Please help.

Recently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that she was going to crack down on the border … the Canadian border. Now, her Department has circulated to law enforcement agencies nationwide an intelligence report telling them to be on the lookout for conservatives:

The report also said a push for new immigration legislation that would grant residency or citizenship to people who entered the country illegally could fuel anger among groups fearing competition for jobs.

The Department of Homeland Security has yet to follow this logic out to its inevitable conclusion and home in on the obvious real threat: Canadian conservatives.

Perhaps we’ll soon see a campaign coordinated amongst the Obama Administration, the SPLC, and the New York Times editorial board about the looming menace to the American Dream posed by I, Ectomorph.

Here’s a hilariously low-IQ article by Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, the doyenne of clueless human sciences reporters:
Sex, Race And IQ: Off Limits?

From YNet News:

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz recently instructed ministry officials to develop a comprehensive plan for deporting 100,000 illegal foreign workers from Israel within a year.

The New York Times reports on an apparent nasty side effect of an epilepsy drug, with this lead-in from the NYTimes.com home page: “Lower I.Q. in Children Linked to Mother’s Use of Epilepsy Drug:”

Three-year-olds whose mothers had taken valproate during pregnancy had I.Q. scores that were nine points lower on average than children whose mothers had taken a different antiseizure medication, lamotrigine. The I.Q. scores of toddlers whose mothers took valproate were also lower than scores of children whose mothers took two other antiseizure medications, phenytoin and carbamazepine. …

Cognitive assessments were conducted in 258 2- and 3-year-olds born to 252 mothers, of whom 53 had taken valproate.

Over all, children’s I.Q. scores were strongly related to mothers’ I.Q. scores, except among the children of mothers treated with valproate [generic name Depakote], the study found.

At age 3, children exposed to valproate in utero had a mean I.Q. of 92, compared to 101 for children exposed to lamotrigine, 99 for those exposed to phenytoin, and 98 for those exposed to carbamazepine, the study found.

Have you ever noticed how in the New York Times’ universe, IQ is unquestionably valid and terribly, terribly important in the Health section of the newspaper? (See, for example, the NYT’s recurrent coverage of the effects of the exposure to lead in reducing I.Q.)

In this Health section article, for example, the Times is getting worked up over an IQ test given to 2-3 year olds, which is pushing the age limits of IQ testing. And the sample size is only 53. And yet, there’s absolutely zero quibbling about the usefulness of IQ testing in this article. It’s simply assumed that, of course, everybody knows that a difference in average IQ scores of about eight points is a big deal.

Yet, in the Education section of the Times, where you might think IQ would be even more relevant, it rarely comes up. And when it does put in an unwelcome appearance, it is often dismissed as discredited.

And here’s the headline in the Washington Post, “Epilepsy Drug in Pregnancy May Lower Child’s IQ,” which links to the AP’s article by Mike Stobbe. It too simply assumes that IQ is a valid and important thing.

Genetic reporter Nicholas Wade, who has been on book break, is back with an NY Times front page story “Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases:

“The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.

Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been developing a powerful method for comparing the genomes of patients and healthy people, with the hope of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases.

This method, called a genomewide association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic variation it detects has turned out to explain surprisingly little of the genetic links to most diseases.

As Matt Ridley has said, no matter what you might think from reading the Health & Science section of your newspaper, your genes didn’t evolve in order to kill you. So, this hunt for Killer Genes was always a little dubious, as I’ve been pointing out all decade.

Instead, your genes evolved to help you survive and reproduce. So, these expensive genome studies have so far proven better at finding the causes of differences in capabilities between individuals and between extended families (a.k.a., racial groups).

Dr. Goldstein argues that the genetic burden of common diseases must be mostly carried by large numbers of rare variants. In this theory, schizophrenia, say, would be caused by combinations of 1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10 common genetic variants.

This would be bleak news for those who argue that the common variants detected so far, even if they explain only a small percentage of the risk, will nonetheless identify the biological pathways through which a disease emerges, and hence point to drugs that may correct the errant pathways. If hundreds of rare variants are involved in a disease, they may implicate too much of the body’s biochemistry to be useful.

An alternative theory, proposed by Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald in the 1990s is that more diseases are caused by infections than we currently assume. (Here’s the 1999 Atlantic Monthly cover story on them.) Of course, genes and germs are not mutually exclusive causes. It could be that, say, you’ll only get Disease X if you are both exposed to Germ Y and your immune system lacks Gene Variant Z.