Richard Spencer

Never underestimate man's willingness to lie for a good cause. 

Stephen Jay Gould mismeasured skulls in racial records dispute

By Dan Vergano

USA TODAY

9 June 2011

The late scientific icon, Stephen Jay Gould, botched and perhaps faked his critique of a racist 19th-Century scientist's skull collection, suggests a second look at his efforts.

CAPTION

UPenn

In a 1978 Science paper, Gould (1941 - 2002) , reported that the Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), "a prominent Philadelphia physician," had mis-measured the cranial capacities of his 1,000-skull "American Golgotha" collection gathered from around the world, to suit his racist beliefs. The finding led to one of Gould's best-known books, The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of scientific racism.

"Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data?," asks a PLoS Biology study led by anthropologist Jason Lewis of Stanford University. "Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted?"

So, the study team remeasured the skulls collected by Morton, now owned largely by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Overall, they find, Morton did make mistakes in measuring skull capacity (he first stuffed them with seeds, and later lead shot to measure their brain size). But the mistakes were random. The random mistakes didn't favor any racial theory of larger brain sizes for white people over others.

"Given how long Gould's work has been criticized in this arena, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for the work to be done to write this article," says the University of Texas's David Prindle, author of Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. "People who dislike Gould's work will likely go on disliking him even more after this article. People who are fans of his writing will likely go on supporting his views."

Today, researchers know that larger average skull size is largely a function of cold weather:

In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were unfortunately common in 19th-century science or that bias has inappropriately influenced research in some cases. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or ''racial,'' and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations. In particular, cranial capacity variation in human populations appears to be largely a function of climate, so, for example, the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

Yes! Head size is correlated with cold weather...but then so is IQ.

From Lynn, Race Differences in Behavior

The article continues:

Morton neither manipulated his skull samples, unfairly selected which data to report, skewed results by gender, or ignored his mistakes to favor racist interpretations of his skulls, the PLoS Biology study authors conclude -- all charges made by Gould against the long-dead physician.

What's more, the researchers found Gould made some mistakes in his re-analysis of Morton. "Our analysis of Gould's claims reveals that most of Gould's criticisms are poorly supported or falsified," they conclude:

Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that ''unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth''. This view has since achieved substantial popularity in ''science studies''. But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.

This is hardly the first time an anthropologist has lied in the name of equality: 

Franz Boas – Liberal Icon, Scientific Fraud

By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

VDARE.com

14 October 2002

Two of the major superstitions of our time are the notion that man is merely a blank slate whose behavior is merely the product of the social environment and its sister, that race doesn't exist. Yet one by one, the pseudo-scientific sources of these myths are being discredited by serious scientists, and last week, one of the biggest sources of all took a nose dive.

Franz Boas, often called the grandfather of modern anthropology and a pioneer pusher of the idea that race is not a very meaningful concept, merely a "social construct" not found in nature, probably ranks with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age. As a Columbia professor from 1899 to 1942, he virtually created modern anthropology, and the students he trained—among them, Margaret Mead and some of the most famous names in the field—dominated the discipline until only a few years ago.

One of Boas' favorite targets was so-called "scientific racism," and much of his own writing was intended to combat what he saw—sometimes rightly—as unscientific or simply false thinking about race.

But it now turns out that Boas himself was guilty of no small degree of unscientific blunder—and maybe even fraud.

In 1912, Boas published what became a classic study that claimed to show that the skull shapes ("cranial forms") of the descendants of European immigrants to the United States altered from those of the original immigrants. Boas offered no explanation for why the changes took place, but if they were real, his finding pretty much wiped out the idea that different racial and ethnic types differ in fixed physical characteristics.

Boas's study, write Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble in their popular history of anthropology, They Studied Man, [pay archive]

"did much to establish the notion in human genetics that what are transmitted in the germ plasm are not fixed characters but potentialities ... dependent upon the environment for the particular form they will assume. The 'nature-nurture' controversy was largely obviated by this alternative."

In political terms, if human beings have few or no "fixed characters" and are shaped by the social environment, then what we know as modern liberalism is in business. So is communism, which also assumes that human beings can be transformed by manipulating the social environment.

It's no accident that Boas was a lifelong sympathizer of Marxism.

Unfortunately, for the social and human engineers, the study has now been shown to be invalid. Last week in the New York Times Science section, science reporter Nicholas Wade reported on an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard L. Jantz that took another look at Boas's study and methods. The effects of the new environment on the skulls of the immigrants' descendants, they found, are "insignificant," and the difference between the European and American born children were "negligible in comparison to the differentiation between ethnic groups." [“A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race” By Nicholas Wade, NYT.Oct 8, 2002]

Moreover, as Dr. Jantz told the Times, Boas

"was intent on showing that the scientific racism of the day had no basis, but he did have to shade his data some to make it come out that way."

In other words, Boas decided what his conclusions would be before he finished the research and then "shaded"—i.e., cheated on—the data to make them support the conclusion he wanted.

This is not science; it's fraud -- and modern liberalism is founded on it.

 

Liberals and neocons are inclined to romanticize civil unrest by non-Whites when they can gaze at it on cable news from the safety of their living rooms. Hence, the "Arab Spring." When American Blacks act up, on the other hand, the Beltway crowd prefers not to talk about it. At most, they'll promise to address the matter with new social legislation. They certainly never wax hopeful about violent disturbances that threaten their status quo. 

In a gutsy move, Drudge has detailed this nation-wide social phenomenon, which includes a hilarious story about gay SWPLs in Miami pushing back against the violenent antics attendant to "Urban Weekend." (We are assured that "it's not about race"...)

It's worth revisiting my piece from last summer on the "flash mob" phenomenon, "Race Riots 2.0." These latest outrages on the beach appear to be the canary in the coal mine of a major social and economic breakdown. 

Forget Harold Camping, for many of America's cities, the apocalypse has already occurred.

From Economic Collapse:

All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the "rust belt" and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the "real" rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities.  If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about.  Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes.  This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south.  America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.

If you still live in an area of the United States that is prosperous, do not mock the cities that you are about to read about.  The cold, hard reality of the matter is that economic decline and economic despair are spreading rapidly and they will come to your area soon enough.  Right now we are still talking about "American hellholes", but if the long-term economic trends that are destroying this nation are not turned around eventually we will just be talking about one gigantic "American hellhole".  In the end, no area of the country will completely escape the economic hell that is coming.

Let's take a closer look at what is currently happening in some of the worst areas of the country....

Detroit, Michigan

In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.

During the boom days of the 1950s, Detroit was a teeming metropolis of approximately 2 million people, but today the current population is less than half that.  The city of Detroit, once a shining example of middle class America, is now a rotting cesspool of economic decline and it actually saw its population decline by 25 percent during the decade that recently ended.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit lost a resident every 22 minutes between the years of 2000 and 2010.

So why are people leaving Detroit so rapidly?

There simply are no jobs.

At the height of the economic downturn, the mayor of Detroit admitted that while the "official" unemployment rate in Detroit was about 27 percent, the "real" unemployment rate in his city was actually somewhere around 50 percent.

Since there are not enough jobs, that also means that not enough tax money is coming in.  Detroit is essentially insolvent at this point.

Detroit officials are trying to implement some austerity measures in a desperate attempt to get city finances under control.

For example, the state of Michigan recently granted approval to a plan that would shut down nearly half of the public schools in Detroit.  Under the plan, 70 schools will be closed and 72 will continue operating.

It has been estimated that the remaining public schools will have class sizes of up to 60 students.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing also wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.

Essentially that would mean abandoning 20 percent of the city of Detroit to the gangs and to the homeless.

The mayor of Detroit has also discussed a plan in which authorities would bulldoze one-fourth of the city in order to save money on services.

So with all of this going on, is Detroit a pleasant place to live at this point?

No way.

Today, Detroit is considered to be the third most violent city in the United States.

In fact, crime has gotten so bad and the citizens are so frustrated by the lack of police assistance that they have resorted to forming their own organizations to fight back.  One group, known as "Detroit 300", was formed after a 90-year-old woman on Detroit's northwest side was brutally raped in August.

If you want to see what the future of America looks like, just take a few hours and go driving through Detroit some time.  But please only do this during the day.  Do not do this at night.  Detroit is not a safe place anymore, and you cannot count on the police to help you in a timely manner.

Detroit was once one of the greatest cities in the world.

But today it is an absolute hellhole.

Camden, New Jersey

So is there any place in America that is worse than Detroit?

Well, many would nominate Camden, New Jersey.

Many years ago, Camden was actually thriving and prosperous.  But today the city of Camden is known as "the second most dangerous city in America".

In a recent article entitled "City of Ruins", Chris Hedges did an amazing job of documenting the horrific decline of Camden.  Hedges estimates that the real rate of unemployment in Camden is somewhere around 30 to 40 percent, and he makes it sound like nobody in their right mind would want to live there now....

Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires; neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.

Gangs have stepped into the gaping void left by industry.  In Camden today, drugs and prostitution are two of the only viable businesses left - especially for those who cannot find employment anywhere else.  The following is how Hedges describes the current state of affairs....

There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city's few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.

But before we all start judging Camden for being such a horrible place to live, it is important to realize that this is happening in communities from coast to coast.  All over the United States industries are leaving and deep social decay is setting in.

Even the criminals in Camden are struggling.  Things have gotten so bad in Camden, New Jersey that not even the drug dealers are spending their money anymore.

So where are the police?

Unfortunately, there is very little money for police.  Authorities in Camden recently decided to lay off half of the city police force.

So now the gangs and the drug dealers have more room to operate.

Sadly, this is not just happening in Camden.  It is happening all over New Jersey.

Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Police union recently surveyed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.

So why doesn't the state government step in and help out?

Well, the state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.

New Jersey also has $46 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $65 billion in unfunded health care liabilities.  Nobody is quite sure how New Jersey is even going to come close to meeting those obligations.

Meanwhile, cities like Camden are rotting a little bit more every single day.

New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans had a struggling economy even before Hurricane Katrina struck back in 2005.  But that event changed everything.  It is now almost 6 years later and virtually the entire region is still a disaster zone.

New Orleans permanently lost 29% of its population after Hurricane Katrina.  There are many areas of New Orleans that still look as if they have just been bombed.

21.5 percent of all houses in New Orleans, Louisiana are currently standing vacant.  Many of those homes will never be inhabited again.

What made things even worse for New Orleans (and for residents all along the Gulf coast) was the horrific BP oil spill last year.  The mainstream news does not talk about the oil spill much anymore, but those living in the area have to deal with the effects every single day.

Some of the industries in the Gulf region were really starting to recover from Hurricane Katrina but the BP oil spill put a stop to that.

Before the oil spill, Louisiana produced more fish and seafood than anywhere in the United States except for Alaska.  But now the seafood industry has been absolutely devastated.  It has been estimated that the cost of the BP oil spill to the fishing industry in Louisiana alone could top 3 billion dollars.

Some local shrimpers in the region are projecting that it will be about seven years before they can set to sea again.

New Orleans keeps trying to bounce back from all of these disasters, but times are tough down there.

Today, New Orleans is the 13th most violent city in America.  That is actually an improvement.  Before Katrina New Orleans had even more violent crime.

The truth is that other areas along the Gulf coast are doing a lot worse than New Orleans is doing.  A ton of big corporate money has flowed into New Orleans.  Officials are trying to clean up the city and make it a huge tourist destination once again.

But in the surrounding areas things are not looking so bright.  There are areas along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida that are some of the most depressing places in the nation.

It is almost as if there are hundreds of thousands of people that time forgot.  In some rural areas along the Gulf coast the poverty is absolutely mind blowing.  There are very few jobs and there is very little hope.  Meanwhile, large numbers of people in the region continue to get sick from the toxic dispersants used to clean up the oil spill.

Let us hope that we don't see another major disaster in the Gulf of Mexico any time soon.  As it is, it is going to take decades for that region to fully recover.  There are a lot of really good people that live down there, and they deserve our prayers.

Vallejo, California (And Virtually The Rest Of The State Of California)

Almost the entire state of California is an economic disaster zone. Austerity measures are being implemented in city after city as tax revenues have nosedived.

The following is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article that describes the brutal austerity that has been implemented in Vallejo, California....

Vallejo is still in bankruptcy. The police force has shrunk from 153 officers to 92. Calls for any but the most serious crimes go unanswered. Residents who complain about prostitutes or vandals are told to fill out a form. Three of the city’s firehouses were closed. Last summer, a fire ravaged a house in one of the city’s better neighborhoods; one of the firetrucks came from another town, 15 miles away. Is this America’s future?

Sadly, that is what the future of America is going to look like.  Public services are being slashed all over the nation due to budget crunches.

Unless there is a major jobs recovery, the situation in California is going to continue to degenerate.  The truth is that the state of California needs millions and millions of new jobs just to get back to "normal".  For example, near the end of last year it was reported that 24.3 percent of the residents of El Centro, California were unemployed.  Not only that, as of the end of last year the number of people unemployed in the state of California was approximately equivalent to the entire populations of Nevada, New Hampshire and Vermont combined.

Businesses are closing in California at an astounding pace.  At one point last year it was reported that in the area around Sacramento, California there was one closed business for every six that were still open.

As a result of all of this, home prices in many areas of California have completely fallen off a cliff.  For example, the average home in Merced, California has declined in value by 63 percent over the past four years.

California also had more foreclosure filings that any other U.S. state in 2010.  The 546,669 total foreclosure filings during the year means that over 4 percent of all the housing units in the state of California received a foreclosure filing at some point during 2010.

Sadly, things don't look like they are going to turn around in California any time soon.  Forbes recently compiled a list entitled "Cities Where The Economy May Get Worse".

Six of the top seven spots were held by cities in California.

California is becoming a very frightening place.  When you combine high unemployment with unchecked illegal immigration what you get is rampant poverty.

20 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County are now receiving public aid of one form or another.

In particular, the number of children that are considered to be in need of public assistance is truly scary.

Incredibly, 60 percent of all the students attending California public schools now qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.

Poverty and illegal immigration have also caused a tremendous health care crisis in the state.  The hordes of illegal aliens taking advantage of "free" medical care at hospital emergency rooms have caused dozens of hospitals across the state of California to completely shut down.  As a result, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.

The bozos in Sacramento keep passing hundreds of new laws in an attempt to "fix" the state, but the truth is that for the poorest residents of the state all of those new laws don't make a shred of difference.

The following is how Victor Davis Hansen describes what he saw during his recent tour of the "forgotten areas of central California"....

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World . There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business - rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections - but apparently none of that applies out here.

Hansen also says that he observed that people in these areas are doing whatever they can to get by....

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when "food stamps" were embarrassing bulky coupons).

Are you frightened yet?

You know what they say - "as goes California, so goes the nation".

What is happening in California now is eventually going to come to your area.

Right now California is also having a huge problem with gangs.  Gang violence in America is getting totally out of control.  According to authorities, there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the country, and those gangs are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.

But instead of ramping up to fight crime and fight illegal immigration, police forces all over California are being cut back.

For example, because of extreme budget cuts and police layoffs, Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that there are a number of crimes that his department simply will no longer respond to due to a lack of resources.  The following is a partial list of the crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to....

• burglary
• theft
• embezzlement
• grand theft
• grand theft: dog
• identity theft
• false information to peace officer
• required to register as sex or arson offender
• dump waste or offensive matter
• loud music
• possess forged notes
• pass fictitious check
• obtain money by false voucher
• fraudulent use of access cards
• stolen license plate
• embezzlement by an employee
• extortion
• attempted extortion
• false personification of other
• injure telephone/power line
• interfere with power line
• unauthorized cable tv connection
• vandalism

Not that Oakland wasn't already a mess before all this, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?

Today, Oakland is considered the 5th most violent city in the United States.

Will it soon become the most violent?

But Oakland is not the only major California city that is facing these kinds of issues.

Things have gotten so bad in Stockton, California that the police union put up a billboard with the following message: "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops."

Already the police force in Stockton has been stripped down to almost nothing.

A while back, the Stockton Police Department dropped this bombshell....

"We absolutely do not have any narcotics officers, narcotics sergeants working any kind of investigative narcotics type cases at this point in time."

Do you think drug dealers will be flocking to Stockton after they hear that?

California was once the envy of the world.

Now it is becoming one gigantic hellhole.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The historical ones that that we have reveal that Detroit was a more civilized, cultured, and communal—as well technologically advanced—place in the first half of the century.

Stephen McNallen returns to AltRight Radio to discuss the comic-book movie Thor, as well as Pagan archetypes in popular culture across the decades.

The official website of McNallen's Asatru Folk Assembly can be visited here.

The AFA's webpage on "The Real Thor" can be visited here.   

HBD Chick relates, in uncapitalized, sparseley punctuated blogspeak, a story of a naive sociobiologist who, in the search for truth, offended a protected minority. 

you prolly heard by now that satoshi kanazawa says black women are ugly.

of course, he didn’t really, but who cares about silly little ol’ details like that.

what happened was kanazawa got some “attractiveness” data from add health. the evaluations were made “three times by three different interviewers over seven years” (during waves i – iii). the data showed that, consistently, black females scored lower in attractiveness than white, asian, or native american women; this did not happen in the case of black males.

andrew over @

“At this point, we have no idea who the interviewers who rated the students were. The attractiveness ratings would have been altered by varying degrees of prior familiarity between the individuals… whether the interviewers were of a certain age… the same sex or opposite sex breakdown… ingroup/outgroup… interviewer race… et cetera. There are simply a lot of variables that bring the reliability of attractiveness data into question. Perhaps this information is available, but it wasn’t in Kanazawa’s article, and I couldn’t find it on the study’s website.”

well, add health (a university of south carolina entity) apparently outsourced its fieldwork positions to both the national opinion research center (norc) of the university of chicago (waves i and ii) and rti international (wave iii).

fieldworkers seem to be part-time, contract workers, afaics. with the connection to the unversity of south carolina and the university of chicago, i was guessing that the fieldworkers were likely college students — maybe grad students interested in the field — sociology or whatever the heck it is (i’m talking about the interviewers here — i realize that the add health people are in the medical field). and, who winds up in sociology? mostly white women, with perhaps a few asian women thrown in. so, i was thinking that a lot of the interviewers might’ve been young white college women — and they might not find black women to be very attractive.

however, on the norc website, there are some videos of field interviewers explaining why they love their job, etc., etc., and they’re all older folks, i.e. not college students. of course, i’m sure this group is a pc-selected group — they’ve got almost all the races included there. but, still, three out of the five are white folks. if that is at all representative, then, yeah — there could, again, very well be some bias introduced here.

it’s still interesting that black women were consistently evaluated as the least attractive, but who were the evaluators? if they had been all black men, perhaps the results would’ve been different.

what i think is even more interesting is that blacks — both men and women — consistently rated themselves as attractive or highly attractive, more than members of the other races. black and proud! good for them!:

As you’ve probably heard by now, a Russian design firm has been condemned for…well…evoking fascism in a recent advertising campaign.

Russia's Winter Olympics slips into controversy over 'Nazi images'

Tom Parfitt

The Guardian

16 May 2011

A promotional campaign linked to the 2014 Winter Olympics is stirring debate in Russia because of its use of allegedly "fascist" imagery.

The campaign employs images of blue-eyed, blond sportsmen and women which have been described by critics as "neo-Hitlerite" and "like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film".

Images of an Aryan-looking snowboarder and an ice-skater gazing into the middle distance dominate giant billboards in Moscow and feature on the cover of brochures to advertise Gorky Gorod, an elite housing complex being built at Krasnaya Polyana near Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast. The complex is a private-public partnership which will be the Olympic media village at the 2014 Games.

"Without doubt the authors of this advertising were inspired by Nazi art," said Ekaterina Degot, a well-known art historian and former curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery.

When the billboards were put up, the Russian art collective Voina, itself known for its controversial painting of a 65-metre penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg, tweeted: "On Pushkinskaya Square opposite Gap, there is a huge advertisement, openly fascist in style, for elite housing in Sochi."

Degot and others said the style and pose of the subjects in the images was heavily suggestive of Nazi art which stresses racial purity and superiority.

The Guardian has learned that the images of the sportsmen were produced by Doping-Pong, a St Petersburg-based design company which uses a swastika as one of its online "banners".

One of the company's recent projects is a series of erotic photographs of two young women, one called a "fa" (fascist), the other an "antifa" (anti-fascist activist), who grapple with each other in a wrestling ring and tear off each other's clothes. The "fa" appears to win the fight and triumphantly wraps herself in a Nazi flag.

I have no doubt that the Dopingpong firm was, in some fashion, gesturing towards the “fascist” aesthetic of the '20s and '30s. A glance at its catalogue reveals that it does quite a bit of this. The degree to which these references are ironic or tongue-in-cheek, I’ll leave up to the reader. Since the images are overtly “retro,” Dopingpong has certainly applied at least one layer of irony. One might also add that the connotation is more of an era than an ideology: Stalinists were also keen on evoking a certain strong, wholesome, defiant aura; moreover, some public architecture of the New Deal era is cut from the same cloth of Albert Speer’s “Nazi” Classicism. (The offending poster also reminds me of those vintage mountaineering posters I always see on sale every winter.)

But in the end, all of this is besides the point.

What we glimpse in this episode is the degree to which egalitarianism is propagated—and the war on Whiteness, waged—aesthetically. A poster that displays blond, blue-eyed Slavs in heroic postures is deemed, by our opinion- and culture-makers, as a few steps away from Auschwitz. Other cultures are allowed to be grand: Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, can be glorified in gargantuan kitsch. Heroic art featuring White people, on the other hand, is viewed as immoral.

This trend in public display mirrors that in high art, in which centuries of neo-Classicism and Romanticism were, in essence, cancelled in favor of abstraction and modernism’s anti-aesthetic. As Wilmot Robertson noted, “In the dispossession of the [American] Majority, it is the Majority artist who so far has been the greatest casualty.”

The converse of this sad development is the utter tastelessness of current self-styled “conservatives,” whose sole aesthetic seems to be oversized billowing flags. (And they’re capable of much worse.)

Regardless of whether it’s “fascist” or not, the image of healthy, strong, defiant Europeans is what a truly pro-Western propaganda poster should look. And that’s why it’s attacked.

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

Satire is often prophecy. Take, for instance, this ridiculous 2010 video from The Onion: "US Treasury Sells Fort Knox Gold to Cash4Gold.com."

Sell all the gold in Fort Knox--that'd be absurd!  Well, here's this week's Washington Post:

The short answer is no.

The New York Times thinks it’s on to something in promoting a Pew study that, at first glance, demonstrates that the “economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.”

The reality is that “religious” differences largely track the racial-and-IQ spectrum that organs like the New York Times don’t like to talk about.

First off, the “Hindu” sample is so selective it should probably be thrown out. In Race Differences in Intelligence, Richard Lynn demonstrates that IQ on the Indian subcontinent covers a very wide bell curve; this results mostly from the great racial heterogeneity of the Indian people (or rather peoples), whose elite displays the characteristics—and intelligence—of their Aryan ancestors. Those who make it all the way to America on a H-1B visas are, no doubt, the crème de la crème.

Last weekend, the New York Times Magazine (!!) featured a largely fair and sympathetic story on the new leader of France's Front National, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, the long-time warrior of the nationalist Right.

With Sarkozy floundering and the likely Socialist candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of sodomizing an African chambermaid, Le Pen most certainly has a shot at the presidency. But as the Times alludes to, if Le Pen were to do well, the "mainstream" Left and Right would, no doubt, combine forces in order to prevent the ascension of an "extremist," much as Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin teamed up against Jean-Marie in 2002. Despite its pretensions of "liberal democracy," the Western world is essentially a one-party state.

I'm generally well disposed towards the Front National; indeed, I remember being enthusiastic during its 2002 insurgence. But after reading the Times profile, my feelings about Marine are decidedly mixed.

About a decade ago, Marine began to emerge as the daughter with the guts and political skills to take over the family business. She became a lawyer and worked behind the scenes in the party, with her father’s help, to become its vice president, edging past older male figures in the hard-nosed battle to succeed him. Jean-Marie Le Pen built the National Front out of a collection of fringe parties with overlapping but often conflicting agendas. The original core included avowed fascists, former members of the Vichy government that had been loyal to Hitler, anti-Jewish zealots, anti-immigrant nationalists and staunchly conservative Catholics. Jean-Marie held them together in part by using rhetoric that spoke to their fears and goals; that the same rhetoric kept the party isolated from the mainstream didn’t matter, because governing was never his objective.

Marine Le Pen has bigger ambitions, as the pollster Frédéric Micheau puts it, “to refresh the image of the far right.” Indeed, she insists she is not a figure of the far right at all and has belittled its racism as something for “people with small brains.” She has gambled that it is time for the party to leave the baggage of World War II behind. Or, as she said, “I have damage to repair, damage between the French people and the National Front.”

There are some obvious differences between Le Pen and her father, which partly account for her success and which she spelled out for me: “I’m a different person, a woman, a mother, in my 40s, of another generation.” There is also her political astuteness. The day before I met Le Pen, Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s interior minister, caused a stir by saying in a radio interview that “French people, in the face of uncontrolled immigration, sometimes feel they are no longer in their own home.” The words went against the careful line Sarkozy had been taking and echoed sentiments that Le Pen expressed. That same evening, she appeared at a press conference brandishing a laminated National Front membership card printed with the name Claude Guéant and invited him to join the party. The ploy made headlines across the country.

“Whose idea was the membership card?” I asked as we sat down. Le Pen shot up her hand with the sharp eagerness of a schoolgirl and smiled slyly. Then, clearly proud of her craft, she produced the card and laid it in front of me.

Le Pen works assiduously at the fine political balancing act of remaining loyal to her father — and maintaining the support of the party’s base — while distancing herself from the elder Le Pen’s outrageousness. She has jettisoned her father’s frank anti-Semitism, but she keeps the anti-immigrant policy plank as a central feature of the platform and will occasionally use headline-grabbing rhetoric, as when in December she likened the French having to endure Muslims praying on their streets to living under Nazi occupation.

She insists that her message on immigration is not xenophobic but rather commonsensical. She pointed repeatedly to the United States as a model: “In France, we often say the U.S. is a multicultural society, but it’s not. It’s multiethnic but one single culture. I don’t say that nobody should enter our country. On the contrary, in the old days immigrants entered France and blended in. They adopted the French language and traditions. Whereas now entire communities set themselves up within France, governed by their own codes and traditions.”

The economic crisis in the European Union has worked to her advantage as well. As a French nationalist and an anti-E.U. voice, she has called for France to drop the euro and return to the franc.

The real secret to her success, however, may be in her adroit scrambling of traditional leftist and rightist positions. Signaling a clear break from her father and the right in general, she has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

When I pointed out that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician, she shot back, “Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” and opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis.

First off, I unequivocally endorse Le Pen's desire to move the nationalist Right beyond the Second World War. Refighting these old battles is not only increasingly irrelevant but often become ruinous to building alliances between European nationalists.

And now for some good news!

From "Tyler Durden":

Strauss-Kahn Does Not Have Diplomatic Immunity

To all those who thought, himself probably included, that DSK would get away scott free from his most recent rape incident (as opposed to the metaphorical rape that the IMF has exercised over the decades over insolvent creditor nations), the Telegraph has one word: wrong. "Dominique Strauss-Kahn was told he does not have diplomatic immunity from prosecution against charges including alleged rape, said Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman."

Here's why:

According to the IMF's Articles of Agreement, officials have immunity "with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the Fund waives this".

The organisation demands that member countries notify it when officials are arrested, so that it can assess whether this applies. It is unclear what Mr Strauss-Kahn was doing in New York.

Under normal circumstances it is the managing director – Mr Strauss-Kahn – who decides whether immunity applies, provided the IMF's executive board does not veto his decision.

In a short statement, the IMF did not mention immunity and referred enquiries to Mr Strauss-Kahn's "personal lawyer and to the local authorities" It also appears that Nicolas Sarkozy's government is not making any attempt to protect Mr Strauss-Kahn.

One unnamed aide has told Le Monde: "To me, there is no immunity. It is a matter for the IMF and the host country, the United States. His Frenchness is not at stake."