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American schools

Found creative ways of boosting test results

31.03.2013 (updated 01.04.2013). For decades Americans have wondered how much it's possible to boost children's scholastic achievement. Not everyone has been willing to accept the current state of affairs, however, and now Beverly L. Hall, a former district superintendent who won fame and fortune for the performance of her students, has been charged with racketeering, theft and other crimes in the doctoring of students' test answers. Continue reading in The New York Times.

Neanderthals

Additional evidence that they interbred with early Europeans

31.03.2013. The skeletal remains of an individual living in northern Italy 40,000-30,000 years ago are believed to be that of a human/Neanderthal hybrid, according to a paper in PLoS ONE:

If further analysis proves the theory correct, the remains belonged to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. Prior genetic research determined the DNA of people with European and Asian ancestry is 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal:

[...]

The genetic analysis shows that the individual’s mitochondrial DNA is Neanderthal. Since this DNA is transmitted from a mother to her child, the researchers conclude that it was a “female Neanderthal who mated with male Homo sapiens.”

By the time modern humans arrived in the area, the Neanderthals had already established their own culture, Mousterian, which lasted some 200,000 years. Numerous flint tools, such as axes and spear points, have been associated with the Mousterian. The artifacts are typically found in rock shelters, such as the Riparo di Mezzena, and caves throughout Europe.

The researchers found that, although the hybridization between the two hominid species likely took place, the Neanderthals continued to uphold their own cultural traditions.

That's an intriguing clue, because it suggests that the two populations did not simply meet, mate and merge into a single group.

As Condemi and her colleagues wrote, the mandible supports the theory of "a slow process of replacement of Neanderthals by the invading modern human populations, as well as additional evidence of the upholding of the Neanderthals' cultural identity.”

Read the entire article in Live Science.

Labour

Betrayed the UK working class over immigration

23.03.2013. Throughout the Labour Party’s long, destructive period in office the party’s immigration policy represented a savage betrayal of the British people, writes Leo McKinstry in his article Labour betrayed the working class over immigration (link added by HT):

As the floodgates opened to new arrivals the very fabric of our country was transformed. Vast swathes of urban Britain became like a foreign land. Social cohesion collapsed. British workers were thrown on the economic scrapheap. No occupying foreign invader could have done more damage to Britain than the treacherous, unpatriotic governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. There is now growing public fury and despair over what has happened to our once well-ordered nation. 

[...]

An ideological attachment to mass immigration and multi-culturalism is written into the party’s DNA. What Miliband is really trying to do is not proclaim a new policy but to mislead the public. A ll his traits of hypocrisy, duplicity and opportunism were on full display in his party political broadcast last night. He said with phoney candour that Labour “got it wrong on immigration”. 

What a grotesque understatement. 

In truth Labour almost wrecked our nation with their aggressive social revolution, in which the rate of immigration was deliberately cranked up to almost 600,000 new arrivals every year. 

Our democracy has been subverted by tribalism at the ballot box, our justice system by sharia law. Vicious misogyny is rampant, reflected in the appalling incidence of honour killings and forced marriages. Incredibly the Home Office estimates that 24,000 girls in this country are at risk every year from the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation. Miliband’s blatherings last night would have been laughable were they not so offensive. He proclaimed in his broadcast that it is “not prejudiced” to worry about immigration yet Labour always painted critics of its open-door policy as xenophobes and racists. 

[...]

The fact is that 80 per cent of migrants vote Labour so the party hugely expanded its client base by demolishing our borders. In addition there was the ideological impulse. Contemptuous of Britain’s heritage, riddled with guilt about our past, filled with Marxist notions about victimhood and discrimination they were determined to refashion our society along the lines of their ideology. So the twin forces of mass immigration and multi-culturalism were used as weapons to create “a new social order” to quote the chilling words of Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman. Miliband was one of the architects of Labour’s immigration disaster. His broadcast should be treated with the same scorn that his party showed in office towards Britain’s national integrity.

Read the entire article in The Express.

Racist South Africa

The gruesome reality

23.03.2013. In July of 2012, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the nonprofit group Genocide Watch, conducted a fact-finding mission in South Africa. He concluded that there is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers, known as Boers. “The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental,” Stanton contended. “It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes,” he added — especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. “We don’t know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation,” he added. This is reported by Arnold Ahlert in his article The Gruesome Reality of Racist South Africa. A little later he continues:

The number of farm murders, or “plaasmoorde” as it is called in Afrikaans, is staggering. Over the last decade, it is estimated that at least 3000 Boers have been killed. Estimating the number of murders is necessary because the ANC has banned crime statistics from being compiled, claiming they scare off foreign investment. Moreover, the world knows little about the savagery that accompanies those killings. Many victims, including women and infant children, are raped or tortured before they are killed. Some have boiling water poured down their throats, some are burned with hot pokers, and some are hacked to death with machetes, or disemboweled. Several others have been tied to their own cars and dragged for miles.

The ANC, whose leader Jacob Zuma was reelected with over 75 per cent of the total voting delegates at the ANC National Conference held in Bloemfontein last December, denies that genocide is occurring, insisting that such attacks are part of the larger crime problem. Yet a report filed by the South African Institute of Race Relations notes that while crime has ostensibly declined between 1994 and 2011, “substantial numbers” of police stations have manipulated their crime statistics. The report sub-headline underscores the corrupt nature of crime statistics in the country: “Is this a true reflection of the crime statistics in South Africa? Who knows!” it states.

What is known is that the ANC celebrated in 100th year anniversary with a song led by President Zuma himself. “Dubula iBhunu” or “Shoot the Boer” was a line in the lyrics of an apartheid-era song, “Ayesaba Amagwala” (“the cowards are scared”) that violates the South Africa constitution prohibiting the “advocacy of hatred that is based on race … and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.”  Yet Zuma apparently felt no compunction to refrain from singing it, because the ANC considers it an integral part of the anti-apartheid movement that is part of their heritage.

[...]

Dr. Stanton concluded that Malema’s revival of a song advocating murder moved South Africa from the fifth stage on his genocidal scale to stage six. When the South African judiciary ruled it to be unlawful hate speech, Genocide Watch put South Africa back at stage five. When President Zuma was caught on tape January 2012 singing, “We are going to shoot them with the machine gun, they are going to run/You are a Boer, we are going to hit them, and you are going to run/shoot the Boer…” South Africa was raised to stage six once again.

Stage six is known as Preparation: “Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is expropriated. They are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.”

The sixth stage is followed by stage seven: Extermination.

[...]

Like so many societies where demonstrating who’s in control becomes a necessity, disarming the population becomes a priority. In 2010, the ANC-led regime changed the Firearms Registration Act, demanding that all legal guns be re-registered by July 31, 2011. In the process of re-registration, more than half the applicants were turned down, and 90 percent were turned down again on appeal. Thus, white farm families were forced to relinquish their last line of defense against the tens of thousands of criminal gangs roaming the countryside–armed with AK47s. and as Genocide Watch noted on its website last July one more step was taken as well. “The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” it reported. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”

[...]

Stanton sees a bigger picture. In a speech in Pretoria, organized by the Transvaal Agricultural Union, Stanton claimed the ANC was demonizing white farmers, who have been in South Africa since the 1600s, by calling them “settlers.” A Genocide Watch reports reveals the strategy behind those efforts. “High-ranking ANC government officials who continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers’ and ‘colonialists of a special type’ are using racial epithets in a campaign of state-sponsored dehumanization of the White population as a whole,” it stated. “They sanction gang-organized hate crimes against Whites, with the goal of terrorizing Whites through fear of genocidal annihilation.”

Read the entire article in FrontPage Magazine.

Euro-Islam

«Playing Two Different Pianos»

13.03.2013. Andrew E. Harrod has published "Euro-Islam" and Its Problems at Gatestone Institute. Some excerpts (links in original):

Benjamin Idriz, an imam who leads the Islamic Community Penzberg (Islamische Gemeinde Penzberg or IGP) in a town south of Munich, has achieved prominence in Germany as an exponent of a rational, modern understanding of Islam. Yet aspects of Idriz's biography and public positions call into question his enlightened image with unsettling links to radical Islamic elements.

Idriz presents his conception of Islam in his autobiographical 2010 book Grüß Gott, Herr Imam!: Eine Religion ist angekommen (Greetings Mr. Imam!: A Religion has Arrived). As Idriz describes in it, and online at his mosque's website, he "grew up in Macedonian Skopje in a multilingual house." His family counts a "series of venerable imams reaching back generations." Correspondingly, Idriz memorized the Koran by the age of 11, earning him the traditional Islamic honorific of hafiz.

Idriz's opus describes an Islam supportive of human morality and not sectarian barbarism. He regrets that "unfortunately there are in fact Muslims who mistake jihad for violence and terror, understand under sharia medieval corporal punishments, and propagate a conflict between Islam and the so-called Western culture." Idriz places in his "weekly sermons the main emphasis upon universal values…as old as our cosmos."

These universal and sectarian understandings, he writes, correspond to "two various forms of Islam." There is one version that "formed itself in the process of revelation as it was given to Muhammad." A second corrupted version "was instrumentalized for political goals after Muhammad's death…and was also strongly dogmatized in its dogma-free aspects."

Idriz concludes that "Islam, as Muhammad interpreted and lived it, possesses a universal character and has the capacity to adapt itself to every epoch and every place." In Muhammad, Idriz sees a person who encouraged people "to follow the voice of their conscience" in the name of a philosophically and theologically undefined "justice". Idriz thus places himself in the tradition of "rationality emphasizing" Muslims such as the Mutazilites of the 8-10^th centuries.

Accordingly, Idriz argues that regressive behaviors often associated with Islam such as the oppression of women derive from particular cultural conditions, not from Islam. Throughout history, Idriz claims, the "essential principles of Islam's belief remained the same" while Islam's "conception and practice…correspondingly adapted to the sociopolitical conditions of individual countries." Drawing upon his Balkan heritage extensively discussed in the book, Idriz contrasts the "proximity of the Bosnian understanding of Islam to the European mentality" with Islamic "oriental societies" supporting practices such as "honor murder."

Thus Idriz sees personal Islamic faith as compatible with a free polity. [...]

[...]

Such a Jekyll and Hyde mixture severely strains Idriz's credibility as a proponent of a 21^st century Islam. If Idriz is not actually concealing a stealth agenda as frequently made accusations of Islamic taqiyya suggest, then he is, at the very least, seriously confused. At any rate, Idriz has ultimately failed to present a convincing vision of Islam as a rational religion and a faith in harmony with political freedom. The search for moderate Muslims in Germany and elsewhere continues.

Read the entire article at Gatestone Institute. Hat tip Document.

Napoleon Chagnon

The struggle for scientific anthropology

11.03.2013. Evolutionary anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s new book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, is creating a considerable stir because it (gasp!) reiterates his findings that the behavior of the Yanomamö tribe of the Amazon basin was a good fit with an evolutionary model. Continue reading at The Occidental Observer.

Breivik trial

Yours truly lost his job soon after testifying in court

03.03.2013. Shortly after testifying as an expert witness for the defense in the Breivik case in 2012, the HT editor was asked to resign from his job in the R&D Department of DNV. The Norwegian daily Vårt Land recently ran the story, and an English translation has been made available at GoV.

Nine year old Aaron

«Bullied to death for being white»

01.03.2013. The devastated family of a nine-year-old boy who hanged himself say he took his life after racist taunts by Asian bullies, reports The Sun.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.