CHARLES MURRAY AGAIN POINTS OUT SOME UNPOPULAR TRUTHS

Just a small excerpt in case you have not seen the article yet -- dealing with the causes of the impoverished and criminal American underclass:

"Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio--the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35%--of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in the early 1960s was 24%.

But illegitimacy is now common throughout the population, right? No, it is heavily concentrated in low-income groups. Perhaps illegitimacy isn't as bad as we used to think it was? No, during the last decade the evidence about the problems caused by illegitimacy has grown stronger. What about all the good news about falling teenage births? About plunging welfare rolls? Both trends are welcome, but neither has anything to do with the proportion of children being born and raised without fathers, and that proportion is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next generation".

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ELSEWHERE

On "reparations", Eleanor Spreitzer writes: "Who got hurt more? -- If African Americans can sue because their-great-great-great-great-granddaddies were thrown on a boat and shipped over here - can African Africans sue because theirs weren't?"

I am pretty surprised that the no. 1 story on the blogosphere at the moment (according to Technorati) is this one -- about the Catholic Church no longer accepting the literal truth of the Bible. But that's been true for centuries. The church has always contended that the Bible needs interpreting and that it alone has the authority to do so. There was some guy called Martin Luther who disagreed with that, though.

Good to see that the hyper-correct Cressida Dick (former head of London Police's "Diversity Directorate", frequenter of official homosexual meetings and resolute enemy of "hate speech") seems likely to be prosecuted over the deliberate police murder of a Brazilian electrician on a London train.

Good comment from Barone: "I am struck by the sublime indifference of most critics of Bush's Iraq policy to the fate of the Iraqi people. They are totally unexultant about the overthrow of a vicious dictatorship and seem to have no interest at all in what would happen to Iraqis if we leave suddenly. Hitchens has argued persuasively that no one deserves the label of liberal who is so indifferent to whether others live in freedom or under tyranny. In this passage Bush reminded Americans more hardheadedly about our own self-interest. But of course many of his critics are more interested in hurting Bush than they are in preventing the emergence of an anti-American tyranny in Iraq."

The physical basis of psychopathy uncovered? "Study findings have provided evidence of a structural brain deficit in pathological liars, with the prefrontal cortex implicated as an important component underlying deceitful personality. Yaling Yang, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA, and colleagues found that pathological liars, compared with both mentally healthy individuals and those with antisocial personality disorders, had a 22-26% increase in prefrontal white matter as well as slightly reduced gray matter. This finding suggests the "prefrontal cortex is a key component in lying and if during the developmental stage an individual developed more white matter in this region, they may be more prone to have excessive lying behavior," Yang explained to MedWire News. He added that slightly reduced prefrontal gray matter has previously been associated with the behavioral pattern of breaking rules in order to gain an advantage. The significance of the increase in white matter is that it gives people the cognitive capacity to lie in order to conduct this type of behavior, he said".

There is a petition to the U.S. government demanding accountability from the U.N. here that some readers may like to sign. It is being organized by Jay McFarland.

A good rant here: Excerpt: "One of the fundamental problems with the Left is that they have apparently trained themselves to ignore distinctions, such as the distinction between producers and parasites. The Left has also shown themselves to be blind to the sequence of cause and effect. Both of these bad habits appear to benefit the adherents of the "primacy of the parasite" ideologies that were invented by such parasites as Marx and Mohammed"

The Australian government has just appointed a new chief to its major public broadcaster -- Steven Skala. He is "a rising leader in Melbourne's influential Jewish community" so we may be able to hope for some reduction in the pro-terrorist bias of the organization concerned.

We may have reform coming at the BBC too. There is an excellent and extensive article on the Leftist bias at the BBC here: Excerpt: "The growing cacophony of voices accusing the BBC of being less than impartial in its news coverage scored an important victory this week when Britain's public broadcaster appointed an independent panel to examine whether its reporting of the Middle East had been coloured by a pro-Palestinian bias."

A deeply disillusioned Leftist confronts the antisemitism and pro-Fascism of most of the modern Left. He attributes it to their failures with socialism: "The temptation in times of defeat is to believe in everything rather than nothing; to go along with whichever cause sounds radical, even if the radicalism on offer is the radicalism of the far right. In 1878, George Eliot wrote that it was "difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print". So it is again today. Outside the movies of Mel Gibson, Jews aren't Christ killers any longer, but they can't relax, because now they are Nazis, blood-soaked imperialists, the secret movers of neoconservatism, the root cause of every atrocity from 9/11 to 7/7".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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