BOOK REVIEW: for The Reptile with a Conscience by Nathan Cofnas. Paperback. pp. 523.Available from The Ulster Institute for Social Research. Review by J.J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

One of Einstein's more famous sayings is: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong". That single experiment would now appear to have been done so is Einstein now old hat?  Far from it.  Just as Einstein's relativity subsumed Newton's mechanics, so the next generation of physics will have to cope with the observations that came from Einstein's work.

A failure that Einstein himself acknowledged was his failure to devise a "unified field theory".  Einsten was of course Jewish so it is interesting that another brilliant Jewish writer, Nathan Cofnas, HAS attempted a "unified field theory".  But this theory is not about physics.  It is about ideology.  Nathan has presented us with a theory that accounts for both religion and politics as being from the same rootstock.

And I can even tell you very simply what that theory is.  Nathan points something out that seems obvious when you hear it but nobody previously seems to have thought of it.  He takes Adam Smith's famous theory of markets  -- the invisible hand -- and points out that religious people also see an invisible hand in the world about them:  The hand of God.

You don't have to think about that for long, however, to start saying "Yes but ...".  And that is why Nathan has written his book.  He presents his theory in a much more subtle and careful way than my crude generalization above and proceeds to answer all the "Yes buts ..".  He fleshes out how he believes both conservative thinking and Judeo/Christian thinking arise.

But this is not a book for scholars, philosophers and ideologues only.  It does something that anybody interested in modern  politics needs badly:  It gives an systematic  answer to the old Leftist retort to all facts and arguments that they dislike:  "There's no such thing as right and wrong, anyway".  The crazy thing about that assertion of course is that the same Leftists who say that will say in almost the same breath that racism or anything done by George W Bush is wrong.  They contradict their own assertion almost as soon as they make it.  So it is not only conservatives but Leftists too who need to get their minds clear on what is right/wrong and where that right/wrong comes from.  And Nathan helps us greatly with that.

But WHY do Leftist deny right and wrong when it suits them?  Doing so makes all their OWN doctrines, policies and beliefs look like empty vapour.  It's a strange thing to do.  So:   The reason they do it is because most analytical philosophers say the same thing.  And as John Maynard Keynes once said:  "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

Analytical philosophers say:  "If there is this objective property of "rightness", how do we detect it and where is it?  Do we lift up a stone somewhere and find it there?  And that challenge has proved hard to answer.  Just what IS rightness and how do we know it is right?

In recent times, however, an answer to that has begun to emerge:  We know some things are right because we have rightness instincts.  Rightness IS located somewhere.  It is located in our long evolution as social beings. It is somewhere in our primitive "reptilian" brain.  But the "Yes, buts ..." come thick and fast to that proposition, as it is obvious that our higher brain (where "conscience" is located) has a role too and can make some things seem right to one person that another person sees as wrong.  So how do we sort THAT mess out?  Nathan goes through it systematically for us and leaves even atheists like me confident that there IS such a thing as a real right and wrong.

Nathan's book will not be the final answer on all the questions it addresses but, like Einstein's theory of relativity, future discussions in the field will have to take account of his arguments if  they are to be well-informed.

"Der Schwed"  -- yesterday and today


During the 30 years war of the 17th century  Gustav Adolf den store (Gustavus Adophus) led his Swedish troops to many great victories in Europe.  Without him the Protestant cause may well  have lost out to the Catholic South.  His armies were at the time simply referred to as "Der Schwed" (the Swede), though they would have referred to themselves as the "Svea". 

So we see that the Swedish martial spirit did not die out with the Vikings of the 11th  century (Swedish Vikings mostly sailed up rivers into what we now know as Russia.  It was left to the Norwegians and Danes to harass Britain and Western Europe).

And, strange as it seems in the light of their constant peacenikery of the 20th century,  that spirit is still alive today.  For good reasons the proximity of Russia gives everybody at the Eastern end of the Baltic the heebie-jeebies.  Going by their invariant and very successful form since the 11th century,  we would expect the English to deal with such a  peril by forming alliances with other countries.  Not so the Swedes.  They cherish their independence.  And they can realistically do that because of confidence in their military.   They have been prepared to fight Russia alone if need be.  The Finns did it under Mannerheim in the early stages of WWII so they have a successful example to go by. But the Swedish military has to be independent too -- so we come to the Swedish defence industries. 

With a population about the same size as Israel, it is amazing what the Swedish defence industries have produced. The famous Bofors  gun was used for antiaircraft defence by BOTH sides in WWII and is still in use today.  And Bofors are not sitting on their laurels.   I could go on to talk about Swedish military aircraft and submarines but I  think that for the moment I will just say a few words  about Bofors.

Aside from nuclear weapons, the most fearsome thing about the old Soviet Union was their vast fleet of tanks.  And Bofors produced an answer to that in the form of the BILL1, a fearsome antitank missile.  Bofors turned out tens of thousands of them,  quite enough to wipe out the entire Soviet tank fleet with a bit of luck.    It is a guided missile that flies just a bit ABOVE the tank and fires a shaped charge down onto the turret of the  tank at just the right time -- the turret being  a tank's weakest point.  That must be a considerable challenge to the missile's controller but the Swedes must be  confident that trained operators can pull it off.  Below is a video of it in action:



(Note:  Some mischievous person has been circulating the above video together with a claim that it shows an Israeli missile using white phosphorous to destroy a Syrian tank.  Israel has been much criticized for its limited use of white phosphorous in Gaza but insists that it only used phosphorous in accordance with the laws of war.  Using it in an anti-tank weapon would heap criticism on Israel so the false claim attached to the above video is malicious)

And to keep up with advances in tank technology Bofors have produced a BILL2 missile that is even more capable than BILL1.  (The "B" stands for Bofors)

It seems sad that such an apparently effective weapon is not held in the arsenals of Western countries but Swedish neutrality forbids it.  Only a few other "neutral" countries such as Austria and Brazil have it.  So Sweden has had to bear all the costs of developing and deploying the weapon by itself -- a considerable challenge.  Most armament  manufacturers are keen to sell their stuff to all and sundry  -- to help defray the development costs.

And even if Sweden did decide to sell BILL2 more widely, it might not get much uptake.  I remember when I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war, we deployed the   prime Swedish antitank weapon of the day, the Carl Gustav.  But as soon as we entered the Vietnam war, the Swedes stopped supplying ammo for it!  Tanks featured little in the Vietnam war so it was not a great setback but it was a salutary lesson in being careful about the source of supply of your weaponry.  The Swedes have no worries on that score.

IQ, conservatism and racism



On 22nd January I commented on claims by two Canadian psychologists to the effect that conservatives and racists have low IQs.  One look at the study told me that it was brainless so I just reproduced the journal abstract and pointed out two of the things that made it brainless.  I didn't see any point in a detailed look at the paper.

The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard.  Monbiot's entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives,  with the most amusing point being that after Leftists  telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article.  The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.  

I want to say more about just one of them:  The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable.  That is however a matter of degree and of purpose.  They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect.  In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood.  So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life!  So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim.  The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however,  The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however.  The second  article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed.  Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results.  The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible.   They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large. 

So statistical significance is irrelevant.  It is other forms of significance we have to look at.  Let me put it this way:  What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives.  Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to "racism".  The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial.  Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that.  The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure.  So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago:  That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is.  A much noted paper in the field even identified  Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives!   Can you get any madder than that?  So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that "conservatives" AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance).   How clueless can you get?  What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives.  They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them.  It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think. 

By contrast, I am a conservative so  a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not:  Provided a substantial prediction of vote.  See here.  So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless.  The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with  conservatism.  I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For  reference, the Canadian study is:  "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact"  by Gordon Hodson and   Michael A. Busseri

Deep dishonor in America's Leftist academe


The Humanities faculty at Durham's Duke University have demonstrated bigoted anti-white attitudes that are perfectly mainstream among such faculty at American universities. An amazing total of 88 of them signed the now notorious condemnation of the innocent Duke lacrosse players before the players had even appeared in court, let alone been convicted. Their hatred of American society immediately blasted away the centuries of wisdom which said "innocent until proven guilty". And the wisdom of that maxim was shown when the players were found NOT guilty.

So what is still going on at Duke can reasonably be extrapolated to at least the Humanities departments of America's universities and colleges. And that is not pretty.

One of the Lacrosse players who was NOT accused by the pathetic Crystal Gail Mangum was nonetheless caught up in the blast and suspended by the university at roughly the same time as the other players. He is now suing. As you can read here, Ryan McFadyen is arguably the person who behaved with greatest honor in the whole affair. He certainly behaved with greater honor than prosecutor Nifong or Durham police -- who tried to suborn him into giving false evidence. There is another glimpse of his character here.

And when McFadyen refused to be intimidated into giving false evidence, Nifong and the police must have realized that he had put them into a dangerous position. Fabricating evidence is a crime with severe penalties. So they immediately went all-out to blacken his name. And that blackening still shows up today in that he has become something of a hate figure to many.

So he is now suing over that defamation and the illegal and improper behaviour of all concerned in the matter.

The trial has however produced some document disclosures that reveal the full depth of the moral depravity of senior Duke U officials. The documents contain bombshell emails from Duke President Brodhead and others suggesting that Duke's primary concern was to protect its PR, even if that meant sacrificing innocent students.

In documents submitted February 3 by Plaintiffs' lawyers, President Brodhead is quoted in an email sent very early in the case to other Duke staff:

“Friends: a difficult question is, how can we support our lacrosse players at a devastatingly hard time without seeming to lend aid and comfort to their version of the story? We can’t do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they behaved with honor. The central admin can't, nor can Athletics.”

And Joe Alleva, then of the Duke Athletic Dept., also testified during his deposition on January 20, 2012, that he made positive and truthful statements about Plaintiffs and their teammates’ character at the University’s press conference on March 28, 2006.

Mr. Alleva testified that he was “crucified” immediately afterwards for making those statements by President Brodhead himself and in front of the Crisis Management Team, all of whom knew how “off-message” Mr. Alleva’s truthful, positive statements about plaintiffs were.

Alleva was the one who later told Duke lacrosse coach Pressler that "it's not about the truth" any longer; that the case was about the interest groups and the integrity (reputation) of the university. (Hence the title of coach Pressler's book, "It's not about the truth").

Or as Robert K. Steel (then chairman of Duke's Board of Trustees) said in explaining why Duke would not be defending its falsely-accused students: "Sometimes people have to suffer for the good of the organization". More details here

You would think that all the exposure of their moral depravity might have created some caution among Duke faculty about race-related matters. It does not appear to have done so. Just a few days ago I ran a large excerpt from an article which summarized the Arcidiacono affair. I will simply refer readers to there for a treatment of that little explosion of rage and hate. See HERE for the full article. Having their warped view of America threatened is intolerable to Duke's Leftist Mafia.

No Leftist will admit it of course but I cannot see why Duke should be regarded as atypical. I don't think there is anything especially poisonous in the air at North Carolina. I think we have seen coming to the surface at Duke what is smouldering away beneath the surface at most of America's universities and colleges. They are true heirs of Stalin and the ghastly Soviet Union. They are a nest of vipers.

Whine! whine! whine! Would YOU be devastated if you found that most physicists are men?


In a profoundly unscientific article, two female physicists are apparently deeply disturbed by the reality concerned. Under the heading "Women in physics: A tale of limits" Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye have written a long screed that can be summarized with both brevity and accuracy by a very fashionable whine: "We bin discriminated against".

A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don't.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by "the dog that didn't bark", however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of course disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it -- thus violating one of the most fundamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can't see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with "equality". They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.

Are religious people better adjusted psychologically?


The academic article below offers some interesting facts but the perspective appears to be a Leftist one so I thought I might offer a different perspective. I add some comments at the foot of the article

Psychological research has found that religious people feel great about themselves, with a tendency toward higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than non-believers. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is only true in countries that put a high value on religion.

The researchers got their data from eDarling, a European dating site that is affiliated with eHarmony. Like eHarmony, eDarling uses a long questionnaire to match clients with potential dates. It includes a question about how important your personal religious beliefs are and questions that get at social self-esteem and how psychologically well-adjusted people are. Jochen Gebauer of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton, and Wiebke Neberich of Affinitas GmbH in Berlin, the company behind eDarling, used 187,957 people's answers to do their analyses.

As in other studies, the researchers found that more religious people had higher social self-esteem and where psychologically better adjusted. But they suspected that the reason for this was that religious people are better in living up to their societal values in religious societies, which in turn should lead to higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment. The people in the study lived in 11 different European countries, ranging from Sweden, the least religious country on the planet, to devoutly Catholic Poland. They used people's answers to figure out how religious the different countries were and then compared the countries.

On average, believers only got the psychological benefits of being religious if they lived in a country that values religiosity. In countries where most people aren't religious, religious people didn't have higher self-esteem. "We think you only pat yourself on the back for being religious if you live in a social system that values religiosity," Gebauer says. So a very religious person might have high social self esteem in religious Poland, but not in non-religious Sweden.

In this study, the researchers made comparisons between different countries, but another study found a similar effect within one country, between students at religious and non-religious universities. "The same might be true when you compare different states in the U.S. or different cities," Gebauer says. "Probably you could mimic the same result in Germany, if you compare Bavaria where many people are religious and Berlin where very few people are religious."

SOURCE

The original journal article is "Religiosity, Social Self-Esteem, and Psychological Adjustment: On the Cross- Cultural Specificity of the Psychological Benefits of Religiosity" by Jochen Gebauer et al.

Two things to note: 1). As is so common in psychological research, the "sample" is in fact no sample at all. We have no idea how representative of the community at large are "Lonely Hearts"; 2). The assessment of mental health appears to have been rudimentary. A few queries about self-esteem and depression are a poor substitute for a proper mental health survey such as the MMPI. So again, the results must be taken with rock-salt.

Setting aside those reservations however, the interpretation also seems to make an assumption that may not be correct. The assumption is that only positive rewards are at work. It may be the other way around. The difference in interpretation is not large but it may be important.

I live in Australia, which, like Norway, is a very irreligious place, where regular churchgoers are something of a rarity. So I may have some insight into the results from Norway above

So I would summarize the research findings above as showing that religion does normally make you happier but that only shows up in places where it is accepted. Where religion has little acceptance and may be mocked (as it not uncommonly is in Australia) the social "punishment" for religious belief may cancel out that happiness. It may be bias against religious people that was the key driver of the national differences observed above.

An uninsightful look at racist attitudes


Below is an academic journal article which claims that "racists" have low IQs. I append some comments at the foot of it

Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes

Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact

Gordon Hodson et al.

Abstract

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

SOURCE

What the article ignores is that the mental gymnastics required by political correctness are considerable. A simple soul who sees a lot of black crime is likely to have a low opinion of blacks and say so. But, as is often said, some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual would believe them. And concluding that chronic black criminality is all Whitey's fault is one such idea. So all the study really shows is that brighter people are more able to absorb the counterintuitive but politically correct cult that the elite have made normative in society. Only simpler people take their views from observable reality.

And we must also note that we are talking here about ADMITTED attitudes. And where some attitudes are much decried -- as are racially-denominated attitudes -- the truth of any admissions can only be speculated on. It could well be that attitude to blacks (say) is the same at all levels of IQ but only the simpler members of society are foolish enough to admit what they really think.

I could go on but I think it is already clear that this study proves nothing.

My take on an ancient controversy

The Roman Catholic church claims special authority for itself on account of the alleged fact that the disciple Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and that Christ had given Peter special powers that Peter passed on to later bishops of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is these days referred to as the Pope, which simply means "father". So there are 3 claims there in need of validation.

1). There is no mention in the NT that Peter was ever in Rome. It was Paul who went to Rome according to the NT. But could Peter have followed on later? If so, such an important event would surely have been noted somewhere at the time in the 1st century. The Catholic Encyclopedia can rustle up just 3 alleged 1st century references:

"Earlier still is Clement of Rome writing to the Corinthians, probably in 96, certainly before the end of the first century. He cites Peter's and Paul's martyrdom as an example of the sad fruits of fanaticism and envy. They have suffered "amongst us" he says, and Weizsaecker rightly sees here another proof for our thesis.

The Gospel of St. John, written about the same time as the letter Clement to the Corinthians, also contains a clear allusion to the martyrdom by crucifixion of St. Peter, without, however, locating it (John 21:18, 19).

The very oldest evidence comes from St. Peter himself, if he be the author of the First Epistle of Peter, of if not, from a writer nearly of his own time: "The Church that is in Babylon saluteth you, and so doth my son Mark" (1 Peter 5:13). That Babylon stands for Rome, as usual amongst pious Jews, and not for the real Babylon, then without Christians, is admitted by common consent (cf. F.J.A. Hort, "Judaistic Christianity", London, 1895, 155).

It should be obvious that these are all weak reeds to lean upon.

What did Clement mean by "amongst". That it meant "in Rome" is just one interpretation. Since Clement was bishop of Rome, however, it may be this selfsame sly allusion that gave rise to the later belief that Peter reached Rome. As Bishop of Rome, Clement would have an obvious interest in fostering such a myth.

I pass over the second "reference" in polite silence.

The third reference asserts that there were no Christians in Babylon at the time. But there certainly were Jews and the famous Babylonian Talmud eventually emerged as the product of their deliberations. So it is entirely plausible that Peter did go there in an attempt to make converts and had some success. So this passage too is no proof of anything.

I would have entertained the idea that "Babylon" was symbolic if the reference had come from a sometimes gnostic writer like St. John but Peter writes a perfectly straightforward book of instructions. I think we must take him at his word. He went to Babylon, not Rome.

2). Special powers conferred? The basis for this claim is the passage in Matthew 16:18. "And Jesus answering said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."

Transliterating the relevant Greek of the original we get: "ou ei petros kai epi tautee tee petra oikodomeeso mou teen ekkleesian". That shows that Christ was using two different words for Peter and the rock upon which he was to build his "church'. He was making a distinction, not an equation. I go into more detail about the Greek passage here

An issue seldom addressed, however, is that Christ spoke Aramaic, not Greek. So what we read in Matthew is itself a translation. So what was Christ most likely to have been saying in Aramaic?

Alfred Persson has done the most extensive exploration of the Aramaic background to the text but he really rambles on so I will try to summarize: He points out that "petros" is the Aramaic word for "firstborn" but that it was also known at the time (educated Israelites at the time spoke Greek, as indeed did educated Romans) that the same word in Greek meant "rock". So Jesus was using that known double meaning to make a point vivid.

What point? What was the rock upon which he would build his group of followers? That is no mystery at all. There are numerous references in the NT which equate Jesus's TEACHINGS with a rock -- e.g. Matthew 7:24; 1 Corinthians 10:4. So Jesus expected his teachings to form the foundation of a new group. He was certainly right about that! To encourage his followers, Jesus then goes on to say that the wisdom he imparts is very special indeed. It will give his followers entry into the kingdom of heaven. So the new group will be a privileged one indeed. Orthodox teachings among the Israelites at the time foresaw a resurrection to life on earth, not a transformation into spirit beings.

But what about: "And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Catholics claim that the passage gives Christians on earth the power to control events in Heaven. But that is surely absurd. Christ was surely saying that his teachings are an accurate guide to what has already been bound or loosed in Heaven.

3). But say we ignore all of the above and concede that Peter was given some special power. Where is there any statement or evidence in Christ's words that this power could be passed on? There is none. So all three of the Roman claims are mere assertions with no obvious truth value.

More doubts about the Mediterranean diet


I recently criticized a Swedish study of the Mediterranean diet in which the lead author was Gianluca Tognon. Yes. An Italian really did study the Mediterranean diet in Sweden! The paper was titled: "Does the Mediterranean diet predict longevity in the elderly? A Swedish perspective".

He has replied to my comments as follows:

Hi, I’m Gianluca Tognon the first author of this article. On behalf of all the authors of this research, I would like to reply to some issues you mentioned in your article.

First of all thanks for having read it with criticism instead of just reporting the results, science is not based on absolute truths but it can just give the best estimation of the truth after a lot of discussions like this one.

You criticized the fact that we used a refined version of the Mediterranean diet score in order to get an association. The other “unrefined” score did not show an opposite association compared to this one. It was inversely associated with mortality but not statistically significant. This means that what it was measuring was not the whole story. [Why?]

What we did during refinement was to replace total cereals with unrefined cereals based on the fact that low glycaemic index food items are considered healthier than refined one. Then we included eggs, as a possible marker of a “western” diet (together with meat products) and polyunsaturated fats likely to be the kind of unsaturated fats in the healthy Nordic diet. Finally, we included alcohol intake because it’s a hallmark of the Mediterranean diet.

So, since we did not produce several random scores and then report the one that was associated, but based the refinement on previous knowledge, we do not consider this cheating. It is not the first time that this score is modified or adapted to different contexts: development and regional adaptation is a constant and evidence-based process.

Anyway, in the article we reported a sensitivity analysis which showed that none of the factors included in the score we used was able alone to explain our result. This is reported in the article we published.

What is important to say, is that our research was based on food groups (vegetables, cereals, fish products, etc.). Which food items are included in a specific food group can vary from country to country. The important thing is that the dietary pattern inspired by the traditional Mediterranean diet can be exported in other contexts without losing its healthy properties.

We think that explaining this result by just social class would be too simple. Our statistical model was adjusted for smoking, marital status, education and weight status, all possible mediators of the influence of social class on health.

So the association we obtained was independent of potential confounding factors (which, by the way, could also explain the differences in survival between Australian and Greeks since diet is not the only factor affecting survival).

We excluded “implausible” diet reporters by excluding subjects with extreme ratios between the energy calculated from their reported diet and their calculated basal metabolic rate. This did not modify the association making it positive instead of negative, but allowed us to get a better estimation of how much the effect was in terms of longevity increase.

The questionnaire was validated, and I have to tell you that validation of an instrument (like diet history here) with another one is absolutely the rule in epidemiology and not just in psychology as you reported. Diet assessment is subject to errors, validation allows you to reduce them as much as possible.

Finally, regarding antioxidants as a possible explanation, you’re correct that the discussion on this issue is still open. This is an observational study, so we cannot provide a biological explanation of what we observed. But we can speculate what the mechanisms could be. Antioxidants might or might not be part of the story, other researchers will then try to demonstrate if this is the truth or not.

Scientific evidence is not based on a single study, but it’s based on several results, obtained in different contexts by different independent researchers.

I am aware that this will not reply to all possible criticisms about this research, but again thanks for giving us the opportunity to clarify some important issues.

Prof. Tognon is a very civil and polite man so I am reluctant to be too hard on him but his reply really only amplifies my original criticisms. He used an existing index of the Mediterranean diet and found that it predicted nothing. He then dreamt up his own version of the Mediterranean diet and that predicted something. So which is the true measure of a Mediterranean diet? Surely the first one. The second one could more accurately be called the Tognon diet!

The only real social class marker he used was education but education is only a start. Many highly educated people are poor and many rich people are not well educated. Bill Gates never got a degree. A proper study of social class would also require inclusion of income, occupational status, self-perceived class and IQ. So his findings are very much open to explanation in terms of a class effect.

Finally, Prof. Tognon in his bracketed comment above does something I have been waiting for advocates of the Mediterranean diet to do. He admits that national diets tell us nothing certain about lifespans because other factors could explain long life. I have made that point myself in the past but I have mainly gone along with the joke and pretended that the longer lifespan of Australians (when contrasted with Mediterranean lifespans) tells us something. It does not, of course.

But the same applies to the claim of benefits from the Mediterranean diet. Mediterranean people get fewer heart attacks. So what? How do we know that that is due to their diet? We don't. It could be some genetic factor at work, for instance.

Prof. Tognon's admission has thrown the whole body of epidemiological assertions about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet out the window -- including his own assertions. Correlation is not causation.

How the Mediterranean diet can add 3 years to your life... even if you don't start until you're 70 (?)


A load of old cobblers in the article below. Difficult to know where to start but I was amused to read in the journal abstract (also below) that they got their results by using "a refined version of the modified Mediterranean diet index". First you modify your index then you refine it to get the results you want, apparently.

I was however impressed that they went to great trouble to validate their diet questionnaire. Validation is routine in psychology but rare in medicine. None of the validation methods used would have distinguished Mediterranean from non-Mediterranean diets, however. The authors themselves admit the fallibility of their methods by excluding some "implausible" diet claims from their analysis. One wonders if some bias might have crept into that process.

Anyway, as usual, the results are explicable by social class. Middle class Swedes are more likely to say they eat the "correct" foods (whether they do or not) than working class ones are. And middle class people have better health anyway.

I note also that the failed but indestructible antioxidant theory is invoked.

And finally, how do they explain the fact that a traditional Australian diet is about as "incorrect" as you can get yet Australians live longer than Greeks? There are an amazing number of nonageneraians tottering around Australia who grew up on very fatty food accompanied by a few vegetables that had been boiled to death.

The traditional diet favoured in Greece, Spain and Italy provides a great health boost no matter when you switch. No one doubts that following a Mediterranean diet is the healthy option.

But researchers have calculated the regime could add an extra three years to your life. They say it is a rich source of chemicals called anti-oxidants that fight cancer, heart disease and can slow the ageing process.

Scientists who studied the eating habits of 1,200 over-70s found that those following a Mediterranean-style diet tended to live for two or three years longer. They examined surveys which had been carried out by all the adults on their eating habits.

This contained details of how much fruit, vegetables, cereals, meat and fish they ate as well as how much alcohol they drank.

Elderly men and women have been recruited for the rolling research programme since the 1970s. Those taking part were contacted by researchers every few years to find out about their general health.

The team from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg found participants whose eating habits followed a Mediterranean style diet were 20 per cent more likely to be alive eight years later. They calculated that on average these individuals lived for between two and three years longer than those who had a different eating regime.

The diet was inspired by traditional eating habits of Greece and Southern Italy, hence its name.

More HERE

Does the Mediterranean diet predict longevity in the elderly? A Swedish perspective

By Gianluca Tognon et al.

Abstract

Dietary pattern analysis represents a useful improvement in the investigation of diet and health relationships. Particularly, the Mediterranean diet pattern has been associated with reduced mortality risk in several studies involving both younger and elderly population groups. In this research, relationships between dietary macronutrient composition, as well as the Mediterranean diet, and total mortality were assessed in 1,037 seventy-year-old subjects (540 females) information. Diet macronutrient composition was not associated with mortality, while a refined version of the modified Mediterranean diet index showed a significant inverse association (HR=0.93, 95% CI: 0.89; 0.98). As expected, inactive subjects, smokers and those with a higher waist circumference had a higher mortality, while a reduced risk characterized married and more educated people. Sensitivity analyses (which confirmed our results) consisted of: exclusion of one food group at a time in the Mediterranean diet index, exclusion of early deaths, censoring at fixed follow-up time, adjusting for activities of daily living and main cardiovascular risk factors including weight/waist circumference changes at follow up. In conclusion, we can reasonably state that a higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet pattern, especially by consuming wholegrain cereals, foods rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, and a limited amount of alcohol, predicts increased longevity in the elderly.

Age (Dordr). 2011 September; 33(3): 439–450.

Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance?


There is an amusing paper in the forthcoming JANUARY 2012 NOTICES OF THE AMS (American Mathematical Society) which purports to show that it is only oppression of women by society which causes females not to do well in mathematics.

The paper was of course zealous to rule out genetic differences but that does rather leave them without an explanation for Chinese excellence in mathematics. Regardless of the country in which they reside, Chinese tend to be prominent among leading mathematicians -- and China itself is a major centre of mathematical excellence. Yet China is still in many ways a very traditional society in which the very notion of gender equality would normally be scoffed at. The way they abort girl babies is surely enough evidence of that.

Anyway, the paper more or less assumes what it has to prove. In a rather self-contradictory way, the authors seem to assume that educational performance fully indexes innate ability. The paper draws its "evidence" not from IQ tests but from various international measures of educational attainment. And educational attainment is the product of many things other than IQ. Hard work anyone? Social pressures anyone? So I partially agree with the first line of their "Conclusions":

In summary, we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls

You note that they skate entirely over IQ.

They go on to argue that eliminating gender "inequities" is needed to lift female mathematical achievements. After decades of feminism and affirmative action it is hard to imagine how more might be done on that front in the USA other than by procrustean quota systems so the recommendation is as vacuous as it is irrelevant.

Women will always be up against their lower level of mathematical ability that IQ tests reveal so clearly. In recent years women have been pushed into mathematics to satisfy feminist dogma but few will rise to the heights.

Another Leftist claim of psychological dysfunction among conservatives


Leftists have been projecting their own psychological deficiencies onto Conservatives since at least 1950 -- and they are not going to give up any time soon.

The latest installment is a book by Warmist Chris Mooney called "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don't Believe in Science". Below is an announcement of it which I will follow with some comments

Over the last year here at DeSmogBlog, my writings have converged around a set of common themes. On the one hand, I've shown just how factually incorrect today's political conservatives are, documenting the disproportionate amount of misinformation believed by Fox News watchers and the disproportionate wrongness of the right when it comes to science.

At the same time, I've advanced a variety of psychological explanations for why we might be seeing so much political and scientific misinformation today on the right wing. For instance, I've unpacked the theory of motivated reasoning; and I've also talked about why conservative white males in particular seem to be such strong deniers of climate science.

All of this, I'm now prepared to say, is just the iceberg tip. You see, for the last year, I've been working on a book on the same topic, which explains why conservatives are so factually incorrect-drawing on the latest research in social psychology, political science, cognitive neuroscience, and other fields.

The book is now finished in draft form-due out next year with Wiley-and it is long past time to formally announce its existence. After all, it is already up on Amazon. But I can go farther by showing the draft cover image (the current subtitle is likely to change, as this phenomenon goes far, far beyond science, as does the book). I can also share the text that will soon go up to Amazon and elsewhere. Eat your heart out, Ann Coulter:

Bestselling author Chris Mooney uses cutting-edge research to explain the psychology behind why today's Republicans reject reality-it's just part of who they are.

From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why won't Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts?

Science writer Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs.

* Goes beyond the standard claims about ignorance or corporate malfeasance to discover the real, scientific reasons why Republicans reject the widely accepted findings of mainstream science, economics, and history-as well as many undeniable policy facts (e.g., there were no "death panels" in the health care bill).

* Explains that the political parties reflect personality traits and psychological needs-with Republicans more wedded to certainty, Democrats to novelty-and this is the root of our divide over reality.

* Written by the author of The Republican War on Science, which was the first and still the most influential book to look at conservative rejection of scientific evidence. But the rejection of science is just the beginning.

Certain to spark discussion and debate, The Republican Brain also promises to add to the lengthy list of persuasive scientific findings that Republicans reject and deny.

I know very well that this invites controversy, so let me say (even though I expect many conservatives will ignore it!) that the book also fully documents the handicaps and drawbacks of liberal/Democratic psychology. It's a yin-and-yang kind of thing; you can't make one argument without the other.

There's a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There's a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There's a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can't see eye to eye. There's a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people's hearts (and winning elections).

But when it comes to determining what's true about complex, technical subjects-issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can't just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs-I'll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.

More HERE

It's laughable how he can't see his own faults and instead attributes them to others. He praises "staying open-minded and tentative in your beliefs". Yet is a member of the terminally dogmatic Global Warming crowd with their desperately asserted "consensus". If only Warmists WOULD "stay open-minded and tentative in their beliefs" -- but there's no sign of it. Jim Hansen compares coal trains with Nazi death trains: Very subtle.

On one level what Mooney says is right. There is no doubt that Leftists and Rightists have differing brains. The repeated findings about the strong genetic determination of political orientation leave no doubt of that. But how those differences work is as yet unknown. It's all speculation and theory. I point to the fact that levels of happiness are dispositional and suggest that conservatives are born happy and Leftists are born whiners. But I have no more evidence for that speculation than Mooney does for his theories. It is certainly true that conservatives repeatedly show up in surveys as happier than those on the Left but whether that is a direct outcome of brain anatomy remains to be seen.

It is true that there are various psychological studies supporting his characterization of conservatives. I spent 20 years ripping metaphorical holes in the journal articles concerned. The studies are universally poorly done. Leftists are generally too lazy (for instance) to do doorknock research. They just hand out a bunch of questionnaires to their students and their students happily give the "researchers" back what they want. And that is supposed to tell us about all humanity.

And when we add to their lack of sampling their psychometric naivety, what we have is mere progaganda -- something more reminiscent of Dr. Goebbels than of science. To take just one instance of such naivety: They have lists of questions that they use to separate out people who are conservative from those on the Left. But when it comes to actual elections, we find that their alleged indices of conservatism give zero prediction of actual vote! Alleged conservatives are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican! So the Leftist psychologists don't even know what conservatism is, let alone being able to research it.

But let us assume that despite their methodological negligence, the Leftist psychologists have somehow guessed right. Even then there still are deep holes in their reasoning. A classic accusation -- hinted at by Mooney above -- is that conservatives are "intolerant of ambiguity". But is that a vice? Might it not be a sign of mental laziness? Surely its opposite is the search for order -- and what a true scientist does is search for order in the phenomena he studies. So Leftists must make poor scientists -- and the global warming nonsense certainly confirms that. A majority of physical scientists seem to believe it -- despite it being nothing more than a poorly-founded prophecy. They are certainly accepting a lot of ambiguity there, a quite stultifying level of ambiguity.

The other type of study the moon-man refers to is activity studies in the brain. And it seems true that in the same situation, different areas of the brain "light up" among Leftists and Rightists. That is perfectly to be expected from the genetic studies. But the moon-man tries to infer things from such patterns of lighting up. But such research only scratches the surface of brain function so all such inferences are just speculation. More on that here

On the question of whether religion makes conservatives anti-science, I have what I think is an amusing commentary here

The moon-man will give comfort to Warmists but it is comfort that is as poorly founded as Warmism itself

Were the lying Dutchman's lies important?

Rush Limbaugh makes a case that the now discredited Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel was riding the old Leftist hobbyhorse of trying to prove scientifically that conservatives are psychologically defective: Good projection but bad science.

The paper that Rush concentrates on is here and it implies that we dislike blacks because we often see them in messy "slum" environments. Even if that were a genuine finding, however, I don't really see it as much of a problem. Stapel did not claim that he had isolated the ONLY cause of negativity towards blacks and the possibility that the very high rate of violent crime among blacks has a central bearing on attitudes towards them was not addressed at all.

Stapel did however claim that a "heightened need for structure" was behind the effect that he observed -- i.e. it was only people with a heightened need for structure who let the messy environment influence them. That too seems innocuous enough at first sight but when one realizes that a heightened need for structure has been identified by many psychologists over the years as characteristic of conservatives, we begin to see the "conservatives are defective and that's why they don't like blacks" story emerging.

That a need for structure is a bad thing is of course highly debatable (does it mean that Leftists have a need for chaos?) but in any case I did many years of research on the "conservatives have a greater need for structure" hypothesis and other hypotheses like it and found that all the "proof" offered was based on research methods not much better than Stapel's. You can read my papers on the subject here.

Stapel also claimed that meat-eaters are a bad lot but I think Rush deals well with that claim.

More skepticism about the death of Hitler

You can read here an overview of another book that claims Hitler did not die in Berlin but escaped to Argentina. I said in my previous post on the subject that I have my own reasons -- founded on my own close study of Hitler's history and psychology -- for not believing that.

I am beginning to wonder however -- not because of the new book but because of the response to it. The critics of the book say that it is a "consensus" of the experts that Hitler died in Berlin and the publisher should be ashamed for publishing such a book. That is so close to what defenders of the global warming hoax say that my skeptical antennae begin to twitch.

Moreover they admit that the alleged fragment of Hitler's skull held by the Russians is not in fact Hitler's and that there was a great deal of confusion in Hitler's bunkler at the time of the Russian surge into Berlin.

The only "proof" they offer that Hitler died in his Berlin bunker is the testimony from one of Hitler's closest aides who says that he saw Hitler dead there. The possibility that one of Hitler's aides might have lied to protect his boss has apparently not occurred to them.

I think I will now have to say that I am agnostic on the matter.

More academic evidence of the importance of genes and the UNIMPORTANCE of your home environment

"Human values: Genetic and environmental effects on five lexically derived domains and their facets"

By Walter Renner et al.

Abstract

Whereas a substantial genetic component of Conservatism and Religiosity is well documented, there is little evidence with respect to the behavior genetics of other aspects of human values. A sample of 157 monozygotic and 74 dizygotic twins reared together received the Austrian Value Questionnaire (AVQ), which measures a broad variety of value domains and their facets, found by the lexical approach in the German language. Family resemblance of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism was best explained by additive or dominance genetic and non-shared environmental effects, whereas the influence of the environment shared by twins was negligible. In contrast, Religiosity was transmitted by additive genetic, shared and non-shared environmental influences. At the level of facets, the Intellectualism and Harmony showed a homogenous etiology while Religiosity, Materialism, and Conservatism were etiologically heterogeneous.

Personality and Individual Differences. In Press, Corrected Proof - doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.09.003

Aren't you glad that there's someone around to translate that academic Double-Dutch for you?

Note initially that after decades of research it is now generally accepted that both political and religious ideology is substantially determined by your genes. You didn't CHOOSE to be a Conservative or religious: You were BORN that way. That still grates on the teeth of most people but that is what the inheritance research has repeatedly shown. Exactly WHAT is inherited which makes you a Leftist is still not pinned down but my bet is that it is a tendency to be miserable. Happiness is definitely a stable trait and conservatives are certainly happier, which again shows up repeatedly in research.

But that is all prelude. The reseachers above were looking for OTHER things that might be genetically inherited. They found that traits of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism were all determined heavily by genetics but hardly at all by the environment. Religiosity, however, was to a degree influenced by your environment. Pretty simple, really -- even if runs against almost everybody's preconceptions.

You now see why elections are won or lost according to how well the candidate appeals to the voter in the middle. Most of us are born conservative (happy) or Leftist (miserable) and can't be changed from that. It's only the minority who are half way between happy and miserable who can be swung. Background on previous research in the area here

Clarifying note: It is your tendency to be religious in general that is inherited, not your particular religion.

Did Hitler escape to South America?

I am inclined to think that he didn't but the case is not as open and shut as you might imagine. Consider two things:

1). We only have the word of the Red Army for what they found in Hitler's bunker and the old Soviet apparatus told lies as easily as some people tell the truth. They even had a word for such lies: "Disinformation" -- with one of its more successful examples being the demonization of that great man of God, Pope Pius XII.

And it would have been a great disgrace for the Soviets if they had let Hitler slip through their fingers. So they would have claimed to have got him even if they had not -- reasoning quite cogently that Hitler would not blow the cover that they had conveniently provided for him.

2). It is undisputed that many Nazis, including some senior ones, DID escape to South America. So if them, why not the Leader himself? He would only have had to manage a night flight from somewhere in the Reich to Fascist Spain and all his troubles would be over. A transfer from there to one of the South American dictatorships could have been arranged in a variety of ways. And the Latin American elite were at that time (and to a considerable extent still are) apostles of Bolivarism -- which is just Fascism by another name, Fascism complete with a Fuehrerprinzip of course. So Hitler's welcome would have been warm, though secretive.

And a night flight would not even have been particularly dangerous. It would be assumed by all concerned that only Allied aircraft would be in the air by that time and the profile of some German military aircraft was similar to the profile of some Allied aircraft (e.g. the Junkers 88 could be mistaken for a Mosquito bomber) so any challenge would be unlikely.

But the reason I doubt that Hitler escaped is that I cannot see him ever shutting up for long. The man was a born preacher so I am sure that if he had survived we would have eventually heard something from him in some way.

But if you want to read an interesting article offering evidence that he escaped, see here or here

A small note on the Tuskegee Syphilis study of the 1930s

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has been widely condemned as an example of American racism -- and Leftists love it for that reason. It enables them to be "holier than thou". THEY would never do such an evil thing! It is usually portrayed as the U.S. government infecting black men with syphilis.

The truth is nothing of the sort, of course. The key fact that nobody seems to notice is that the study lasted for 40 years. 40 years? Shouldn't the men have died long before that? Once you ask that question, the truth begins to come out. The men recruited for the study ALREADY HAD tertiary syphilis. And in the tertiary stage the disease has usually been naturally "beaten" in some way. In other words, most such patients are no longer ill and live on rather as if they had never been infected. THAT intriguing fact was what sparked the study. It was an attempt to get more information about the life history of tertiary syphilitics. Richard Shweder has all the details.

And the amusing thing is that the study was founded and carried out by "progressives". "Progressivism" was overwhelmingly dominant in pre-war America. And it wasn't even a government study initially. It was started by a private charity funded by the former chairman of Sears Roebuck, a Progressive Jew named Julius Rosenwald. A small excerpt from Wikipedia:

Julius Rosenwald, an American clothier, became part-owner ofSears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, and eventually served as its president from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its Board of Directors until his death in 1932.He became interested in social issues, especially education for African Americans, and provided funding through Dr. Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college (HBCU), prior to founding the fund....

The Rosenwald Fund was also one of the original backers of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. With support from the Rosenwald Fund, an ambitious program had begun to improve the health of African Americans in US southern states in 1928. Emphasis was on treating people with syphilis, then found at a high rate in poor African-American communities.

I am pointing that out in the hope that it will take one of the Leftists' toys away from them. Where other facts fail to penetrate their prejudiced brains, perhaps the fact that the study was the work of a "progressive" Jewish philanthropist might cause them to lose their erections.

Why no increase in living standards?

In the excerpt below, economic historian Martin Hutchinson sets out clearly that real incomes for almost all Americans have not increased for a long time. Even the entry of many more women into the workforce has not helped. In the light of past income gains and all the technological progress over recent decades, this is pretty astounding. So why?

Congress, is the simple answer, sometimes with the assistance of the President. Their ever-increasing and amazingly stupid meddling in the economy has choked off growth. The half a billion dollars that Mr Obama recently wasted on a failed "green jobs" company (Solyndra) is merely the latest example of that.

As Hutchinson points out in detail, the blizzard of regulation does fairly closely coincide with the economic pause. He then goes on to blame a second factor for the pause: The expansion of international trade. But that is mightily eccentric. From ancient Athens onward, trading nations have always been beacons of prosperity -- so I think we can regard Hutchinson's excursion in that direction as either a descent into populism or a desire to provoke, probably the latter.

But there IS a second cause of the economic hiatus. The blizzard of regulation has produced both direct and indirect harms. Hutchinson concentrates on the indirect harms: The innumerable costly barriers that business now has to surmount before they can produce anything.

Quite amazingly, however, Hutchinson overlooks the direct harm of ever-increasing regulation: The vast expansion of a largely useless bureaucracy. It is the bureaucrats who are eating the worker's lunch. Why does America need Federal departnents of health, education and the environment, for instance? The States all have departments dealing with those matters. Abolishing all the Federal departments that overlap with State functions would slash the bureaucracy hugely and free up the penpushers to do something useful.

Making a useful citizen out of a penpusher would not happen overnight but with retraining it could happen over time. And doing something useful -- something people will voluntarily pay for -- is what wealth consists of. The national wealth consists of goods and services, not bits of greenbacked paper. The wealth is what the money will buy, not the money itself.

So if Obama had something more than a vacuum between his ears he would be blaming bureaucratic over-reach, not "The rich" for America's present doldrums

The Census Bureau’s study of American incomes, poverty and health coverage issued last week was most interesting when considered, not as a metric of this recession, but as a long-term picture of where American living standards are going. If median incomes are back to 1996 levels in real terms, then the stagnation which followed the 1973 living standards peak has intensified and the prognostication for the future must be thoroughly unpleasant. It’s thus worth examining how much of the decline is only a medium-term problem, due to mistaken policies that can be reversed, and how much is an inevitable and permanent decline from what may have been a fleeting middle class Nirvana in 1950-73.

Real U.S. median household income of $49,445 in 2010 was 6.4% below its level in 2007 and 7.3% below its peak in 1999. Given the performance of the economy it’s likely that this position has worsened in 2011. More alarmingly, median household income is only 0.9% above its value in 1989 and 6.3% above its level of 1973. For most households, an entire working life of 38 years has elapsed with no significant increase in living standards. As is well known, the dispersion of income has also sharply increased; in 1973 only 1.2% of households had an income above $200,000 in 2010 dollars, whereas in 2010 3.9% of households exceeded that level. The middle middle class, with incomes of $35,000 to $74,999 has shrunk from 40% of the population to 31%.

Even this grim tale does not give a full picture of the decline, because household income has been sustained compared to 1973 by a much higher proportion of women in the workforce. Real median male earnings have declined by 4% since 1973, whether you consider all men or only those with full-time, year-round jobs. However the picture is brighter for women, whose workforce participation rate was around 70% of men’s in 1973 if you consider all jobs, or a mere 43% of men’s participation if you consider only full-time, year-round jobs. Today female workforce participation is 90% of male whichever way you look at it. Furthermore women’s earnings have done much better than men’s, up by 85% for all workers or 33% when only full-time workers are considered. Still the bottom line is that for traditional families, real incomes have only increased since 1973 at the cost of the wife going out to work and childcare being hired (if necessary.)

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. workforce is thoroughly disgruntled, with attitudes to public institutions, politicians, churches the media etc. having declined catastrophically since the 1970s. This is in no way a sign of deteriorating national character, but simply of stagnating and in many cases declining national fortunes.

There appear to be two culprits for stagnating or declining living standards, apart from technological change, which may also have played a complex role. The first was a blizzard of regulation beginning in the 1960s and intensifying after 1970, with a second burst in 1989-94 and a third since 2009. In the 1970s, living standards’ fall from their 1973 peak coincided with (i) more U.S. income going into environmental cleanup (probably mostly beneficial, even if not directly included in GDP) (ii) into intensified safety and workplace welfare legislation (a bonanza for trial lawyers but probably little benefit to others, and certainly tending to reduce wages and increase healthcare costs) and (iii) such nonsenses as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, which added a huge drag to the U.S. economy, wiped out well over a million high-paid jobs in the U.S. automobile industry and achieved far less fuel saving than would have been achieved by a 50 cent tax on gasoline. Second and third bursts of regulatory hyperactivity, in 1989-94 and since 2009, have coincided with further erosions of U.S. living standards; this is most unlikely to be a coincidence.

The other major culprit, which kicked in around 1995 or so, is globalization, caused by the immense technological change of the Internet and modern cellphones, which have made multinational logistical sourcing chains infinitely more efficient and cheaper. This is not simply a one-off effect; outsourcing a product or service to India, China or Vietnam not only makes it cheaper, but also increases the capabilities of the local Indian, Chinese or Vietnamese workforce, raising its capability still further and making it competitive in more sophisticated products and services. In this respect David Ricardo’s Doctrine of Comparative Advantage, which essentially said that outsourcing was beneficial to both the rich outsourcer economy and the poor outsourcee economy, has been proved to be completely wrong. Ricardo failed to take account of the improved capabilities in the outsourcee that would result from the outsourcing, and the ability of newly empowered impoverished outsourcee workforces to learn the business, clamber up the value chain and eat the outsourcer’s lunch.

More HERE

Leftist anti-science

The major theme in Democrat attacks on GOP Presidential contenders at the moment seems to be that they are "anti-science". As usual, if we want to see what is true of Leftists, we just have to look at what they say about conservatives. Leftists are such good "projectors" that they would be star employees in any movie house. And the multiple fallacies in global warming theory reveal who are the religious believers and who is pro-science.

And if belief in God is anti-science, what are we to make of core Leftist beliefs such as "all men are equal"? Such beliefs are clearly false in any physical sense. They are anti-science beliefs. They are religious (metaphysical) beliefs. And even though I am an atheist I think that belief in "all men are equal" is a lot nuttier than belief in God. Anybody can see with their own eyes that the Leftist belief is false. As many have argued, Leftism is a religion too.

I am very pleased however to present a third argument that it is the Left who are anti-science. Brilliant young American philosopher Nathan Cofnas has given me permission to present a small excerpt from his forthcoming book Reptiles with a conscience. See below:

Just as some conservatives, mainly religious conservatives, are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their religious beliefs, many liberals are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their liberal beliefs.

For example, when president of Harvard Larry Summers suggested and provided evidence that innate, biologically rooted differences in aptitude between the sexes explain some of female underrepresentation in quantitative fields, two motions to censure him were introduced by two professors of humanities—anthropologist J. Lorand Matory and sociologist Theda Skocpol—and the ultimately successful movement to fire him was led almost entirely by other professors of humanities, most with no training in psychometrics.

In April 2005 I had an e-mail correspondence with a well-known critic [Nancy Hopkins from MIT] of Larry Summers’ comments on women’s underrepresentation in quantitative fields. Summers said that, because men have a larger variance in math ability, among those qualified to teach mathematics at top universities, which he suggested requires ability corresponding to a math IQ of 160, about 20 percent are women.

I pointed out to this critic that Summers provided data in support of his hypothesis, whereas I had not seen her provide data in any of her public rebuttals of him. She began her response to me with the statement that she is “interested only in the truth!”

She then explained that real potential in mathematics is not measured by the tests on which Summers’ data were based. She wrote: “The top math students in North America are not measured by the SAT score and its tail as Summers suggested, but rather by a much more competitive test that measures the true math genius whiz kids. This test is called the Putnam competition.…

This year, 1 of the 5 Putnam Fellows is a girl. In addition, this year, 4 of the top 15 students in the competition… were women.”

As politely as I could, I pointed out that one out of five is 20 percent, and four out of fifteen is about 27 percent, which is consistent with Summers’ assertion that males are overrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5.

Her response was to tell me that I “cannot listen to the facts that are put before [me]” and that “Old folks like…[me] should retire gracefully into the sunset.”

Her response was very curious to me (not just because I was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time, which presumably she didn’t know). Why, if Summers said that woman are underrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5, would this critic counter with evidence that confirms exactly that?

She is not stupid. She is a scientist at a top university, and entirely capable of realizing that her own data support the very hypothesis she opposes. If she has no commitment to accepting the implication of evidence, why cite evidence? And why assert interest in truth so emphatically? If she has the intellectual capacity to realize that her own argument is invalid, why would she expect that argument to convince anyone else?

I think that I now can answer these questions. Truth is a value to almost everyone. But most people have many other values to which they are more committed than they are to truth—like in this case, commitment to the belief that the male and female populations have the same distribution of all cognitive abilities and proclivities.

When truth conflicts with more important values, people do not outright deny truth or its importance; they pay as much homage to truth as possible without compromising their more important values. One way of doing this is to pretend to use the method of discovering truth—namely, appealing to empirical evidence or logical argument—to arrive at their predetermined conclusion.

An amusing Leftist evasion about Christian faith and abortion

NPR has an article up titled: "Evangelical: Religious Right Has Distorted the Faith"

That immediately led me to expect a debate about Bible doctrine and I was figuratively rubbing my hands about that as I think I can say without boasting that I know my Bible extremely well. Check my Scripture blog if you doubt it.

Instead what I found in the article was a discussion about how evangelicals were slow to react to Roe vs. Wade. The article was a summary of discussions among various Protestant church leaders with nary a single reference to the Bible!

Now I for one take a considerable interest in early church history but anybody who knows anything about modern Protestant groups knows that trying to unify them or even sum them up is like herding cats. They are inherent individualistic and expecting ANY united action from them is extremely optimistic.

And that there was no immediate concerted protest against freely available abortion is the whole complaint of the NPR article.

But that ignores the fact that abortion is an extremely difficult issue for most conservatives and many Christians. The Left are all for abortion. When they get total power they murder people by the millions so who cares about a few unborn babies?

Conservatives however recognize and respect individual rights and perceive that both the mother and baby have rights. So how to resolve a conflict between those rights? To this day, different Christians take different positions on the issue.

But our Leftist NPR writer is so tone deaf to moral argument that he showed no recognition that there was any issue there and that it might take some time to feel a way through the dilemmas involved. Leftists really are morally illiterate, some to the point of psychopathy.

For what I think is becoming a mainstream Christian approach to the abortion issue, see here