Stuart Ritchie writes: But although Mukherjee is awed by the intelligence of geneticists, he doesn’t think much of scientific attempts to measure intelligence. Indeed, in one chapter he launches an all-out attack on IQ tests. Why study the genetics of general intelligence, Mukherjee asks, when new evidence from the psychologist Howard Gardner shows that there are actually multiple intelligences? This will come as a surprise to Gardner, who has never provided any data for his now-debunked ‘multiple intelligences’ theory. In fact, general intelligence is probably the most well-replicated phenomenon in all of psychological science. But how would Mukherjee know this? His reading of the research on intelligence is cursory and out of date; he fails to cite a single scientific paper on the genetics of intelligence more recent than 2003, with most sources coming from the 1970s or earlier.
This lapse in scholarship is made all the more frustrating in the next two chapters, where Mukherjee discusses gender, sexuality and personality, happily concluding that they are all strongly genetically influenced. Perhaps he thinks IQ is one controversy too far. But a glance at the scientific literature shows that the research on the genetics of intelligence is vastly more developed than on, say, sexuality. No attempt is made to cover intriguing (and solid) findings such as the increasing genetic effect on IQ with age, or the first glimmers in large gene-hunting studies of DNA variants linked to more efficient brains.
Another underdeveloped topic examined in The Gene is ‘epigenetics’, the notion that the environment leaves marks on the genome that switch genes on and off, with concomitant health effects. Might these marks be passed on to our children, and even grandchildren? Mukherjee’s recent New Yorker essay on this topic angered scientists because it signally failed to acknowledge other genetic ‘switches’ that are far better known. That essay’s magpie-like focus on the shiny new ideas of epigenetics is not found in the book, but Mukherjee still leans too heavily on studies of the effects of the Dutch famine of 1944 — which do not rule out non-epigenetic explanations — and dismissively relegates alternative views (which are far more in line with the limited evidence on epigenetics) to a footnote.
What of the future? In The Gene’s final section, we get a little on embryo selection, a little on gene editing and a little on stem cells, all of which may soon be used to ‘engineer’ healthier, smarter or otherwise altered humans. The book’s coverage of these techniques — on which the importance of a full, frank debate cannot be overstated — is accompanied by a vague ‘manifesto’ on some of their pitfalls and caveats, but the whole treatment feels rushed, as if Mukherjee didn’t wish to scare the horses by getting too far into the ‘newgenic’ implications.
This disappointing failure to grasp the genetic nettle can be illustrated by a quotation from Mukherjee’s section on IQ tests. ‘Is g [general intelligence] heritable? In a certain sense, yes.’ Alas, the ‘certain sense’ here really means ‘after much qualification’; in fact, after so much qualification that you’ll go away thinking the answer is actually ‘no’, and not worrying too much about it. So, in the same spirit: is The Gene worth reading? In a certain sense, yes.
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But these are strange times on the right, and since his resignation from Breitbart in March, Shapiro, currently editor-in-chief of Daily Wire, has increasingly found himself targeted by the so-called alt-right movement, a loose conglomeration of online personalities — many if not most of them anonymous — currently devoted to tweeting and posting their support for Donald Trump and attacking those who disagree, often in racist and anti-Semitic ways. They have been denigrating Shapiro as a “pussy,” a “cuck,” and — inevitably, given the nature of this movement — a “Jew” and a “kike.”
His former employer has gone after him too. Shortly after Shapiro resigned, Breitbart published — and then quickly pulled down — a bizarre article bylined with a pseudonym previously used by Shapiro’s father on Breitbart and headlined “Ben Shapiro Betrays Loyal Breitbart Readers in Pursuit of Fox News Contributorship” (Shapiro’s father, David Shapiro, stepped down as a contributor at the same time Shapiro did — Ben told Politico that his father had written under a pseudonym to shield himself from the death threats Ben receives). Then, last week, Breitbart published a piece by an alt-right Twitter personality known as “Pizza Party Ben” — yes, that was how his byline appeared on the site — that consisted mostly of a video mocking Shapiro for having complained about anti-Semitism, the alt-right, and Trump:
The nadir came a couple of weeks ago, though, when Shapiro’s wife gave birth to the couple’s second child. As the Daily Wire noted, Shapiro was hit with a wave of vicious anti-Semitic abuse, including multiple Holocaust references and requests that Shapiro and his family be sent to the ovens.
Jesse Singal only provides two points of view — those of Ben Shapiro and of himself.
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NEWS: The FBI has rounded up 17 black gang members that were in connection with the murder of Jessica Chambers in Mississippi. She was a white 19 year old girl that had disappeared from a gas station while she was filling up her car with gas; her body was found burning just a few miles from the station. The thugs doused her with gasoline and then burned her alive.
Even though this happened more than a year ago, the mainstream media was covering it non-stop…oh, wait, just kidding. There was little to no coverage about this story. Now, especially because there are 17 black thugs that have been arrested, we really aren’t going to hear squat about it.
This is just another example of another White life that doesn’t matter to the media, and certainly not to the idiot residing in the White House.
PANOLA COUNTY, Miss. — The FBI spent the morning rounding up suspected gang members.
There is a total of 17 people facing charges under Operation Bite Back.
Nine people were picked up Tuesday.
The others were already in custody on other charges or had been arrested under this operation and bonded out.
FBI agents targeted suspected members of the Black Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, and Sipp Mob street gangs. (WREG)
Here are the names of the thugs facing charges:
Lyndon Mosely, Jr., 24
Edward House, 39
Joshua Cannon, 25
Anand Vijay Shegog, 39
Mondarious Armstead, 23
Gregory B. Andrews, 22
D’Irian Case, 18
Janicholas Vankeith Scott, 34
James Mosely, Jr., 26
George Todd, 23
Dedrick Ivery, 39
Antonio Johnson, 28
Xavier Hooks, 25
Kevin Windfield, 37
Elgin Lamar, 38
Deon Smith, 20
Stanley Coleman, 40
The truth about murder and race in Mississippi may prove reducible to black and white after all, as with fifty years ago in the infamous “Mississippi Burning” case. Breaking, bombshell social media evidence in the Jessica Chambers case suggests the dynamic is reversed, but similar.
In trying to follow and sort out the details surrounding the grisly immolation death of the white former cheerleader two weeks ago, one encounters a cast of very shady characters a country mile long and wide, with the sordid backstory of small-town police corruption in Panola County, and a troubled family tale, all of it murky and convoluted almost beyond belief.
Nailing the actual guilty party, however, could turn out to be not all that complicated. That’s because some black terrorists in the victim’s immediate circle have left a rather obvious trail of specific, racially-oriented murder threats.
For readers familiar with the concept of Occam’s Razor, what seems to be an incredibly tangled mystery might instead just fit the boilerplate template of what I’m calling Occam’s race war.
One week before, and on just the day before Jessica Chambers was carjacked and burned to death, certain blacks among her intimate circle and acquaintance were involved in Facebook exchanges wherein calls for the rape and burnings of white women and children, especially the families of white police officers, were posted.
Although not a police officer himself, Jessica Chambers’ father is an employee of the Panola County sheriff’s department, in the vehicle maintenance section.
You’ll need to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to slurp on, while you try to get a grip on what follows.
In the first Facebook comment in question, on November 30th, a woman using the name “Teapooh Itiswatitis Latrice” reacts to a fake news story carrying the headline “Cop Shoots 1Yr Old Black Baby After Mistaking Pacifier For Gun.”
“Teapooh,” apparently not being very bright, looks to have shared the story without realizing it was actually absurd satire, typical of incendiary internet hoax sites. In sharing the bogus article, “Teapooh” typed the comment, “Somebody need to rape all his kids in front of him then sit(sic) the house on fire an watch them burn….i bet he was a white man SAD”
She shared it via the Facebook timeline of a woman named Sandy Rudd (now please bear with me for a minute while I outline some crucial connections before giving you the rest of the specific, criminal threat).
Sandy Rudd is the aunt of Bryan Rudd, Jessica’s abusive, criminal ex-boyfriend and local gang member. Sandy, who gave the false name of “Cassandra Market” to a reporter in an interview, is herself alleged to be a member of at least one notorious criminal gang — she denies it, even though at least one picture of her has surfaced showing her making gang signs in a group picture with others, all of them defiantly throwing gang signs.
Sandy Rudd acknowledges that she is the one at the gas station who asked Jessica Chambers for a cigarette, when Jessica is seen on the store surveillance video walking over to someone who is off-camera.
Jessica lived with Bryan Rudd and his mother, Theresa Rudd Fleming, for two years in the period leading up to her murder, before a brief stay in a Christian-run rehab/shelter for troubled women. Bryan Rudd has since moved away, to Iowa.
Now get this: “Teapooh” is, according to the “hacktivists” who have accessed various social media accounts of the people involved, actually Teanna Rudd, the wife or live-in girlfriend of a man named Brejuan Buyers.
Brejuan Buyers is the man seen on the gas station’s surveillance video with the gas can in the hours just prior to Jessica being burned over 98% of her body. He rode with Sandy Rudd in her car to the gas station, on that same night the murder victim is seen at the store — while he is filling the gas can at the pump — only 90 minutes before she is found burned.
“Teapooh” made more than just that one murderous comment on Facebook. On the day before Jessica’s murder, on December 5th,she shared a video via someone posting as “Derrick Jaxn” (Jessica’s last word, uttered to a first responder, is reported to have been “Eric” or “Derrick”). The post was accompanied by her comment, “Somebody needs to rape all they(sic) kids in front of them then set them on fire there(sic) learn then white bitches need to be dead”
The clock is ticking, and the FBI was brought in to work on the case as of a few days ago. Many persons of interest have been interviewed, and no arrests have been made.
Brejuan Buyers, the gangsta “gas can man,” can also be seen in two homemade videos here and here, getting high and hurling angry obscenities at whoever watches.
Incidentally, just because whichever authority initially declares some person to have been interviewed and “cleared” doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t be implicated later on, upon further investigation/developments.
Gas station “owner” Ali Alsanai, about whom I’ve previously written, has now been said by the local District Attorney to be not officially suspected of any direct involvement in the case. However he remains a very suspicious figure in all of this, to those who pay close attention to his story’s inconsistencies, his body language, outward displays, mannerisms, and deceptive speech patterns (for one thing, honest people don’t constantly use the phrase “to be honest with you” when answering questions). In spite of his openly flashy gangsta-jihad persona, he’s definitely covering up some kind of illegal activity in and/or around the store.
In one interview, Alsanai blatantly and very casually contradicts himself on timeline details, and says that pictures of himself posing with powerful guns are “photoshopped.”
At the 11:48 mark of that same interview video, the reporter asks him about the small bags being dealt out to people from inside and in front of the store by a black woman (seen carrying and handing out the packets on the CCTV recording on the night of the murder). Alsanai has claimed that the bags contain “chicken” — some say “chicken” is street slang for methamphetamine or cocaine. Yet when the interviewer brings them up as supposedly being “chicken,” Alsanai completely blows the straight face he’d been making an attempt to maintain, and starts laughing, obviously breaking up at how preposterous a lie he is telling.
Just prior to her demise, Jessica Chambers is reported by numerous sources as having been trying to leave the gang and move on with her life, and had been telling people she was planning to write a book about having survived the gang lifestyle. She is also reported to have been in an altercation with someone at the same gas station a week before her murder.
Many blacks and even some whites on social media are accusing Jessica’s father of her murder, for no other reason than her having intimate relationships with dangerous and abusive black men.
After police officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo were recently exonerated by grand juries in the deaths of black criminals Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and when George Zimmerman was acquitted last year in the Trayvon Martin case, blacks rioted, looted, burned, and murdered random whites, just as they did after the initial acquittals of the white cops in the Rodney King case in 1992. It’s plain to every honest person that blacks wantonly and savagely attack and murder whites all the time throughout the country, often for no reason at all except the thrill of racially-motivated malicious mayhem. Particularly, we have just seen and heard Michael Brown’s mother’s boyfriend, repeat felon Louis Head, violently screaming “burn this bitch down!!!” over and over again, accompanied by blacks rampaging, burning, looting, and attacking — sometimes fatally, with hammers or other deadly means — random, innocent whites in St. Louis and elsewhere.
Speaking of Louises, Farrakhan just recently stood before a crowd of cheering blacks at a prominent Maryland college and renewed his nationwide public exhortations for blacks to mass-murder whites, whenever and wherever.
In philosophy and problem solving, there’s the principle of reasoning known as Occam’s (or Okham’s) Razor, which goes like this: Among multiple alternative explanations, all of which require various assumptions in order to arrive at possible solutions, often the simplest and plainest answer — involving the least number of assumptions — turns out to be the right one.
So, we have local black gang associates posting terror threats on social media — threats of murder, by burning, directed at the women and children family members of white police employees — immediately before the murder, by burning, of the white teenage daughter of a local police department employee. Plus, the killing took place only minutes after the victim was seen on video at the same location as the husband or boyfriend of the person who posted the threats, as he was filling a handheld can with gasoline.
The entire case could simply be one more incident in the modern, one-sided race war of black on white; a war which is never talked about in the mainstream media. Or, it could be more complicated than just black and white.
The evidence so far suggests that, despite the murkiness of elements and complicated roster of suspicious players, the truth in Courtland, Mississppi might come with the simplest and most obvious explanation.
Expect things to blow wide open very soon. The blogosphere’s best and the brightest are all over this caper like George Zimmerman on a Chipotle burrito bowl.
Posted inBlacks, Crime|Comments Off on 17 Blacks Guys Charged In Death Of One White Girl
The evidence shows that immigrant groups tend to retain the social status that they arrive with. The same goes with more recent immigrants to the United States. Due to visa restrictions, certain immigrant groups were permitted entry to the United States only if they could prove they had skills that were needed in the U.S. labor market. For example, the Africans, Chinese, Christian Arabs, Filipinos, Indians, Iranians, and Koreans who did gain entry into the United States were from the upper echelons of their home societies. And, in the United States, they enjoy significantly higher than average social status (as measured, again, by the number of doctors per 1,000 members of the group). Groups who, for various reasons, did not face the same restrictions — including the Hmong, Latinos, and Maya — entered the United States with low social status and have struggled to achieve upward mobility since. Immigration to the United States, in other words, rarely changes one’s social status. …
Given current patterns of immigration to the United States, Washington faces an enormous policy challenge. Two in five of all immigrants to the United States are from Mexico and Central America. Latinos now constitute 22 percent of all children in the United States; by 2050, they are expected to be 39 percent. But the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low.
This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given that migrants from Mexico and Central America tend to be negatively selected from their home populations: they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)