Wealth is less to do with hard work or luck and more to do with your genes, DNA study shows

The findings below were well-known from twin studies but our knowledge of genetics has now advanced to the stage where we can look for the actual genes which underlie those findings.  And we are now begining to see them.  We can see that the genes that lead to high intelligence also lead to higher income etc.  In their usual blind way, Leftists usually dispute that IQ tests really measure anything.  But when you are seeing the associations in actual human genes, there is much less room for dispute.  The full, very detailed paper underlying the report below is here

It should be noted that the same studies which show a strong IQ influence on income also show negligible effects from family environment and other environmental variables.  Your genes really are your destiny and there's not much you can do about it. That finding will put a lot of noses out of joint on both the Right and the Left but that is what the data shows


Wealth and success may be less to do with hard work or luck and more to do with DNA, it seems. An analysis of 286,000 Britons showed that the genetic make-up of those who earned over £100,000 differed from those on low incomes.

A scan pointed to 24 ‘golden genes’ that affect intelligence, the immune system, and the strength of muscles and heart – and so can make the difference between economic success and poverty.

The discovery follows work at the Centre For Cognitive Ageing in Edinburgh.

Three-quarters of the genes are linked to intelligence, the scientists found. But physical attributes also affect the chances of being wealthy and some of these may be inherited.

‘Genetic variants associated with higher income correlate with a genetic predisposition for greater intelligence, a longer lifespan, better physical and mental health, fewer feelings of tiredness, having fewer children and better living conditions,’ the researchers say in a paper which is yet to be published.

SOURCE 

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'Progressive' = The New Nazi.  Both show an obsession with race and a contempt for life

Democratic Socialists, National Socialists and the ties that bind.

Before Donald Trump was elected President, and certainly since, self-described "progressives" or "democratic socialists" in the Democratic Party have denigrated anybody who opposes their agenda as Nazis. But are they engaging in psychological projection? Consider the following recent events.

Comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Jim Clyburn and Rep. Rashida Tlaib display contempt for Jews -- in Rep. Clyburn's case, for victims of the Holocaust. Heavily Democratic legislatures in New York, Illinois and Virginia perpetuate the wanton destruction of human life by passing laws allowing abortion to the moment of birth. In Virginia, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said a woman can choose whether a baby who survived a botched abortion should live. False flags are cynically organized to delude the unsuspecting and promote an agenda. Behind those developments is the pervasive identity politics that defines some groups as inherently better than others.

In those four areas -- anti-Semitism, genocide, false flags and identity politics -- do "democratic socialists" and Nazis share more than the former want to admit.

Contempt for Jews is not limited to Nazis or "democratic socialists." But by embracing Islam in their politics of "diversity" and "inclusion," the "democratic socialists" tolerate Islam's anti-Semitism. The Nazis understood the connection between Islam and anti-Semitism so well that they sought Islam as an ally in their politics of extermination.

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, broadcast anti-Semitic messages from Berlin with Hitler's blessing from 1941 until the end of World War II. Al-Husseini -- a close ally of Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood's founder -- told Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine to "kill the Jews wherever you find them," thereby continuing a personal campaign that lasted nearly 25 years.

The Waffen-SS also had a special Muslim division, the Handschar, named after the German word for scimitar. Comprised of Bosnian Muslims, the Handschar division perpetrated atrocities against Jewish civilians. Notably, it was the only division in the Waffen-SS allowed to have chaplains, with one imam presiding over each battalion.

Today, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" circulates widely in the Arab world, with no discouragement from Muslim clerics.

The House Democrats' flaccid response to its members' anti-Semitic remarks reflects the refusal to confront Islam's anti-Semitism. Their resolution condemning all forms of bigotry -- without mentioning Rep. Omar by name or Islamist terrorism -- reveals Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house, to be this century's Neville Chamberlain.

Promoting the wanton destruction of human life extends beyond abortion. Last March, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown -- a Democrat whom Planned Parenthood endorsed for re-election last year -- signed legislation allowing mentally ill patients to be denied food and water unless that patient issued an advanced directive to the contrary before becoming debilitated. Previously, only caregivers with power of attorney could make such a decision. The bill received unanimous support from the Democrats in the Oregon legislature's House of Representatives.

In January, Oregon's Democrats introduced another bill expanding the state's law governing medically assisted suicide to include any patient with an incurable disease or intolerable pain. Currently, only patients who are expected to live no more than six months because of a terminal disease qualify.

This March, Maryland's House of Delegates -- the lower chamber of that state's legislature, the General Assembly -- approved legislation allowing medically assisted suicide. The bill passed 74-66 on March 7 -- with 73 of the chamber's 99 Democrats supporting it. Within days, members of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer Labor Party sponsored similar legislation in each house of the state legislature. Six states and the District of Columbia permit physician-assisted suicide.

Such laws follow the ultimate logic of the Nazis' euthanasia program, Aktion T4, which Hitler personally initiated in 1939 and which doctors administered. Designed to eliminate what the Nazis called "life unworthy of life," the program focused on the chronically ill, the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally incapacitated -- whether adults or children -- using mercy as one excuse for extermination.

During Aktion T4's two years of open operation, nearly 70,000 died from starvation, dehydration, lethal injection and gassing. The Nazis built six gas chambers designed as showers to fool the victims. Though public pressure forced the Nazis to discontinue the program in 1941, it provided the basis for the murderous methods used in death camps.

The utilitarian impulse governing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses for such bizarre experiments as creating humanized mice -- usage that has the Democrats' implied consent -- also governed the Nazis' use of prisoners for their own macabre experiments in concentration camps. In one example, camp doctors infected children with tuberculosis, removed their lymph nodes to determine the disease's progress, then executed their subjects.

The "democratic socialists" and the Nazis even share the propensity to promote their agendas by fabricating incidents. Eight decades before Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime supposedly perpetrated by Trump's supporters, the Nazis orchestrated a scenario that plunged the world into war.

On Aug. 31, 1939, with relations between Germany and Poland rapidly deteriorating, Polish troops attacked and briefly took over a German radio station near the Polish border to broadcast this message: "Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands."

Gliwice was the Polish name for the then-German town of Gleiwitz. Gunfire could be heard during the broadcast. German police overpowered the troops and re-captured the radio station.

Only the Polish troops were not Polish troops. They were members of the SS, who not only carried out the attack but dressed concentration-camp inmates in Polish army uniforms and killed them as "proof." One of the "troops" was an unmarried German farmer who sympathized with the Poles. The SS arrested him a day earlier and murdered him.

German radio carried news of the faux attack within hours. It seemed that Hitler's assertions about the Poles oppressing and killing German nationals had merit. The next day, Sept. 1, Hitler declared war against Poland. World War II had begun.

The Gleiwitz "attack" belonged to a campaign of false flags orchestrated in late August 1939 by the SS and German military intelligence, the Abwehr. Attention to detail was so meticulous that the Abwehr also provided Polish military equipment and Polish military identification to the fake troops.

Nearly 80 years later, a swastika and the words, "Heil Trump" and "Fag Church" were found on the walls of St. David's Episcopal Church in Brown County, Ind. immediately after Trump's election. The graffiti was "among numerous incidents that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s Election Day win," wrote the Washington Post. Yet six months later, police arrested organist George Nathaniel Stang for vandalizing his own church.

"I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag," wrote Stang, who wanted to "mobilize a movement."

That movement reflects the "democratic socialists' " goal of arbitrarily favoring ostensibly oppressed groups at the expense of those in power. That goal varies from the Nazis' racial policies only in the nature of the groups. Otherwise, both narratives are fundamentally identical.

Just as the "democratic socialists" view women, African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and the sexually non-straight as needing special protection from powerful whites, Christians and capitalists, so did the Nazis view "Aryans" as needing special protection from Jews, socialists and capitalists. Just as the Nazis viewed "Aryans" as superior due to their race, so do "democratic socialists" view the marginalized as inherently superior due to their victimization.

If racism is the belief that ethnicity matters more than values, ideas and ethics, then "democratic socialists" and Nazis are identically racist. In both cases, individual rights and equality under the rule of law mean nothing.

Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, rejected the American ideal of individual liberty under law in favor of preferences for designated groups at others' expense. Marcuse advocated a "policy of unequal treatment" that "would protect radicalism on the Left against that on the Right,” he wrote.

Such a policy, Marcuse wrote, would demand "the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements" that oppose Leftist goals, and "may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions."

This was the Nazis' practice in service of their ideology. This is the democratic socialists' goal in service of theirs.

Tucker Carlson discussed the applied consequences of Marcuse's approach March 11 during his Fox News show:

"You sometimes hear modern progressives described as the new Puritans. That’s a slur on colonial Americans. Whatever their flaws, the Puritans cared about the fate of the human soul and the moral regeneration of their society. Those aren’t topics that interest progressives. They’re too busy pushing late-term abortion and cross-dressing on fifth graders. These are the people who write our movies and sitcoms.

The Left’s main goal, in case you haven’t noticed, is controlling what you think. In order to do that, they have to control the information you receive. Google and Facebook and Twitter are on board. They’re happy to ban unapproved thoughts without apology. They often do. So do the other cable channels, and virtually every major news outlet in this country. ... They demand total conformity."

Indeed, in issuing warnings about Nazis, the "democratic socialists" and their appeasers in the Democratic Party are issuing warnings about themselves.

SOURCE 

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Liberalism Is Dehumanizing

By David Limbaugh

Liberal ideology is rife with inconsistencies, but none is greater than how its supposedly animating motivation — human compassion — is contradicted by its devaluation of human life.

Liberals have long claimed superior compassion and demonized conservatives as being uncaring. This has always been untrue while superficially appearing to be true, and liberals have evangelized countless young minds with this seductive canard.

It's difficult to convince embryonic liberal activists that individual liberals may be compassionate but their governing ideology and the inevitable consequences of their policies are not. It's also difficult to make them see that conservatives are compassionate and tolerant when we stand for unchanging moral standards and openly disagree with policies that liberals successfully peddle as compassionate.

But beyond the superficial rhetoric, liberalism does not stand the test of compassion, because it subordinates individuality to identity groups and the collective and degrades human dignity. One of the great ironies of secular humanism is its purported championship of mankind as the measure of all things while undermining what makes us human. How can a philosophy that devalues human individuality ultimately be compassionate toward human beings?

The most obvious example is liberals' extreme advocacy of abortion, making it a holy sacrament that is not about individual choice but a paranoid conviction that pro-lifers threaten women's rights, health care and autonomy.

Another example is socialism, which the leftist-dominated Democratic Party is virtually embracing today. Throughout history, socialists have duped millions of well-meaning people into believing that free market capitalism is evil and socialism is noble. I don't even subscribe to the glib pitch that it is wonderful in theory but doesn't work in practice. It's also unappealing in theory because it is fundamentally at odds with human nature and the human spirit. It arrogantly assumes it can remake human beings as irresponsive to incentives and devoid of their competitive spirit and their natural yearning for liberty.

In practice, socialism has consistently impoverished and enslaved. With its top-down control of the economy, it obliterates individual economic liberty and thus robs individuals of an essential part of their humanity. Government-forced transfer payments — taking other people's money to satisfy one's sense of moral self-worth — is a far cry from charity and compassion. I know of no conservatives who oppose a social safety net for the truly needy, provided it incentivizes the able-bodied to return to the workforce.

When it comes to health care, of course conservatives want to maximize people's access to the highest-quality care at the lowest prices and most choices, but they dispute that forcing everyone to be insured helps achieve any of those goals efficiently. What is true of socialized medicine is true of socialism generally: It doesn't work anywhere in the long run — including in Sweden, truth be told. How compassionate are socialism and less extreme big-government liberalism when they destroy economic growth and prosperity and, left to their own devices, often lead to totalitarianism? Socialism, just like much of economic and political liberalism, is more about people seeking power and control over individual lives.

The latest rage is intersectionality, which establishes new hierarchies of victimhood and privilege based on the overlapping and interrelated categories of disadvantages that groups of people have experienced. We must no longer look at discrimination through the "single-axis framework" of race, gender, class, disability, etc., but understand how the various identities intersect. Some people have multiple "burdens" or "disadvantages," such that black women, for example, suffer more discrimination than black men and white women. Unless we refine our thinking to account for these combinations of disabilities, the most disadvantaged will be ignored. Isn't this exhausting? Who really thinks like this if not forced to?

This is why feminists have recently been shamed for promoting their singular cause while presumably ignoring the plight of transgender people, gay people, the disabled and black women in particular. It is why intersectionality zealots are questioning whether Sen. Kamala Harris is "black enough" to be president, as her father is Jamaican and her mother is Indian. She may not be black enough because she is not African-American — a bona fide descendant of American slaves. It is why race- and gender-obsessed people are upset that the three Democratic presidential front-runners are white men.

It doesn't seem to occur to these self-described supporters of democracy that three white guys happen to be ahead because people are voicing their opinions. It also doesn't seem to bother the Democrats expressing their preference for white men that though they won't dare challenge the orthodoxy of intersectionality, they are violating its premises with their voting inclinations.

Among other things, intersectionality is dehumanizing because people are demonized or protected depending on their group, not on what they have done or what they have personally experienced. How can people not see that this kind of thinking violates our basic sense of justice and accountability? Intersectionality, perhaps even more than the rudimentary forms of identity politics that preceded it, is also damaging to people because it forces them to focus on themselves as victims of disadvantaged groups rather than encourage them to strive, as individuals, to be the best they can be.

If the results of liberals' policies — as opposed to their good intentions, posturing and virtue signaling — count for anything and if the ideas they promote are as dehumanizing as they appear, though many individual liberals may have enormous hearts, the ideology to which they are in thrall is stunningly uncompassionate.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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