A (female) British teacher in Sudan has been charged with blasphemy, and may be flogged, for allowing her students to name a classroom Teddy bear after Mohammed. What struck me as odd about that is that Mohammed is one of the most popular men’s names in the Muslim world. As Mark Steyn wrote

These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves a fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World Trade Centre? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing petrol station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A gang-rapist in Sydney? Mohammed Skaf. [Racism is bad - so is self-delusion - Telegraph, December 20, 2005]

Now it turns out that a 7-year old has “come forward” to say that he named the bear after himself. But it turns out that she may face “more serious charges.”

It’s also reported that she’s been in jail for 48 hours and hasn’t been given food by her jailers.

“She is sitting all by herself. No one has talked to her. No one has been in to see her today and she looks very sad,” said a police officer outside the Criminal Exploration Bureau, in one of Khartoum’s dusty side streets. “She has also had no food yet.”

British consular officials were turned away yesterday afternoon but were allowed to leave a bag of chicken kebabs and some water. [Gillian Gibbons at risk of more serious charges after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad, Times of London, November 28, 2007]

At least the British goverment is protesting, but that’s about all they can do. Not only are they not willing to send a gunboat, as in the nineteenth century, but Britain is now so politically correct they’re not in a position to complain–it’s now an offense to blaspheme against the Prophet in Britain.

I suggest that any one thinking of a job overseas should not pick a Muslim country.

Leave it to a reporter to compare illegal alien job thieves with Santa’s little helpers. Also of interest, the only use of the word “Christmas” in the whole article was to describe one man’s t-shirt.

HAYWARD — Like Santa and his merry elves, a green-vested volunteer team of Guatemalan day laborers came out of the shadows Tuesday morning to spread some holiday cheer.

No toys. Just lots of gum-scraping, leaf-raking, graffiti-busting and deep-cleaning of downtown sidewalks.

Carlos Alinan, wearing a T-shirt depicting characters from “A Garfield Christmas Special,” hoped that his scrubbing of a grimy Main Street also carried a subtle message.

“We’re trying to make a good impression,” he said in Spanish. “Some people like us and some people don’t.”
[Day laborers clean up downtown to improve Hayward's image , ANG Newspapers, November 28, 2007]

Unlike the traditional elves up at the North Pole, who are universally loved.

Say, as a way of showing gratitude, why doesn’t Hayward reward these helpful fellows with repatriation, er a free ride home to celebrate Christmas with the family?

It’s sad to see another worthy American institution run into the ground by multiculturalism, as the Girl Scouts has been turned into another organization celebrating kumbaya. While the scout leader in this instance expressed a desire to bring the girls more in touch with the majority society, she is fighting a losing battle: roasting a couple weenies is not going to make Muslim kiddies feel any less separate when their parents are determined not to assimilate.

And this being a New York Times story, a racist insult of white Americans is no problem whatsoever.

But a more common concern among parents is that the Girl Scouts will somehow dilute Islamic traditions.

“They are afraid you are going to become a blue-eyed, blond-haired Barbie doll,” said Asma, the girl who at times makes her sash everyday attire. Asma noted that her mother had asked whether she was joining some Christian cabal. “She was afraid that if we hang out with Americans too much,” the young immigrant said, “it will change our culture or who we are.”

Troop leaders win over parents by explaining that various activities incorporate Muslim traditions. In Minneapolis, for instance, Ms. Hakeem helped develop the Khadija Club, named for the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, which exposes older girls to the history of prominent Muslim women.
[To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In New York Times, November 28, 2007]

What if a group of white Girl Scouts were told by parents not to become “nappy-headed hos”? The Times would have a cow. But when Muslim immigrants openly revile Americans in a racist manner, no one in the elite editorial offices bats an eyelash.

I’d already excerpted this a month ago in my first VDARE.com article on James Watson, but, for the record, I want to post the ending of James Watson’s recent book Avoid Boring People This appeared in 02138, which I presume is the zip code of Harvard:

Before leaving [interim Harvard President Derek] Bok’s temporary office in Loeb House [in 2006], mindful of the Summers fiasco, I remarked to Derek that the time was not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to prove its hypotheses ever more indisputably, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes likely malfunctioning to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our desire to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of good will may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek, who had spent most of our meeting listening, asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “15 years” meant that Summers’ then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

Upon returning to the Yard, however, I wondered if even 10 years would pass.

From a CNN article on Lois Gibson, the forensic artist who drew the picture of “Baby Grace” from the toddler’s decomposing body that led to her grandmother recognizing her.

But it was decades of research that help her nail the image.

A trained artist can look at a skull and immediately tell the race and gender of a corpse. And that’s the beginning of giving a name to the unknown.

“If you turn the skull of a white male sideways, it’s almost like a truck hit it. It’s just straight up and down flat,” said Marla Lawson, a renowned forensic artist who works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “The forehead protrudes very little and the chin sinks in. But for African-Americans, they slightly slope at the forehead and they protrude slightly at the mandible and they have these great cheekbones. Their skulls weigh more than white people’s skulls, and their teeth will be whiter and brighter usually.”

An Asian person’s skull will have a wider facial area, Lawson said, but people of Hispanic descent are more challenging because the structures are nearly identical to Caucasians.

But determining male and female is easy, said Lawson who created the first, and dead-on, likeness of Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph while he was a fugitive. Run your fingers vertically over your eyebrows. Males feel a defined ridge under the brow line. A woman’s face is smoother. …

Anthropologists spent years taking measurements from various cadavers — male, female, chubby, emaciated, short, young, old, Asian, Latino, black, white. They’ve compiled those measurements in how the depth from skin surface to bone differs based on all those factors for 21 different spots on a face and placed those averages in a chart. Forensic artists use those measurements to determine how much flesh and contour to put on a skull to create a bust or make a sketch.

I don’t watch much TV other than football games, American Idol, and Seinfeld reruns, but I gather there are many hours per week of shows like the various CSIs devoted to forensic medical investigations. Surely, watching these kind of police procedurals imparts the knowledge that race and sex are the first thing forensic scientists figure out from looking at skeletons, right?

So, how can the popular “race is just skin deep” myth survive? Do most people just compartmentalize their knowledge and never draw connections between the various facts they know? I’m really baffled by how people can fail to notice things like this.

I guess it’s a little like how for 2000 years everybody accepted Aristotle’s assertion that a heavy rock falls faster than a light rock without testing it. But, when it comes to race, you don’t even have to perform an experiment. You just have to apply facts you already know in one realm (your daily life) in another realm (social theory). But almost nobody does that.

A friend got into a discussion of the death penalty with some liberal economists, who were all aghast to hear him point out that variations in the murder rate by states are driven largely by ethnic demographics. He writes:

Predictably, I got involved and ended up running a bunch of regressions using a spreadsheet I built. The spreadsheet is attached. I didn’t try to reproduce any of the complex models that economists have used to prove/disprove DP deterrence. That is far beyond my knowledge of statistics and/or access to data. However, I did suggest that demographics might explain state level variations in homicide rates.

As you might expect, this idea was not well received. Any number of alternative explanations were offered. Predictably, they were almost entirely junk. I did find one marginal exception (poverty) described below. My major results were

1. Demographics do a rather good job of explaining state variables in homicide. The basic demographic regression gives a R2 of 0.687 and an adjusted R2 of 0.6734. The P-values are superb.

An R-squared of 67% (or r = 0.82) is extremely high in the social sciences. (more…)