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before they take it down, read this

I copy a letter that purports to be from an African American professor of history at UC Berkeley.

 

UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality And Cultural Orthodoxy

The following letter was allegedly written by a UC Berkeley history professor and shared among his or her colleagues anonymously (source / archive link):


Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.

Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black. Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you. The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist. MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites. No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.

I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.

UPDATE #1:

Wilfred Reilly@wil_da_beast630

I can confirm that the letter in the thread below was sent to me and Tom Sowell. It’s really worth reading, in a time of widespread panic. https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/status/1271219776606687233 

Tracy Beanz@tracybeanz

Thread: I was sent this and felt the need to thread it here on Twitter. It will be long. It is purported to be an anonymous, open letter from a professor at UK Berkeley in the History Department. The only comment I will make is to say it is worth every moment of the read.

1,089 people are talking about this

UPDATE #2:

UC Berkeley History@UCBHistory

An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member. We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.

neanderthals, humans and denisovans

You remember the moment in Blade Runner when Roy Batty dies before the eyes of Deckard? Deckard decides then and there that Nexus Six replicants were human, and that terminating them was murder.

It seems that our ancestors who mated with Denisovans and Neanderthals felt the same way about them, too. A recent study shows that

“Ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer than polar bears and brown bears, and so, like the bears, were able to easily produce healthy, fertile hybrids according to a study, led by the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology.

“The study, published today [3 June] in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that the genetic distance values between humans and our ancient relatives were smaller than the distance between pairs of species which are known to easily hybridise and have fertile young.”

My genome is  about 2% neanderthal. What about you?

I am not, however, a Nexus 6. I wish I were some days, except for the four year life span.

All people not purely African have Neanderthal genes. Maybe the neanderthal admixture had something to do with the emergence of higher orders of cognition in other humans with whom they bred. Worth thinking about, eh?, in these days of public self-humiliation of whites in the United States and elsewhere.

 

Making decisions – about riots

I was watching a video of US Marines about to attack a town in Afghanistan. The Captain addressed his battalion. At about 2:20 into the video he said (I paraphrase) : “The plan we have gone over and over – as soon as you land, it will fly out the window. You will be called upon to make a hundred decisions that there is no right answer to. But guess what? you will have to decide; you will have to act.”

I enjoyed the approach, and it ought to be better understood. You will have to act, you will have to decide. I wish it were more broadly understood in society. You have to decide and you have to act. Make a wrong decision? Go ahead and make another. This one may be better. This approach is utterly contrary to the bureaucratic mindset which fears decision-making.

A former boss of mine was a judge. He said: “Make ten decisions. Eight will be right. One will be wrong. One you win or lose on appeal”. But the message was” keep making decisions.

This brings me around to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book on the newest generation, and it is not pleasant reading.  The Coddling of the American Mind 

chronicles the increase of neurotic levels of fear among American college students: how good intentions and bad ideas are generating a generation of weak people. As he says: prepare your children for the road not the road for the children.

 

The message Haidt is giving in his YouTube lecture is that we are heading for tribal war. That was in 2019. Look around you. What do you see? Dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality and anti-intellectualism [at 42:40]. The riots and revolt we have been witnessing these last few days have been long prepared by the erosion of cultural and educational standards. The failure of the forces of order to act, because they have been told to lay off by mayors and governors, is yet another signof the scale of  the rot inside our institutions.

 

Someone, possibly Jonathan Kay, said that this could be Trump’s Reichstag Fire moment. I avoid the connotation that Kay would like to put on these riots. These are an excuse for  looting and for anti-fa to break windows. Everyone is seeing far too much disorder to be enthusiastic for kneeling before the black race and beseeching forgiveness, as the Left would have us do. Time for some violence from the state against Antifa and the looters. And yes, Derek Chauvin disgusts me. But so does mass break down of order.

 

 

Graduation exercises

I was present at the University of Ottawa’s graduation exercises yesterday for its arts faculty. In the tedium of watching 1,000 unrelated young people receive degrees, there is little to do but notice the sex, ethnicity and nationality of the graduates. Here are my observations:

  • It was 80% female, not 70% female. One in five arts graduates were male. Whether this portends a disaster for male status and income is a topic for another blog.
  • Africans and Haitians. There was a large contingent of African and Haitian young women graduating. Clearly we need have no fear that African immigrants to Canada are problematic; they are climbing the ladder of success as fast as they can.
  • I might have counted two Jews out of 1000. Where are the Jews? When I attended McGill in the sixties, about 75% of the arts faculty was Jewish. Have they gone to better universities? Other universities?
  • Muslims were far fewer than Africans, who seemed about one in ten graduates, though they were probably fewer in fact.

There you have it. Expect more educated African-Canadian women in your workforce, and fewer males of all races and ethnicities.

Check your aboriginal privilege at the door

I read today the article by Terry Glavin on why yet another attempt to build a pipeline is failing.  It is not a caricature. It is not a spoof. It is the real world outcome of policies launched by our Supreme Court years ago,  and in so far as the Court has consistently done its best to make Canada an ungovernable mess, it is succeeding.

The backers of the pipeline hired Indian groups to do the preparatory wood clearing and road building for $620 million. They obtained the permission of 20 band councils through whose territory the pipeline would pass. Was this enough? No!

“The thing is, it doesn’t much matter what those 20 band councils have to say for themselves. What matters is what the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their clans and their house groups say, and for several years they have been saying, fairly consistently, thanks, but no thanks, no pipeline, no damn way…

…In Wet’suwet’en country, the law is the ancient feast system, and the hereditary chiefs are bound to uphold the law. That’s not just some hippie anthropologist’s point of view, either. It’s the view of the Supreme Court of Canada, in its specific findings in the landmark 1997 Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en case, Delgamuukw versus the Queen. It was the hereditary chiefs who fought and won that court battle. In Wet’suwet’en country, Aboriginal rights and title are vested in the hereditary chiefs and their clans and their house groups.”

In the Supreme Court judgment summary of the Delgamukw case, we read as follows:

The appellants, all Gitksan or Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, both individually and on behalf of their “Houses”, claimed separate portions of 58,000 square kilometres in British Columbia.  For the purpose of the claim, this area was divided into 133 individual territories, claimed by the 71 Houses.  This represents all of the Wet’suwet’en people, and all but 12 of the Gitksan Houses.  Their claim was originally for “ownership” of the territory and “jurisdiction” over it.  (At this Court, this was transformed into, primarily, a claim for aboriginal title over the land in question.)

133 individual territories, claimed by 71 houses. For 1500 to 2000 people, as the Court said. See below.

I continue with the Delgamuukw case because more people should be aware of how profoundly the interest of the larger society of Canada were trammelled and thrown aside by the actions of the Supreme Court.

The issue concerned the treatment by the trial judge of oral histories of the Aboriginal claims, and it was held that he had not properly given them the weight the Supreme Court thought he ought to have done. So the upper court dismissed the judgment of the trial judge, and allowed the claim and a new trial.

The oral histories were used in an attempt to establish occupation and use of the disputed territory which is an essential requirement for aboriginal title.  The trial judge refused to admit or gave no independent weight to these oral histories and then concluded that the appellants had not demonstrated the requisite degree of occupation for “ownership”.  Had the oral histories been correctly assessed, the conclusions on these issues of fact might have been very different.

So are the claims of the Kings of Gondor to be descended from the Andurin of Atlantis to be judged by the oral history of one J.R.R.Tolkien? More close in time, and somewhat more realistic, are the claims of the Kings of Scotland to be the Kings of England to be adjudged by the oral traditions of hereditary clan chiefs of the Celtic Highlands faithful to the Stuart cause? As those clan chieftains recalled in 1975? Or were those claims not finally ended in fire and sword at Culloden?

If the Supreme Court of Canada were adjudicating the legitimacy of the House Windsor to be the legitimate rulers of the United Kingdom the claims would depend on some daft crofters in Skye and Uist who remembered their great grandmothers’ fairy tales of Bonnie Prince Charlie. No serious state should allow a court to determine its legitimacy.

These thoughts may seem absurd and overdrawn. Even I can at times when I can see the dilemma of the courts. They were thrust into the position of inventing law on the spot: to give substance to the term “aboriginal rights” as mentioned in section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act. In the legal treatment of aboriginal rights by our courts we see the action of judges trying to make sense of the claims of the original inhabitants against the claims of the larger society.

Being the good Liberals they were, the Supreme Court was extravagant in its definitions of “aboriginal title”.

Aboriginal title was specifically detached from those traditions specific to the continued maintenance of Indian economic or cultural existence.

Aboriginal title encompasses the right to exclusive use and occupation of the land held pursuant to that title for a variety of purposes, which need not be aspects of those aboriginal practices, customs and traditions which are integral to distinctive aboriginal cultures.  The protected uses must not be irreconcilable with the nature of the group’s attachment to that land.

Terry Glavin’s article on the latest blockades assigns some blame to Trudeau and Premier John Horgan of British Columbia. What did they mean when they said “that their consent should be required, as per the United Nations’ guidance, for industrial developments such as pipelines to proceed in areas subject to some degree of Aboriginal title.”

Let me give you the straight Canadian redneck version of events, and it is very simple, as you would expect. For the political Left, and I include the Supreme Court as a leading exponent of leftism, Indian title is a white-created tool to frustrate economic development. Aboriginals are mascot groups. Thomas Sowell described the use of mascot groups as the way in which liberals show their moral superiority. “See how concerned I am!” In Canada, “aboriginal title” is a tool of left-wing lawyers and courts who are committed to seeing resource extraction come to a halt, so that they simultaneously grow wealthy in court cases and frustrate the legitimate claims of Canadians to participate in the wealth of this country by elevating the claims of bands of one or three thousand over the claims of all the people.

The jurisdictional confusion,  the wrecking of the National Energy Board, the over-consultation, the refusal to throw down the gauntlet at the courts, or even to take them on in reasoned debate, as one ought, suits the interests of the anti-development portions of the Canadian Left.

In the Delgamuukw decision of 1997, the Supreme Court said “Wet’suwet’en consist of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 persons, who also predominantly live in the territory claimed.” Keep that number of people in mind when you read the following paragraph from Terry Glavin.

Whatever the region’s band councils have to say, the Coastal Gaslink pipeline route enters Wet’suwet’en territory at a place called Honeagh Bin, which is under the authority of the Thin House (Yexsowwiten) chief, whose people are members of the Big Frog (Gilseyhyu) clan. The pipeline route then traverses Small Frog (Laksilyu) property held by the House of Many Eyes (Ginehklaiyex), and on and on like this until it passes through the house territories of the Bear/Wolf clan (Gitumd’in), one of whose chiefs, Madeek (Jeff Brown) was a leader at the roadblock the RCMP dismantled on Monday. Eventually, the pipeline route reaches Talbiits Kwa, another Big Frog territory, which is where the Unist’ot’en have been controlling traffic on the forest service road for the past several years. The route then leaves Wet’suwet’en country at Lho Kwah, and enters the Haisla Nation territory. The Haisla are organized mainly into the Kitamaat First Nation, which generally supports the LNG Canada project.

We have reached an absurd point when such intra-tribal arcana is required to be considered when we try to make pipelines work. We are endowing villages of backwoodsmen the might, majesty, and power of states. If they were white, we would see the situation much more as Billy-Bob MacAuslan and his  clan of rednecks holding up the pipeline against the will of the Tysons down the valley who want it. I do not deny Billy-Bob his agency or his human rights, but they do not include his right to reduce our GNP because the moral equivalent of his teddy bear told him so, or because his ancient clan animosities require him to oppose whatever project the tribe of ancient enemies over the next mountain range favours, nor even when he believes a pipeline is not in his interest.

We invented statehood for a reason. One of the main ones was to bring an end to the power of local lords.  Canada should not be prevented from being a state because Billy-Bob Delgamuukw thinks he is heir to the Winged Serpent, the Holy Grail, the Revelations of the Spirit Bear, or the Second Attention. He is just a guy living in the woods. He has been consulted, and he doesn’t want a pipeline. Too bad. Buy him out (at a reasonable price) and build the thing.

 

 

 

 

Chinese geneticist claims to have gene-edited babies

 

Amidst the usual moral posturing and condemnation, it appears that somewhere in China some scientist – who is a graduate of top US universities – engaged in “washing” the sperm of some HIV infected fathers in order to spare their children HIV infection. The Guardian reports, through a lot of huffing and puffing, the following:

The researcher, He Jiankui of Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments, with one pregnancy resulting so far. He said his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease, but to try to bestow a trait that few people naturally have: an ability to resist possible future infection with HIV.

He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they lived or where the work was done. There is no independent confirmation of He’s claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts.

He revealed it on Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organisers of an international conference on gene editing that is due to begin on Tuesday, and earlier in interviews with the Associated Press.

“I feel a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also make it an example,” He said. “Society will decide what to do next” in terms of allowing or forbidding such science….

He Jiankui studied at Rice and Stanford universities in the US before returning to his homeland to open a lab at Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, where he also has two genetics companies.

He said he practised editing mice, monkey and human embryos in the lab for several years and has applied for patents on his methods. He said he chose embryo gene editing for HIV because these infections are a major problem in China. He sought to disable a gene called CCR5 that forms a protein doorway that allows HIV, the virus that causes Aids, to enter a cell.

All of the men in the project had HIV and all of the women did not, but the gene editing was not aimed at preventing the small risk of transmission, he said. The fathers had their infections deeply suppressed by standard HIV medicines and there are simple ways to keep them from infecting offspring that do not involve altering genes. Instead, the appeal was to offer couples affected by HIV a chance to have a child that might be protected from a similar fate.

He said the gene editing occurred during in vitro fertilisation. First, sperm was “washed” to separate it from semen, in which HIV can lurk. A single sperm was placed into a single egg to create an embryo. Then the gene-editing tool was added. When the embryos were three to five days old, a few cells were removed and checked for editing. Couples could choose whether to use edited or unedited embryos for pregnancy attempts. In all, 16 of 22 embryos were edited, and 11 embryos were used in six implant attempts before the twin pregnancy was achieved, He said.

Tests suggest that one twin had both copies of the intended gene altered and the other twin had just one altered, with no immediate evidence of harm to other genes, He said. People with one copy of the gene can still get HIV.

Musunuru said that even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes faced higher risks of contracting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it is treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern.

Thus, sexual selection, and disease, which is the normal way humans and all sexual species have been gene-edited, body by body, phenotype by phenotype, for the last billions of years, that is okay. But getting into the molecular level  and splicing and cutting genes is bad. Go figure.

I can hear the Christians calling me a Dr. Mengele, that the genome is sacred, and I hear that that the bioethicists have “concerns”. [Can you imagine that some people are paid to be “bio-ethicists”?]

I can hear the sound of the Asians flocking to new technologies to make their babies smarter, healthier, more disease resistant, and stronger.

New forms of competition will come to the human species, and it will be genetic, though the practices associated with gene-editing will be tolerated or encouraged by certain races and cultures ahead of some others. Attitudes against gene editing will soon be seen as the equivalent of not allowing the pasteurization of milk. Nothing  can be done to oppose it, except voluntary non-participation. Those cultures or religions that do not participate will eventually be considered to be like those sects that do not allow blood transfusions.

We in the politically correct West will be talking about the non-existence or social construction of racial differences, which simultaneously exists and does not exist, depending on the argument being engaged in. Meanwhile, other cultures or races will be busily experimenting with genetic engineering.

Hitler in Hell

I get over-Hitlered. I have read too much about the man and I resist, in vain, yet another tome on the subject of this revolutionary modernist mass annihilator. I know that Stalin makes Hitler look like a piker when it comes to mass murder, but Stalin is fundamentally a communist, and Communism is stupid, dumb, mechanical, and eliminatory.  In Communism we find the modern university, obsessed with false explanations for inequality, but with death quotas and actual mass murder.

“Fascism”, as Fran Leibowitz said, “is too exciting, communism, too boring”. So it was with some trepidation that I ordered Martin Van Creveld’s pseudo-autobiography “Hitler in Hell”. Hitler writes from a sort of air-conditioned featureless, shadowless world where the demons take his tray and keep him fed, but he faces an eternity of nothingness as a punishment for his sins and crimes.

Martin van Creveld is a military historian, an Israeli Jew of Dutch origin. He has written plenty of serious important books on warfare, logistics, and strategy.

His Hitler in Hell is a hoot. It is a way of telling Hitler’s story in an amusing way while Creveld (alias Hitler) gets to take a few shots at Joachim Fest, David Irving, Allan Bullock, John Toland and Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s historians, and, in his fictional voice,  the German generals whom Hitler thinks betrayed him.

It presents Hitler in straightforward terms as acting rationally to defend and avenge Germany in the wake of World War 1, as long as you can accept the absolutely demented notion that the Jews are the world’s parasites. Van Creveld presents Hitler as sane, save only that he was obsessed with the Jews, obsessed, and ready to murder them the way you take insect spray to a hornet’s nest.

Just as Stalin was a pure communist, and sought to eliminate all capitalist-market relations in the Soviet Union, even at the price of destroying his farmers and peasantry, so Hitler was a pure anti-Semite, and sought to eliminate all Jews wherever he could get his hands on them.

All the rest of his behaviour was sincerely anti-democratic, expansionary, war-mongering, cruel, and suited for the obloquy of man, but it was rational if you accept the premises of German cultural and racial supremacy, and hatred of everything Jewish.

One other book that comes close to capturing Hitler’s mindset is the most outrageous book I have ever read, Norman Spinrad‘s “The Iron Dream”, which purports to be a book authored by one Adolf Hitler, who emigrated to the United States in 1919 and illustrated science fiction books, and who eventually turned his hand to writing science fiction. You know, with titles like “Lords of the Swastika”. I recommend it if you can find it as a book, or go to the Intertubes and find it as a pdf.

There was yet another book about Hitler in which a team of Israeli commandos find him in the jungles of Paraguay. They cannot get him out for some reason so they put him on trial before a jury of one Guarani Indian. It was The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, by George Steiner. In his self defence, Hitler is allowed to speak. The Indian juror does not understand a word of the oration, but understands his meaning perfectly. The Guarani Indian decides that Hitler is a shaman. As such he could not be guilty, since he is a magician. In his defence, Steiner’s Hitler defends master race ideology  as nothing more than what the Jews believe about themselves, and claims to be the real founder of Israel. You can imagine the controversy that Steiner got himself into.

It is curious that, in reading van Creveld’s commentary on writing Hitler in Hell, found at the back end of the book and George Steiner’s comments on writing the Portage to San Cristobal  of AH, they each admit that once they got the idea, the books practically wrote themselves.

Steiner, Van Creveld, and Spinrad – all Jews – are a lot quicker and less ponderous to read than Joachim Fest and Ian Kershaw. Of the three of them, Spinrad captures the anti-semitism of Hitler as no one else ever has. I repeat my warning that Spinrad’s book is outrageous. Frankly I think only a Jew could get to the core of anti-semitism as well.  Van Creveld’s take on Hitler will convey more facts and accurate chronology. If you want to read about the Third Reich for a rapid and insightful overview, van Creveld is greatly recommended.

 

 

The Thirteenth Warrior

 

Image result for the thirteenth warrior

 

 

I saw the Thirteenth Warrior again after a gap of many years. My friend, who had never seen it until yesterday, is now another convert to this outrageously wonderful movie.

Let’s face it, it is a national socialist movie. No, I do not mean National Socialist as in a celebration of hideous Hitlerian totalitarian doctrines. It is the story of Beowulf retold,  where Grendel becomes a collective monster, a  tribe of cannibals who eat humans, and who think they themselves are bears.  The humans, northmen all, are fighting for their lives against an apparently superior force of anti-human evil, the Wendol, the collective of cannibals. It is based on the clever Michael Crichton’s story, Eaters of the Dead.

In writing this little article, I came across the negative review by Roger Ebert. Pay him no attention. Lisa Schwarzbaum called it “the most unexpectedly audacious, exhilarating, and wildly creative adventure thriller I have seen in ages”.[12]

As a friend once said, The Thirteenth Warrior is the same movie as Cross of Iron (1977), or Aliens (1986). A group of warriors who think they are the toughest meanest sons of bitches have to take on an overwhelming force of alien evil, and they discover the limits of their powers.

It is also outrageous fun. Watch it with other males.

Lo do I see my father before me

Lo do I see my mother, my sisters, my brothers before me

Lo do I see them back to the Beginning

Lo do I see them in the Halls of Valhalla

Where the brave may live forever!

It will get you pumped. Pajama boys will need to retreat to a safe space to recover.

As the bard says to the Arab diplomat character about the Wendol, after he has killed a few of them, “Don’t worry little brother, there are more!”. That is to say, aliens left to kill. The struggle is eternal.

 

 

 

 

 

Diversity means uniformity; inclusion means exclusion

You are not alone if you have begun to cotton on to the idea that “diversity” does not include you, dear reader. You are probably male, probably over forty, probably white, and you do not fit into the desired categories of “diverse” people that the Left favours. Tucker Carlson  started into the diversity mantra the other night by asking some long overdue questions.

 

 

Diversity is hogwash. I come from a formerly diverse society. It is called Quebec, and whatever you might feel about the French Canadians, they are very sound on the diversity question. They will have none of it, as long as diversity presents an English-speaking face. They have resisted “diversification” for centuries, which they call assimilation, and will continue to do so until they disappear demographically, which is a long way off. Having been raised in a society where I was the rejected outsider, I have come to appreciate how normal it is for a society to reject multiculturalism, and insist on the society’s right to perpetuate itself, even at great cost.

Perhaps by reason of personal history I am skeptical of diversity, or at least conscious of where it begins and ends. A common language is good, though not essential. But a common set of civic values is essential to the maintenance of liberty, order, cohesion, and yes, actual tolerance for diversity.

If you want to experience “diversity”, go to India. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains Sikhs, Parsis: all vie for space, respect, and resources. Forty,  or is it four hundred, languages create a babble of mutual incomprehension.  Racial, caste, and ethnic differences are as great as anything in all of Europe, even considering how it is after the Muslim refugee invasion.

I want everyone to start questioning “diversity”.

A new bumper sticker is needed.

 

Question diversity

 

This anti-white stuff is coming for you, dude

 

Explicit anti-white racism is now de rigeur in our universities. If you think this is temporary, think again.

First demonstrate your contribution to “diversity”, as defined by the academic elites who seek to abolish themselves because, to no one’s surprize, they are white.The College Fix reports

For Cal Poly, requiring the diversity statement is one part of a larger effort school officials are engaged in to “improve diversity” via dozens of various endeavors outlined in its 30-page action plan. As part of the diversity initiatives plan, the university also has a goal of “increasing, in a Proposition 209-compliant manner, the hiring of diverse faculty utilizing cluster hires every other year.”

It is evident to me and to a growing number of reasonable people that the entire university sector is overinflated and needs drastic reduction of its financial resources. The government must stop subsidizing this racialist evil. And stop enserfing our children to debt for a useless and dangerous miseducation.

Here is a portion of Cal Poly’s action plan. To read it is to see the anti-white future:

 

Office of University Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity Action Initiatives
Items in bold are key initiatives.
Future Actions Initiative Anticipated Implementation Department(s) Description
Cultural Humility Institute
Winter 2019
Vice President for Student Affairs, Office of University Diversity and Inclusion
Cultural humility is a lifelong process of self-reflection, self-critique, and commitment to understanding and respecting different points of view and engaging with others humbly, authentically and from a place of learning (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998).

Student Diversity Advisory Committee
Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
An advisory committee to the Office of University Diversity & Inclusion made up of student representatives to help guide work related to student concerns and to gain input on initiatives.

Campus-Wide Allyship Trainings

Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Cross Cultural Centers
An expansion of the currently offered Allyship workshops on Race & Ethnicity and Gender & Sexuality offered by the Cross Cultural Centers.

Collective Impact Strategic Action Plan Open Forum
Fall 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The Inclusive Excellence Council will review the Collective Impact Recommendations and create a strategic plan to be shared in a Fall 2018 Open Forum.

Collective Impact Strategy Group Recommendations
June 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The three Strategy Groups will have short- and long-term recommendations outlined.

Mandatory Implicit Bias Trainings for MPPs and Confidential Employees
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Employee and Organization Development
The “Exposing Hidden Bias” workshop will be mandatory for all MPPs and Confidential Employees.

Collective Impact Listening Sessions
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Open sessions reflecting the 3 Collective Impact Strategy Groups: Campus Climate, Curriculum, and Recruit & Retain. The sessions will garner input from participants.

All Faculty and Staff Association Meeting
Spring 2018
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
A gathering of representatives from the 5 established Faculty Staff Associations.
Expand BEACoN mentors to include staff and alumni *
TBD
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Include opportunities for staff and alumni to provide mentorship for underrepresented students

Campus Climate Survey
2019
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
A survey to assess campus climate will be re-administered.

New Employee Orientation
2017
Employee and Organization Development
An introductory training for new employees at Cal Poly. Onboarding for all new staff positions, including a diversity and inclusion segment.

BEACoN Research Mentor Program
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The BEACoN Research Mentor Program pairs students with research mentorship under the guidance of faculty. Enhanced the faculty/student mentorship program to add paid research opportunities.

Collective Impact Process for Advancing Diversity & Inclusion at Cal Poly
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
The Collective Impact approach is premised on the belief that no single policy, department, organization or program can tackle or solve the increasingly complex social problems we face as a society. The approach calls for multiple organizations or entities from different sectors to abandon their own agenda in favor of a common agenda, shared measurement and alignment of effort. Unlike collaboration or partnership, Collective Impact initiatives have centralized infrastructure – known as a backbone organization – with dedicated staff whose role is to help participating organizations shift from acting alone to acting in concert.

Vice President for Diversity & Inclusion
2017
President’s Cabinet
The lead position in OUDI was elevated to executive level for greater impact.
Established the Chicana/o Latino/a and Indigenous Alumni Chapter
2017
Alumni Association
Supports and creates community for Latinx alumni.

Faculty Associate Positions
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion
Faculty Associates are hired by OUDI to gain a faculty perspective in diversity and inclusion work.

Implicit Bias Trainings for Staff and Faculty
2017
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Employee and Organization Development
A two-part implicit bias workshop series that brings attention to the unconscious biases we all possess and provides some strategies for overcoming thier impact in our work and relationships.

Implicit Bias Trainings for Faculty Search Committees
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Academic Personnel
This training introduces participants to implicit bias in decision-making and hiring. It is required for all tenure/tenure-track faculty search committees.

Diversity in the Curriculum Training for Faculty
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and the Center for Teaching Learning & Technology
A summer week-long workshop designed for faculty to incorporate diversity and inclusion topics into their curricula.

Bias Incident Response Team Established
2016
Office of University Diversity & Inclusion and Dean of Students
The Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) is co-chaired by the Dean of Students and the VP for Diversity & Inclusion. The team meets to discuss the appropriate course of action on hate/bias incidents on campus. BIRT also works to support and provide resources to those who are targets and/or witness acts of bias in our campus community.

==========

Remember:

Diversity = uniformity

Inclusion = exclusion