Barrel Strength

How many big stupid ideas have marched through our institutions in our lifetimes, wrecking as they go?

Let us define what we mean. A Big Stupid Idea is any idea which, though it may once have been true, or is partly true, is pushed to such an extreme that it lasts beynd its time, or worse, is pushed to the exclusion of its necessary qualifications. a truth can become an untruth when it is claimed to be the Whole Truth.

I invite anyone to add their own Big Stupid Ideas to the list.

And pardon the offence to my market-oriented friends, but the latest big stupid idea is:

1) The market is the solution.

Uh, no. The market is a restricted sand-box whose rules and dimensions are determined by non-market institutions such as courts and parliaments, the rule of law, and the guardian forces of the state which protect the sandbox, and the tolerance of the public for its outcomes.

When those who play in this sandbox load the ordinary joes of this life, including you and me, with their failures, but privatize the winnings, society reacts negatively. The social contract between those who play in the sandbox and the rest of us is a real fact, which the Ayn Randists ignore at their peril.

2) Genetics has no (legitimate) role to play in the determination of social outcomes.

I can never figure out whether this is an “is” argument or an “ought” argument, but in either case it is wrong. The abundant new evidence accruing daily about the role of the genetic in every social outcome (viz. The Bell Curve, Before the Dawn, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion) and in the fundamental composition and success rate of various humans is so overwhelming that only an ideologist could be blind to it. As to the “ought” portion of the argument, I rely on the immortal words of Eric Voegelin:

“All men are equal, and all men are unequal. And the ways in which they are equal are as interesting and important as the ways in which they are unequal. Any society which forgets the truth of either fo these two propositions will end in violence.”

Thus, recent findings include the facts that: race is not a social construction, but a real biological fact; intelligence is distributed differently among ethnic and and racial groups; evolution has not stopped, but is in fact accelerating; a great deal of the different outcomes among nations and peoples is not therefore the result only of unfair exploitation, but of genetic factors. How to make outcomes fair in such as situation is not a trivial exercize in forced redistribution.

From the failure to provide for the genetic factors of life proceeds many further errors and false ideas.

On a smaller scale, here are few more:

3) Isreal is an apartheid state: the Palestinians are the blacks; the Israelis, the Afrikaners.

From this narrative, everything flows. ThePalestinians are the virtuous underdog, the Israelis the white supremacist masters. The role of Islam in making this inter-ethnic and religious issue intractable is ignored. Apparently intelligent people believe this. It has the effect of letting them know they are on the right side, which is its main function. No further thought required.

4) Islam

God has commanded you to obey God’s ravings, accurately recorded verbatim in the Koran, to tyrannize and subdue every other person in the universe, and the female sex especially. Jews are to be exterminated on the Day of Judgment. And so forth.

Need I say more?

5) Man is causing irreversible damage to the environment through burning fossil fuels, and only a concerted, coordinated global campaign to reduce carbon emissions can save the planet.

This is the latest emanation of leftist control fantasies, after the failure of Marxism. It is just the zombie of state socialism with an another compelling pseudo-scientific justification, rising from the grave of Communism.

The fact that we can and should take better care of resources (fish, forests, air, soils) than we do has nothing to do with the spiritual impulse to control every living thing which lies at the core of ecologism. Making the production of carbon dioxide as sin is about as sensible as making lust a sin. If it worked for the Christians, then why not for the Greens?

What are your candidates for Big Stupid Ideas? At best they should not be restricted to Canada or North America. They should be working through the culture more or less around the world, or the english-speaking portion of it that we are familiar with.

Stieg Larsson’s Elizabeth Salander series is a moderately entertaining read, despite everything bad I am going to say about it. Having stayed up too late last night finishing the last of the  series, I must complain about some of Larsson’s tedious moralizing leftism, and his dhimmitude to women.  

Lest you think me unfair imputing leftism to Larsson,  which oozes through the books, the Wikipedia entry for him states:

Larsson was initially a political activist for the Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers League), a photographer, and one of Sweden’s leading science fiction fans.[3] In politics he was the editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen. He also wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen

The series of three books is built around various men behaving badly towards women. Even the male protagonist, the journalist Blomkvist, is criticized for a love ‘em and leave ‘em attitude. What was Stieg Larsson repenting? 

Blomkvist’s fictional sister says of him: “He screws his way through life and doesn’t seem to grasp how much it can hurt women who think of him as more than a casual affair.”

The strange, anti-social heroine, Lizbeth Salander, has been the subject of a vast conspiracy to ruin her life, run by a section of Swedish Security Police.

Her father, former member of Russia’s military intelligence,  ran a white slavery business; her half-brother murders women for sport.

A colleague of one of the central women in the story sends her vicious emails because she would not look at him in high school.

The central villain in the first Stieg Larsson book tortures women to death in his basement.

Salander, the heroine, is attacked  by biker thugs, of whom she disposes readily.

Her father puts a .22 bullet in her head.

It goes on and on.

Like many modern books, the last one in the series needs a thorough editing. The first half of the book could have been dropped with no loss of interest or importance to the devlopment of the plot. In fact the second and third books are badly written. Far too many characters are introduced. The plots go nowhere for weeks of fictional time.

Then there is the relentless recitation of facts and brand names which characterize modern police procedurals. No one has an orange soda; they have a Ramlosa (European brand name). Every car trip is described street by street: for example – “She turned left of Helmansgatan, drove a couple of blocks to Svavelsjo, and parked in front of the Tre Kronor.” Who gives a damn?

The weirdest thing, for a North American, is the feeling that in Sweden, we are seeing a vision of our own future. Larsson envisions a society so tightly bound up in procedural fairness and privacy laws that its organs of state seem barely able to function. The police are barely effective. The state also seems to have a thing against people taking measures to defend themselves. For example, the heroine Salander is charged with manslaughter for killing her father, after the fucker had popped a .22 into her head, and she had clawed her way out of a shallow grave and subsequently put an axe in his face. Credentialism runs unchecked: there is a sort of collective gasp of awe when the  lawyer defending Salander at her trial reveals that she has a degree in pyschology. Whoopie doo!

Stieg Larsson’s male lead, Blomkvist, says towards the end of the tale, that the principal issue is men’s violence towards women.

I agree that the villains in Larsson’s books are all men and they richly deserve the fates he devises for them, but a moment’s reflection will indicate that each sex can be evil in the manner of their own kind. I suspect that Stieg Larsson would not agree to the proposition that men and women are morally equal.

Sweden is the place where one of the Muhammad cartoonists  is assaulted when he tries to give a lecture at a university, where he sleeps in different houses at night, and where the burka-clad woman who calls for his death does so with impunity, where the Malmo fire department needs police protection to enter Muslim parts of town, and yet the imaginiation of the earnest dweeb leftist Stieg Larsson is taken up with violence against women of every kind except the principal source, even in his own country, Islam. Go figure.

You can wait for the movies of the Larsson books; they will be more tightly edited.

____________________________

A good review of the books – one which agrees with me – can be found in an interview with Larsson’s wife, Eva Gabrielsson, in the Guardian, of all places.

Let us look at the facts:

1. Europe is being destroyed from within by elites who seek to replace its actual populations with a rabble of barbarian immigrants, with all the effects of crime, no-go zones, and imposition of the values of those barbarians on Europe.

2. The same process is happening in the United States, by uncontrolled illegal immigration of mestizo-Spanish central Americans.

3. The United States has been taken over by an affirmative-action President who neither understands the culture of the place nor its capitalist underpinnings, and who does not much like its white citizens.

4. A variety of laws and speech-control commissions have been empowered to suppress discussion of race, religion, and intelligence distribution on any terms other than the virtues of mulitculuralism, massive barbarian unqualified immigration, tolerance of Islam and the assumption of white guilt for all social evils.

Yes, this is one of those days when I think that western civilization is in a process of rapid and uncontrollable decay. I do not see anywhere, except on a few conservative blogs, any realization of how bad it is and how rapidly it is getting worse.

I do not see any political leadership, or serious political movements, anywhere in the West, daring to take on the assumptions that are driving us over a cliff, namely:

1. The equality of all cultures

2. the equality of all races (in terms of intelligence and achievement)

nor do I see any challenge being mounted to

3. The apparent desire to diminish, demean and or replace the white race with something else wherever it is currently dominant, if that is the appropriate word, or hanging on, if you prefer

or defence of

4.The superiority of of our constitutional order.

Do you?

I am bored stiff with Canadian politics and I suspect you are too. Indeed I am bored with US politics. The global warming scare is fizzling out. The outcomes on several fronts are predictable and they work,  in general, towards conservative aims and outcomes. The only uncertain issue, in the grand strategic sense, is whether we will be forcibly Islamized in 25 years, or not.

Glorious Leader Harper moves the jello which makes up this country to the right, and any change he can make below the level of public discussion he makes, and any change requiring public discussion he does not make. Thus immigration and refugee policy can get fixed by administrative action, but the Human Rights Commissions march onward until they meet their deserved fate: ignominy and dismantlement. But not now.

Obama continues to screw up at his own pace, stiffing his allies and appeasing our enemies.  He will be punished at the mid-terms in spectacular fashion, and the issue is whether he will be considered worse than Jimmy Carter, or slightly better. I already have several bets out that he is a one-term President and I see no sign that my money is at risk.

Free-speech issues, which are really substitutes for the Islamic issue, are now being engaged, and they will play out over years. Sensible people  are not always winning them, but we are engaging a larger segment of society in the necessary discussions of race, class, religion, intelligence distribution, and why they cannot be discussed in frank terms.   The free-speech issues are important because they mark the boundaries that leftists want to put on freedom of discussion in the West, which is to say: they want to end it entirely for everyone, possibly including themselves. And, just as they did in the days of Communism, there is always a large contingent of leftists who hate liberal constitutional democracy and their own culture more than they fear the outside threat.

Only in the case of Islam, the threat is now inside the house, because of senseless immigration policies.

The Muslim issue is the new Communism. The same issues ae being asked. What is communism?Are there  really such people as communists? What do they intend towards us? Have they infiltrated our governments?

Islam is resuming  a thousand three hundred year long battle with everyone else, after a pause when their political arrangements (the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates) were crushed.

The same sorts of naivety, enthusiasm, folly, intimidation, appeasement, infiltration and refusal to discuss the matter are occurring in relation to Islam as occurred in relation Communism.

The collapse of Christianity is leaving a vast spiritual vacuum in the West, and the Muslims are merely filling it.

Thus it was with great pleasure I turned this past Easter weekend from secular concerns to Jesus’ really bad day upon the cross, and to a brilliant, deeply learned, and well thought out book by the San Francisco philosopher and historian of religion, Jacob Needleman, whose What is God? counts among the 30 most important books I have read.

I thought it would be one of those duty-books that I occasionally read because, like broccoli, they are good for me, though dry and distasteful. Nothing of the sort. It caught me from the opening pages of childhood recollection, and continued straight through to the end, opening larger and deeper vistas. (His description of his boundless loathing, as a young Jewish man, for Saint Augustine aroused in me nothing but sympathy, and outright laughter, as he burns every page of The City of God one evening in outrage).

Needleman’s book leads through a painless and engaged  discussion of western philosophy and religious thinking to spiritual pratices and thence to an exposition of the thought of George Gurdjieff and his followers.

I have bought two copies of “What is God?” to lend to my children and friends, and I have just ordered a dozen books on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, John Sinclair (Lord Pentland), Jeanne de Salzman and the other disciples.

Jacob Needleman’s “What is God?” is a tonic for your soul. You have one, you know, and it needs exercise and refreshment. It is a good guide to begin thinking about the question because, as he says, the answer to “who is God?” is entirely bound up with the question “who are you?”. And I am  more concerned with those two questions than I am with any other at this time.

_______________________

An engaging on-line resource of writing by Gurdjieff’s disciples can be found at http://books.google.ca/books?id=oyZ14dBwIZMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gurdjieff&source=bl&ots=D0EsZqpKq6&sig=NqoXKG0W5l_DWFI-vw4gCghG7HE&hl=en&ei=ZlG_S42JFMH78Aai0az8CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=17&ved=0CDUQ6AEwEA#v=onepage&q&f=false

This morning’s article in the National Post trumpets Capitalism made us Kinder, study says.

Obviously it is not capitalism, which is a late development of the post-1400s in Europe, but the universal human tendency to trade, which has softened barbaric manners.

“The finding, reported in the journal Science, suggests people trust and play fair with strangers because markets and religion — not some deep psychological instinct inherited from our dim tribal past — have helped shape our neural circuitry over the eons.”

“The hunter-gatherer and tribal societies studied are known for sharing among family and close acquaintances. But the researchers found fair play in monetary transactions with strangers was almost an alien concept. People in the simpler societies treated strangers less fairly, and were less likely to punish people who kept most of the money for themselves.

“Social scientists — and economists in particular — have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers.

“Mr. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

“The emergence and growth of markets allowed for the exchange of goods, skills and knowledge and enabled large complex societies to emerge and function, Mr. Henrich says, noting that humans in large societies are not nearly as selfish as some would suggest.

“There are all these aspects to our lives that just seem to work, because we are not actually baboons,” Mr. Henrich says in an interview.

This is what we would have expected. Read the rest…

Unleash your inner geek, Prime Minister!

O QanaDa, juHqo’maj je vav saq.
Batlh je rewbe’, qod Hoch roghvaH ra’.
tiDu’ wew Hot’bey, legh HoS je tlhab.
Da ‘u’, O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

joH’a’ jegh juHqo’ yay je tlhab.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

And the translation:

O Canada, our home world and fatherland,
Honour and love in all its people command.
Our hearts glowing, we see strength and freedom.
Throughout the universe, O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

God give our home world victory and freedom.
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time,
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

First, Geoffrey Sachs. Then me, in five carefully worded megatons.

Geoffrey Sachs in the Guardian:

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

 On the motives of those who oppose the global warming agenda:

“the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.”.

Finally, it is our duty to obey:

“The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.”

So let us review his argument:

• Those who oppose us are against the scientific method itself, it is not a mere disagreement about some facts.
• Our side is filled with wonderfully intelligent minds.
• Their side is corrupt and evil.
• Obey or be damned.

And now I am going to  give some of it back.

[After the passage of a few days since first reading the Sachs article, I realize what drove me and Antony Watts up the wall about it. It was not intended to rationally persuade anyone who differs in the least from its views. It was the equivalent of an officer slapping a dazed private, saying "get back in line, soldier. Nothing has happened". The entire eastern front has collapsed. The shattered wreck of armies is drifting past the position, and the officer is merely trying to cow the soldier back into line. It was an assertion of authority over weak minds, and the insult lies in the author's belief that we are weak minded. But he was not talking to us. He was talking to the wavering fanatics.]

First, this line of attack is entirely typical of all global warming alarmists whom I have encountered personally and in print, without exception. I have not met any global warmist who has failed to use his adherence to the dcctrine as a signal of his moral superiority, rather than as a position in a rational discussion. The most disturbing thing about warmists is their religious enthusiasm and intolerance.

Second,  I have observed this form of argument many times before.  I have argued with Jews, of whom Geoffrey Sachs is one, for over forty years on all matters political, theological, factual or legal. Many Jews, if not most, exhibit a strong tendency to overstate the argument in the terms used by Sachs. We shall discuss what those features are below.

Third, the global warming movement shows many of the features associated with ideological movements of the twentieth century: Feudianism, Boasian sociology, and subsequent intellectual movements making  left-wing critiques of society (the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al). These were mostly Jewish in origin, composition, and working styles. These groups exhibited or exhibit:

• high degrees of authoritarianism: intellectual subordination of the group to a charismatic leader or his ideas;
• sharp in-group out-group distinctions, between the elect/the saved/the initated and the rest, who are divided into the possibly useful and the damned (those who knowingly disagree).
• a conspiratorial style: worldly success in ensuring members of the in-group are placed in the right spots to manage the propagation of the group’s ideas and the upward mobility of its members;
• Condescension towards and failure to respect the ideas of others. Indeed, failure to agree is a sign of psychopathoogy.

To summarize:

1. The pattern of thought and behaviour of the global warming alarmists exhibits many resemblances to the intellectual fads of the 20th century.
2. The style of argument of Geoffrey Sachs is particularly Jewish.
3. People should not be cowed by Sachs’  style of discourse, particularly they should not be afraid of being called anti-semitic for saying that this style of argument is obnoxious, authoritarian, and anti-liberal.

Freud, Boas , Marcuse and their doctrines  have turned into the equivalent of a pet rocks.  Global warming via CO2 emissions is rapidly joining these intellectual poseurs on the rubbish dump of failed ideas.

The style of argument, the conspiratorial methods, the inability to withstand criticism from members of an out-group: all this will persist. It will simply find a new authoritarian ideology to latch onto.

So Geoffrey Sachs can go fuck himself.

No actually I don’t. I hate his doctrines. David Warren is a tower of intellectual strength and and integrity. On many issues, he represents a voice of long-term sanity, though as a Holy Fool he aggravates many.

My problem with David Warren is that he is not of our species, and does not know it. Consequently on the subject of sex he preaches to some other class of being not commonly found among humans – those who feel no lust. He may share human DNA; but I can scarcely believe it from the way he talks.

In this week’s sermon, he writes:

“A woman, who is not the victim of a rape, has always had that right; and even my Catholic Church recognizes a method of contraception that is quite infallible. Gentle reader may guess what that is. And while it is only a rule of thumb, “no sex without babies, and no babies without sex” does in fact provide adequate guidance for any conceivable life issue.”

How else can you account for his advice in a major newspaper, that the best course was “no babies without sex, no sex without babies”. Wilful perversity? Possibly, but not on this issue.

This is not Roman Catholicism, David. It is just the voice of a man in whose veins no testosterone runs. I am not saying that you lack courage, for clearly you have profound moral convictions and have suffered greatly for them. I am saying that you have critical absence of the vital juices that make humans the most sexual of all species.

A man who explained his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism on the basis that the Anglican Church was getting too gay-friendly has some serious thinking to do about the nature of the priesthood of the Roman Church, the largest gay-owned and -operated institution in the world.

Warren continues:

“This moral injunction (no babies without sex, no sex without babies) is dismissed as “too simple.” Yet merely by trying to draw some alternative line, say between contraception and abortion, we have already found the means to become irretrievably lost. All moral injunctions are simple, and the sinful heart has always cried out for a little complexity.”

Warren continues in the long line of Catholics from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine forward, to find something inherently sinful about the human desire for sex, whether with oneself, or others, whether with the opposite sex, or one’s own.  One of the 39 articles of the Anglican religion, written in the 1540s,  expresses it thus.

 IX:…..”the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, phronea sarkos, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

If lust be something not subject to the law of God, one asks how it is different from the production of bile or hemoglobin, or the production of neurotransmitters or snot, or any other bodily function. And if lust is subject to the will of God in the same way as other bodily functions and processes, one asks how or why it has the nature of sin.

Sex is how we got here. I mean more by sex than by how we were given birth. I mean sexual selection, how you chose your mate and how you were chosen, is the only means of evolution directed enough, intelligent enough, discriminating enough, to take us from furry-faced bipeds under the plains of Africa to listening to Mozart under northern stars, dining on food with cutlery and table cloths, in the space of 30,000 years. Read Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind for a more complete exposition of this argument. To place in sexual selection the burden of sin is a portion of traditional Christian doctrine that we have all walked away from, for many profound reasons.

All but David Warren and his lonely band of traditional Catholics. May God bless them and preserve them, for they have been made crazy. Our revenge shall be to outbreed them.

Real men iron their shirts. At least I like to think so. 

Ironing has many advantages.

The activity is mindless in the zen sense, a series of repetitive actions of flattening fabric with the hands and passing the iron over it to bring perfection to wrinkled matter. Like ritual of any kind, the activity misleads the mind strategically, so that the mind thinks that it is busy doing something while it empties itself. It is a whole lot easier than sitting in a chair contemplating one’s thought processes. It involves less social self-presentation than church. It involves less risk from inattention than driving. It is far less expensive than fly-fishing, being able to be conducted in your basement with a minimum of equipment.  It conduces to large amounts of spousal approval, while permitting serious listening to one’s favourite music. 

As I ironed my wife’s blouses, I considered the fact that the buttons of women’s shirts run down the left side rather than the right. I speculated whether some bored housewife in the late 1950s used this same fact to argue that the differences between men and women were merely conventional, like the placement of buttons on a shirt. It would have marked the humble orign of one of the world’s stupidest and most damaging ideas, that has trampled through society like King Kong in a rage.

A friend of mine who went to university after me, in the 1980s, said that there were two large unquestionable ideas reigning in his day: 1) Reagan was stupid and capitalism was evil and 2) the differences between men and women were merely conventional. You will recall in the seventies and eighties  that mothers gave their boys girls’ toys and their girls’ Tonka trucks, in the attempt to demasculinize the male and masculinize the female, though they did not use those terms. There was also the doctor who used some poor boy who had lost his penis in a medical accident. The boy, used as the poster child for the notion that a genetic male could be raised as a female, subsequently resumed his male identity, got reconstructive surgery and married. There were many attempts of a similar nature to eradicate male-female differences.

How come these experiments, when conducted by social engineers, are never labelled ideological? When parents  support spanking children , they are being “ideological”. When parents oppose spanking children, they are called “progressive”? A recent study from social researchers at Calvin college supported the benefits of spanking between the ages of two and six for the later development of responsible adults. I do not know whether any such study can prove anything useful, but I did remark that the Usual Suspects sniffed that the Christian origin of Calvin college maight have induced a bias into the experimental method. As if the leftist assault on society by Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors and imitators proceeded from some Burkean satisfaction with hierarchical social arrangements.

There was always an  ambiguity in the argument too, of the socially constructed view of  male-female differences. They could never quite get it clear whether the differences were socially constructed, or whether the male was, in essence, just violent and evil. We men were all supposed to wear the red ribbons of shame for twenty five years because some abused Algerian boy, Gamil Gharbi, renamed Marc Lepine, killed the fourteen women engineering students at the Universite de Montreal. Even in 2010 it takes a brave newspaper to publish an article suggesting this tragedy might have been about Islamic male contempt for women than reflective of a general male hostility to female success.

Amid the terrible news of earthquake in Haiti and the world-historical confrontation between Google and China over the unity of the Internet, comes this news: the male Y chrmosome keeps reinventing itself.

The Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, published this today in Nature
The study compared the Y chromosomes in chimpanzees and man, to discover that the rate of change in humans was phenomenal.

Quoting from Nature:

“As the earlier studies had suggested, many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human. Page’s team found that the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans. The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%.

“Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome.”

All this reinforces how different we are from chmps as a species, but how much more different we are becoming over time. It also reverses the previous notion that the Y chromosome was residual or of declining importance. As we male chauvinists expect, it is the source of most of the change in the human species. Take that, Andrea Dworkin!

[Note: The genome sequencing comparison between men and women, and chimps of either sex, has yet to be conducted. So my headline is yet unproven.]

 Test: Which of the three items just mentioned: the disaster in Haiti, the unity of the Internet, or the rapid evolution of the Y chromosome, do you consider most important? Discuss.

Study shows: greens are pious hypocrites.

The more you assign yourself moral superiority because you shop “green”, the more inclined you are to cheat in a number of different ways.
“Co-authors Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, professors at the university’s Rotman School of Business, set up tests for a sample of university students, which asked them to purchase a basket of goods at either a hypothetical organic shop or a typical grocery store. Those who bought more green items were found in separate tests to be significantly less likely than their conventional counterparts to share money with an anonymous recipient and more likely to cheat on and lie about the results of a simple quiz.”

We have all noticed this about lefties and fundamentalists: their self-attribution of a vast reservoir of moral superiority, so that they can be ruder, nastier, more arrogant, less tolerant, than their sinning conservative or less fundamentalist neighbours.

“Grant us, mother Gaia, the grace to be more ecologically conscious and concerned, and to pardon us our sins against our fellow humans, for thy Name’s sake”.

The tendency to assign oneself moral superiority is universal. The greens are only the latest manifestation.

As the science behind global warming evaporates, it becomes necessary to increase the vilification of opposition, while changing the subject. Pull back from any concrete assertions of fact, and sling shit at your opponents from the high ground of self-declared moral superiority.

George Mobiot’s vapourings in this week’s Groniad are a case in point. Observe how he eliminates any middle ground:

“‘Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impedimentsand those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.”

Notice two distortions by which Monbiot frames the debate. First, those who oppose are inherently unreasonable: Read the rest…

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-index.html

The method used divided webpage lookups by media articles, or pages.  (The author is British).

“Using the TWI (Tiger Woods Index) as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

“Applying the “ratio analysis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

The author says that a statistician might fault him but that, unlike Micahel Mann, his methods and date are open to public insepction.

The method allows for infinite expansion. It allows for a possibly consistent measure of public interest versus newspaper (media) interest. More work needs to be done on this, because it is a simple measure of the frequent gap between popular interest in a topic and the newspaper’s interest.

The article, published in today’s Globe and Mail, and derived from the Guardian, has to be read in the complete inverse of its intentions:

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.