be studying “gender.”

Political scientist Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously is one of those books that is as interesting as its necessity is depressing.  Nothing that is written here — men are more interested in sports than women, women prefer status in men, females are better suited to care for children, etc. — would have been controversial in Adams’ day or amongst any band of hunter-gatherers.  But here we are in 2009, explaining that girls are not boys.  The Enlightenment philosophers’ mistake was projecting their belief in reason onto the rest of humanity.

From the First Day

One-day-old female infants have a stronger response to hearing a human in distress than their male counterparts.  Three days after birth, the stronger female interest in people is present.  Girls will maintain eye contact with a silent adult twice as long as boys do.  If the adult talks, girls but not boys will look longer.  Week-old baby girls but not boys can distinguish between an infant’s cry and other noises.  Only females are able to separate photographs of people they know from those they don’t by the age of four months.  Infants separate by sex very early.  One-year-olds prefer to play with their own kind and when watching a movie of babies will look at the members of their own sex more than the other.

If the above paragraph alone isn’t enough to kill the socialization hypothesis, we can look at real life examples of attempts to thwart Mother Nature.  In 1966, a circumcision gone wrong left one male identical twin without a penis.  Psychologist Dr. John Money of John Hopkins University persuaded the parents to raise the child as a female.  Surgeons completely castrated him and built what looked like a female vagina.  “Brenda” was from that point on treated like a girl.  She was given female steroids that would “facilitate and mimic female pubertal growth and feminization.”  When Brenda was 12, he/she was reported to be doing fine.  Time magazine ran a long piece on the story and the 1979 Textbook of Sexual Medicine claimed that Brenda’s “remarkably feminine” development proved the “plasticity of human gender identity.”  What’s missed here is that even if Brenda’s story was true, a lot more than socialization was going on.  Female hormones were injected and removal of the testicles ensured that some male hormones wouldn’t be produced.

But chemical tinkering and socialization together weren’t enough to make a boy into a girl.  Researchers eventually showed that Dr. Money was a fraud (whether he was embarrassed over the pain he caused or simply a maniac who liked seeing children mutilated and tortured we don’t know).  By the 1990s, Brenda had become David and was working in a slaughterhouse.  At the age of 14 he decided to start living as a male and a year later his parents told him the truth.  David was given male hormones, his breasts were removed, and he had a constructed penis installed.

After the real story came out, researchers at John Hopkins decided to find out what had happened to other boys that they decided would live as females.  They located twenty-five of them.  Each enjoyed rough-and-tumble play.  Fourteen had declared themselves boys, with one doing so as early as at five-years-old.

Simone de Beauvoir

The Ugly Implications of Feminism

If males and females should put the same amount of time and effort towards work, than the principle of equality demands that men do just as much work raising children.  As feminist Susan Okin has written about her just world:

In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.  No assumptions would be made about “male” and “female” roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separate from child rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be a cause for surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time with one parent than the other.

Presumably, since we don’t want a world where people do more of what they don’t like or aren’t good at, we can socially construct one where men and women will like or dislike child rearing equally.  According to Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be.”

Getting in the way of these egalitarian fantasies are the wishes of actual women.  In surveys, women are more likely than men to say that they enjoy spending time with infants.  Sweden, always on the cutting edge, decided in the 1970s to allow parental leave for a family only if the father took it.  The government undertook a propaganda campaign to get men to take care of their children.  To this day, Swedish mothers take parental leave twice as often as fathers do and for six times as long.  Similar evidence comes from the Israeli kibbutzim.  These small communities aimed specifically at doing away with traditional sex roles.  At the beginning, children were raised away from their parents.  After lobbying by young mothers, the family is once again the center of society.

No wonder that in 1975 feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.  It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

This authoritarian streak is part of mainstream feminism.  Women’s advocates will support day care subsidies but not tax breaks for dependents, because the former is only financially beneficial if women work.

Perhaps it is the childlessness of feminists that makes them unable to understand their fellow women.  The peptide oxytocin is the most important nurturing hormone.  It promotes bonding and a relaxed emotional state.  It’s released in males during orgasm and in females while they are pregnant or breastfeeding.  Females have more receptors for the hormone and the number increases when a woman is pregnant.  Rhoads explains:

Oxytocin and prolactin, another hormone that surges during pregnancy and breastfeeding, change women’s personalities in ways that make them better mothers.  These hormones seem to make routine more tolerable.  Compared with other women their age, pregnant and breastfeeding women have been found to be more tolerant of monotony.  They are also more prone to please and obey-a trait that some researchers think is nature’s way of making them more ready “to ‘take orders’ from their babies.”  Even the act of stroking her baby releases oxytocin in the mother, causing her to feel a “beatific calm” and somewhat sedated.

. . . Many women feel euphoric or exhilarated while nursing.  A few even have orgasms.

When asked to rate how important on a 10 point scale different parts of their lives are to their happiness, 86 percent of mothers say that their children are a 10 while only 30 percent of working women give their careers a rating that high.  Many women who buy into the worldview of the nihilists end up regretting it.  Sylvia Hewlett set out to write a book on women who had achieved great things.  After interviewing the first ten, she was struck by the fact that each one was childless.  Not a single woman was so by choice.  Hewlett then went out and commissioned a survey of women who were making more than $60,000 a year in midcareer.  When they graduated from college, 14 percent knew they didn’t want children but 33 percent ended up childless.  Hewlett wrote that she was “continually surprised — and humbled — by how raw and near to the surface the emotions” were.  A women said to Hewlett that is was “frightening, this yearning for a child — it’s hard to fathom the desperate urgency.”  There is no equivalent feeling in childless successful men.  Quite a few of the older women had unrealistic expectations of being able to get pregnant in their 40s.  They were like Hillary Clinton, who said at the age of 49 that she might like to have another child.

Not even ideological feminists are immune.  A childless newswoman from Australia said that she was “Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel.  Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfillment came with a leather briefcase.”  A female journalist with a Yale degree said that when she realized that she wanted to mother her baby, “a huge and terrifying abyss” opened up beneath her.

A primate female is built for birthing and raising children.  Her psychological makeup and hormonal balance evolved for it.  Some skills are remarkably specialized.  When a baby cries in pain, mothers and fathers react the same way.  But when the cry is “I want” (food, comfort) the female is quicker to respond.  When childless women watch a video of a baby crying their heart rates accelerate.  Those of childless men decelerate.

As much as women need children, children need their mothers.  Infants prefer their moms to their dads.  One researcher explains the subtle dance that goes on when a child is nursing:

During a feeding, dozens of events occur.  The baby sucks, winces, squirms, relaxes, lets go of the nipple, burps, falls asleep, hiccups, smiles, roots, cries, opens his eyes, tenses his face or softens his expression.  His mother rocks, sits still, hums, is silent, adjusts her position, tenses, relaxes, gazes, smiles, talks, pats, strokes, lifts the baby, puts him down.  Each event is a remark.

It’s unclear whether fathers have interactions of comparable complexity with their infants because it’s difficult to find men who are with their babies long enough to be researched.  One study found that men on average talked to their infants 38 seconds per day.

While in the womb, a baby can recognize a mother’s heartbeat and voice.  After birth, he is calmed by both.  In one experiment researchers took monkey babies away from their mothers and noted the “grief, listlessness, the obvious and heart-rendering despair.”  One person involved declared, “Thank God, we only have to do it once to prove the point.”  If only our culture showed such consideration for human children.

The Chivalrous Conservative

Men are given much less attention than women in this book.  While the tragedy of Title IX and the havoc its wrecked on male sports is given its own chapter, besides that things are supposedly going pretty well for men.  According to Rhoads, “The sexual revolution gave men, not women, what they wanted.”  Perhaps a very small minority of men.  Rhoads writes that on college campuses today women sleep around, and in general it’s men who decide if the relationship continues.  That wasn’t the experience of most college students I knew.

I’m guessing that the sample that the author worked with was biased.  Men who aren’t doing well with women generally don’t like to talk about their nonexistent sex lives, and many aren’t above lying when they do.  The female sample is also unlikely to be representative.  The author tells us about pretty girls who gain weight so men will leave them alone, but the views of females too fat to even attract ugly men aren’t given much consideration.  Although the latter is most certainly more common, girls whose attractiveness and not obesity is the source of their pain are much more likely to talk about it.

There is a tendency noted by Roger Devlin for anti-feminist conservatives to cast themselves as the true defenders of women’s rights. Attention is given to the fact that women aren’t attracted to men who are beneath them in status (making it extremely difficult for high-achieving women to find husbands) but not much to the men who lose status and mating opportunities because their jobs go to women.  Affirmative action is not mentioned.  While it would be pointless to get into a discussion about who — men, women or children — have been most victimized by feminism, ignoring the plight of males is itself a product of this evil ideology.

The Need for Righteous Anger

At the beginning of his chapter on the psychoanalytic movement in the The Culture of Critique Kevin MacDonald quotes Paul Churchland who said: “How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted — on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments . . . is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”  The same thing has to be asked about feminism.  How did a movement so destructive to both utilitarian and biological interests gain such widespread acceptance?

It’s really may not that much of a mystery at all.  We’ve got these giant brains, and sometimes they lead us astray.  Religious groups that don’t believe in procreation have popped up and gone extinct.  The Western world has become such a death cult.  The nihilists will leave this planet and the patriarchal shall inherit the earth.

Rhoads notes that his classes on sex differences are overwhelmingly female.  The young co-eds are on the edge of their seats while the few men look bored.  The author writes fondly about the young “radical feminists” he’s had in his classes.  He’s too kind.  My reaction to leftists has been closer to that of Paul Gottfried, who said in his Encounters that over the years he “developed a Nietzschean reaction to the girly men and virago women that populate university settings.”  Feminists and multiculturalists changed society while motivated with a burning hatred for those they considered the epitome of evil, not by making friends with those they considered simply misguided. It’s a lesson we ought to learn.