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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

by Sheeritwern Posted on May 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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I didn’t realize that Charles Murray was still talking about his belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites. But he is. Over at Vox, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett report on a two-hour podcast he did recently with Sam Harris:

The consensus, he says, is that IQ exists; that it is extraordinarily important to life outcomes of all sorts; that it is largely heritable; and that we don’t know of any interventions that can improve the part that is not heritable. The consensus also includes the observation that the IQs of black Americans are lower, on average, than that of whites, and — most contentiously — that this and other differences among racial groups is based at least in part in genetics.

I’ve read The Bell Curve, so I’m not just talking out of my ass about it. And it’s a weird book. The vast bulk of it is about the first five bolded items above, which really are part of the scientific consensus. You can argue the details, but it’s safe to say that intelligence is real; it’s important; it’s partly genetically heritable; it’s difficult to change; and blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites. The evidence in The Bell Curve on these scores is fine. But then the book gets to a couple of chapters about the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap, and suddenly the evidence gets very, very fuzzy. In fact, I want to share a brief boxed item included on page 310:

The German Story

One of the intriguing studies arguing against a large genetic component to IQ differences came about thanks to the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II, when about 4,000 illegitimate children of mixed racial origin were born to German women. A German researcher tracked down 264 children of black servicemen and constructed a comparison group of 83 illegitimate offspring of white occupation troops. The results showed no overall difference in average IQ. The actual IQs of the fathers were unknown, and therefore a variety of selection factors cannot be ruled out. The study is inconclusive but certainly consistent with the suggestion the B/W difference is largely environmental.

In one sense, I applaud Murray and his co-author for including this. At the same time, they spend no time engaging with it in the text of the book. But they should: it’s only one study, and as they suggest, it has some missing pieces. Still, it’s one of the very few studies of African-American and white American children raised in middle-class environments outside of America. The fact that it shows no difference between black and white children is pretty significant—especially since it’s highly unlikely that any of these children received any kind of special treatment.

I don’t want to pretend that this study is definitive. It’s not. But a single disconfirming case is all you need to demonstrate that the black-white IQ gap is entirely non-biological, and this one is pretty close.

It’s not impossible that there’s a biological difference in intelligence between blacks and whites. That’s fundamentally a scientific question, and it hasn’t been conclusively proven one way or the other. But the effect of American culture on blacks is so toxic that it’s all but impossible to believe that any conclusions drawn in a study of Americans can ever be free of environmental contamination. After all, the Irish used to have low IQs. Jews used to have low IQs. And everyone was quite sure it was due to biology. But when anti-Irish and anti-Semitic animus died out, their IQs increased to normal levels. Amazing, isn’t it?

Maybe eventually Murray will find his long-sought gene complexes for cognitive ability, and will be able to show that there really is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. But I doubt it. The evidence just doesn’t point in that direction. Maybe in ten or twenty years we’ll know for sure.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

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Gen. Michael Flynn’s Slow Descent Into Madness

by SanfordTomlinso Posted on November 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Dana Priest tells us today about Donald Trump’s new National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn:

A lot of reporters and other civilians found Mike, as everyone called him, refreshing. A plucky Irish Catholic kid from Rhode Island, he wasn’t impressed by rank. He told his junior officers to challenge him in briefings. “You’d hear them say, ‘Boss, that’s nuts,’ ” one former colleague said.

….The greatest accomplishment of Flynn’s military career was revolutionizing the way that the clandestine arm of the military, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), undertook the killing and capture of suspected terrorists and insurgents in war zones….Stanley McChrystal, who was appointed to run JSOC in 2003, brought Flynn in as his intelligence chief….He “boxed him in,” someone who had worked with both men told me last week, by encouraging Flynn to keep his outbursts in check and surrounding him with subordinates who would challenge the unsubstantiated theories he tended to indulge.

Sounds like a good guy who just needs a little direction. So, um, what happened?

In 2012, Flynn became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency….“He made a lot of changes,” one close observer of Flynn’s time at the D.I.A. told me. “Not in a strategic way—A to Z—but back and forth.”

Flynn also began to seek the Washington spotlight. But, without loyal junior officers at his side to vet his facts, he found even more trouble. His subordinates started a list of what they called “Flynn facts,” things he would say that weren’t true….Flynn’s temper also flared. He berated people in front of colleagues.

….Flynn had been on the job just eighteen months when James Clapper told him he had to go….Flynn began saying that he had been fired because President Obama disagreed with his views on terrorism and wanted to hide the growth of ISIS. I haven’t found anyone yet who heard him say this while he was still in the military….As Flynn’s public comments became more and more shrill, McChrystal, Mullen, and others called Flynn to urge him to “tone it down,” a person familiar with each attempt told me. But Flynn had found a new boss, Trump, who enlisted him in the fight against the Republican and Democratic Party establishments.

Well, I guess it will all work out. Donald Trump will provide a firm hand at the—wait. What’s this?

President-elect Donald Trump has received two classified intelligence briefings since his surprise election victory earlier this month….A team of intelligence analysts has been prepared to deliver daily briefings on global developments and security threats to Trump in the two weeks since he won.

….Officials involved in the Trump transition team cautioned against assigning any significance to the briefing schedule that the president-elect has set so far, noting that he has been immersed in the work of forming his administration, and has made filling key national security posts his top priority. But others have interpreted Trump’s limited engagement with his briefing team as an additional sign of indifference from a president-elect who has no meaningful experience on national security issues.

So Trump thinks that his work schedule will lighten up after he actually becomes president? And then he’ll have time to get up to speed on all the stuff he doesn’t know? And rein in Flynn at the same time?

We are so screwed.

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Gen. Michael Flynn’s Slow Descent Into Madness

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3 New Books to Feed Your Brain

by ElinorO62bp Posted on November 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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You’ve just filled your belly to the brim. Turn now to some new tomes that will help fill your mind:

The Devil’s Chessboard

By David Talbot

“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.—Aaron Weiner

The Hidden Half of Nature

By David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé

In this transformative read, David Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences, and his wife, biologist and environmental planner Anne Biklé, unravel the universe of microbes that make dirt fertile and allow us to digest food. Both the lining of our colons and the ground beneath our feet, the authors write, are “bio­logical bazaars where plants and people trade nutritional wares and form alliances.” Combining lucid explication of emerging science with personal anecdotes, Montgomery and Biklé, who confronted a cancer diagnosis while writing the book, reveal that our immune defenses depend on protecting and nourishing these microscopic brigades.—Tom Philpott

My Life on the Road

By Gloria Steinem

Steinem spent her childhood crammed against her sister in the backseat of a car as her father tried to persuade roadside antique dealers to buy his wares. In My Life on the Road, her first book in more than 20 years, Steinem elegantly reflects on this nomadic upbringing and how it inspired her own travels. Though she never learned to drive, her tours as a young journalist introduced her to women who helped shape her ideology: disgruntled American stewardesses, passengers in a female-only Indian train car, and an Irish taxi driver who told Steinem in the 1970s, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!”—Becca Andrews.

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3 New Books to Feed Your Brain

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

by Rafael40Ru Posted on May 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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AFTER MORE THAN five decades trying, Larry McMurtry—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain, and creator of Booked Up, one of the planet’s largest used bookstores—still can’t escape the enduring mythologies of the Old West, which he set out to debunk with the publication of his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, back in 1961.

The son and grandson of cattlemen, McMurtry, 77, was raised on the plains near Archer City, Texas, whose landscape and small-town mentality inform so much of his work—he left at 18 for college, returning decades later with the unlikely dream of transforming his hometown into a book lovers’ mecca. Among his 32 novels and 14 nonfiction works, you’ll find fictional accounts of Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and other legends brought back to earth. In 1997, he told the New York Times Magazine he was “bored to death with the 19th-century West,” and figured Comanche Moon, the last installment of the Lonesome Dove series, would be his final say on it. But in his new novel, The Last Kind Words Saloon, fans will recognize that familiar pace, that spare diction, those somnolent settings—fading frontier towns with their ignorant, stoic cowboys and ranchers, beat-down Indians, whores, rustlers, drunks, schemers, and desperately lonely wives.

Mother Jones: I thought you were done with the Old West. What happened?

Larry McMurtry: I changed my mind. I got an idea and I followed it.

MJ: The Last Kind Words Saloon follows Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, among others. Yet their famous gunfight at the OK Corral seemed almost incidental.

LM: I don’t think I was that ambitious. It seems like the OK Corral is a good place to stop. I paid it much less attention because it was kind of a throwaway, an event that wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither side wanted to fight, and yet guns started going off and a fight ensued.

MJ: You’ve described Old West mythologies as destructive. Which ones particularly grate?

LM: The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist—it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

MJ: In your antipathy partly rooted in your own childhood run-ins in small-town Texas?

LM: It was more like the culture that I lived in and absorbed by osmosis: It was a racist, anti-feminist culture, and it had been throughout the whole period of settlement. It was still all that when I was a little boy.

MJ: To what degree have you succeeded in your demythologizing mission?

LM: I haven’t succeeded at all. It’s just as racist and misogynistic as it ever was. The image of the cowboy is one of the dominant images in American culture.

MJ: In the book, a brief sub-plot involves a group of ruthless Indians who do horrible things to a group of white travellers, and are in turn dispatched by the white authorities. What were your intentions with that episode?

LM: It was timely. For one thing, it actually happened during the period and in the places I was writing about. It was the last massacre on the southern plains. It was the final breakaway band of Kiowa who did it. It took place about 20 miles from my family home in Texas. General Sherman was on a tour of the western forts. He was there early in the morning and didn’t see the Indians. But they saw him, and waited until he left for Jacksboro. In the afternoon, seven teamsters came along that route and were massacred.

MJ: Much like Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove, the men in this book lack introspection; certainly they are reserved in their self-expression. The women are lonely and miserable and hungry for attention. What kind of men were your rancher father and grandfather, and how did they relate to their own wives?

LM: One of the reasons I wrote Lonesome Dove was to try to understand my father. My father’s reaction to the hardships his mother endured marked him for life. They left Missouri and came to our family home. There was nothing there when they arrived, but there was a stream. My father saw his mother carry bucket after bucket after bucket of water up from that stream to the house. She had 12 children. It made him intolerant of my mother, because she was not as competent as his mother.

MJ: What was it like for a studious kid like you growing up in small-town Texas?

LM: I didn’t realize that it was as limited as it was until I got to places that weren’t limited, like Houston. The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

MJ: How did your father feel about you going off to college and becoming a writer?

LM: He didn’t oppose it. We visited Rice and he saw what a wonderful school it was. He had some vain hope that I would change my mind and become a veterinarian.

MJ: Is your family still in the cattle business?

LM: Unfortunately, they are, and for nostalgic reasons. My two younger sisters both worshipped my father.

MJ: You studied under Wallace Stegner at Stanford, right?

LM: Actually, I didn’t. He was in India the year of my scholarship. I studied under Malcolm Cowley and Frank O’Connor. Mr. Cowley came in and turned off his hearing aid and let us all squabble among ourselves. But we knew he had value, because he came from the world of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald. He knew all of them. He wrote a wonderful book called Exile’s Return about that generation. In the end, Hemingway turned against him. Frank O’Connor was an Irish short story writer. He didn’t like teaching, and he was irascible. I mentioned once that I had read Smollett, and he exploded. But he was an exceptional writer, a beautiful short story writer.

MJ: You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you’d intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?

LM: Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.

MJ: Were you surprised when you learned that it had won the Pulitzer?

LM: I was teaching in Uvalde, Texas, the day I won. I gave six speeches that day. My friend Susan Freudenheim told me I had won the prize. I was too busy to have much of a reaction to it. I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath. If I hadn’t won the Pulitzer, I doubt I would have been president of PEN.

MJ: Do you find it strange being so closely identified with a book you wrote almost 30 years ago?

LM: That’s just the way it was and the way it is. Many people are identified with one book. Philip Roth with Portnoy’s Complaint. Joseph Heller and Catch-22. Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire. Strangely enough, Norman Mailer never wrote a novel that identified him. I think The Executioners Song is a great book.

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

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How the Royal Navy Helped the Late Peter O’Toole Become an Acting Legend

by JanisEasley Posted on December 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Peter O’Toole, the phenomenally talented Irish-English actor famous for his roles in such films as Lawrence of Arabia and Becket, died on Saturday at the age of 81. He was being treated at the Wellington Hospital in London after a long illness, according to his agent.

“My thoughts are with Peter O’Toole’s family and friends,” British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted. “His performance in my favourite film, Lawrence of Arabia, was stunning.” President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins added: “Ireland, and the world, has lost one of the giants of film and theatre…I was privileged to know him as a friend since 1969…He was unsurpassed for the grace he brought to every performance on and off the stage.”

O’Toole leaves behind a towering legacy in theater and cinema. In his earlier days, he was also a notorious party boy who lost much of his sizeable Lawrence of Arabia paycheck in a two-night gambling spree with co-star Omar Sharif at casinos in Casablanca and Beirut. “I was happy to grab the hand of misfortune, dissipation, riotous living, and violence,” O’Toole told the Sunday Express in 1995.

His epic carousing, however, turned to cautionary tale when in the mid-1970s he was diagnosed with pancreatitis, and subsequently had chunks of intestinal tubing removed; he then gave up the bottle, having gone to the brink of death. He would later say of his unexpected recovery, “It proved inconvenient to a few people, but there you go.”

O’Toole earned eight Academy Award nominations without bagging a single win (a record), but was presented with an Honorary Oscar in 2003. In a way, O’Toole, a former journalist-in-training, owed his entire career in acting to a conversation he had with a skipper while serving in the Royal Navy. As he told NPR:

I served with men who’d been blown up in the Atlantic, who’d seen their friends drinking icy bubbles in oil and being machine gunned in the water. And I mentioned that I wasn’t particularly satisfied with what I was doing in civilian life, which was working for a newspaper. And the skipper said to me one night, have you any unanswered calls inside you that you don’t understand or can’t qualify? I said, well, yes, I do. I quite fancy myself either as a poet or an actor. He said, well, if you don’t at least give it a try, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

In honor of his passing, here are a few great clips of the actor when he wasn’t acting on stage or in a big movie: O’Toole’s classic entrance on Late Show with David Letterman:

O’Toole and Orson Welles debating Hamlet on the BBC in 1963:

…and, finally, O’Toole reciting the Spice Girls:

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How the Royal Navy Helped the Late Peter O’Toole Become an Acting Legend

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

by Elyse Corder Posted on November 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Today is a “Where’s Waldo” edition of Friday catblogging, except that Domino is a lot easier to find than Waldo. Our quilt this week is another double Irish chain. Thanks to poor planning on my part, nearly all of our Irish chain quilts got backloaded into the end of the year, which is why you’re seeing a bunch of them lately. And there’s still one to go. This one is machine pieced and hand quilted.

In other news, I’m reliably told that whatever else you may think of it, the Daily Mail is your go-to destination for pictures of cute cats and other animals. Also, judging from its front page, it’s the place to go for hyperbolic Black Friday News. Here is today’s top headline in the US edition: “Black Friday chaos sweeps America: Man shot for a TV and another is stabbed for a parking space as shoppers turn violent.” You may, if you wish, take this as a data point against my thesis that Black Friday is fading away.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

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Mold responsible for Irish potato famine may be gone for good

by John Graham Posted on May 22, 2013

Mold responsible for Irish potato famine may be gone for good

By John Upton

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Scientists used modern genetic sequencing and rotten old museum samples to peer back in time at the cause of the potato blight that led to more than 1 million deaths in Ireland in the 1840s.

The fungus-like water mold that ravaged the country’s potato crop sent hungry Irish survivors fleeing for far-flung new countries — which is why so many people now justify getting wasted every St. Patrick’s Day, saying they’re sure they have an Irish ancestor somewhere in their family tree.

What the scientists found was a strain of Phytophthora infestans that is different from similar water molds that are still ravaging the world’s crops. From the BBC:

Researchers in the UK, Germany and the US analysed dried leaves kept in collections in museums at Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, UK, and Botanische Staatssammlung Munchen, Germany.

High-tech DNA sequencing techniques allowed them to decode ancient DNA from the pathogen in samples stored as early as 1845.

These were compared with modern-day genetic types from Europe, Africa and the Americas, giving an insight into the evolution of the pathogen.

“This strain was different from all the modern strains that we analysed — most likely it is new to science,” Prof Sophien Kamoun of The Sainsbury Laboratory told BBC News.

“We can’t be sure but most likely it’s gone extinct.”

Thing is, the scientists can’t figure out what made the water mold so devastating. From an article in Nature:

[Plant Geneticist Detlef] Weigel’s team also found nothing in the nuclear genomes of the famine strains to explain their ferocity. In fact, the strains lack a gene found in modern strains of P. infestans that overcomes the plant’s resistance genes. And, surprisingly, the famine strain seems less lethal than the P. infestans strains that now cause US$6 billion in crop damage per year. “It seems rather that the potatoes were unusually susceptible,” he says.

OK, all very interesting. But given that the mold strain responsible for the Irish famine appears to have gone extinct, we have some advice for the scientists who are done analyzing the infected old potato leaves: Burn them.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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blogs about ecology

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Mold responsible for Irish potato famine may be gone for good

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