Verbal Venom: Biological Parallels for Western Pathologies

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Stung Out to Die
Here’s a short and very old word: Wasp. Here’s a long and very new word: Neuroparasitology. Despite their differences, the two words go together very well. Neuroparasitology is the study of how parasites manipulate the brains of their hosts. Parasitic wasps are experts at this manipulation. For example, some inject paralysing toxins with their stings and create living larders for their offspring. Mason wasps lay eggs on paralysed caterpillars, then seal them into brood-chambers made of mud. The caterpillars are then eaten alive by the larvae that hatch from the eggs.

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Parasitic wasps induce this suicidal passivity with minute injections of neurotoxin, because tiny amounts of chemical can have huge effects on nervous systems. The way a caterpillar submits to being eaten alive is both grotesque and fascinating, but then parasitism is one of the most interesting aspects of biology. Like predators, parasites have spontaneously evolved again and again in the animal kingdom. There are parasitic mammals, birds, fish, insects and more: Think of vampire-bats, cuckoos, lampreys, mosquitoes and so on.

Each species of parasite exploits some particular aspect of its host’s biology. Wasps inject toxins that paralyse nerves; cuckoos lay camouflaged eggs that fool eyes and brains. But this raises a dangerous idea about Homo sapiens. It’s clear from biology that predation and parasitism evolve quickly and easily among animals. All birds have a common ancestor, but some birds, like eagles and shrikes, now prey on their relatives, while others, like cuckoos and skuas, now parasitize their relatives. So why can’t predation and parasitism have evolved among those animals known as human beings? Why can’t there be predatory or parasitic ideologies, professions and even races? Read more

More on Ralph Miliband: A KGB Connection?

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From a correspondent:

In Britain the media row over whether an obscure, deceased Marxist academic Ralph Miliband was a loyal British patriot who loved his country, rumbles on (see Alex Kurtagic’s article, “Ralph Miliband was not unique”). It is important for two reasons. One is that the Daily Mail, the voice of middle England is very much at bay with the Guardian and BBC snapping at its heels over what it has printed about Miliband.

The second is that Ralph Miliband was the father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband who may or may not have inherited his father’s radical attitudes. But in all the sound and fury of the Daily Mail row, one question remains unasked.

Who was “Lev” the mysterious Russian figure who moved in Ralph Miliband’s circle in the sixties and was willing to pay for information about NATO.

We are introduced to “Lev” in the autobiographical writings of David Horowitz who is now a prominent Neocon but was then part of the left wing Jewish Marxist academic milieu. Horowitz moved to London in the mid-sixties and was taken under the wing of Ralph Miliband when the two lived next door to each other in Hampstead. Read more

The NPI Conference — After the Fall: The Future of Identity

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*The National Policy Institute’s 2013 Leadership Conference will be held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC on October 26th, with related events on Friday 25th and Sunday 27th*. It is still time to register online at our website http://www.npiamerica.org/2013-conference.*http://www.npiamerica.org/2013-conference.*

 Though there’s much talk about “identity” in political debates these days, it’s not always clear what we are talking about. Is identity defined by Race? Language? Religion? Ethnicity? Nationhood?

The National Policy’s Institute (NPI)’s coming conference—After the Fall: the Future of Identity—will raise such questions and provide the audience with important perspectives.

While the entire Western world is facing similar and inter-related challenges nowadays—from mass non-European immigration to financial bankruptcy, from cultural debasement to social atomization—the identity of “the West” that is at stake is not clearly understood. Often, what is meant by “the West” is its neoconservative conception: liberal democracy, human rights, and cultural and religious pluralism. (Paul Gottfried has quipped that when neocons say “the West,” they seem to mean the Upper West Side.) Since this “West” doesn’t recognize race, or culture in the full sense of the word, it knows no border. It is all too often conflated with the Occident, which has a history of its own and is embodied by a particular people—the European people.

The “West” as defined by mainstream discourse is challenged by Third World immigrants today. They might be willing to benefit from the delights of a technologically advanced society, but for most of them, they keep seeing themselves as members of distinct cultures, with different and often competing interests. They rarely adhere to the liberal values that, we are supposed to believe, define our identity. Quite often, they can even outright reject them. Read more

Richard Dawkins and the Beltway Celebrity Culture

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Richard Dawkins and #81277B

Book signing at the National Press Club hosted by Sally Quinn, the quintessential gossip columnist and D.C. socialite

Richard Dawkins has been making the rounds on the celebrity-author circuit with the release of his newly published memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, the first of a projected two-volume autobiography.

Dawkins addressed a standing-room only audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on September 30. The event’s host was Sally Quinn, who was once described as “the reigning queen of Washington dinner party culture.” Quinn has carved out a niche as the supreme hostess of the Georgetown salon, the keeper of the keys to the beltway’s celebrity circuit.

The 72-year-old socialite has attained celebrity status for who she is, not what she has accomplished. Quinn is the third wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who rocketed to fame during the Watergate scandal. Were it not for Nixon’s ill-fated cover-up, Bradlee and Quinn would have remained relatively obscure beltway figures as editor and spouse.

Her resume is quite thin. Quinn’s accomplishments include: graduating Smith College, getting hired at the Washington Post without any writing experience (Here is her reported job interview with Bradlee: “Can you show me something you’ve written?” asked Managing Editor Benjamin Bradlee. “I’ve never written anything,” admitted Quinn. Pause. “Well,” said Bradlee, “nobody’s perfect.”), failing to make it as a television news anchor on the CBS Morning News (leaving the program in six months), writing two books and various profiles for The Washington Post, and at 41 giving birth to a son. Read more

A indústria do Holocausto no Reino Unido

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Francis Carr Begbie: The Holocaust Industry in the UK, The Occidental Observer, 5 de outubro de 2011
Tradução, links e comentário ao fim do post: O Ocidental Lusófono
Her_Majesty_the_Queen_Lays_a_Wreath_at_the_Cenotaph_London_During_Remembrance_Sunday_Service_MOD_45152054-1
poppyEm meados da manhã do segundo domingo de novembro, os clarins soarão no Último Posto, no Cenotáfio Memorial de Guerra em Londres, e por dois minutos a Inglaterra ficará em silêncio. A simples dignidade do Domingo da Recordação, a rainha depositando uma coroa de flores, o silêncio enquanto uma canópia de flores de papoulas vermelhas cai sobre os veteranos e homens das forças-armadas em posição de sentido, tornam este um momento de tristeza quase impossível de suportar.
Embora o evento comemore todos os mortos de guerra britânicos e da Comunidade Britânica, ele tem suas raízes nas trincheiras da Primeira Guerra Mundial e em batalhas como a do Somme, na qual os britânicos sofreram 58 000 baixas, um terço mortos no primeiro dia. O silêncio marca a décima primeira hora do décimo primeiro dia, quando as armas silenciaram em 1918. O símbolo da ocasião é a flor de papoula vermelho-sangue, distribuída pela Legião Real Britânica e usada por milhões.
Não há símbolo mais sincero do sentimento tradicional na Grã-Bretanha do que a flor da papoula. E é por isto que duas recentes decisões de financiamento do governo revelaram uma mudança tão espantosa de prioridades culturais. A primeira foi uma recusa em financiar um projeto para o plantio de de papoulas em um campo da recordação para os mortos de guerra da Grã-Bretanha. O segundo foi uma promessa do Primeiro-Ministro de despejar mais dinheiro dos contribuintes na promoção da indústria do Holocausto, atualmente em grande expansão.

Race as a biological reality and social construct

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I was pleasantly surprised to see an article on a radical website that actually says something positive about biological approaches to ethnicity, citing Frank Salter and me (Jay Knott, “Invention, Imagination, Race, and Nation,” posted on Dissident Voice). A couple comments:

Shlomo Sand: I really don’t know how anyone can take Sand seriously given that he simply dismisses the data on Jewish population genetics. But Knott is right:

Sand accepts that his work has had no effect on Israeli nationalism nor on Jewish identity worldwide. Why is this so? If you expose a delusion, wouldn’t you expect significant numbers to abandon it, and thank you?

Good point. Jewish ethnocentrism is legendary—I use the term ‘hyper-ethnocentrism’ to describe it (here are some contemporary examples from Israel). It’s beyond rational discussion and cries out for a biological explanation. Sand’s rational arguments, whatever their merit, are not going to persuade rabbis who are convinced that non-Jews are a lower life form.

The Ethics of Ethnocentrism: Knott accepts that there is a biology of ethnocentrism, but regards it as immoral. Commenting on Frank Salter’s opposition to immigration to Australia, he writes “Considering how white Australia was founded, it’s unethical to try to stop third world refugees settling there.” And he goes on to note that

American evolutionary historian professor Kevin MacDonald is also a right-winger. His Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior9 argues that “ethnic affiliations are extraordinarily robust” and that this is because racial identity is biologically beneficial to the genes which cause it.

But the notion that racial identity is adaptive does not imply that it is morally justifiable, any more than accepting the obvious fact that heterosexuality is more adaptive than homosexuality has any consequences whatever for one’s views on gay rights.

From an evolutionary point of view, moral idealism is a very dangerous idea because it may well lead to altruism and evolutionary death. A moral idealism that results in displacement-level immigration is obviously an evolutionary dead end. Evolution is a game that, if one decides not to play, one automatically loses. Read more

Bill Kristol: Israel muss den Westen retten

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Translated by Michael Colhaze

Ich finde es erstaunlich, dass eine intelligente Person Washingtons Neocons ernst nehmen kann. In der letzten Woche trommelte Bill Kristol in The Weekly Standard für einen Krieg mit Syrien und behauptete allen Ernstes, der Präsident müsse nun unbedingt handeln „ um sicherzustellen, dass Assads chemische Waffen Amerika nicht mehr bedrohen können“.

Als ob Assad eine Batterie von ICBMs besitzt und bereit ist, Terror und Verderben auf Amerike regnen zu lassen.

Bill Kristol ist zutiefst besorgt darüber, dass der Frieden im Nahen Osten ausbrechen könnte bevor die USA den letzten Feind Israels zerstört hat. Der Artikel steckt voller Vergleiche mit Hitler und Mussolini, wie z. B. hier:

Es wird diesmal kein Rheinland geben. Iran ist nicht das Deutschland der 1930er Jahre, und die Vereinigten Staaten sind mehr als formidabel im Vergleich zu Großbritannien. Der Iran wird seine Ziele mit Hinterhältigkeit und Diplomatie erreichen müssen, während Hitler sie mit Kraft ubd Bravado gewann. Aber ein Hinnehmen des Strebens der Islamischen Republik Irans nach dem Besitz von Atomwaffen führt genau dazu, was mit der Akzeptanz von Nazi-Deutschlands expansionistischen Träumen geschah.

Die Iraner werden es diesmal heimlich und leise durchziehen, aber dann wird es nicht mehr lange dauern und sie sind in Cleveland.

Mehr: http://michael-colhaze.biz/KEVIN1Kristol.html