Ask anyone what the nose does, and the reply will most likely be related to smell. We appreciate our noses because they help us experience flowers and fresh-baked cookies.
In fact, our honkers have another, more important function: They warm and humidify the air we breathe, helping prevent illness and damage in our airways and lungs. Because of this, scientists have long suspected that nose shape evolved partly in response to local climate conditions. In cold, dry climates, natural selection may have favored noses that were better at heating and moisturizing air.
A team led by scientists at Pennsylvania State University has found more evidence of the relationship between the noses we have now and the climates where our ancestors lived.
In a study published in PLOS Genetics on Thursday, the researchers found that nostril width differed significantly between populations from different regions around the world. Moreover, the higher the temperature and absolute humidity of the region, the wider the nostril, the researchers found, suggesting that climate very well may have played a part in shaping our sniffers.
Physical traits that are in direct contact with the environment often undergo natural selection and evolve faster, said Arslan Zaidi, a postdoctoral scholar in genetics at Penn State and an author of the paper. “This is one of the reasons why we looked at nose shape.”
…Between the groups in this study, only nostril width and skin pigmentation showed greater differences than would be expected because of chance accumulations of genetic mutations.
Over all, people whose parents and ancestors came from warm, humid climates tended to have wider nostrils, whereas those from cold, dry climates tended to have narrower ones. Correlations between nostril width and climate were strongest for Northern Europeans, the researchers found, suggesting that cold, dry climates in particular may have favored people with narrower nostrils…
Studying how certain traits evolved as environmental adaptations that may no longer be relevant could also help us understand disease risk today, Dr. Zaidi said.
“We know there are variable risks of respiratory diseases across different populations in the U.S.,” he said. “Can we find an explanation for that in morphology?”
Posted inEvolution|Comments Off on NYT: ‘Ancestral Climates May Have Shaped Your Nose’
I enjoyed this movie. “Acclaimed writer and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt must battle for historical truth to prove the Holocaust actually occurred when David Irving, a renowned denier, sues her for libel.”
Deborah Lipstadt is portrayed by a beautiful actress (Rachel Weisz) while David Irving is portrayed by a creepy-looking actor (Timothy Spall). The real life David Irving looks similar to actor Tom Wilkinson who is in the movie but curiously given the role of the barrister attacking Irving.
Rachel Weisz, Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt
David Irving
Tom Wilkinson
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 06: Actor Timothy Spall attends the 2014 National Board of Review Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street on January 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic)
The film makes clear that Lipstadt had unlimited funds and legal help at her disposal while Irving represented himself. Lipstadt’s team poured through Irving’s diaries to find a few passages to discredit him. Who has written an honest diary who would not be embarrassed to have parts of it read aloud in court?
Wikipedia: “Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The defendants (with Penguin’s insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust.”
Deborah Lipstadt is more moderate than others when she describes Allied policy as merely “bordering on complicity” in the Final Solution. What prevented Auschwitz from being bombed, says Lipstadt, was the “deep antipathy” toward “contemptible” Jews held by key figures in Washington and London. David Wyman, perhaps the most cited member of the prosecution team, is at one with Lipstadt in seeing anti-Semitism at the core of the “abandonment.”
The role of memory, and its fraught relationship to fact and truth, is threaded through Lipstadt’s legal battle with Irving, and so through “Denial,” the new film dramatizing that epic British courtroom struggle. The film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and will open in select cities in the United States on September 30. Starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt, it’s based on Lipstadt’s book recounting her ordeal, “History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.”
Though in the end victorious, Lipstadt faced a legal saga that was filled with uncertainty and marked by intense loneliness. In the United Kingdom, the burden of proof in a libel case is on the accused, so it was up to Lipstadt and her British legal team to prove that Irving was wrong; that the Holocaust had, indeed, occurred, and that Jews were its intended victims. Lipstadt, then and today still a professor at Emory University, had put everything on the line to defend herself against the claims of a man who was driven by prejudice and anti-Semitism but also knew how to construct a cunning and cynical argument.
“History on Trial” was published in 2005, and it eerily resonates today. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the surge of derogatory Holocaust-related tropes on social media perpetrated by extremists in this country raise a similar quandary: How do you deal with those who deny history, who disregard factual evidence, who seem to care little for the truth? And can this one film — a solid, interesting, at times gripping film, but one not destined for blockbuster status — help counter an ugly narrative?
The contemporary echoes were one reason that Weisz, whose parents fled from the Nazis, wanted the part. “Obviously, the Holocaust being on trial is just a very outlandish notion to me,” the British-born actress said during an interview in a Manhattan hotel. “But the idea that there are objective truths, and there is a difference between opinion and fact — in the current climate of relativism, people just spout opinions as if they are facts! There doesn’t seem to be much respect for the difference of the two things. So I thought it was fascinating to put something on trial and prove it was irrefutably a fact and that someone’s opinion didn’t stand up.”
David Irving is a complicated chap. There’s an excellent five-part British miniseries “Selling Hitler” about the Hitler Diaries. Apparently, Irving lead the way in denouncing the diaries as fraudulent after first calling them genuine.
In 1983, Stern, a weekly German news magazine, purchased for 9 million marks the Hitler Diaries of 61 volumes and published excerpts from them. Irving played the major role in uncovering the Hitler Diaries as a hoax. In October 1982 Irving purchased, from the same source as Stern’s 1983 purchase, 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to discover that many of the documents were forgeries.[52] Irving was amongst the first to identify the diaries as forgeries, and to draw media attention. He went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Stern magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine.[53] Irving’s performance at the Stern press conference where he violently harangued Trevor-Roper until ejected by security led him to be featured prominently on the news; the next day, Irving appeared on the Today television show as a featured guest.[54] Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because they had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Irving had purchased his collection in 1982.[52] At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving announced, “I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here”.[52] Irving was proud to have detected and announced the hoax material and of the “trail of chaos” he had created at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and took pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his sloppy work (not detecting the hoax) and criticism of Irving’s methods and conclusions.[55] Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries, such as a diary entry for 20 July 1944, which would have been unlikely given that Hitler’s right hand had been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg earlier that day.[56]
A week later on 2 May, Irving asserted that many of the diary documents appear to be genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler’s physician Dr. Theodor Morell.[55] Robert Harris, in his book Selling Hitler, suggested that an additional reason for Irving’s change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving’s claim in Hitler’s War that Hitler had no knowledge of it.[57] Subsequently Irving conformed when the diaries were declared as a forgery by consensus. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call them a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call them genuine.
David Duke of course came to his views on race through the KKK. It is easy to think of David Duke as a clown, but his views on Jews largely parallel Kevin MacDonald’s.
David Irving is a different case. He was a respected amateur historian and popular author about military matters. He is educated guy and a really talented writer. Because he speaks and reads German fluently, he has used original source material for his works. He is more responsible than anyone, other than Kurt Vonnegut, for publicizing British firebomb raid on Dresden (for fans of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it plays a significant part in that book as well). What happened with Irving is that in all of his original research, he was unable to come up with anything linking Hitler with direct orders to exterminate the Jews. He also minimized the number of Jews who were deliberately killed. (The numbers, even from established historians of the Holocaust, are all over the map. Arno Mayer, who wrote, Why did the Heavens not darken, in that book said that more Jews died of disease and other causes than were put to death in gas chambers in Auschwitz.)
Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book in which she called Irving a Holocaust Denier, lumping him with people who were explicit Holocaust deniers. Irving sued her in England for libel and lost. In the process Irving’s historical research was shredded by Richard Evans, another British historian of WWII and the Nazis, because Evans said that Irving had deliberately shaped his books and opinions by ignoring some facts and stressing others to reach a desired result.
This result of the trial pretty much ruined Irving’s reputation among serious historians. However, there are a number of points that really have to be made in Irving’s defense: Irving foolishly represented himself at trial whereas Libstadt’s team consisted of the best barristers in England paid millions of pounds by wealthy Jews including Spielberg. Evans was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to testify as an expert witness, and in subsequent events, has been criticized by neutral sources as someone who has made serious errors in his own works. Irving made all of his source materials available to the defense and Lipstadt refused to turn over much of what she had that she based her claim in the book on.
Irving is probably the English speaking historian who knows the most about the Nazi leadership having read and translated Goebbels diaries, written a book on Goebels and on Himmler as well as on other aspects. Irving has also changed his views on the extent of the Holocaust. He still doesn’t think it can be attributed to Hitler, but does think that others in the leadership were involved, and he now concedes that there were extermination camps and that at least hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.
Christopher Hitchens strongly supported Irving’s right to his opinions and his books. The question is always one of whether histories should be refuted by calling its author a racist or an anti-Semite or refuted with facts. Irving was not some crank pounding out tracts. He may have had an agenda as Evans testified, but if that is the case, identify the agenda as Evans did and show how Irving distorted the facts. However, that may be true for some of the parts of Irving’s works, its certainly not true for most of them.
Haaretz: ‘Hitler’s American Model,’ by James Q. Whitman, contends that America’s racist legislation served as a model for at least portions of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.
“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” by James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 208 pp., $24.95
It’s not widely realized that Adolf Hitler wrote a sequel to “Mein Kampf.” Published only in 1961, “Hitler’s Second Book,” as it was titled, rehashed many of the themes from his earlier work but also included some significant additional material, including some fascinating praise of America’s immigration system in the 1920s.
“The American nation appears as a young, racially select people,” Hitler wrote. “By making an immigrant’s ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual himself, the bleeding of Europe of its best people has become regulated in a manner that is almost bound by law.”
Yale law professor James Q. Whitman, in his intriguing new book, “Hitler’s American Model,” contends that the Nazi leader’s praise of America was not merely some propaganda rant but reflected the Nazis’ genuine admiration for the laws governing race relations in America in those years.
More than that: Whitman contends that Nazi legal theorists not only extolled America’s racist legislation, but actually used it as a model for at least portions of the Nuremberg Laws. The centerpiece of Whitman’s case is a June 1934 gathering of senior Nazi attorneys and Justice Ministry officials to draft sweeping new legislation that would define the status of German Jews and their relations to non-Jewish Germans.
In preparation for the conference, the attendees examined legal systems around the world, in search of precedents for government-imposed legal restrictions based on race. They were not looking for ammunition to publicly justify the laws they were creating; in fact, there was no public aspect at that point, since the 1934 meeting was held entirely behind closed doors. Rather, Whitman shows, they were trying to determine how best to turn Nazi racial ideology into German federal law.
“This pivotal meeting on the road to the Nuremberg Laws involved repeated and detailed discussion of the American example,” Whitman writes. The Germans were not interested so much in U.S. segregation laws; their goals were to disqualify Jews from citizenship and to criminalize marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, in order to “protect German blood and honor.”
For this, they looked to a number of American legal innovations. One was the way in which the U.S. immigration quotas, adopted by Congress in 1921 and tightened in 1924, were structured to heavily favor what were considered “racially desirable” people in northern and western Europe, and severely reduce the number admitted from eastern and southern Europe (primarily Jews and Catholics) and from Asia. Although the U.S. was by no means the only country to decide immigration based on racist ideas, Whitman notes, it had become “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.”
The Nazi jurists were also keenly interested in America’s development of a type of second-class citizenship for residents of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the territories that the U.S. captured and occupied in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Supreme Court upheld the conquered peoples’ status as “non-citizen nationals.” German legal scholars created an extensive body of literature on the subject, which the Nazis utilized. “America, in the eyes of this German literature, was a laboratory for experimentation in diminished citizenship rights,” Whitman notes.
Finally, the Nazis looked closely at the laws in 30 states prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks, the last of which (Virginia) was abolished only in 1967. In defining who could marry and who could not, these American precedents included helpful (to the Nazis) ways for deciding the status of persons of mixed-race. The issue of “mongrelization,” which entered the American legal system originally because of relations between white masters and black slaves, was important to the Nazis in addressing the question of Germans who were of partly Jewish descent.
As an example of the prominence of sentiment in America against race-mixing, Whitman quotes U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo (Democrat of Mississippi) railing, in 1938, about how “mongrelization” could “destroy white civilization.” Bilbo worried that “even one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.”
Many states—primarily, but not exclusively, in the south—defined a Negro as someone who had any Negro ancestors; hence the term “one drop.” Ironically, the Nazis considered the one-drop rule too harsh, and instead adopted the one-grandparent rule to define Jewishness.
Whitman should have mentioned that such views were held not only by crude southern demagogues, but by the president of the United States himself. In a document from 1939 (first published by this author more than 10 years ago), President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reliably quoted by a friendly senator as boasting, “We know that we do not have any Jewish blood in our veins.” Prof. Greg Robinson’s study of FDR’s writings in the 1920s uncovered statements warning that “the mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future citizenship.” And there can be no doubt (since it was a matter of public controversy) that the president approved his administration’s policy of segregating Negro blood donations during World War II.
Did America’s racist legislation directly influence any aspects of Nazi racial laws? Whitman concludes that although the Nazi statute criminalizing mixed marriage “was not directly copied” from the U.S. legal code, the German jurists’ thinking clearly was “influenced” by the American example, as demonstrated by their frequent reference to U.S. law during that crucial 1934 conference, and the inclusion of extensive American material in major Nazi law texts. While “it is perfectly possible” that the Nazis “would have succeeded in criminalizing mixed marriages even if they had not had an American example to cite,” Whitman writes, there is “no justification for ignoring the evidence of Nazi engagement with American models that litters the sources.”
Posted inAdolf Hitler, America|Comments Off on Was Hitler Inspired by Racist American Laws?
I find that the more Orthodox Jew, the more comfortable he is with this kind of discussion. The Orthodox Jew knows who he is and he usually has no problem noticing that different peoples have different gifts.
The assimilated Jew, on the other hand, is often hyper-sensitive about this discussion and will likely reject any stereotype of Jews, be the stereotype positive or negative.
Joshua Mason-Barkin, MA, MA Jewish Education & Nonprofit Management, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (2007):
I think the question is, at its core, problematic. (I don’t think it’s intentionally anti-Semitic. But it’s leaning in that general direction.)
Some Jews are smart. Some Jews are stupid. Some Jews are wealthy. Some are poor. Some are good athletes. Some are not. Some are funny. Some are not. To suggest that Jews, as a group, share certain common traits reflects an ignorance about Jews and Judaism — and maybe also about ethnicity, religion, and people.
Imagine asking: “What are strengths and weaknesses of black people?”
The problem is that the very fact that you’re asking the question suggests that you’re comfortable with (potentially racist) generalizations based on stereotypes, such as, “Blacks are good at basketball.”
Furthermore, such generalizations are logically falacious. (No, not fellatio — get your mind out of the gutter.)
When taken as a percentage of the total number of people currently listed on NBA rosters, it is probably accurate to say that there are many blacks who are very good at basketball. But based on that information, I actually know nothing about the chances of finding a good basketball player if I were to walk up to a random 25 year old African American on the street. (And statiscally speaking, the chances of that person being any better at basketball than a randomly chosen white person are actually pretty slim.)
Many Jews work in financial industries. This does not mean that Jews are good with money, that Jews are good at counting, that Jews are excellent bankers, or that Jews know some secret about the stock market. (I can introduce you to hundreds of Jews — if not many thousands — who are not good with money.)
Jews are strong and weak at the same things as white people, Arabs, left-handed people, Pacific Islanders, and Roman Catholics. In other words: like any group of people, individual Jews vary greatly from each other.
* Joel V Benjamin, I’m a secular Jew who admires Israel for its high ethical standards and technological achievements.
Their main strength is their strongly held ethical values which include a respect for:
– civil liberties for all people
– learning
– law
– ideas
– truth
– history
– tradition
– generosity
They have a strong determination to:
– persist in times of trouble
– help others when they are in need.
Some individual Jews or Jewish groups have the same weaknesses as the members of any other large selection of humanity.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on What are strengths and weaknesses of Jewish people?
Bob Ward writes: “The Germans were ideal alien residents. Maj. Joseph Sestito, U.S. Army…later observed: “They seemed to have a group spirit, based on the idea that on each one’s model behavior rested the glory of the Reich.”
I had lunch yesterday with a donor who is an Englishman who has lived all over the world. He brought up the topic of how a lot of aspects of American life strike him as more German than English, such as American newspapers, which have traditionally aspired to be serious, informative, and responsible, while British newspapers like being outrageous and fun.
He then went off to meet with some German friends and writes:
Good brainstorm over a beer with my buddies on the Germanness of America, some of which I already mentioned:
1. TV advertising (slapstick, not subtle)
2. The Army (are there more German generals than German politicians in the US — which states does army recruit from?)
Pershing, Eisenhower, Schwartzkopf
3. Attitude to self improvement
The German poet Rilke’s mantra “You must change your life” caught on a lot faster in America, especially California, than Britain. For example, my Swiss German paternal grandfather was a health food nut who moved to Southern California 85 years ago to grow his own food in his yard.
4. Easy to scare (see Hollywood), lack of natural scepticism
5. Taking things serious (the brit needs to be seen not to be trying)
6. Lack of irony
7. American English — tendency to use longer words eg. Transportation rather than Transport, tendency to use “The” ie. “The Congress” rather than just “Congress”
8. Law abidingness eg. attitude to jaywalking
9. Food
A lot of quintessentially American food items, such as the hot dog (which FDR famously served to the King of England in 1939), were popularized at the quite German 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Posted inGermany|Comments Off on Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun
"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)
