Anti-white racism: keeping minorities in their place

A study by Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, reveals that in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area teachers routinely "gave more praise and less criticism [of a student essay] if they believed a minority student had written the paper, as opposed to a white student."

"This positive bias in feedback to minority students may" Haber concluded, "be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem."

Obviously.

How can a group at the bottom of the heap in terms of income, employment, imprisonment, singlemotherhood, etc. do better?

By trying harder, and in particular, by adopting the work ethic, moral responsibility and self-discipline of more successful groups.

Political correctness and affirmative action only reinforce the inclination of unsuccessful minorities to blame others for their own failings and irresponsibility. This, some blacks well know, which is why such people are particularly hated by the liberal left.

Question is though, do the politically correct harm the interests of American minorities deliberately, or are they just stupid? Who knows, but probably the latter, considering the virulent bigotry displayed when their ideology is challenged.

Liberals, so long in the ascendant, are today the complacent and reactionary equivalent to the blimps of an earlier age. Their response to criticism is more often an explosion of mindless rage than a reasoned argument. Opponents are bigots, racists and fascists -- people so contemptible their arguments need never be addressed.

Thus, when Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid contributor, wrote a blog piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education that questioned the validity of "Black Studies" as a discipline, her critique was dismissed by the CHE without debate as failing to conform "to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us."

More to the point would have been to show that a Ph.D. in Black Studies provides a gateway to opportunities other than in the teaching of black studies or other branches of the political correctness industry.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, the insanity of liberals whom the gods would destroy is even more apparent.There, Britain's incredibly stupid police are now so focused on the enforcement of political correctness that they prefer to ignore reports of child gang rape if the victim is white and the criminal assailants immigrant Asians.

Naturally, in such a world, political correctness triumphs over any so bigoted as to object to the abuse of immigrant women, provided only that abusers are not white.

Clearly the integration of minorities in white society will never be achieved under the administration of looney liberals. Instead, there will be social division and disintegration ending one may reasonably expect in a violent reaction.

I have no desire to see expostulating liberals carted off in tumbrils to the gas chambers. But something of the kind seems inevitable, given the way things are headed.

See also: Newark Star-Ledger admits to censoring race in savage mob attacks

Why less government means more prosperity

The extraordinary thing about the modern age is that Western government's now spend something like half of the wealth of the nation: 50% in the UK, for example, 55% in France, 45% in Canada.

Which raises the question, what value do people get for the money that government takes from them  to spend on their behalf? In calculating GDP it is assumed that every dollar of government spending on services, administration, etc., yields similar value to a dollar spent by the individual making his or her own choice as to how their money should be disposed of.

But what if every dollar of government spending yields less than a dollar in value? What if it yields much less in value that a dollar spent privately? What if many dollars spent by government create negative value?

In America, how much value does the average citizen receive from the Department of Homeland Security's expenditure this year of $57 billion dollars? Might it not be a negative quantity? How much negative value is there to the average traveler to being sexually groped by a rubber-gloved TSA agent? And what is the cost of the time consumed in airline security checks, which according to a former TSA Chief, are a complete waste of time?

Similar questions arise concerning most other expensive government programs. In England, how much value do parents find in having schools teach their children the art of fellatio, or how to put on a condom? How much value do the British find in a police force that is so stupid it outlaws the use of the four-hundred-year-old English word "blacklist" because they think the term is RACIST.

In addition, what about the costs of regulation, and the grotesqueness of nearly every nation's tax code that wastes endless hours of citizens' time, and billions of dollars of legal and accounting fees to achieve compliance?

One has only to ask the question to realize that most reductions in government spending would result in increased prosperity, although the benefits would be unevenly distributed. Welfare cheats would be the losers, others of the indigent classes might be subject to the humiliation of receiving charity, i.e., aide given voluntarily rather than taken by force from Peter and forked over to Paul as a matter of right.

But the biggest losers in any move to reduce government to a sensible size would be the huge army of bureaucrats who administer or carry out government programs and earn more than those doing equivalent work in the private sector, have greater job security and an index-linked pension.

But the "public servants" needn't worry. If the political class know nothing else, they are masters of the politics of envy. They know how to win Paul's vote by promising rob Peter, while convincing many Peters that they are Pauls who will benefit from the scam.

Still there may be some hope for us. The supply siders are still with us and making a great success of the Swedish economy, by all accounts.

Freedom of Speech, No 37: UK Police Blacklist "blacklist"

UK: POLICE chiefs have banned IT staff from using the word "blacklist" over fears it is RACIST, reports the Sun.

But as the term "blacklist," which dates to the 17th Century, is not RACIST, one had to conclude that British POLICE chiefs are complete twats.

The computer term whitelist — used to denote a list of acceptable contacts — has also been outlawed, the Sun report continues:

In an email, Scotland Yard warned staff the words were no longer “appropriate”.

Security services chief Brian Douglas wrote: “I am sure we can appreciate the sensitivity around the use of such terminology today so please ensure it is no longer used.” He suggested using green and red list instead.

So in Britain, it is now RACIST to use any term that some police twat calls "inappropriate". And what is RACIST constitutes a criminal offense. So it is now possible in Britain to be gaoled for using a term that some twat in the police thinks is "INAPPROPRIATE."

Furthermore, Scotland Yard said: “This is not a change in policy."

So imposing the politically correct tyranny of twats is nothing new in Britain. It's ongoing policy no doubt fully supported by the liberal and pseudo-Con twats running the government.

One can only hope that some Amerindian immigrants to the UK will take the tyrannical idiots to court over the proposed use of the term "REDLIST."

blacklist n. (ca 1619) : a list of persons who are disapproved of ...

Other words Britain's dimbulb police chiefs may find RACIST because their use might lead to complaint by some miserable, thin-skinned, illiterate immigrant from the Caribbean or Africa who has been taught by Britain's self-hating white liberal elite to consider him or herself the perpetual victim of white RACISM include:

blackball
black damp
black death
blacken
blackguard
blackheart
blackleg
black lung
blackmail
black-market
Black Mass
black rot
blacksnake
black widow

Use of the following terms will surely also be criminalized as white supremacist:

whiten
white hope
white knight
white lie 
whitewash

Will We Have Inflation, Deflation or Both at the Same Time

Debt crises usually end with massive money printing and inflation, as in Weimar Germany in the 1920's, or with deflation and depression as in the US and Europe in the 1930's.

Today, inflating away troublesome debts seems to be the preferred option of the Nobel-prize-winning economists, but how exactly is that to be accomplished?

At the turn of the 21st Century, it was easy. Governments dropped interest rates and folks borrowed, driving up the money supply and creating numerous housing bubbles as a consequence.

But now most people are either not creditworthy or want to deleverage, as is evident from the more than  $1 trillion in excess reserves that US banks have on deposit with the Fed.

That's why governments have engaged in stimulus spending, which has generated thousands of projects for bridge repair, road improvement, and alternative energy that were unaffordable in good times.

The outcome has been investments of questionable value undertaken at inflated prices by contractors with good connections accomplished at the cost of government-crippling debt.

So is continued massive stimulus spending a political option? Evidently not, as the present vogue for austerity makes clear.

How about keeping a tight rein on government spending while cutting taxes and covering deficits by money printing? That looks to be the best option, but for governments, giving up tax revenue is, well, giving up. The bureaucracy will fight relentlessly any such a plan, and remember how many votes the "public service" have.

So Japanesification of Western economies is perhaps what is in store, with chronic though limited deficit spending, continuously growing public debt, and gradually declining real incomes as food, and energy prices rise and taxes are ratcheted up in response to rising costs of debt service and of pensions and healthcare for an aging population.This is the deflation-inflation co-existence scenario. Money supply rising somewhat faster than the economy, real incomes and the cost of manufactured goods falling due to global wage arbitrage, automation and computerization, and house prices falling, despite low interest rates, due to declining disposable income.

Or, for something entirely new,  governments might try helicopter money: everybody to get a government cheque, say $100,000, on condition that they apply it first to the payment of debts, mortgages, etc. -- this is the debt Jubilee advocated by Steve Keen. It would be inflationary, but it would slash the debt load, and create conditions for a new debt-based round of economic expansion.

Race and IQ in America

One seemingly objective and thus non racist way of denigrating black people is to point out that African Americans score lower on IQ tests than other Americans. Thus, in an essay for Taki's mag that precipitated his firing by National Review, John Derbyshire states: 

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Freed Reed, commenting on the killing of Trayvon Martin, makes similar points:

... on every known measure of cognitive ability, on IQ, SATs, GREs, everything, blacks average about one standard deviation, fifteen IQ points, below whites. The gap is a fact. It exists. It is reflected in performance. It has proved intractable. In a technological civilization that rewards intelligence, the deficit sharply limits legitimate access to the higher reaches of money, power, class, and prestige.

There are two common responses to such statements.

One is to say that IQ tests were invented by white people and, in America, are mainly administered by white educational bureaucrats and thus are undoubtedly culturally biased in ways that lower the apparent IQ of black people.

The other is to say, yes, the black-white difference in IQ is real and that to acknowledge it is simply a matter of scientific realism. Furthermore, it may be noted, although white people invented IQ tests, Asian Americans nevertheless score higher on IQ tests than European Americans, so cultural bias cannot explain the racial differences.

Both arguments make a valid point, but both ignore realities of greater significance.

On the question of cultural bias, Fred Reed provides pertinent evidence:

The death [of Trayvon Martin] has been improbably termed, by professional blacks, “genocide.” Whatever happened to dictionaries, I wonder.
 
Perhaps the worst thing about the case is the appalling English it revealed, “He dont be doing nothing aint right he just….” Usually the brighter and more literate of a group spend time on the internet. Heaven help us. These inarticulate mutterings devoid of punctuation or any grasp of the structure of the language illustrate what we know but ignore: We are screwed.

Clearly, those with no use for Webster's dictionary or knowledge of standard English grammar cannot be expected to perform well on an IQ test for users of standard English or to spell in a way that reflects standard English pronunciation. But that in no way proves that failure to learn standard English is necessarily proof of inferior intelligence.

As a child, I lived in a community of non-standard English speakers, namely, the country folk of South Devon, England. What we spoke was English, yet it would have been unintelligible to a graduate of Harvard University. The conjugation of verbs had a remarkable complexity, the vocabulary was distinctive, and the pronunciation  provided a barrier to easy communication with the educated middle-class.

Sadly, though brought up bilingual, I have been away from Devon so long that I have forgotten the speech of my home county, where the natives are now rarely to be encountered since they have been swamped by hoards of foreigners from London, Birmingham, and Bristol, not to mention India, Bangla-Desh, the African continent and China. I do recall, though, how an old fellow hoeing cabbages in cottage garden summed up some road directions for me: 

Just fancy you'm be in the arrrmy: Left, Roight, Left, Roight.

A man capable of such pithy speech must surely have a brain in good order, yet an IQ test for standard English speakers could hardly be expected to reveal the full extent of his ability.

But even better evidence of the influence of culture on IQ test results is the so-called Flynn Effect.

In his study of IQ tests scores for different populations over the past sixty years, James R. Flynn discovered that IQ scores increased from one generation to the next for all of the countries for which data existed. ...Research shows that IQ gains have been mixed for different countries. In general, countries have seen generational increases between 5 and 25 points. (Source)

Thus, there can be no doubt whatever that IQ is highly influenced by cultural, socio-economic or some other environmental factors, and that since that influence varies greatly among countries it will surely vary also among groups within a country.

But that inter-racial IQ differences are in part culturally determined, does not alter the fact that, in America, blacks as a group are at the bottom of the heap in terms of income, education, unemployment, rates of crime and imprisonment, and the proportion of single-parent families. And it does not alter the fact that it is at the bottom of the heap where American blacks, as a group, will remain so long as their communities are led by those who blame black poverty and frequent criminality on the racism of others rather than their own failure to strive to become, through their own efforts, what they presently are not.

It is also true that even though differences in intelligence, temperament, physical attributes both physiological and structural unquestionably exist among the races or classes of mankind, to speak as though group characteristics define the individual amounts to the crudest form of disparagement. If a Devon country lad has, on average, an IQ 15 points less than a graduate of Eton College, does that make the Etonian a better man? To many in England, the answer may be an emphatic yes or no, depending on the class to which they belong. But either answer is absurd, since it judges the individual not on their merits but on their group affiliation over which they have no control and over which individual genius or heroic determination may prevail.

Liberal Bigotry: The Only Kind of Pro-White There Is

Mass murderer Anders Breivic. The only
kind of advocate for white people there can be?

Seventy percent of the British public oppose mass immigration, yet the only parties committed to ending mass immigration are the BNP, run by the clown and racist, Nick Griffin, and the British Freedom Party, a BNP spinoff and the political wing of the Anders-Breivik-connected English Defence League.

Thus as the state has worked, since the Government of Edward Heath, to the destroy the British nation as a racial and cultural entity, the self-proclaimed nationalists, led by con-artists, anti-democrats, racists and thugs have provided the ruling elite an invincible defense against the charge of treason.

How convenient. How impossible, in the mind of the state-educated, BBC-Guardian-brainwashed liberal-leftie to believe that anyone could oppose the genocide of the British people by mass immigration other than out of shear nigger-hating racism.

The same combination of state-controlled education and liberal-left bigotry of the mainstream media enables the destruction of the founding European group in the United States. As JAY explains, only a racist is pro-white in America.

Facism Today, No. 23: The extraordinary death of Gareth Williams

The inquest on the body-in-the-bag, British code breaker and math wizz, Gareth Williams has reached a verdict.

According to Corona Dr. Fiona Wilcox, Williams was probably murdered -- quite possibly by his own employer, the British Government.

Williams worked for MI6 who, according to his family's solicitor, failed, following his disappearance, to make "... even the most basic inquiries about his whereabouts and welfare."

The Coroner concluded that:

Most of the fundamental questions in relation to how Gareth died remain unanswered.

She said that evidence given by "G", Williams' MI6 line manager stretched "the bounds of credibility". She also recorded the fact that during the investigation Scotland Yard were not permitted to speak with Mr Williams' MI6 colleagues.

Dr. Wilcox stated that the lack of hand and footprints in the bathroom where Williams' body was found was "significant".

It was "highly unlikely" she said that Mr Williams got inside his red holdall alone:

If Gareth had been carrying out some kind of peculiar experiment, he wouldn't care if he left any foot or fingerprints.

 Mr Williams' family told the inquest that they believed Gareth was likely murdered by an agent of the security services.

For a much more comprehensive review of the case see Winter Patriot's: Sherlock Holmes and the Alderney Street Mystery.

See also:

50 agents face DNA tests over spy-in-the-bag killing as coroner brands death 'unlawful' and puts MI6 in the frame.

Paul Krugman's dollar debasement lunacy and what will cure unemployment

Mish Shedlock has an excellent post about today's debate on Bloomberg between Ron Paul and Paul Krugman.

On Krugman's justification for continued Fed money printing, namely, that:

The reckless thing is to allow mass unemployment to continue.

Mish comments:

Although the Fed does have a dual mandate on employment and inflation, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, the Fed's Dual Mandate Is Mission Impossible.

Here's the deal.

1. The Fed can control money supply but it will have no control over interest rates (or anything else).

2. The Fed can control short-term interest rates, but then it would have no control over money supply (or anything else).

That is the full and complete extent of the Fed's "control". Note that neither price stability nor unemployment is in either equation. The reason is the Fed controls neither.

The result of all the recent Fed printing is a big yawn, otherwise known as excessive reserves as the following chart shows.

Excess Reserves of Depository Institutions



Does that chart look like the Fed is in control? If so, control of what? Excess Reserves Then and Now

The above "Mission Impossible" snip was written August 27, 2009. Excess reserves now look like this.

Mish continues the piece to explain why more money printing will likely increase, not decrease, unemployment. 

If Sound Money Does Not Cause Unemployment, What Does?
Unemployment result from one of two causes: minimum wage laws that set wages above the value of the labor of the least productive workers, or welfare provisions that make unemployment preferable to employment.

Both factors contribute to today's high US and European unemployment. In the US, the Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 is five to ten times the rate for industrial labor in the Third World economies with which the US now competes without protection.

In Europe, generous welfare schemes make unemployment more attractive for many than the inconvenience of minimum-wage menial labor. 

What Western Governments Are Doing to Eliminate Unemployment?
To eliminate welfare and lower Western wages to the level of the Third World would eliminate mass unemployment in the West, but at horrendous cost.

Living costs are higher in America and Europe than in Asia, which means that an abrupt reduction in Western wages making them competitive with those in the Third World would reduce tens of millions to the grimmest poverty and malnutrition, while creating conditions conducive to violent insurrection.

The unacknowledged solution that has been adopted by Western elites to achieve convergence of Western and Third World wages is to undertake a gradual debasement of currencies, during which nominal wages are held more or less constant, thereby causing real wages to fall. During the process, it must be assumed, living costs will adjust downward in line with wages.

The problem is that wage convergence achieved this way will take years during which time the labor of millions will be wasted, labor force skills will be lost, capital will be exported, and the productive capacity of the West will be severely diminished.

Moreover, the effectiveness of the program has been limited by the readiness of Third World nations, particularly China, and also Japan, to run trade surpluses with the West, thereby preventing rapid devaluation of Western currencies. As a result, the desired fall in real wages in the West has been delayed.

A Better Solution
 Leaving aside the option of protectionism, and assuming that global free trade is here to stay, the steps needed to eliminate high Western unemployment without massive social disruption are clear.

First, for those able to work, the receipt of welfare must be contingent on employment. This can be achieved by creating a market for government-funded wage subsidies. Employers would bid in a competitive auction for subsidies of limited duration that would be equal in value to the minimum wage. Depending on the price bid, employers would then be able to pay the minimum wage at a cost net of the subsidy somewhere between the minimum wage and nothing.

As discussed elsewhere, the cost of such a scheme would be minimal, and would be offset by the elimination of multiple existing welfare programs and other unemployment-related costs including unemployment-related costs of crime, prison incarceration, mental illness, and the loss of workforce skills.

Second, the cost of living in the West must be lowered to that of the Rest. Among other things, that means a massive reduction in the cost of government and the burden of taxation that it imposes on workers: the exact opposite of the policy Krugman advocates.

Third, conditions for employment-creating investment in the West must be improved by insuring a level playing field globally in workplace health and safety standards and environmental regulation. Because the Third World should upgrade their standards not the First World dismantle theirs, Western nations must be free to impose tariffs on goods produced in non-compliance with Western standards for worker and environmental protection.

Fourth, corporation taxes in the West should be no higher than in the Third World. Logically, since all taxes are ultimately paid by people, corporation tax should be abolished, the burden transferred to shareholders, which would eliminate the incentive for investors in the West to transfer capital to low tax jurisdictions abroad.

Conclusion
One can rest assured that none of the above proposals will be adopted and that the West will continue is decline into poverty, internecine conflict and ultimate military defeat and incorporation into a despotic Asiatic empire of one variety or another.

The Coming Race War in America

The Need to Lynch Zimmerman

 By Fred Reed

April 19, 2012: The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland. The title is not ironic. He foresaw a major racial explosion. The book of course was furiously ignored. It should not have been. It dealt with an apocalyptic vision that has lurked around the edges of American consciousness since before the Civil War. And still does. We just don’t talk about it.  

What has this to do with Zimmerman? 

This: Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration. 

Read more

The Decline of Britain

By Theodore Dalrymple

The Spectator, February 4, 2012: Is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a cause for jubilation? Certainly her reign has been a personal triumph: her iron sense of duty, gracefully performed, has been exemplary, if not an example often followed. For 60 years she has exercised a self-control that most of us find difficult even for 60 minutes; her recent state visit to Ireland put all our public figures of the past decades in the shade.

Not that that is very difficult, for there is no disguising that her reign has been an era of continuous and continuing decline. Of course, not even accelerating levels of British incompetence have been able to arrest the march of technical progress, and, in raw physical terms, life in these islands has improved greatly. It is now even possible to find passable food almost everywhere, even in the provinces.

But in relative terms, Britain has declined. When she came to the throne, the British car industry was the second largest in the world; now there is no major British-owned car company. In the land of the industrial revolution, foreign ownership and management is the sine qua non of industrial success. Though we invented the railway, others must build them for us; though we invented nuclear power, we cannot by our unaided efforts build a nuclear power station. Even in football, our clubs are foreign-owned and the players foreign. The British are too undisciplined to be good at what they are most (regrettably and childishly) interested in.

What have the last 60 years done for our villages, towns and cities? British architects, devoid of scruple as of talent or aesthetic sense, have waged war on beauty and triumphed in the struggle. It is as though they personally resented the achievements of the past. Hardly a town exists that has not been ruined by the hacks of modernism and the blindness of the town-planners. It is lucky for them that there is no justice in the world.

But it is in intangibles that the decline has been most marked. In 1952, Britain was among the best-ordered countries in the western world, and now it is the worst. The recent outbreak of mass criminality can have surprised only the wilfully blind. The British are now among the least self-disciplined people in the world: it is as though they had undergone a gestalt switch, so that what they previously decried they now honour, and vice versa. They are the fattest people in Europe: the characteristic smell of Britain is re-used fat. They treat the country as their personal rubbish tip — there is more litter here than anywhere else comparable — and they drink brutishly. They take more drugs than anyone else. They consume without discrimination and dress abominably because they have no self-respect or respect for others, an absence that is often evident in the way they work, no small matter in a service economy. They favour the uncouth over the refined and the stupid over the intelligent; their vulgarity, like their drunkenness, is not unselfconscious but militant. They mutilate rather than beautify themselves; they care for nothing except their odious entertainments, and their popular music is a paean to their hatred of life. They are individualistic without individualism. A consumer society without taste is a horrible thing to behold.

In the wake of the conviction of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, an editorial in the Guardian referred to the ‘hard lives etched on the faces’ of the accused. By hard lives, it meant not the kind of materially difficult lives that coal miners once lived, but lives lived in a brutal and fundamentally stupid culture: such faces not being biological, but biographical and cultural artefacts. You look for them in vain in pictures of even the poor at the beginning of our monarch’s reign. When you compare the faces and manner of dress in the football crowds from that era — or of footballers, for that matter — when football was a much more proletarian game than it is now, with the faces and manner of dress now, you see only human retrogression. And in no other country do you see so many horrible faces, like those of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, as in Britain.

Britain is now, what it was not at the beginning of the Queen’s reign, a corrupt country. On the Pelion of inefficiency has been piled the Ossa of careerism. For this Lady Thatcher must take a large part of the blame, for it was her fatuous belief in the wonders of management that gave the new nomenklatura its first lease of life. She made £400,000 salaries (and over) possible in the public service. The ideology of management was something that Blair creatively developed, as the Soviets used to say with regard to Marxist theory, to the point that we now cannot even run a public examination system with any probity.

The revelation that schools regularly deceive Ofsted inspectors was only too emblematic of what the British state now is: a hall of distorting mirrors. Schools, it seems, resort to all manner of subterfuges on the day of inspections in order to appear better than they are. And this corruption is not a malfunction of Ofsted; it is its main purpose. It is instituted to deceive the public into thinking that the government — that shepherd of the carnivorous sheep that constitute its flock — cares about educational standards. How else can one explain the fact that Ofsted warns schools of its impending inspections? Such a warning is a virtual incitement to deception; at the very least, it is a indication that the inspectors want to be deceived. It is by such means that standards can fall in reality while they rise in the virtual world of the government statement.

Wherever one looks in the public service, which is increasingly the means by which a nomenklatura enriches itself personally at the expense of the taxpayer, one finds the same kind of deception, the same attempt to manipulate appearance at the expense of reality, the same demand that employees, from the lowest to the highest, assent to propositions that they know or suspect to be false, in order to destroy their own probity.

Kathleen Ferrier

In 1952, when the Queen came to the throne, the most popular female singer in the country, indeed the second most popular woman in the realm after the Queen herself, was Kathleen Ferrier, whom the great conductor, Bruno Walter, called one of the two greatest influences on his whole musical life, the other being none other than Gustav Mahler. To listen to her performance, when she knew that she was dying, of ‘Der Abschied’, from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, under Walter’s baton in the year of the Queen’s accession, has been rightly called unbearably moving.

Sixty years later, the most popular female singer was Amy Winehouse, the stupidly tattooed militant vulgarian of disgraceful conduct. Like the British people, of whom she was emblematic, she behaved abominably without being interesting. The first singer died prematurely of cancer; the second of gross overindulgence, in her own vomit. QED.


Kathleen Ferrier: The Keel Row, a traditional Tyneside folk song evoking the life and work of the keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne who manned the shallow-draughted boats that carried coal from the banks of the river to the waiting colliers.

The Keel Row is the trot march of the Royal Horse Artillery, of which Rudyard Kipling wrote: "The man who has never heard the 'Keel Row' rising high and shrill above the sound of the regiment...has something yet to hear and understand".

It's The Off-shoring, Stupid!

Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2012: Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Those companies, which include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., International Paper Co., Honeywell International Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., boosted their employment at home by 3.1%, or 113,000 jobs, between 2009 and 2011, the same rate of increase as the nation's other employers. But they also added more than 333,000 jobs in their far-flung—and faster-growing— foreign operations. ...

Wage convergence between the West and the rest still has a way to go.

Meantime:

One in two new US graduates jobless or underemployed

Spanish unemployment hits a new high of 24.5%.

The US Economy slows

Falling US home prices drag new buyers under water

Eurozone Retail Sales Plunge

Canadian employment withers

and ...

But it would be as tedious as it would be easy to go on, and on, and on.

Harvard University Library and Administrative Stupidity

The Guardian -- Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. A memo from Harvard Library to 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library $3.75m a year.

So, Harvard University, with total revenues of over $3 billion, cannot afford 3.75 million, or just over one tenth of one percent of the universities overall budget, for journal subscriptions.

LOL

What a miserable bunch of pikers.

The reason scholars at top universities publish in top (subscription based) journals is that everyone in a particular field reads the top (subscription based) journals in that field.

"Freely available" open access journals are not free. There is a publication charge paid by the author.

So what Harvard University Library wants is for its top researchers to publish in second tier open access journals at their own expense so that librarians have more cash to spend on whatever it is that librarians, not scholars, want.

Thanks to Professor Mark J. Perry's Carpe Diem blog for the reference to the Guardian report.

Minerals and mortality

Male residents in the small Somerset village of Hinton St George have the highest life expectancy in the UK – at 88.7 years. ...Residents of Hinton St George are expected to live on average almost four years longer than the place with the lowest life expectancy – Bootle in Merseyside. This is Somerset

Houses of Hinton St. George, England are built of the local limestone.

South Somerset has some of the most beautiful villages in England. There are two reasons for this.

One is the construction, in the 19th Century, of the Great Western Railway network, which generated an agricultural boom by providing the means whereby dairy and horticultural products could be shipped from Somerset to the rapidly growing London metropolis. The resulting prosperity is evident in the architecture of both village and farm buildings of the era.

The other reason for the charm of South Somerset is the mellow yellow Jurassic limestone from which most houses are built, which can easily be cut to form decorative doorway arches, and window frames and mullions.

It is likely that the local limestone also accounts for the unusual longevity of Hinton St. George's residents.

As Wessex Water, the Malaysian owned company that supplies the village, reports, the water supplied to the village is moderately hard, containing 68 mg of Calcium per liter. Assuming a consumption of two liters of water per day, that means a daily intake of calcium from drinking water of 136 mg, or about one fifth of the average daily calcium requirement for an adult.

In addition to calcium, the local limestone bedrock will have enriched the groundwater from which the local water source is derived in magnesium, which plays a key role in the prevention of ischemic heart disease and stroke.

Almost certain it is the minerals in the water supply that delay mortality in the village of Hinton St. George.

The higher mortality among residents of the Merseyside town of Bootle, likely reflects the fact that that community is supplied by surface water originating from reservoirs United Utilities, which is typically devoid of calcium, magnesium and other minerals.

Why blog?

A writer is a person who would run about in public flapping their arms up and down if it were the only way they could attract attention. H.L. Mencken

Some blog for attention, others to change the world. To the hypergraphiliac a blog must be the joy of their life.

But whatever the motive, writing disciplines thought. It requires evidence in support of assertions of fact and coherence in logical development. Writing for publication, even under a pseudonym, reinforces the need for both clarity and focus.

Blogging can thus be important, not so much as a means to propagate one's opinion, than as a way of discovering what one's opinion is.

Onion Sauce

THE Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Continued here.

That, surely, is one of the greatest pleasures of having a blog.

One can say, "Hang blogging" and bolt out of the house without even waiting to put on a coat and walk down the street or across the meadow and feel the warmth of the spring sunshine on one's back.

Like playing hooky from school, or  quitting a job, letting a blog go hang, provides the delightful sense of freedom. Freedom to explore the endless possibilities of existence.

Of Men, and Apes and Civilization

The close DNA sequence similarity between men and apes has led some to suppose that a man is no more than a wimpy chimp with a slightly swollen head. Further, it has been suggested, since the difference between men and apes is so trivial, there must be creatures somewhere in the limitless expanse of the universe at least as superior in intellect to us as were are to chimps. So, according to this line of thinking, despite the modest enlargement of the human fore-brain, we have little to be swelled-headed about.

But this reflects a misunderstanding of the difference between men and apes and the significance of that difference.

Both men and apes are mammals, which means that they are built to the same plan. They have liver and lights, stomach and spleen, four limbs, a head and a tail. At the cellular level the similarity of design is even closer: the same membranes, organelles, nucleic acids and enzymes. So inevitably men and apes share much the same DNA sequence, as they do with horses and hamsters, and even with reptiles and fishes, fungi and forest trees.

There is an underlying biochemical unity to the life of this Earth. But that does not make the fangs of a tiger and the molars of a camel functionally equivalent. Small changes in the proportions and slight differences in the elaboration of a basic design can result in fundamental differences in function.

Thus with the brains of man and chimp. In the lobes and their connections the two are largely similar. But the human brain has approximately twice the mass of the brain of a chimp, and there is a many-fold difference between the two in the size of certain lobes. The human brain is thus adapted to functions unknown to the mind of a chimp.

And it is possible for very slight genetic changes to result in qualitatively transformational changes in function. For example, a single-gene mutation that results in one additional rounds of cell division in some portion of the embryonic brain would double the final volume of that part of the brain.

Why, then, it might be said, if the only thing distinguishing a man from an ape is a small collection of single gene mutations, the difference between us is indeed trivial. But that is to misunderstand the evolutionary step that man has made and which no other ape has, or could ever make, so long as mankind exists.

To evolve a larger brain, an organism must have use for a larger brain. The brain is an energy intensive organ, requiring a continuous infusion of glucose and oxygen. A chimp with a brain like that of a human would be at a severe disadvantage. It would want to sit around and think but it would need to work harder than every other chimp to obtain the food necessary to keep its costly brain alive.

The only way such a chimp could survive would be to invent language, create a civilization and its associated technologies thereby raising the chimp living standard while lowering the hours of work.

That is what mankind achieved. And that is what no other species on Earth can achieve while mankind exists because mankind has preempted the resources of the entire planet.

As to the claim that an extraterrestrial intelligence would likely consider the mind of man as feeble a thing as we humans are inclined to consider the mind of a chimp, the answer should be, "give us time."

It took humans about one hundred thousand years to exchange the lifestyle of an ape for that of a yuppie. But most of that transformation occurred, with exponential acceleration, in the last ten thousand years.

Humanity is now at a critical point in its existence. We have technology that can put the entire accumulated knowledge of the species at the fingertips of every one of the seven billion membners of the species. And electronic media allow us to do that at trivial cost. The result could be an explosion in technological innovation the like of which we can hardly imagine and which will either lead us very quickly to self-destruction or grant us the power of gods.

Not only do we have the ability to educate every receptive mind to a point far beyond that reached by Aristotle or Newton, but to build intelligent machines that can outperform the human intellect by orders of magnitude.

This is precisely the transformation that any intelligent civilization created by organically evolved creatures anywhere in the universe must have undergone. It is the transformation from advancement through haphazard accumulation of mutations and genetic rearrangements that yield short-term survival advantage, to the engineered improvement of the organism and its enveloping civilization.

And once evolution is intelligently planned, it likely follows the same course anywhere in the universe. There is now no apparent limit to the advancement of human knowledge and dominion over the planet and beyond—unless we are destroyed by our own technology. But in that case, intelligent life may be a self-limiting phenomenon wherever it arises in the universe, in which case the civilization of humanity is approaching a climax of complexity that will never be exceeded anywhere in the universe.

Screw the Banks

Image Source

I've had it with banks.

It's OK if the Fed or some other central bank offers a helping hand when a bank faces a rare liquidity crisis due to circumstances beyond its control. But when banks create an interminable economic catastrophe through chronic insolvency resulting from unfathomable incompetence or criminal insanity it's time make the bankers pay.

That time has come. It is time for governments to expropriate every bank in need of a bailout, fire the CEO and other top officials, kick out the useless directors, which is to say all of them, recapitalize as necessary and inform the shareholders that due to the foolishness of their investment, the value of their holding is precisely zero.

The high street banking operations should be retained in public ownership indefinitely, while the venture capital operations are sold on the understanding that they will never receive a government bailout and will be broken up by the government if they come anywhere close to being too big to fail.

In addition, we need a new system of money creation. Allowing private institutions to create credit without limit led to the present disaster. In future, private institutions wishing to offer credit must first raise the capital, either privately, or by borrowing from the central bank. In that way, the central bank, which must be nationalized, will have firm control over the money supply and can prevent credit bubbles such as have disrupted the World economy since the turn of the century.

The following links provide the evidence, if you need it, of the criminal complicity of the New World Ordure governments of the EU and the US in the current unending banking crisis.

ZeroHedge: Video Explanation Of How The ESM Is Europe's Uber-TARP On Steroids

Golem XIV: Plan B – How to loot nations and their banks legally

 Nigel Farage: The EU Heading for Economic and Democratic Disaster

Mish: IMF Chief Jackass Calls for Taxpayer-Funded Bank Recapitalisations to Avoid Painful Deleveraging; Mish Says Fire the Parasites and Disband the IMF

The United States of Assault

America's Supreme Court helps
bring home the lessons of Guantanamo

By Naomi Wolf

The Guardian, 5 April 2012: In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

One of the most terrifying moments for me when I visited Guantanamo prison in 2009 was seeing the way the architecture of the building positioned glass-fronted shower cubicles facing intentionally right into the central atrium – where young female guards stood watch over the forced nakedness of Muslim prisoners, who had no way to conceal themselves. Laws and rulings such as this are clearly designed to bring the conditions of Guantanamo, and abusive detention, home.
I have watched male police and TSA members standing by side by side salaciously observing women as they have been "patted down" in airports. I have experienced the weirdly phrased, sexually perverse intrusiveness of the state during an airport "pat-down", which is always phrased in the words of a steamy paperback ("do you have any sensitive areas? … I will use the back of my hands under your breasts …"). One of my Facebook commentators suggested, I think plausibly, that more women are about to be found liable for arrest for petty reasons (scarily enough, the TSA is advertising for more female officers).

I interviewed the equivalent of TSA workers in Britain and found that the genital groping that is obligatory in the US is illegal in Britain. I believe that the genital groping policy in America, too, is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state – at any moment.

The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy's striking use of the term "detainees" for "United States citizens under arrest". Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy's new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.

Ten years of association have given "detainee" the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply – especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term – with its associations of "those to whom anything may be done" – is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.

Where are we headed? Why? These recent laws criminalizing protest, and giving local police – who, recall, are now infused with DHS money, military hardware and personnel – powers to terrify and traumatise people who have not gone through due process or trial, are being set up to work in concert with a see-all-all-the-time surveillance state. A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls. Similar legislation is being pushed forward in the UK.
With that Big Brother eye in place, working alongside these strip-search laws, – between the all-seeing data-mining technology and the terrifying police powers to sexually abuse and humiliate you at will – no one will need a formal coup to have a cowed and compliant citizenry. If you say anything controversial online or on the phone, will you face arrest and sexual humiliation?

Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. I was told by an NYPD sergeant that "safety" issues allow the NYPD to make arrests at will. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters – if there will be any left after these laws start to bite – from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.

Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: "There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control."

As Chris Hedges wrote in his riveting account of the NDAA: "There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011."
This enormous new sector of the economy has a multi-billion-dollar vested interest in setting up a system to surveil, physically intimidate and prey upon the rest of American society.

Now they can do so by threatening to demean you sexually – a potent tool in the hands of any bully.

See also:
American Tyranny: Sexual Humiliation From Abu Ghraib to an Airport Near You

Bush-Obama Program of Sexual Humiliation From Abu Ghraib to the High School Prom

Why the US Tortures People

Supermodel Bar Raefeli on airport pat down: 'It left me no doubt about her sexual preference'

Becky Ackers: Mr. Idiot of the Keystone Gestapo Speaks

The People Versus Parliament

Statue of Simon de Montfort on the Haymarket
Memorial Clock Tower in Leicester.

The origins of the English Parliament, it is claimed, are to be found in the ancient moots and witans of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. But as a body representative of the common people of England, Parliament can be dated precisely to the year 1265 when the rebel, Simon de Montfort 6th Earl of Leicester, made King Henry III a captive figurehead and called a Parliament of elected representatives, two from each county and from selected boroughs.

Although de Montfort was killed in battle by royalist forces the same year and his body hacked in pieces, Henry III's successor, Edward I, reestablished an elected Parliament, a model that has been retained ever since. And since, by the Great Charter (Magna Carta) of 1215, the king had ceded control over taxation to Parliament, the financing of the English government has, for almost 750 years, been under the nominal control of the people.

But, as a result of the constitutional changes that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the executive branch of the English Government passed from monarch to Parliament. And because Parliamentary votes are now controlled not by the representatives of the people expressing the interests of their constituents, but by the party machines that are owned by hidden financial or alien interests, the people no longer have significant control over the government.

That is why an "independent" Government advisory body, the "Committee on Standards in Public life," insolently proposes taxpayer funding of election campaigns by parties the taxpayers won't support voluntarily.

What this reveals is that something has gone hopelessly wrong with England's Parliamentary system, which is democratic in name only, and is in reality a system of government by factions serving interests of which most citizens are only dimly aware but to which, if they knew of them, they would be vehemently opposed.

On the right, those interests include Israel, the finance and real estate industries, and the American war for global empire. On the left, those interests include, Israel, the finance and real estate industries, and the American war for global empire.

A measure of the anti-democratic nature of parliamentary government in Britain and elsewhere is the near universal contempt with which politicians treat the taxpayer.

To the left, the taxpayer is a whingeing anti-social element who is assumed to be a cheat and a liar unless investigation proves otherwise, and who any politician should be proud to punish.

To the right, there may be surreptitious gestures to mollify the higher bracket taxpayer. But the main objective is to compete with the left for the votes of the supposedly underprivileged, downtrodden, exploited or discriminated against with promises of ever more broad-ranging taxpayer funded giveaways, subsidies and regulatory mechanisms.

Previously I suggested that some semblance of democratic balance might be achieved by populating the upper house in every parliamentary system with those who pay the highest taxes. The aim of that proposal was to make the influence of the money power in politics more visible and therefore more responsible.

But giving the money power, which has the means to avoid heavy taxation, overt political influence would provide minimal relief to the little people, the middle class, who lose half their income in taxes largely so that politicians are able to buy the votes of the great army of bureaucrats who administer the multitudinous "benefits" that secure the votes of the lower classes.

To remedy the financial exploitation and destruction of the common folk, I propose two innovations, one symbolic and the other of substance.

The symbolic innovation would be a scheme to recognize taxpayers for the contribution they make to the Treasury, this to be accomplished by the issuance of medals based on a person's tax contributions during the past five years. Thus, those contributing on average more than they receive in benefits, either monetary or in kind, would receive a Citizenship Medal Third Class, which would be cast in bronze and announced in newspapers, local radio, etc. Those contributing a net amount of, say $10,000 a year would receive a Citizenship Medal Second Class, which would be cast in Silver. Those contributing $100,000 per year would receive a Citizenship Medal First Class, which would be cast in Gold. In addition there could be medals in platinum or studded with diamonds for the nation's greatest taxpayers. Medals would be issued every five years so that, on formal occasions, veteran taxpayer would have a series of medals to add to their military service medals.

But more than this is needed to restore to the English and the other Parliamentary democracies the power over the public purse that English citizens enjoyed under Simon de Montfort's Parliament of 1265. To restore that right, the innovation of substance that I propose is a Citizen's Assembly to rule on all money bills proposed by the executive branch of government, i.e., Parliament.

The Citizen's Assembly, like Simon de Montfort's Parliament, whose members were elected by freeholders with property of a rentable value in excess of forty shillings a year, should represent the competent and responsible middle class. This community would be defined by taxpayer status. All those awarded a Medal of Citizenship First Class or higher would be eligible to sit as a member of the Citizens' Assembly. From among those eligible individuals two would be selected at random from each constituency and required to serve for a period of three years, selection of representatives being made yearly such that one third or the Assembly's members were replaced each year.

This idea would undoubtedly be dismissed by the establishment parties and their media hangers on as totally insane, and it is, I acknowledge, something that could surely not be instituted other than by a conquering warrior and intellectual giant such as de Montfort. Sadly, therefore, we must expect that the Western democracies will continue their accelerating plunge through corruption, into chaos leading to not-long-delayed extinction.

Did Anders Breivik Strike a Blow For or Against Multicultural Genocide in Europe?

Source: Islamophobia Watch. The unstated assumption that Islamophobia Watch
makes is that if you oppose multiculturalism and European genocide by mass
immigration you are a fist waving Nazi like Anders Breivik

After 9/11, one must always ask: Cui bono? who gains?

If Anders Breivik thought that killing 80 of his Norwegian compatriots struck a blow against multiculturalism and the genocide of the Norwegian people by mass immigration, he was, and presumably remains, totally insane.

But according to the most recent psychiatric report, Anders Breivik is, and presumably always has been, sane.

And if Breivik was sane at the time of the Oslo bombing and Utoya massacre for which he claims responsibility, then his intention must have been to achieve precisely what he did achieve, namely, to smear by association with his criminal action the great majority of Europe's indigenous population who share his claimed opposition to multiculturalism and mass immigration.

So which is it? Is Breivik a nutter? Or is he an agent of the same evil forces that used 9/11 to bring the American people to the will of a globalist elite intent on war for global empire?

Aangirfan provides a mass of information that may help you decide.