The Jon Entine book that John Derbyshire reviewed last night, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People
It has reviews and supporting material, somewhat like the section that we have of Alien Nation Reviews on VDARE.com.
Here’s a top of the head list of the most important assassinations of political leaders in America since WWII, plus attempts on the life of Presidents and Presidential candidates, with a rough grouping of the assassins in terms of left, right, or apolitical crazy.
Harry Truman - Left – Puerto Rican terrorists - Left
John F. Kennedy - Left — Lee Harvey Oswald - Left
Malcolm X - Left — Nation of Islam hitmen - Left
Martin Luther King - Left — Conspiracy of white racists and criminals - Right
Robert F. Kennedy - Left — Sirhan Sirhan - Left
George Wallace - Right — Arthur Bremer - Apolitical Crazy
Gerald Ford - Right — Squeaky Fromme — Left or Crazy?
John Lennon - Left – What’s His Name - Apolitical Crazy
Ronald Reagan - Right — John Hinckley - Apolitical Crazy
In the candidate’s debate last night, Tim Russert raised Louis Farrakhan’s recent support for Sen. Obama, and even mentioned Obama’s spiritual advisor’s recent award to Farrakhan. But, of course, the entire fairly lengthy discussion was approached purely from the standpoint of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism rather than from his more general anti-whiteism (is that even a word?). There was nothing, for example, about the Nation of Islam dogma that evil Dr. Yacub on the Isle of Patmos genetically engineered Europeans to be a race of human wolves. These days, anti-Semitism is absolutely disqualifying, but anti-whitism (in fact, I don’t even know how to spell the word) is not worth mentioning.
Obviously, Obama holds no particular animus against Jews. The problem will be that if he has to pander to organized Jewish lobbies to wash off the taint of Farrakhanism-by-Association,
For example, for Greg Cochran’s benefit, here’s a transcript from the New York Sun, “In Cleveland, Obama Speaks on Jewish Issues.” After an earlier question from the audience at a Jewish gathering about Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. and Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Obama distances himself from Zbigniew Brzeziński, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. While Brzeziński was born in Poland, like some in the audience, he was born to the wrong kind parents in Poland (see “Borat” for details).
“There is a spectrum of views in terms of how the US and Israel should be interacting. It has evolved over time. It means that somebody like Brzezinski who, when he was national security advisor would be considered not outside of the mainstream in terms of his perspective on these issues, is now considered by many in the Jewish Community anathema. I know Brzezinski he’s not one of my key advisors. I’ve had lunch with him once, I’ve exchanged emails with him maybe 3 times. He came to Iowa to introduce for a speech on Iraq. He and I agree that Iraq was an enormous strategic blunder and that input from him has been useful in assessing Iraq, as well as Pakistan, where actually, traditionally, if you will recall he was considered a hawk. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party was very suspicious of Brzezinski precisely because he was so tough on many of these issues. I do not share his views with respect to Israel. I have said so clearly and unequivocally.”
In contrast to the anti-Semitism non-issue, Obama’s feelings about whites in general are very complex, as he explains at vast length in his autobiography. And they don’t much fit in with the Oprahesque image he has been pushing on the campaign trail.
His denunciations of Farrakhan in public this week over Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism differ sharply from his much more nuanced discussion of the anti-whiteism of Blacks Muslims and Farrakhan on pp. 195-204 of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance:
“If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”
But, after a discussion of the failure of the Nation of Islam’s attempts to sell black-only toothpaste and other consumer products, Obama rejects Farrakhanism as being unable to “create a strong and effective insularity.”
In front of the Cleveland Jewish group, Obama addressed a question from the audience about the Farrakhan-Wright connection in greater detail
“It is true that my Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who will be retiring this month, is somebody who on occasion can say controversial things. Most of them by the way are controversial directed at the African American Community and calling on them start reading books and turn off the TV set and engage in self help. And he is very active in prison ministries and so forth. It is also true that he comes out of the 60s he is an older man. That is where he cut his teeth. That he has historically been interested in the African roots of the African American experience. He was very active in the South Africa divestment movement and you will recall that there was a tension that arose between the African American and the Jewish communities During that period when we were dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and South Africa had a relationship at that time. And that cause - that was a source of tension. So there have been a couple of occasions where he made comments with relation, rooted in that. Not necessarily ones that I share. But that is the context within which he has made those comments.
“He does not have a close relationship with Louis Farrakhan. Louis Farrakhan is a resident of Chicago and as a consequence he has been active in a range of community activities, particularly around ex-offenders and dealing with them. I have been a consistent, before I go any further, a consistent denunciator of Louis Farrakhan, nobody challenges that. And what is true is that, recently this is probably, I guess last year. An award was given to Farrakhan for his work on behave of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statements.”
Obama is lying in this last statement. The Wright family in 2007 put together an elaborate video tribute to Farrakhan that they presumably showed at their gala Hyatt Regency bash on 11/2/07 when they gave Farrakhan the newly concocted “Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Trumpeter Award” for “Lifetime Achievement.”
The video praises Farrakhan for all sorts of things, but not for “his work on [behalf] of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statesments.” Nor did they distance themselves from his “controversial statements.” I gave Obama a break on this excuse of his back in January when he first responded, thinking he might not have known the truth, but he has since had plenty of time to review the copious materials the Wrights put together honoring Farrakhan, so now he is being deliberately misleading.
“And I believe that was a mistake and showed a lack of sensitivity to Jewish community and I said so. But I have never heard an anti-Semitic made inside of our church. I have never heard anything that would suggest anti-Semitism on part of the Pastor. He is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with. And I suspect there are some of the people in this room who have heard relatives say some things that they don’t agree with. Including, on occasion directed at African Americans that maybe a possibility that’s just - I am not suggesting that’s definitive.”
The implication is that this Farrakhan stuff is just Wright going senile. In reality, Wright also went with Farrakhan to Libya to visit Col. Muammar Gadaffi in 1984, at the height of Libyan-sponsored terrorism, four years before Obama chose Wright’s church out of all the many he had come in contact with on the South Side of Chicago as a Saul Alinsky-style “community organizer.” Wright, Obama’s most important role model in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply a radical far outside the American mainstream.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is hosting a conference of the Property and Freedom Society in Turkey in May,and Peter Brimelow is going to be one of the speakers. He’ll be speaking on “The Libertarian Case Against Open Immigration“.
So if you’re in Turkey, as some of our readers are, or if you expect to be in the neighborhood , then drop in. Details below:
Third Annual Meeting
Bodrum,
Speakers:
Understanding the Ottoman Empire, Modern
The Libertarian Case Against Open Immigration
In Defense of Corruption
Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple)
The Culture of the Underclass
The Errors of ‘Public Choice’
The Nature of Ancient Financial Markets
Perspectives on the Role of Religion in American Life
On Human Rationality
The Travesty of Political Trials
More Guns Less Crime
Alexander Solshenitzin on Politics and Economics
Climate Change, Societal Evolution, and Progress
How to Deal with Bullies as Neighbors? Reflections on the Foreign Policy of Small Countries
Jim Holt has a nice article in The New Yorker: Numbers Guy: Are our brains wired for math?
It starts off, though, with the now-mandatory couple of pages of description, starting with a head injury victim and going on to MRI scans, of where exactly in the brain the number sense may or may not reside. I always skip over these sections of articles, perhaps because I lack the part of the brain that allows me to think three-dimensionally.
And, because I never seem to wind up missing anything important.
The NYT Magazine had a laugh last year at how credulous we are in the face of brain scan explanations:
“A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans.”
This is not to say that this it won’t eventually prove hugely useful for the layman to have a thorough understanding of brain anatomy, but I don’t think that time has arrived yet.
But the second half of the article gets more interesting:
“Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It’s not so bad at first.
“Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.”
“But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.)
“The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent.”
You just have to have the Times Table pounded into your head over and over as a kid, but our education system is against “rote learning,” so school kids aren’t usually forced to chant them like in the good old days. But kids actually kind of like rote learning. (It’s adults who hate learning that way, and especially hate teaching that way.) Kids like singing the alphabet song, for instance. You’d think educators would find a times table rap that today’s children would like.
The murderer who inspired Michael Kinsley’s crack about how boring the LA Times is finally gets sentenced to life without parole:
Authorities alleged that Graff was on a methamphetamine binge when he walked into the upscale Hollywood neighborhood and savaged the men, whose homes are separated by a backyard fence…
Graff attacked [Robert Lees] the co-writer of the 1948 comedy classic “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and writer on the TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” beheading him and removing some of his organs. Then he carried the head from Lees’ home over a back fence to Engelson’s home on Stanley Avenue, between Hollywood and Sunset boulevards.
Graff fatally stabbed the doctor with his own kitchen knives, police said. Engelson had been on the telephone making airline reservations for a business trip to San Jose. The agent reported hearing a commotion before the line went dead.
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