Novelist, essayist, and music producer Alex Kurtagic joins Richard to discuss the Right's need to reconnect to myth, aesthetics, and esotericism.

VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow joins Richard to discuss the recent Arizona immigration bill, the trajectory of the immigration debate on the American Right, and the theological injunction against despair.

Craig Bodeker joins Richard to discuss his 2008 film, _A Conversation About Race_, as well as his upcoming projects.

Kevin MacDonald joins Richard to discuss the Jewish intellectuals who refashioned the conservative movement in their own image.

Bill Murphy of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) joins Richard to discuss the manipulation of the gold and silver markets by the Federal Reserve and other big banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Stephen McNallen joins Richard Spencer to discuss the rites, rituals, and broader significance of the "indigenous religion of Europe."

The elevation of silly girl talk to the level of mountain top wisdom must surely be one of the signs of our coming Oprah-tastic Western apocalypse.

Marie Wilson, author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World , recently posted some silly girl talk, praising the virtue of vulnerability to The Huffington Post. In her piece Wilson uses the example of an oil rig where masculinity was artificially "re-shaped" to create an environment where "men, for the sake of safety and productivity, were encouraged to abandon the bravado, risk taking, and denying failure associated with tough jobs like these and make themselves, vulnerable." She muses that perhaps it would be better for everyone if the world were more like this oil rig, and brazenly incites women to collude to maintain a status quo that keeps "man-ly men behaviors in place."

Some evidence that racism is natural.

(Health.com) -- Humans are hardwired to feel another person's pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person's skin color doesn't match their own, a new study suggests.

When people say "I feel your pain," they usually just mean that they understand what you're going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other's pain (sort of).

If you see -- or even just think of -- a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don't perceive the pain physically.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process -- a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.

And immigration policy more than anything, if we desire a society where, you know, people care about their fellow citizens.

In the study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, people of Italian and African descent watched short film clips that showed needles pricking black- and white-skinned hands. As they watched, researchers measured the participants' empathy (i.e., their nervous-system activity) by monitoring sensors attached to the same spot on their hands. They also tracked the participants' heart rates and sweat-gland activity, a common measure of emotional response.

"White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models," says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.

The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. "This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play," says Avenanti.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that we naturally empathize with other living creatures that aren't humans who are members of other races. Or proximity leads to distrust.  But of course this is instead blamed indirectly on stereotypes, social conditioning, blah, blah, blah. The article even seems to suggest at the end that this could be used to justify affirmative action type policies for doctors, lest blacks not get treatment from people who feel their pain.

Once again, a healthy society flows with the current of human nature rather than demand we swim against it.  Achieving social harmony is difficult enough without the "blessing" of diversity.

There's reason to believe that the BP oil spill in the Gulf coast is much, much worse than is being let on... An investment banker in the energy industry, Matt Simmons, tells Bloomberg that Obama should send in the military and consider the nuclear option! 

How is it possible that Rand Paul could have been so unprepared for Rachel Maddow's persistent questioning on the race issue? He claimed on her TV program that civil rights "hadn't been a real pressing issue on the campaign." Yet his National Public Radio interview on May 19 shows that he has been down this road before, similarly dodging questions and talking around the issue, while indicating confusion when the subject of race was brought up. According to Frank Rich, Paul had been known to express his views on race as far back as 2002.

Wasn't there time between that little NPR fiasco and the Maddow debacle for his advisers to sit him down and sort out the preferred approaches on all kinds of subjects? You know, "This is the way we're gonna handle this issue." He does have advisers, doesn't he?

How could it come as a surprise that race, of all subjects, would be front and center for any candidate, especially a declared Republican? Such lack of insight betrays a peculiar denseness. The subject of race is a "pressing issue" in every campaign and will remain so, as long as white men like Rand Paul can so easily be backed into a corner and put on the defensive. Maddow simply picked up on Paul's obvious discomfort during the previous NPR interview and ran with it.