Musk To Rehire Marko Elez

WaPo  |  Elon Musk, the head of the U.S. DOGE Service, announced Friday that he would rehire a staffer who resigned after he was tied to a social media account with a history of racist posts.

“He will be brought back,” Musk wrote on X, the platform he owns. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Cain't B'Lee How Quiet BeeDee Been During An Historic Eruption Of White On White Crime And Violence

natyliesbaldwin |   This article was published by the Atlantic Council – which is basically NATO’s think tank – in June of 2018. Keep this in mind when media and commentators today try to bend over backwards to deny or downplay this. – Natylie

By Josh Cohen, Atlantic Council, 6/20/18

It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.

International human rights groups have sounded the alarm. After the March 8 attacks, Amnesty International warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”

To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.

The anti-democratic ideology these groups espouse runs counter the values of the Euromaidan. Ukrainians took to the streets to confront former President Yanukovych because they wanted to live in a democratic state where everyone is held accountable. Honoring the values of Euromaidan therefore requires Kyiv to protect all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, or political views.

Far-right impunity also represents a dangerous threat to Ukraine’s statehood. It’s been long understood in Western political and legal philosophy that the state must have a monopoly on violence in order to be a legitimate state, and when a state loses this monopoly, society starts to break down. Ukraine’s certainly nowhere near this point, but it shouldn’t take any chances either.

Does Mickey D's Still Cook Its Fries In Tallow?

krcgtv  |  A St. Louis woman is jailed after she shot a worker at McDonald’s after a dispute over a discount for french fries, St. Louis County authorities said Friday.

Terika Clay, 30, was charged Thursday with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. She was being held on a $150,00 cash-only bond.

Clay was in a drive-through at a McDonald’s in the St. Louis suburb of Normandy on Wednesday when she argued with an employee over not getting a discount on her fries, according to a probable cause statement from a Normandy detective.

The argument continued when the employee went outside for a smoke break, and Clay struck the employee with her gun and shot her, police said.

The shooting was captured on video, which led to Clay’s arrest, the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office said in a news release.

The victim’s condition was not immediately available Friday.

Online court records don’t list an attorney for Clay.

You Mess With The Kang's Money, You Pay With Your Life!!!

jsonline  |  Last week, the robbery suspect, Antoine Z. Edwards, was charged with felony murder and intentionally contributing to the delinquency of a child with death as a consequence — another felony.

Edwards and his own 16-year-old daughter, who is described as Harris-Brazell’s best friend, told police they coordinated with Harris-Brazell to stage the robbery in order to steal money, according to the criminal complaint.

The document showed no additional evidence Harris-Brazell conspired with the two on the staged robbery, and her family has argued she had no reason to steal money.

Ellis was not in on the staged robbery and fired at the suspect after seeing him leaning into a drive-thru window and waving a gun around in the direction of Harris-Brazell.

Edwards and his daughter did not tell police it was part of the plan for Edwards to lean into the window. Edwards said he did so because Harris-Brazell, who was working the drive-thru register, did not immediately hand over the cash, court documents said.

The incident occurred the evening of Jan. 2, shortly after the restaurant closed.

Ellis and Edwards are in Milwaukee County jail. As of Thursday morning, Ellis did not have a first court appearance scheduled. Edwards’ cash bail was set at $100,000 on Sunday.

According to court records:

Surveillance camera footage shows that as Harris-Brazell alerted other coworkers to the robbery, a manager at the restaurant called out to Ellis, who usually carried a gun with him to work.

Ellis peered around a door into the drive-thru window area as the robbery suspect waived a gun around. From about 20 feet away, Ellis pressed his body against the door and fired one-handed from around the corner of the door.

Harris-Brazell stood in between Ellis and the suspect. She suffered gunshot wounds to her chest.

 

 

Don't Be Stingy With That Dipping Sauce!!!

news4sanantonio |  An argument over barbecue sauce left a teenager in intensive care after being shot in the head at a Wendy's drive-thru.

Now that teenager looks to be out of the woods and is recovering after the horrible ordeal. 

Brian Durham Jr., 16, was rushed to a hospital on Jan. 13 after a dispute in which he was reportedly not involved escalated into gunfire, according to FOX 10 in Phoenix.

The teenage employee at Wendy's in Phoenix was in critical condition after being shot in the head while working the drive-thru.

"The customer reportedly walked up to the drive-thru window, pulled out a handgun and fired into the drive-thru window hitting the victim working inside the store," said Sgt. Vincent Cole of the Phoenix Police Department.

The shooter ran off after the incident, but police were able to apprehend him later. He was identified Theotis Polk, 27, according to FOX 10 in Phoenix.

Durham Jr.’s father, Brian Durham Sr., said the incident started when the customer complained the restaurant did not have barbecue sauce, FOX 10 reported.

"My son just stayed quiet and had the guy’s change in his hand," Durham Sr. told the news outlet. "[He] just stayed quiet while the other two was in confrontation."

According to FOX 10, the bullet didn't hit Brian's brain, which helped minimize the potential long-term damage.

 

"Behavioral Genetics" "Social Science Genomics" - By Any Name - Race "Science" Still Turd-Frosting

newyorker |  Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment, technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as ‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their Twitter bios.’ ”

Harden is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a “psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added, “There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its explanation of the science.”

The nomenclature has given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,” which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of “left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me, “Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists. But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”

Harden’s outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes, genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”

In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”

There is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.” He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued, “And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”

BeeDee - A Peer Reviewed Publication Asserts: Whiteness Is A Malignant Parasitic Condition

NYPost |  A white New York City psychoanalyst is under fire after publishing a report decrying his skin color as a “malignant, parasitic like condition” without a “permanent cure.”

Dr. Donald Moss — a published author who teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute — published “On Having Whiteness” last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals says.

“The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. 

“Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse,” states the paper, also published on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed site.

The “deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples,” the abstract says — and “once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.”

While “effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions,” there is “no guarantee against regression.”

“There is not yet a permanent cure,” the abstract says.

 

Pankaj Mishra Channels Sarah Jeong On BeeDeeism In The NYTimes...,

NYTimes |  A broad range of figures in the Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition and extermination of black and brown brutes. 

Not surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors who build platforms where political correctness, Islam and feminism are excoriated, the facts of injustice and inequality denied, chests thumped about a superior but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active settler-colonialist project.

Emotional incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of white power. For the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today. Whiteness denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth find themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe increasingly challenged.

Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him to vote for Mr. Trump. 

Other panicky white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience, remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce. 

The low comedy of charlatanry, however, should not distract us from the lethal dangers of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial knowledge, according to which the swarthy enemy was subhuman, inviting extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair.

Moral Dependency: #ThatAss = Truth Every Time

motherjones |  Later in the review, Magnet summarizes The Dream and the Nightmare, which he wrote in the 90s:

In that book, I argued that the counterculture’s remaking of mainstream white American culture in the 1960s — the sexual revolution; the fling with drugs…the belief that in racist America, the criminal was really the victim of society…[etc.] — all these attitudes that devalued traditional mainstream values trickled down from young people and their teachers in the universities, to the media, to the mainstream Protestant churches, to the ed schools, to the high schools, and finally to American culture at large.

And when these attitudes made their way to the ghetto, they destigmatized and validated the already-existing disproportionate illegitimacy, drug use, crime, school dropout, non-work, and welfare dependency there, and caused the rate of all these pathologies to skyrocket startlingly in the 1960s and beyond.

….Aghast at the minority-crime explosion that rocked not just the ghettoes but much of urban America, voters began electing officials, especially in New York, who believed that the real victim of a crime was the victim, not the criminal — who ought to be arrested and jailed — and crime fell accordingly.

In other words, blacks today have no cause to blame their troubles on anyone but themselves. Unless they want to blame it on lefty counterculture. This is pretty putrid stuff, and I don’t feel like taking it on right now. Instead, I’m going to change the subject so suddenly you might get whiplash.

Here we go: it’s hardened beliefs like this that make it so hard for many people to accept the lead-crime hypothesis that I’ve written about frequently and at length. A lot of teen pathologies did start to skyrocket in the 60s, but the primary cause was almost certainly lead poisoning. Certainly lead was the proximate cause of increases in crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates. And these effects were more pronounced among blacks than whites, because blacks lived disproportionately in areas with high levels of lead. The opposite is true too: the decline in these pathologies starting in the 90s was due to the phaseout of lead in gasoline.

In theory, none of this should be too hard to accept. The evidence is strong, and given what we know about the effects of lead on brain development, it makes perfect sense. In practice, though, if lead poisoning was the primary cause of the increase in various pathologies in the 60s and beyond, then the counterculture wasn’t. And if the phaseout of leaded gasoline was responsible for the subsequent decline, then the EPA gets the credit, not tough-on-crime policies. And that can’t be tolerated.

On the left, the problems are similar. Liberals tend to dislike “essentialist” explanations of things like crime rates because that opens the door to noxious arguments that blacks are biologically more crime prone than whites. As it happens, lead poisoning isn’t truly an essentialist explanation, but for many it’s too close for comfort. And anyway, liberals have their own explanations for the crime wave of the 60s: poverty, racism, easy availability of guns, and so forth.

Scared White People

seattletimes |  “I’ve got three words for you: scared white people,” Parker says. “Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about, and it was plain as it was happening.”

To be clear: Neither Parker, nor the latest research, is saying that Trump voters are all racists. Most voting is simply party-line no matter who is running. What they’re saying is that worries about the economy, free trade and the rest were no more important in 2016 than in previous elections, but racial resentment spiked.

It makes sense, considering the candidate himself was maligning Mexicans and openly calling for banning Muslims.

What’s doubly interesting is that Parker suspects the reason his research gets overlooked is because he is black. He senses it’s assumed that as a black man he must be biased about race, or is too quick to invoke it.

“I get a whole lot more respect over in Europe,” Parker told me. “There, it’s all about the ideas and whether my social science is sound. It’s not about who I am, like it so often is here.”

Meanwhile, white writers such as J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” are seen as guru guides to Trump country. Even though the mostly colorblind story of economic dead-end-ism Vance tells apparently isn’t what really turned the election.

Parker and Barreto now are working on their own book, out next year, called “The Great White Hope: Donald Trump, Race and the Crisis of Democracy.” Will that get ignored, too?

“I get it, nobody wants to be told what they don’t want to hear,” Parker says. “People want there to be a more innocent explanation, about jobs or trade or something. But sorry, everyone — it just isn’t there. My plea to people is we ought to start focusing on what’s real.”

The 4th Branch Goes to War On Alex Jones and Infowars

WaPo |  The signs about Megyn Kelly’s one-on-one NBC interview with the despicable conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been bad from the start.

First, there was their flirtatious pre-interview banter when Kelly visited Jones’s studio in Austin recently. Jones, on camera, asks Kelly when she is going to interview President Trump, and when she answers that she would use her Jones interview “as a lure,” Jones asks whether she would sit in the president’s lap.

Then there was the teaser for Kelly’s Jones interview that aired Sunday in which Kelly mildly reproves Jones, saying “that’s a dodge” when he utterly avoids her question about calling the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of six adults and 20 children schoolchildren a hoax orchestrated by gun-control advocates. Nothing about this suggests that she held his feet to the fire.

Bro. Makheru - Big Don Claims Khemit Was White

dailymail |  The first ever full-genome analysis of Ancient Egyptians shows they were more Turkish and European than African.

Scientists analysed ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from 1400 BC to 400 AD and discovered they shared genes with people from the Mediterranean.

They found that ancient Egyptians were closely related to ancient populations in the Levant - now modern day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon.

They were also genetically similar to Neolithic populations from the Anatolian Peninsula and Europe.

The groundbreaking study used recent advances in DNA sequencing techniques to undertake a closer examination of mummy genetics than ever before.

Quoth Big Don: India Has It Figured Out

trtworld |  As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates three years in power, one story has persisted in making headlines: the project to create “tall and fair customised children” with high IQs. 

It’s a decade-old project and is operated by the health wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization from which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) draws its inspiration, and the project is spreading its wings around the country.

As the country exploded in rage over similarities with the Nazi “Ubermenschen” ideal, which attempted to create a super Aryan race through eugenics funded by Hitler’s regime, many suggested that the RSS’ covert admiration for strong leaders – like US president Donald Trump and Modi –  is directly related to this attempt to create perfect babies.

An abiding theme of Hindu extreme right-wing literature has been the self-loathing associated with the inability to fight off invading armies, mostly Muslim, over the last thousand years. In fact, RSS leaders routinely collaborated with British authorities before independence so that they didn’t have to join hands with who they perceived to be the greater enemy: India’s Muslims.

No wonder RSS leaders are obsessed with the “weak Hindu” and how to overcome his weaknesses. Enter the customised baby project.

The RSS’ ‘Garbh Vigyan Sanskar’ project, loosely translated as ‘Science & Culture of the Womb,’ properly prescribes the norms which go into the making of a custom-perfect baby. The Indian Express, which broke the story last week, outlined the process that involves three months of “purification” of the intended parents which prevents “genetic defects” from being passed on, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived as well as procedural and dietary regulations.  Fist tap Big Don.

Open Thread: More Human Than Human

Brain item -- AI processing problem...??
would require AI to have the listener's entire life history stored in its memory to determine proper context....??

Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising

No BD. Not an AI processing problem, just an illustration of the mechanical and necessarily error-prone nature of both language and auditory language processing. It's not a Voight-Kampff test and "Context doesn't require a life history".  In fact, with the benefit of big data, and centralized cloud storage and processing of hundreds of thousands of utterances and their associated meanings, the probability of an AI making either the sensory or grammatical error is greatly reduced.  

...Here's a no-nonsense AI item: Turns out AI is not sufficiently stupid to allow PC liberals to shove ridiculous egalitarian concepts down its throat. AI just looks at the *FACTS* and calls it like it sees it....

Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists say

No BD. Unfortunately, you are still trapped in the realm of language and language constructs your reality. Your language reflects your tendencies - which are racist - and so what FRANK is reflecting back at you is not the truth, merely the truth about you.  Fist tap Big Don.

Does Scrabble Spell Doom For The Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence?

unz |  The first logical way the American-invented cognitive game of Scrabble settles the score against radical hereditarians in the racial (Black-White) IQ gap debate is through a two step process: how do white female players compare to white male players in top-level elite Scrabble? Since many mainstream cognitive psychologists tell us that white women (like white men) have much higher tested intelligence than blacks, whether you measure this as “general intelligence” or you just limit it to visuospatial intelligence or mathematical ability, we should expect white women to perform better than black men in any activity that depends on these abilities (since a slight deficiency in such abilities is also the reason white women perform lower than white men, according to the same hereditarians). What we have in Scrabble is an emphatic refutation of this hereditarian expectation of Black cognitive under-performance, especially when the full picture of African achievement in such mental games is examined, as I attempt to do in this article. I also refute any suggestions that such games are insufficient for this analysis.

Hereditarian Science

When I oppose “hereditarians,” I am really concerned with only one specific aspect that many self-described hereditarians seem to share: their intriguingly confident belief that they have already found some kind of proof for a genetic cognitive gap between racial groups that has a certain magnitude and direction, which consequently explains scholastic and IQ test score differences among different ethnic groups. I will call this the “racial hypothesis” in this article, even though it is officially called the “genetic hypothesis,” because I do not want to leave the impression that I reject any genetically transmitted differences in mental (or any other) ability between any two populations. (I have previously theorized that the American black-white IQ gap could simply be a reflection of a high incidence of functionally mild neurological disorders among native black Americans, which tend to affect many more males than females: such a gender IQ gap reversal is less acute in black Caribbeans than black Americans, and absent in Africans, which could suggest that the disorder may have been inherited from mating with similarly affected poor whites during the time of slavery; it has nothing to do with race or evolution per se.)

Although I am therefore also skeptical about a radical global “environmental hypothesis” as the universal explanation for every single time there are any significant performance differences between populations or genders, I think that it should be obvious that the drastically inferior environment of Africa, especially the learning or educational environment (the training factor), is a sufficient explanation for any inferior intellectual performance or IQ of Africans living in Africa (which is why African school children born in Western countries perform as well as white European children, if not better). This article tests that proposition by examining the performance of Sub-Saharan Africans on contests that are much less hindered by the artificial lack of educational (training) resources while simultaneously requiring the application of high natural cognitive resources.

Contrary to Popular Belief, Mathematical Ability Is Not Innate

cambridge |  In this review, we are pitting two theories against each other: the more accepted theory—the ‘number sense’ theory—suggesting that a sense of number is innate and non-symbolic numerosity is being processed independently of continuous magnitudes (e.g., size, area, density); and the newly emerging theory suggesting that (1) both numerosities and continuous magnitudes are processed holistically when comparing numerosities, and (2) a sense of number might not be innate. In the first part of this review, we discuss the ‘number sense’ theory. Against this background, we demonstrate how the natural correlation between numerosities and continuous magnitudes makes it nearly impossible to study non-symbolic numerosity processing in isolation from continuous magnitudes, and therefore the results of behavioral and imaging studies with infants, adults and animals can be explained, at least in part, by relying on continuous magnitudes. In the second part, we explain the ‘sense of magnitude’ theory and review studies that directly demonstrate that continuous magnitudes are more automatic and basic than numerosities. Finally, we present outstanding questions. Our conclusion is that there is not enough convincing evidence to support the number sense theory anymore. Therefore, we encourage researchers not to assume that number sense is simply innate, but to put this hypothesis to the test, and to consider if such an assumption is even testable in light of the correlation of numerosity and continuous magnitudes.

In Vino Veritas: Why Did Pittenger Backpeddle From His Core Beliefs?

charlotteobserver | U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger apologized Thursday after saying the violence in Charlotte stems from protesters who “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.”

Pittenger is a Republican whose district includes parts of the city where protests have turned violent in the wake of a police shooting of a black man.

He made the statement on a BBC-TV news program Thursday when asked to describe the “grievance” of the protesters.

“The grievance in their minds – the animus, the anger – they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not,” Pittenger said. He then criticized people who receive welfare. “It is a welfare state. We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, and we’ve put people in bondage, so they can’t be all they’re capable of being.”

He later apologized on Twitter, saying his answer “doesn't reflect who I am. I was quoting statements made by angry protesters last night on national TV. My intent was to discuss the lack of economic mobility for African Americans because of failed policies.”

In the Historical Vacuum of BeeDee-ism - Chicago is "BLM Consequences"

Hot off the BD brainpan this morning:

Excerpt near the bottom:

"Every cop saw that video," O'Connor said. "One big difference is that now, on the street, there is no fear. Even in the '90s, with all the killing, the gangs feared the police. When we'd show up, they'd run. But now? Now they don't run. Now, there is no fear."

Until recently, the ability of cops, to freely delete an occasional low-life extreme street scum, has been necessary to preserve polite society.  Now, (BodyCams, Dashcams, BLM, big settlement$$$) nobody is safe....

chicagotribune |  Manpower shortages combined with too much overtime lead to exhaustion. And loss of morale from the mayor's botched handling of the Laquan McDonald fiasco have wreaked havoc with command, with street stops down markedly. Yet taxpayers don't have a true picture of how thin that thin blue line has become.

All these problems have deep roots. Daley was at war with his Police Department and demanded a thorough house cleaning. There was a purge of district commanders and other leaders under former police Superintendent Jody Weis, and that created havoc throughout the command structure.

Earlier, the large gang crimes units — south, west and north — which provided valuable human intelligence and interaction with the gangs, were disbanded and remade.

A common theme recently is that people in the most violent neighborhoods don't cooperate with police, but the fact is they won't talk to cops they don't know. And they won't talk with others listening.

The gang members, and their families, knew officers in the old gang crimes units.

"They'd catch a two-time loser with a gun, put the cuffs on, and he'd know what to do," said Bob Angone, who spent 30 years as a street cop, as a tactical lieutenant and commander of the hostage barricade team.

"That loser will say, I know who shot victim so-and-so. They'll give you information, but they'll only tell the police they trust, the specialists, because they know they'll get their break in court, that the specialists would keep your word. That's how it's done. And the city lost a lot when we lost the gang crimes units."

There is another thing to consider about the differences between August 1991 and now. It isn't quantifiable; it won't fit on a mayoral white paper, there are no numbers to it.

But it was reported, with a video, by Tribune journalists Megan Crepeau and Erin Hooley a few days ago under the headline: "Heckling and gunfire as police investigate shooting: 'We're just playing.'"

Police were investigating reports of a shooting in bloody Englewood when about 10 young men confronted them, harassed them, mocked them on the street, hurling epithets, angry, defiant.

inbred, genetically-defective, racist atavisms...?

unz |  Middle Eastern, North African, and Pakistani populations are even more extreme. You can see it in the figure above. Across short runs of homozogosity the results converge onto what you’d expect, roughly. But Middle Eastern populations are a huge anomaly at long runs. That’s because of this:

From 20–50% of all marriages in the GME are consanguineous (as compared with 0.2% in the Americas and Western Europe)1, 2, 3, with the majority between first cousins. This roughly 100-fold higher rate of consanguinity has correlated with roughly a doubling of the rate of recessive Mendelian disease19, 20. European, African, and East Asian 1000 Genomes Project populations all had medians for the estimated inbreeding coefficient (F) of ~0.005, whereas GME F values ranged from 0.059 to 0.098, with high variance within each population (Fig. 2c). Thus, measured F values were approximately 10- to 20-fold higher in GME populations, reflecting the shared genomic blocks common to all human populations. F values were dominated by structure from the immediate family rather than historical or population-wide data trends (Supplementary Fig. 8). Examination of the larger set of 1,794 exomes that included many parent–child trios also showed an overwhelming influence of structure from the immediate family, with offspring from first-cousin marriages displaying higher F values than those from non-consanguineous marriages (Fig. 2d).

For me this was the most interesting, and sad, result:

Despite millennia of elevated rates of consanguinity in the GME, we detected no evidence for purging of recessive alleles.Instead, we detected large, rare homozygous blocks, distinct from the small homozygous blocks found in other populations, supporting the occurrence of recent consanguineous matings and allowing the identification of genes harboring putatively high-impact homozygous variants in healthy humans from this population. Applying the GME Variome to future sequencing projects for subjects originating from the GME could aid in the identification of causative genes with recessive variants across all classes of disease. The GME Variome is a publicly accessible resource that will facilitate a broad range of genomic studies in the GME and globally.

The theory is simple. If you have inbreeding, you bring together deleterious recessive alleles, and so they get exposed to selection. In this way you can purge the segregating genetic load. It works with plants. But humans, and complex animals in general, are not plants. More precisely the authors “compared the distributions of derived allele frequencies (DAFs) in GME and 1000 Genomes Project populations.” If the load was being purged the frequency of deleterious alleles should be lower in the inbreeding populations. It wasn’t.

Middle Easterners should stop marrying cousins to reduce the disease load.

the zenith of Bee Dee high-civilization - racial hygiene - the best of intentions...,

WaPo |  “Imbeciles” is the arch title that lawyer-journalist Adam Cohen has given his narrative of Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case in which the justices approved Virginia’s involuntary sterilization of “feeble minded,” epileptic and other purportedly genetically “unfit” citizens.

The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

As Cohen shows, everything had to go wrong in the legal system to produce this horror, and everything did, starting with a crooked local process that declared Buck intellectually inferior based on her out-of-wedlock pregnancy — an indicator, state doctors averred, of promiscuity, which connoted feeblemindedness.

In fact, she had been raped by her foster parents’ nephew; the couple then sought to cure this embarrassment by having Buck sent away to the state colony for her “kind.”

Virginia established the institution to isolate those who supposedly threatened “racial hygiene” and prevent them from breeding. All told, more than 30 states had such laws during the mid-20th century, though only California surpassed Virginia’s 8,300 involuntary sterilizations. It conductedroughly 20,000.

Today, the evil of such laws is universally recognized. The governors of North Carolina, Virginia and California apologized a decade ago, and in 2013 North Carolina approved $50,000 for each surviving victim.

But the story isn’t over: Virginia has promised $25,000 per person in compensation but appropriated only enough for 16 awards. The Golden State has no compensation plan.

And Buck v. Bell, though basically a dead letter, has never been formally overruled. It stands as a baleful monument — not to the court’s malice, but to the eternal flaws in human nature that cause people to commit injustice with the best of intentions.