Oh No, He Di'int!

HBD Chick relates, in uncapitalized, sparseley punctuated blogspeak, a story of a naive sociobiologist who, in the search for truth, offended a protected minority. 

you prolly heard by now that satoshi kanazawa says black women are ugly.

of course, he didn’t really, but who cares about silly little ol’ details like that.

what happened was kanazawa got some “attractiveness” data from add health. the evaluations were made “three times by three different interviewers over seven years” (during waves i – iii). the data showed that, consistently, black females scored lower in attractiveness than white, asian, or native american women; this did not happen in the case of black males.

andrew over @

“At this point, we have no idea who the interviewers who rated the students were. The attractiveness ratings would have been altered by varying degrees of prior familiarity between the individuals… whether the interviewers were of a certain age… the same sex or opposite sex breakdown… ingroup/outgroup… interviewer race… et cetera. There are simply a lot of variables that bring the reliability of attractiveness data into question. Perhaps this information is available, but it wasn’t in Kanazawa’s article, and I couldn’t find it on the study’s website.”

well, add health (a university of south carolina entity) apparently outsourced its fieldwork positions to both the national opinion research center (norc) of the university of chicago (waves i and ii) and rti international (wave iii).

fieldworkers seem to be part-time, contract workers, afaics. with the connection to the unversity of south carolina and the university of chicago, i was guessing that the fieldworkers were likely college students — maybe grad students interested in the field — sociology or whatever the heck it is (i’m talking about the interviewers here — i realize that the add health people are in the medical field). and, who winds up in sociology? mostly white women, with perhaps a few asian women thrown in. so, i was thinking that a lot of the interviewers might’ve been young white college women — and they might not find black women to be very attractive.

however, on the norc website, there are some videos of field interviewers explaining why they love their job, etc., etc., and they’re all older folks, i.e. not college students. of course, i’m sure this group is a pc-selected group — they’ve got almost all the races included there. but, still, three out of the five are white folks. if that is at all representative, then, yeah — there could, again, very well be some bias introduced here.

it’s still interesting that black women were consistently evaluated as the least attractive, but who were the evaluators? if they had been all black men, perhaps the results would’ve been different.

what i think is even more interesting is that blacks — both men and women — consistently rated themselves as attractive or highly attractive, more than members of the other races. black and proud! good for them!:

Paul Kersey continues the tale:

The author of the now censored study describing why Black females are the least attractive, Satoshi Kanazawa, also wrote this fantastic article for Psychology Today (which is still available) that describes 10 politically incorrect truths of human nature. No. 1 is a worth repeating:

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media.

Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman's health status.

Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are healthier and more fertile than other women; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Alternatively, men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason they prefer women with small waists. A new study of Polish women shows that women with large breasts and tight waists have the greatest fecundity, indicated by their levels of two reproductive hormones (estradiol and progesterone).

Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.

Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females. One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest indicator of interest and attraction. And the size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not.

Now what exactly did the study state and what did Kanazawa conclude in his blog post that got Black women everywhere (whom, if trends continue, will all be considered morbidly obese in 30 years) upset and had them rushing to a beauty salon to get weaves and hair that looks white? Well, it said this:

What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women? Black women are on average much heavier than nonblack women. The mean body-mass index (BMI) at Wave III is 28.5 among black women and 26.1 among nonblack women. (Black and nonblack men do not differ in BMI: 27.0 vs. 26.9.) However, this is not the reason black women are less physically attractive than nonblack women. Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI. Nor can the race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women. Black women are still less physically attractive than nonblack women net of BMI and intelligence. Net of intelligence, black men are significantly more physically attractive than nonblack men.

There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.

It’s a well known fact that Black women have less success at online dating and lower rates of marriage, but is it due to higher rates of testosterone? Not being an evolutionary psychologist, we’ll leave the questions raised by Kanazawa to be answered by professionals.

The London School of Economics, where Professor Kanazawa is employed, is now "investigating" whether it should take action against the HBD menace. 

LSE investigates lecturer's blog over race row

The London School of Economics is investigating a blog post by one of its lecturers, which sparked anger by discussing "why black women are less physically attractive".

Satoshi Kanazawa cited the findings of a University of North Carolina survey in which he said interviewers rated the "physical attractiveness" of subjects.

The post was removed from Psychology Today as critics accused him of causing offence and demanded his sacking.

The LSE said his views were his own.

Dr Kanazawa, a reader in the management department at the LSE, could not be reached for comment.

He is on sabbatical, but normally lectures on evolutionary psychology and management science.

Although the posting was removed, cached versions are available elsewhere on the internet.

According to those, the blog said that in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), black women were, on average, rated to be less attractive than women of other races, while black men were not rated less attractive than men of other races.

Dr Kanazawa suggested, but then rejected, that this may be because of higher body mass index or increased genetic mutations, but said that it might be because of higher testosterone levels.

He did not detail the social or ethnic backgrounds of the interviewers, or the criteria on which they had based their judgements of "physical attractiveness".

Fascinating Fascism

As you’ve probably heard by now, a Russian design firm has been condemned for…well…evoking fascism in a recent advertising campaign.

Russia's Winter Olympics slips into controversy over 'Nazi images'

Tom Parfitt

The Guardian

16 May 2011

A promotional campaign linked to the 2014 Winter Olympics is stirring debate in Russia because of its use of allegedly "fascist" imagery.

The campaign employs images of blue-eyed, blond sportsmen and women which have been described by critics as "neo-Hitlerite" and "like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film".

Images of an Aryan-looking snowboarder and an ice-skater gazing into the middle distance dominate giant billboards in Moscow and feature on the cover of brochures to advertise Gorky Gorod, an elite housing complex being built at Krasnaya Polyana near Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast. The complex is a private-public partnership which will be the Olympic media village at the 2014 Games.

"Without doubt the authors of this advertising were inspired by Nazi art," said Ekaterina Degot, a well-known art historian and former curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery.

When the billboards were put up, the Russian art collective Voina, itself known for its controversial painting of a 65-metre penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg, tweeted: "On Pushkinskaya Square opposite Gap, there is a huge advertisement, openly fascist in style, for elite housing in Sochi."

Degot and others said the style and pose of the subjects in the images was heavily suggestive of Nazi art which stresses racial purity and superiority.

The Guardian has learned that the images of the sportsmen were produced by Doping-Pong, a St Petersburg-based design company which uses a swastika as one of its online "banners".

One of the company's recent projects is a series of erotic photographs of two young women, one called a "fa" (fascist), the other an "antifa" (anti-fascist activist), who grapple with each other in a wrestling ring and tear off each other's clothes. The "fa" appears to win the fight and triumphantly wraps herself in a Nazi flag.

I have no doubt that the Dopingpong firm was, in some fashion, gesturing towards the “fascist” aesthetic of the '20s and '30s. A glance at its catalogue reveals that it does quite a bit of this. The degree to which these references are ironic or tongue-in-cheek, I’ll leave up to the reader. Since the images are overtly “retro,” Dopingpong has certainly applied at least one layer of irony. One might also add that the connotation is more of an era than an ideology: Stalinists were also keen on evoking a certain strong, wholesome, defiant aura; moreover, some public architecture of the New Deal era is cut from the same cloth of Albert Speer’s “Nazi” Classicism. (The offending poster also reminds me of those vintage mountaineering posters I always see on sale every winter.)

But in the end, all of this is besides the point.

What we glimpse in this episode is the degree to which egalitarianism is propagated—and the war on Whiteness, waged—aesthetically. A poster that displays blond, blue-eyed Slavs in heroic postures is deemed, by our opinion- and culture-makers, as a few steps away from Auschwitz. Other cultures are allowed to be grand: Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, can be glorified in gargantuan kitsch. Heroic art featuring White people, on the other hand, is viewed as immoral.

This trend in public display mirrors that in high art, in which centuries of neo-Classicism and Romanticism were, in essence, cancelled in favor of abstraction and modernism’s anti-aesthetic. As Wilmot Robertson noted, “In the dispossession of the [American] Majority, it is the Majority artist who so far has been the greatest casualty.”

The converse of this sad development is the utter tastelessness of current self-styled “conservatives,” whose sole aesthetic seems to be oversized billowing flags. (And they’re capable of muchworse.)

Regardless of whether it’s “fascist” or not, the image of healthy, strong, defiant Europeans is what a truly pro-Western propaganda poster should look. And that’s why it’s attacked.

STIHIE: Cash 4 Gold

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

Satire is often prophecy. Take, for instance, this ridiculous 2010 video from The Onion: "US Treasury Sells Fort Knox Gold to Cash4Gold.com."

Sell all the gold in Fort Knox--that'd be absurd!  Well, here's this week's Washington Post:

U.S. should sell assets like gold to get out of debt, conservative economists say

By Joel Achenbach, Published: May 15

With the United States poised to slam into its debt limit Monday, conservative economists are eyeballing all that gold in Fort Knox. There’s about 147 million ounces of gold parked in the legendary vault. Gold is selling at nearly $1,500 an ounce. That’s many billions of dollars in bullion.

“It’s just sort of sitting there,” said Ron Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”

But that’s cockamamie, declares the Obama administration. Mary J. Miller, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial markets, said the U.S. should sell assets in an orderly, “well-telegraphed” manner, not in a “fire sale” atmosphere with a debt limit deadline accelerating the process.

“It would be bad for the taxpayers. It would be bad for the markets,” Miller said.

The great mind from The Heritage Foundation, the brain-trust of America's "conservative movement," even repeated a line from The Onion's satire, "It's just sort of sitting there." 

In other news, Zimbabwe is considering moving to the gold standard. 

Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?

The short answer is no.

The New York Times thinks it’s on to something in promoting a Pew study that, at first glance, demonstrates that the “economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.”

The reality is that “religious” differences largely track the racial-and-IQ spectrum that organs like the New York Times don’t like to talk about.

First off, the “Hindu” sample is so selective it should probably be thrown out. In Race Differences in Intelligence, Richard Lynn demonstrates that IQ on the Indian subcontinent covers a very wide bell curve; this results mostly from the great racial heterogeneity of the Indian people (or rather peoples), whose elite displays the characteristics—and intelligence—of their Aryan ancestors. Those who make it all the way to America on a H-1B visas are, no doubt, the crème de la crème.

Going down the list, we see that Ashkenazi Jews are wealthy. No surprise here.

The Times also wants to believe that Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) has been disproved by the Pew center’s data:

Overall, Protestants, who together are the country’s largest religious group, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics. That stands in contrast to the long history, made famous by Max Weber, of Protestant nations generally being richer than Catholic nations.

Again, no. The mainline Protestant denominations that once composed the WASP elite, and are still overwhelmingly Northern European in makeup, are wealthier than Catholics. Episcopalians are just below Jews (and Hindus). The Protestant denominations that fall below the poverty line are the Baptists and Pentecostals, which attract rural Whites and Blacks; the latter, no doubt, has a great effect in bringing down the average.

Moreover, as the Pew Center’s 2010 report showed, as Hispanics remain in America, they generally lose their Catholic faith and become either more secular or evangelical. This coincides with the much-noted tendency of generations of Hispanics to become more socially dysfunctional as they spend more time in America (“downward assimilation”). This trend certainly puts downward pressure on the less WASPy Protestant denominations.

Overall, it’s difficult to get a read on the socioeconomic status of White Catholics, since somewhere on the order of a quarter to a third of Catholics in America are Hispanic.

The Mystery of Marine

Last weekend, the New York Times Magazine (!!) featured a largely fair and sympathetic story on the new leader of France's Front National, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, the long-time warrior of the nationalist Right.

With Sarkozy floundering and the likely Socialist candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of sodomizing an African chambermaid, Le Pen most certainly has a shot at the presidency. But as the Times alludes to, if Le Pen were to do well, the "mainstream" Left and Right would, no doubt, combine forces in order to prevent the ascension of an "extremist," much as Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin teamed up against Jean-Marie in 2002. Despite its pretensions of "liberal democracy," the Western world is essentially a one-party state.

I'm generally well disposed towards the Front National; indeed, I remember being enthusiastic during its 2002 insurgence. But after reading the Times profile, my feelings about Marine are decidedly mixed.

About a decade ago, Marine began to emerge as the daughter with the guts and political skills to take over the family business. She became a lawyer and worked behind the scenes in the party, with her father’s help, to become its vice president, edging past older male figures in the hard-nosed battle to succeed him. Jean-Marie Le Pen built the National Front out of a collection of fringe parties with overlapping but often conflicting agendas. The original core included avowed fascists, former members of the Vichy government that had been loyal to Hitler, anti-Jewish zealots, anti-immigrant nationalists and staunchly conservative Catholics. Jean-Marie held them together in part by using rhetoric that spoke to their fears and goals; that the same rhetoric kept the party isolated from the mainstream didn’t matter, because governing was never his objective.

Marine Le Pen has bigger ambitions, as the pollster Frédéric Micheau puts it, “to refresh the image of the far right.” Indeed, she insists she is not a figure of the far right at all and has belittled its racism as something for “people with small brains.” She has gambled that it is time for the party to leave the baggage of World War II behind. Or, as she said, “I have damage to repair, damage between the French people and the National Front.”

There are some obvious differences between Le Pen and her father, which partly account for her success and which she spelled out for me: “I’m a different person, a woman, a mother, in my 40s, of another generation.” There is also her political astuteness. The day before I met Le Pen, Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s interior minister, caused a stir by saying in a radio interview that “French people, in the face of uncontrolled immigration, sometimes feel they are no longer in their own home.” The words went against the careful line Sarkozy had been taking and echoed sentiments that Le Pen expressed. That same evening, she appeared at a press conference brandishing a laminated National Front membership card printed with the name Claude Guéant and invited him to join the party. The ploy made headlines across the country.

“Whose idea was the membership card?” I asked as we sat down. Le Pen shot up her hand with the sharp eagerness of a schoolgirl and smiled slyly. Then, clearly proud of her craft, she produced the card and laid it in front of me.

Le Pen works assiduously at the fine political balancing act of remaining loyal to her father — and maintaining the support of the party’s base — while distancing herself from the elder Le Pen’s outrageousness. She has jettisoned her father’s frank anti-Semitism, but she keeps the anti-immigrant policy plank as a central feature of the platform and will occasionally use headline-grabbing rhetoric, as when in December she likened the French having to endure Muslims praying on their streets to living under Nazi occupation.

She insists that her message on immigration is not xenophobic but rather commonsensical. She pointed repeatedly to the United States as a model: “In France, we often say the U.S. is a multicultural society, but it’s not. It’s multiethnic but one single culture. I don’t say that nobody should enter our country. On the contrary, in the old days immigrants entered France and blended in. They adopted the French language and traditions. Whereas now entire communities set themselves up within France, governed by their own codes and traditions.”

The economic crisis in the European Union has worked to her advantage as well. As a French nationalist and an anti-E.U. voice, she has called for France to drop the euro and return to the franc.

The real secret to her success, however, may be in her adroit scrambling of traditional leftist and rightist positions. Signaling a clear break from her father and the right in general, she has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

When I pointed out that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician, she shot back, “Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” and opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis.

First off, I unequivocally endorse Le Pen's desire to move the nationalist Right beyond the Second World War. Refighting these old battles is not only increasingly irrelevant but often become ruinous to building alliances between European nationalists.

That said, I've become rather tired of this largely symbolic argument that real conservatives should support some degree of socialism vis-à-vis unfettered capitalism (or what in Europe is referred to as “neo-liberalism.”)

As Guillaume Faye points out in his recently translated Why We Fight, in the Western world, the great divide is not between state regulation and laissez-faire but between a declining and degraded White middle class and the bureaucratic, socialist, and banking elite, strangely united with Third World immigrants. The result is a combination of the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism.

In lieu of the social solidarity promised by the Left, we have the social fracturing of mass immigration, as well as the entrenchment of a useless governmental class with “set for life” salaries and pensions that simply cannot be paid without currency debasement. In lieu of the liberty and prosperity promised by the Right, we have inflation, mass indebtedness, a casino-like financial sector, and, ironically, centralized planning.

I don’t know the best way out of this morass--besides, of course, rooting for the system’s inevitable collapse--however, the reality is that Marine Le Pen’s demands that the state protect the citizenry from the “profit motive” is entirely compatible with the worldview of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  

I’m also skeptical of the way in which Marine formulates France’s “culture war.” Sure, most of us want to live in a country in which homosexuals and adulteresses are not routinely stoned. That said, Islam cannot be opposed in terms of protecting a secular-humanist Euro-Disney from the ravages of Muslim conservatives who actually believe in their religion. Europe must oppose Islam with its own cultural and racial identity.

Whether Marine Le Pen is up to the task of forging this identity remains to be seen.

"La guerre contre terror n'a pas eu lieu"

We have officially entered a Baudrillardian bizarro world. Put before us now is silent video of a seemingly sickly and impoverished man, who is apparently Osama bin Laden, seated in a ransacked apartment watching cable-news reports on himself as a grand anarcho-terrorist mastermind.

As Srdja Trifkovic mentioned to me in an interview that will be posted soon, the media and political establishment's story has changed so many times, and the evidence and explanations it has issued have been so strange and ambiguous,  it seems more likely than not that Osama was in fact killed by American special forces on May 2, 2011. If his death were fabricated, then the establishment would have surely concocted a more plausible and consistent description of events--and been able to keep its story straight. 

What actully happened is something we won't learn for years.

But still...wasn't Osama bin Laden supposed to be left-handed? 

Republicans and Focus Groups

We are told that the "focus group" is a means of getting at the truth, determining what average people REALLY think.

In reality, it does nothing of the kind. It is, instead, a measure of peer pressure. In the focus group, you self-consciously utter what you think everyone else is thinking. 

Frank Luntz, the ubiquitous Fox commentator, has compounded this dynamic by televising focus groups, asking various Average Joes to blurt out inane platitudes about Republican presidential candidates, removing the mic if they don't recite a talking point or catchphrase within three seconds.

The process, in turn, instructs the television audience what to think by showing them a mirage of what everyone else is thinking.

I couldn't bring myself to endure last night's Republican debate in South Carolina. I could watch about five minutes of "highlights" of Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum talking about "values" and Obama's unwillingness to fight the terror hard enough before my eyes glazed over.

I watched with great interest, however, this clip, sent to me by a reader, in which a focus group of South Carolina Republicans declared a "winner" in last night's contest--the unlikely Black Republican and former Federal Reserve board member, Herman Cain.

(I first became aware of Cain when he triumphantly announced at this year's CPAC, "The United States of America will not become the United States of Europe--not on our watch!"  Quite.)

As is well known, the February-March South Carolina primary is often positioned to determine (or at least signal) the Republican nomination. Assuming that this year's candidates (with the excpetion of Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Donal Trump) are interchangeable movement-conservative blowhards, should we start preparing ourselves for a Republican nominee selected on the basis of Southern Republicans' desire to prove they're not racist?  

He Did What He Said He Was Going to Do

Gold Confiscation 2.0

Financial bubbles change behavior. In the mid-2000s, people started quitting their jobs in order to "flip" houses: they'd buy dilapidated or out-of-fashion homes, install marble countertops in the kitchen and flatscreen televisions on the walls of the den, and—presto!—they could resell them on an ever rising market and make bundles. In the '90s, I can remember people dropping out of college to become "day traders," which amounted to playing the frenzied NASDAQ like a video game.  

When the bubbles burst, the heroes of the "new economy" had to go back to their old jobs.  

Whenever I check out mainstream coverage of the precious metals market, I am informed again and again that gold and silver are in bubbles, or even that we've now reached the final "blow off" phase of an irrational rally. Many of the people who denied that there was a housing bubble as late as 2008, and ridiculed people like Peter Schiff who forecasted an imminent recession, are now sure that gold and silver are obsessions and phantasms. 

But bubbles occur when Joe Bag of Donuts enters the market—and opens an eTrade account or starts watching those home-improvement reality shows that were all over cable circa 2005-2008. From estimates I've read from professional gold-watchers like Chris Waltzek, less than one percent of investors own precious metals; Marc Faber has related that when he asked 200 mainstream investment advisors whether they allocated at least five percent of their portfolios to gold, NONE raised a hand.  

With gold between $1400-1500, and silver between $40-50 (though sharply down today), Joe Bag of Donuts could hardly ignore the bull market. However, he is taking part in the rally in a very disconcerting way—he's selling his wife's jewelry and family's heirlooms.  

The gold and silver bubble will be in effect when Joe Bag of Donots is buying precious metals willy-nilly, and mainstream pundits are claiming that gold "can never go down" and making Gold 36,0000-like predictions. The sucker phase of the rally will occur when Joe Bag of Donuts is divesting himself and his family of precious metals. 

Gold was nationalized, and trading in it and owning it was made illegal, by FDR in 1933 (though truth be told, the government was not exactly hunting down gold bugs and seizing their property.) I seriously doubt anything like this will happen in the foreseeable future.

The American middle class will be impoverished by other means.    

Jared Taylor's New Book

It's just been released. 

Here's advanced praise from Peter Brimelow, J.P. Rushton, and Richard Lynn:

Jared Taylor is arguably the most brilliant of the leaders of what is sometimes called the “Alternative Right,” the intellectual movement focused on emergent issues that are now systematically suppressed in America’s purblind public debate. This book, the long-awaited sequel to his seminal Paved With Good Intentions, will eventually be seen as a decisive step forward on the historic American nation’s road to recovery from the paralyzing curse of Political Correctness.

Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com and author of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster

The work of an insightful, well-tempered, and above all, demandingly honest mind, White Identity is especially timely as the white population of America comes under intensifying demographic, political, cultural, and economic pressure from both within and without. Jared Taylor deserves our deep gratitude for declaring that whites must find a way to stand up for themselves in a world in which they are becoming a shrinking minority, even in their own once white-majority countries.

Prof. J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario

Jared Taylor documents the dire consequences of demographic change in the United States. He warns of the deterioration that will follow when and if whites become a minority, and sounds a much needed wake-up call for whites to regain their sense of racial consciousness.

Dr. Richard Lynn, Professor emeritus of psychology, University of Ulster

Me on RT: The Bogeyman is Dead

I was on Russia Today this afternoon to discuss the death of the National Security's State favorite Bogeyman.    

A Paleo-libertarian no more?

Sadly, Ron Paul seems to have flipped on immigration: 

VDARE's "Washington Watcher": 

Congressman Ron Paul’s apparent entry into the presidential race will certainly be welcomed by many on the anti-Establishment “Alternative Right”. Paul’s heterodox views on foreign policy and the Federal Reserve, along with his consistent opposition to government spending, had earned him an army of loyal supporters since before his long-shot presidential campaign in 2008.

(Indeed, VDARE.com columnist and patriotic immigration reform leader Rev. Chuck Baldwin has just proclaimed: “The Tea Parties Now Have Their Man.”)

VDARE.com wrote extensively about Ron Paul’s mixed but interesting immigration record during the 2008 campaign, including an interview he did with Peter Brimelow. Back then we noted that he was generally good on the issues of amnesty, sovereignty, welfare for illegal aliens, and above all birthright citizenship (of which very few professional politicians had then heard). He was bad on E-Verify and Real ID. And his positions on legal immigration were disturbingly vague.

But as the 2008 campaign wore on, it became clear that Paul had no idea how to use the immigration issue, with the result that the chameleon Mike Huckabee and the amnestiac John McCain(!!) regularly outpolled him among self-reported immigration patriots—greatly to the disgrace of his campaign managers.

Since the presidential primaries, Paul has been virtually silent. His post-campaign book, The Revolution, did not mention immigration at all.

{snip}

Now, at last, Paul has finally given a comprehensive discussion of his views on immigration—in his latest book Liberty Defined, where he lists his positions on fifty different issues.

But what he—or the left-libertarian faction that seems to have his ear/ byline after the strange death of Rothbardian paleolibertarianism—actually says about the issue of immigration is a profound, and in fact tragic, disappointment.

Ominously, Paul begins by trying to triangulate between the Open Borders Left and a non-existentrestrictionist straw man.

Thus his immigration chapter opens: “There seem to be two extreme positions on immigration: completely closed borders and totally open borders.”

Bunk! No patriotic immigration reformer want a “closed border.” We want a secure border—where we control who comes in and does not. No-one wants to get rid of tourists, cross-border commerce, or even all legal immigration. We just want to keep out drugs, illegal aliens, and terrorists out, while limiting and selecting the inflow of legal immigrants.

Paul’s triangulation continues:

"One side says use the US Army, round them up ship them home.  The other side says give them amnesty... The first choice—sending twelve to fifteen million illegals home—isn't going to happen and shouldn't happen…if each case is looked at separately, we would find ourselves splitting up families and deporting some who have lived here for decades, if not their entire life, and who have never lived for any length of time in Mexico. This would hardly be a Good Samaritan approach to the problem. It would be incompatible with human rights."

Baloney! Far from offering a “third way” between the Left and Right, Paul sounds exactly like both Barack Obama and the GOP establishment:

• Newt Gingrich told a group of Hispanic Republicans last December: "We are not going to deport 11 million people. There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty." [Newt Gingrich wants immigration overhaul, by Kendra Marr, Politico, December 2, 2010]

• Obama told an audience at American University last July:

“If the majority of Americans are skeptical of a blanket amnesty, they are also skeptical that it is possible to round up and deport 11 million people.  They know it’s not possible.  Such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive.  Moreover, it would tear at the very fabric of this nation—because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric.  Many have children who are American citizens.  Some are children themselves, brought here by their parents at a very young age, growing up as American kids, only to discover their illegal status when they apply for college or a job”

[Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Whitehouse.gov, July 1, 2010]

To his discredit, Ron Paul echoed Obama all the way down to the clichés about splitting up families and children without Mexican roots.

James Antle has more.  

In Over our Head in the Great Game

Sailer:

Greg Cochran called me Sunday night, and while we were saluting our brave commandos' success at wreaking vengeance on the man who killed 3,000 Americans a decade ago, we got to wondering about the place that President Obama had mentioned as bin Laden's home: Abbottabad.

I don't like unpleasant surprises, so I try to maintain a skeptical attitude. Yet, even I was shocked to learn where Osama bin Laden had been hiding: in a sizable compound constructed in 2005, right down the road from ... the Pakistan Military Academy.

(The bin Laden estate is "B" on the above Google Maps satellite photo, while the front gate of the West Point of Pakistan is "A".)

In other words, while hundreds of American soldiers have died searching for bin Laden in the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, our purported ally Pakistan was actually hosting him in comfort at the heart of their national security apparatus.

And they were collecting billions from the American taxpayer to help track down bin Laden for us!

I'm horrified.

The behavior of the most powerful elements within Pakistan's government is more cynical, mercenary, and shameless than even I had imagined. I had assumed that Pakistan wasn't trying terribly hard to catch bin Laden and that even some within the state might be on his side. But this looks far worse. This isn't like when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003 in his spider hole. Osama was living large in the heart of Pakistan's security elite.

The Pakistani ruling class didn't even try to make it look like they couldn't find bin Laden.

As I may have mentioned over the years, I have had doubts about Washington's strategy of Invade the World / Invite the World. Yet this news surprised even me over how badly we had been played for suckers by the locals. We Americans are too naïve to play the Great Game. We are in over our heads.

{snip}

As I pointed out in VDARE.com in 2008, the idea that Obama had been born in Kenya was always the most implausible of a host of unlikely theories circulating about the Hawaiian-born politician.... I noted:

"It's especially unlikely that [Obama Sr.] would have taken his heavily pregnant bride on such a grueling trip to Kenya. ... See, back in Kenya, he already had a wife-Keiza, and two kids, Roy and Auma. His bigamous marriage to Obama's mother was a criminal act in Hawaii. Fortunately, for Barack Sr., the state of Hawaii didn't know about his other wife."

Since President Obama had the birth certificate all along, he could have published it whenever it would most deflate his opponents, such as right before the November 2012 election. It's easy to imagine an extremely deft politician like FDR keeping the long form certificate in his desk drawer, occasionally sliding it open to chuckle over the pie-in-the-face he was baking for his rivals.

Yet just a few days after celebrity landlord Donald Trump started complaining about it, Obama caved in. That seemed very strange at the time. I chalked it up to Obama finally running into somebody who was an even better media self-promoter. But I didn't feel terribly satisfied that I understood what was going on.

But, now, it seems plausible that Obama did it to boost his credibility before the bin Laden attack—especially if it had already been decided to arouse Muslim suspicions by dumping the body at sea.

Death of a Bogeyman

Our president’s assertion that he was born in Hawaii strikes me as far more credible than this evening’s reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has just killed Osama bin Laden. 

The theory that bin Ladin was a CIA asset all along perhaps goes a bit too far down the rabbit hole... however, there was reason to believe that the recent videos and recordings of the 9/11 “mastermind” were phony and that the man has likely been dead for years.

My hunch is that those who put on the media-political circus decided that their bogeyman of the decade had outlived his usefulness and it was time he got vanquished by “the good guys” before the public completely forgot who he was. (And with the birth certificate, Trump, and being outshone by the martially dressed Princes William and Harry, perhaps Obama’s handlers felt that he needed to do something big.) 

Putting intrigue aside, let’s, for the sake of argument, accept fully the story the president and CIA have just presented to us. Let’s, for the sake of argument, believe that, in the words of Dubya, “No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.” And let’s take an account of the United States of America before and after it sought to  “rid the world of evildoers.” (Since the hour is late, I’ll keep it brief.)  

The U.S. has fought--indeed, is still fighting--two Middle East wars that have lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans, millions of Arabs, and whose explicit costs run well over $1,250,000,000,000.

The indirect and opportunity costs are unfathomable. Imagine, for instance, the benefit of spending a tenth of this treasure on securing the Southern border and keeping the country’s historic majority from being completely displaced by Hispanic migrants.

Moreover, as a direct response to 9/11, Washington has created a vast security state, whose most noticeable feature is the perverted TSA but which encompasses most of American society. As the Washington Post reported last year (and one can expect the paper to sugar-coat matters),

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.>>

Economically, in the past decade, the U.S. dollar has lost some 25-30 percent of its value; the national debt has ballooned from a scary 5.6 trillion to a ridiculous 14. Total indebtedness of Americans has reached some three and a half times GDP.    

And these are just some of the more obvious numbers, which, much like the War on Terror, are themselves symptomatic of a deeper rot.

Can anyone claim that our culture isn’t even more vulgar and indefensible than it was 10 years ago? That our people haven’t become even more cretinous and childish and self-absorbed? Yes, I know, we now have Facebook and Twitter, but is anyone willing to argue that this country has become a better place to live in since 2001?

Can anyone claim that Osama bin Laden hasn’t, in some ironic way, won?

A dispassionate observer might conclude that the mysterious Saudi didn’t merely kill 3,000 people on September  11, 2001, but, in fact, laid waste to a country already in advanced decline.      

(Hat tip YWC for the video.)

"Schooled in the Austrian Perspective"

This is what happens when White nerds get their hands on authentic African-American musical forms. With this single video, a whole generation of Black Americans has been alienated from Austrian economics.

For more see EconStories.tv. 

A Monarch for the People

It was hard not to get swept up in the recent royal wedding, despite the loathsome celebrification and tabloid vulgarity that accompanies it. As many of my friends have been emailing me this morning, along with the inherent seduction of grand ritual, here before our eyes was an overwhelmingly White crowd genuinely proud of being British.  

The idealized couple, moreover, instills in the people the conviction that marriage and fidelity is royal and beautiful, not a burden. And even if the Windsors are newcomers of German extraction, royal adulating connects Britons with a millennium of ancestry and tradition.       

On the other hand... a part of me views the event much as I’d view flag-waving Red State yahoos who never stop expressing their loyalty to a government that seeks to dispossess them.  

The situation is different in Britain, of course. Now bereft of aristocratic connections, Parliament essentially stands for liberalism: endless debate, legalism, and faux-representation. The monarchy is actually the more “democratic” institution in the sense that the sovereign subjects the people. As the more primal political institution--that which achieved dominion through right of arms--the monarch commands every prime minister to defer to his more fundamental right to rule.  

Though I hesitate suggesting this, as I don’t want to have trouble with the British border authorities the next time I travel there, would it not be in keeping with the monarchy’s tradition for a sovereign to dismiss parliament, establish a dictatorship, expel all foreigners, and negate all legislation of the past 60 years? (Perhaps some parliamentary-liberal elements could be re-instituted at a later date)  

My sense is that Prince William, much like the rest of the decrepit, decadent “aristocrats” of Europe, wouldn’t contemplate such a notion. Perhaps the more rambunctious Harry is up to the task?

Just a thought.

Cracking the Code

As we’ve all been told, when someone talks about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, he’s really talking about race. Apparently, even when a life-long Manhattanite billionaire who gets invited to Davos talks about the birth certificate, he’s really talking about race. (At the very least, he’s trying to rile up the racist boobs.)

I don’t completely disagree with this interpretation of the so-called “Birther” movement—a name, by the way, that was coined by the pro-Obama media to associate the issue with the John Birch Society (“Birchers”) of yesteryear, whose leader speculated that Eisenhower was a Communist.

Obama stands as visual reminder to White, Christian Americans of their creeping suspicion that they’ve lost control of their country. In reality, the Majority hasn’t had a country for a long time, though with Obama, it’s obvious. When Southern WASPs were in the White House, it wasn’t.

Disallowed by the media and their political and religious leaders to articulate the terms of their own dispossession, the Majority begins to imagine that Obama is . . .  a Muslim . . .  a foreigner . . .  a usurper or Manchurian candidate of some sort. (And is it really outrageous to ask whether someone named Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim?)

This is not to say that Birtherism is all false consciousness. “They” have something on everyone and perhaps this is what they’ve got on Obama. And it’s also not to say that Jerome Corsi hasn’t uncovered compelling evidence that there’s more to Obama’s early years then he’s letting on, or that Donald Trump isn’t genuinely concerned with the matter and not just trying to rile up the boobs.

But race is what Birtherism is about. The issue itself wouldn’t exist without the factor of Obama’s Kenyan father and his ungovernable mother who went on a variable Third-World Muslim love tour in birthing and rearing the future president.

Even the secondary “Birther” issue that Donald Trump has raised recently regarding Obama’s academic record is, at the end of the day, about race. As Trump relates,

I heard he was a terrible student. Not like OK, I heard he was a bad student.

How does a bad student then go to Columbia and then go to Harvard? How does this happen?

How Obama got to Harvard—and how his wife got to Princeton—is affirmative action. I doubt there’s any smoking gun in Obama’s academic records, but the whole matter is indicative of the fact that Obama has been promoted since birth (wherever that may have been) well beyond his talent by powerful White liberals. The president hasn’t “overcome” his lowly, African/half-breed identity; he has used it to advance himself. Indeed, he would be nothing without it.

And there’s another element to this matter.

First thing on Wednesday morning, Trump took credit for forcing Obama to release his records, as he should: Birtherism has been around since 2008, but when Trump started talking about it a month ago, it metastasized. More specifically, people of authority began talking about it, or at least began to notdenounce it: on Easter Sunday, Franklin Graham (son of Billy) expressed doubts about the president’s authenticity; Sean Hannity and other conservatives said that Trump’s questions were legitimate and that the burden was on Obama to put the matter to rest; a presidential candidate even claimed to be agnostic on the issue.

Trump changed the game. Things that were unmentionable were up for discussion.

There are, of course, some things that remain unmentionable. It’s worth noting that however indignant liberals like Chris Matthews get over Birtherism, they still let Trump talk about it. If Trump had dabbled in... say... racial differences in intelligence instead, he would have been loudly condemned by both sides and dis-invited from all television interviews. Put another way, even if liberals might hate Birtherism, they will allow it to be discussed precisely because they think it’s ridiculous and thus harmless.

To understand my point, take, for instance, the case of the colorful conspiracy theorist David Icke.

Icke (pronounced “Ike”) says many of the same things about the Federal Reserve System and mass media as does Alex Jones. Icke also claims that the people really running the world aren’t central bankers or the Illuminati but shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the constellation Draco.

Throughout his career, many have speculated that “shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the constellation Draco” is code for “Jews.” This suggestion actually led the Canadian border authorities, at the behest of the Canadian Jewish Congress, to deny Icke entry to the country for a scheduled lecture.

Icke was given free entry, however, once it was discovered that his theories weren’t anti-Semitic but merely preposterous. As the Guardianreports, “Finally, after four hours of questioning, [the border authorities] concluded that when David Icke said lizards, lizards was what he meant."

If Icke suggests that Jews hold a disproportionate amount of power in America’s media and political establishments, and that Washington’s foreign policy is informed by this fact—a view which, I believe, is held by the majority of educated people on Earth—than Icke is deemed a dangerous radical who must be prevented from setting foot in Canada. If, on the other hand, he’s discovered to be a queer, perhaps lunatic, man who writes about bizarre fantasies, then he finds a place in Canada’s managed multiculti paradise.

It’s hard not to conclude that Donald Trump is allowed to talk about the birth certificate precisely because, no matter how “implicitly racist” it might get, it remains a distraction that doesn’t in the least threaten what, for brevity’s sake, I’ll call The System. Even if Birtherism were taken to its ultimate conclusion and a Constitutional crisis ensued leading to Obama’s impeachment, little to nothing about our world would fundamentally change.

But what if someone were to say something “crazy” that actually cut to the bone of the current political and social order... What if, say, a respected, successful man—maybe Trump is up for the task?—were to state unequivocally what Sam Francis uttered at the 1994 American Renaissance conference:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

Someone of stature came close to doing just this in 2007 when James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, announced his “gloomy” attitude towards economic development in Africa because most all social policies are based on egalitarian assumptions. Liberals—who usually profess to be the great defenders of science against knuckle-dragging Creationists—took no time in denouncing and shunning one of the most famous scientists in the world; in a swift, unanimous, and coordinated action, they effectively expelled Watson from polite society. The reason is that even if couched in wonkish and scientific terms, Watson had said something dangerous.

Birtherism is an interesting phenomenon, and parts of it might even be true. But until a Donald Trump stands up and defines the terms in which America’s historic majority is being dispossessed, he might as well be conversing about lizards.