THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Monday, June 7, 2010

Image of the Day: Cosmic Bullet Traveling at 5 Million MPH


Image of the Day: Cosmic Bullet Traveling at 5 Million MPH



 
This beautiful composite image shows N49, the aftermath of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A new long observation from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, shown in blue, reveals evidence for a bullet-shaped object being blown out of debris field left over from an exploded star.

To detect this odd object, a team of researchers led by Sangwook Park of Penn State University used Chandra to observe N49 for over 30 hours. This bullet can be seen in the bottom right hand corner of the image (see the labeled version of the image) and is rich in silicon, sulphur and neon. The detection of this bullet shows that the explosion that destroyed the star was highly asymmetric.

The bullet is traveling at a high speed of about 5 million miles an hour away from a bright point source in the upper left part of N49. This bright source may be a so-called soft gamma ray repeater (SGR), a source that emits bursts of gamma rays and X-rays. A leading explanation for these objects is that they are neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields. Since neutron stars are often created in supernova explosions, an association between SGRs and supernova remnants is not unexpected. This case is strengthened by the apparent alignment between the bullet's path and the bright X-ray source. However, the new Chandra data also shows that the bright source is more obscured by gas than expected if it really lies inside the supernova remnant. In other words, it is possible that the bright X-ray source actually lies beyond the remnant and is projected along the line of sight. Another possible bullet is located on the opposite side of the remnant, but it is harder to see in the image because it overlaps with the bright emission - described below - from the shock- cloud interaction.

Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (yellow and purple) shows bright filaments where the shock wave generated by the supernova is interacting with the densest regions in nearby clouds of cool, molecular gas.

Using the new Chandra data, the age of N49 -- as it appears in the image -- is thought to be about 5,000 years and the energy of the explosion is estimated to be about twice that of an average supernova. These preliminary results suggest that the original explosion was caused by the collapse of a massive star.

Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/S. Park et al. Optical: NASA/STScI/UIUC/Y.H. Chu & R. Williams et al.

Image of the Day: Stunning Island Universe


Image of the Day: Stunning Island Universe Begs the Question: "Are We Alone?"



This gorgeous island universe  just begs the question: "are we alone?" With an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, we think not. Well, perhaps in the Milky Way. NGC 7331, 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, is often touted as a twin spiral analog to our Galaxy. NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog. 


Since the galaxy's disk is inclined to our line-of-sight, long telescopic exposures often result in an image that evokes a strong sense of depth. The effect is further enhanced in this well-framed view by the galaxies that lie beyond. The background galaxies are about one tenth the apparent size of NGC 7331 and so lie roughly ten times farther away.
Image credit: Vicent Peris (OAUV/CAHA/PTeam)

Ancient Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting the Milky Way -Clues to Dark Matter?


Ancient Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting the Milky Way -Clues to Dark Matter?

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Dwarf galaxies are faint, inconspicuous systems with only a few million stars, but they may ultimately play a key role in understanding dark matter. Measurements of the random motions of stars in nearby dwarf galaxies show that these galaxies may require a much larger fraction of dark matter than normal galaxies. They may be the best places to search for X-rays or gamma-rays which could result from the decay or annihilation of dark matter particles.
Astronomers recently discovered a relic from the early universe -- a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.
Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies with just a few billion stars, compared to hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. In the "bottom-up model" of galaxy formation, large galaxies attained their size over billions of years by absorbing their smaller neighbors.
"If you watched a time-lapse movie of our galaxy, you would see a swarm of dwarf galaxies buzzing around it like bees around a beehive," explained Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center. "Over time, those galaxies smashed together and mingled their stars to make one large galaxy -- the Milky Way."
If dwarf galaxies are indeed the building blocks of larger galaxies, then the same kinds of stars should be found in both kinds of galaxies, especially in the case of old, "metal-poor" stars. To astronomers, "metals" are chemical elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Because they are products of stellar evolution, metals were rare in the early Universe, and so old stars tend to be metal-poor.
Old stars in the Milky Way's halo can be extremely metal-poor, with metal abundances 100,000 times poorer than in the Sun, which is a typical younger, metal-rich star. Surveys over the past decade have failed to turn up any such extremely metal-poor stars in dwarf galaxies, however.
"The Milky Way seemed to have stars that were much more primitive than any of the stars in any of the dwarf galaxies," says co-author Josh Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution. "If dwarf galaxies were the original components of the Milky Way, then it's hard to understand why they wouldn't have similar stars."
The team suspected that the methods used to find metal-poor stars in dwarf galaxies were biased in a way that caused the surveys to miss the most metal-poor stars. Team member Evan Kirby, a Caltech astronomer, developed a method to estimate the metal abundances of large numbers of stars at a time, making it possible to efficiently search for the most metal-poor stars in dwarf galaxies.
"This was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. We needed to find a needle in a stack of needles," said Kirby. "We sorted through hundreds of candidates to find our target."
Among stars he found in the Sculptor dwarf galaxy was one faint, 18th-magnitude speck designated S1020549. Spectroscopic measurements of the star's light with Carnegie's Magellan-Clay telescope in Las Campanas, Chile, determined it to have a metal abundance 6,000 times lower than that of the Sun; this is five times lower than any other star found so far in a dwarf galaxy.
The researchers measured S1020549's total metal abundance from elements such as magnesium, calcium, titanium, and iron. The overall abundance pattern resembles those of old Milky Way stars, lending the first observational support to the idea that these galactic stars originally formed in dwarf galaxies.
The researchers expect that further searches will discover additional metal-poor stars in dwarf galaxies, although the distance and faintness of the stars pose a challenge for current optical telescopes. The next generation of extremely large optical telescopes, such as the proposed 24.5-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, equipped with high-resolution spectrographs, will open up a new window for studying the growth of galaxies through the chemistries of their stars.
In the meantime, says Simon, the extremely low metal abundance in S1020549 study marks a significant step towards understanding how our galaxy was assembled. "The original idea that the halo of the Milky Way was formed by destroying a lot of dwarf galaxies does indeed appear to be correct."
New observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood hidden until recently in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. In comparison to the Milky Way, most dwarf galaxies are blob-like, 85% smaller (around 6700 vs 100,000 light-years across), containing around 30 billion stars.
When the Universe was just a fraction of its current age, and galaxies such as the one we inhabit were nowhere to be seen, stars formed inside odd structures, that have long since disappeared.  These structures are called dwarf irregulars, and the scientist believes that the peculiar type of stellar formation processes they display may resemble the original one and may provide clues as to how stars appeared shortly after the Big Bang. 
Unlike massive galaxies, such as the Milky Way, with highly-defined central regions, spiral arms and so on, dwarf irregulars are very small and diffuse groups of stars, which are the last thing to spring to mind when thinking of the word “galaxy”. Star formation in dwarfs today is similar to star formation right after the Big Bang.
“We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now,” says Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper reporting the study. “Our improved approach allows us to uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars.”

Primitive stars are thought to have formed from material forged shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. They typically have less than one thousandth the amount of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium found in the Sun and are called “extremely metal-poor stars." They belong to one of the first generations of stars in the nearby Universe. Such stars are extremely rare and mainly observed in the Milky Way.
Cosmologists think that larger galaxies like the Milky Way formed from the merger of smaller galaxies. Our Milky Way’s population of extremely metal-poor or “primitive” stars should already have been present in the dwarf galaxies from which it formed, and similar populations should be present in other dwarf galaxies. Metals” are all the elements other than hydrogen and helium. Such metals, except for a very few minor light chemical elements, have all been created by the various generations of stars.
“So far, evidence for them has been scarce,” says co-author Giuseppina Battaglia. “Large surveys conducted in the last few years kept showing that the most ancient populations of stars in the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies did not match, which was not at all expected from cosmological models.”
Element abundances are measured from spectra, which provide the chemical fingerprints of stars . Since the dwarf galaxies are typically 300 000 light years away — which is about three times the size of our Milky Way — only strong features in the spectrum could be measured, like a vague, smeared fingerprint. The team found that none of their large collection of spectral fingerprints actually seemed to belong to the class of stars they were after, the rare, extremely metal-poor stars found in the Milky Way.

The team of astronomers around Starkenburg has now shed new light on the problem through careful comparison of spectra to computer-based models. They found that only subtle differences distinguish the chemical fingerprint of a normal metal-poor star from that of an extremely metal-poor star, explaining why previous methods did not succeed in making the identification.

The astronomers also confirmed the almost pristine status of several extremely metal-poor stars thanks to much more detailed spectra obtained with the UVES instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. “Compared to the vague fingerprints we had before, this would be as if we looked at the fingerprint through a microscope,” explains team member Vanessa Hill. “Unfortunately, just a small number of stars can be observed this way because it is very time consuming.”

“Among the new extremely metal-poor stars discovered in these dwarf galaxies, three have a relative amount of heavy chemical elements between only 1/3000 and 1/10 000 of what is observed in our Sun, including the current record holder of the most primitive star found outside the Milky Way,” says team member Martin Tafelmeyer.
“Not only has our work revealed some of the very interesting, first stars in these galaxies, but it also provides a new, powerful technique to uncover more such stars,” concludes Starkenburg. “From now on there is no place left to hide!”
Casey Kazan via materials provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Is Earth's Biodiversity Linked to the Solar-System's Milky Way Orbit?


June 01, 2010

Is Earth's Biodiversity Linked to the Solar-System's Milky Way Orbit? Experts Say "Yes"


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In 1999, Astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way, measured precisely how long it takes the sun to complete one orbit (a galactic year) of our home galaxy: 226 million years.

The last time the sun was at that exact spot of its galactic orbit, dinosaurs ruled the world. The Solar System is thought to have completed about 20–25 orbits during its lifetime or 0.0008 orbit since the origin of humans.
Using a radio telescope system that measures celestial distances 500 times more accurately than the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers plotted the motion of the Milky Way and found that the sun and its family of planets were orbiting the galaxy at about 135 miles per second. That means it takes the solar system about 226 million years to orbit the Milky Way and puts the most precise value ever determined on one of the fundamental motions of the Earth and its sun.
The sun circles the Milky Way at a speed of about 486,000 miles per hour. And every object in the universe is moving apart from the other objects as the universe expands at a constantly accelerating rate.
The sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, one of billions of ordinary galaxies in the universe. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with curving arms of stars pinwheeling out from a center.The solar system is about halfway out on one of these arms and is about 26,000 light years from the center. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.
For their solar system measurement, the astronomers focused on Sagittarius A, a star discovered over two decades ago to mark the Milky Way's center. Over a 10-day period, they measured the apparent shift in position of the star against the background of stars far beyond. The apparent motion of Sagittarius A is very, very small, just one-600,000th of what could be detected with the human eye, the astronomers said.
The measurement adds supports to the idea that the Milky Way's center contains a supermassive black hole- an object, much smaller than our own solar system, contains a black hole about 2.6 million times more massive than the sun.
Earlier this year, a team of researchers at the University of Kansas came up with an out-of-this-world explanation for the phenomenon of mass extinctions on Earth that hinges upon the fact that stars move through space and sometimes rush headlong through galaxies, or approach closely enough to cause a brief cosmic tryst.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that marine fossil records show that biodiversity increases and decreases based on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory.
Our own star moves toward and away from the Milky Way's center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously close to the Earth's biodiversity cycle.
Once the researchers independently confirmed the biodiversity cycle, they then proposed a novel mechanism whereby which the Sun's galactic travels is causing it.
It’s no secret that the Milky Way is being gravitationally pulled toward a massive cluster of galaxies, called the Virgo Cluster, which is located about 50 million light years away. Adrian Melott and his colleague Mikhail Medvedev, speculate that as the Milky Way rushes towards the Virgo Cluster, it generates a so-called bow shock in front of it that is similar to the shock wave created by a supersonic jet.
"Our solar system has a shock wave around it, and it produces a good quantity of the cosmic rays that hit the Earth. Why shouldn't the galaxy have a shock wave, too?" Melott asks.
The galactic bow shock is only present on the north side of the Milky Way's galactic plane, because that is the side facing the Virgo Cluster as it moves through space, and it would cause superheated gas and cosmic rays to stream behind it, the researchers say. Normally, our galaxy's magnetic field shields our solar system from this "galactic wind." But every 64 million years, the solar system's cyclical travels take it above the galactic plane.
"When we emerge out of the disk, we have less protection, so we become exposed to many more cosmic rays," Melott has said.
The boost in cosmic-ray exposure may have a direct effect on Earth's organisms, according to paleontologist Bruce Lieberman. The radiation would lead to higher rates of genetic mutations in organisms or interfere with their ability to repair DNA damage. In this way, the process could lead to new species while killing off others.
Cosmic rays are also associated with increased cloud cover, which could cool the planet by blocking out more of the Sun's rays. They also interact with molecules in the atmosphere to create nitrogen oxide, a gas that eats away at our planet's ozone layer, which protects us from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
Richard Muller, one of the UC Berkeley physicists who co-discovered the cycle, said Melott and his colleagues have come up with a plausible galactic explanation for the biodiversity cycle.
If future studies confirm the galaxy-biodiversity link, it would force scientists to broaden their ideas about what can influence life on Earth. "Maybe it's not just the climate and the tectonic events on Earth," Lieberman said. "Maybe we have to start thinking more about the extraterrestrial environment as well."

A California Refugee Remembers How The Golden State Used To Be…And Nearly Cries


June 06, 2010

06/05/10 - A San Francisco Reader Prepares To Hand California Over To Mexico

A California Refugee Remembers How The Golden State Used To Be…And Nearly Cries

From: “Happier in Texas” (e-mail her)
When I read my letter [BELOW] posted last month about being “squeezed out” of California by illegal aliens, it got me to thinking.
My father passed away 15 years ago but my mother is remarried and lives near Ontario in Southern California.  We speak about the immigration problem a great deal.  Mom is upset about the aliens taking over and said that if she wasn't so old and set in her ways, she would also leave California because she no longer recognizes it.
I have an old section of an orange crate from Visalia in my office, most likely at least 50 years old, which has an image of beautiful ripe oranges in the foreground, with a valley stretching for miles full of fruit trees and lovely snow-capped mountains in the background.
This is how I prefer to remember California---as something long ago in a dream somewhere, a place of beauty and peace, overflowing with fruits and vegetables to share with the world. 
But if I think about the old California too long, I may cry.

A California Refugee Says Illegal Aliens “Squeezed” Her Out; etc.

From:  “Happier in Texas” (e-mail her)
Re: Joe Guzzardi’s Column: So Long, California—Thanks For The Memories
Guzzardi’s California experiences mirror mine.
I lived all over California for 40 years. But I moved from my beloved state in 2002 because I felt squeezed out by the constant flow of illegals. Although I had a bachelor’s degree in social services, I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t speak Spanish.
In 2001, the last time I attended the Monterey County Fair, the Mexican flag flew above the American flag. I asked an official why that was permitted. She replied matter-of-factly that California belonged to Mexico because the United States stole it. She added that Mexico is gradually reclaiming California by becoming the demographic majority.
That was it for me. I couldn't get a job, my kids were beaten up and picked on for not being brown enough and the school administrators were too afraid they would upset the Hispanics so they did nothing
My youngest daughter was taught in immersion classes where all the instruction is in Spanish. Because she was a newcomer, she and the other kids who didn't know Spanish were kept in a mobile classroom in the back of the school like lepers. 
The California I knew was dead. My father had come to America from Serbia back in 1950. He didn't know English well, but he joined the U.S. Army as a way to fast-track his naturalization.
My mother was born in Puerto Rico but spoke nothing but English around our home. My parents were proud of their citizenship. All we kids were raised on English-only and assimilated by celebrating even minor events like St. Patrick's Day and Halloween.
Disgusted, I moved to Texas where my brother and his family had already moved to for the same immigration-related reasons I did. I haven’t been back to California since. I gave the whole state the finger when I reachedNeedles and the Arizona border!
Texas, like Guzzardi’s Pennsylvania, has a unique culture that is celebrated by its residents. There has been a great deal of subversion from the illegal immigrant population but Texans, unlike Californians, fight back.
God bless them for that! 
Thanks to Guzzardi for putting into words what I have been unable to explain to people when they ask, "Why in the world would you leave beautiful California for ugly ol' Texas?"
My answer is that, as Guzzardi wrote, California is no longer part of the United States. California is a little like, say,Haiti....pretty on the beaches, but you wouldn't want to live there.
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A Mid-Western American Worker Is Still Waiting For The Arizona Effect To Take Hold In His State

From:  Kyle Dunlap (e-mail him)
Re: Ed Rubenstein’s Column: April American Worker Displacement: Is An “Arizona Effect” Showing Up?
I'd love to think Rubenstein is correct that the Arizona effect created by S. B. 1070 is spreading throughout the United States. In my experience, however, that’s not the case.
I live in a small mid-western state. After a year of working only part time, I landed a job with a small manufacturing company. The shop floor is more than 50 percent Mexican, most of whom speak little English.
Last week in an all-employee meeting the manager told the workforce (using a translator for the non-English speakers) that the company is considering launching a second shift.
The new jobs have not been advertised. But last week, carloads of Mexicans showed up to submit applications.
The company personnel specialist got his position because he is multilingual. He’s busy calling around to let the illegal alien community know about the openings.
Anyone who manages a multimillion dollar company like mine cannot be naive enough to think all the employees hired in this fashion are legal workers.
Legions of illegal immigrants are eager to jump into any jobs an economic recovery may bring and plenty ofgreedy anti-American business owners are ready to profit from their low wages.
I don't see any Arizona effect here—I wish I did!
To all of you at VDARE.COM, keep up the good fight.
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A Legal Taiwanese Immigrant Implores Republicans To Understand The Consequences Of Over-Immigration

From: Shih-Yi Kuan (e-mail her)
As a legal immigrant, a proud American citizen and a minority, I consider Arizona’s S.B. 1070 as a ray of hope. I hope other states will institute similar measures.
But I’m concerned that prominent politicians still don’t get it.
For example, Florida U.S. Senate Republican candidate Marco Rubio has the potential to be an effective legislator and possibly a future president.
However, I was disappointed at his initial criticism of S.B. 1070. Then, Rubio redeemed himself when he supported the bill’s amended version that minimized the chances of racial profiling.
Still Rubio sends mixed message about immigration. His statement that "the federal government ...has failed to provide a legal immigration system that works” indicates that Rubio is among the many Republicans who think immigration should be easier and that we should have more of it.
What Republicans must learn is that we cannot have a free country if it’s overrun by unassimilated immigrants.
With the exception of the first wave of Cubans, most immigrant groups consistently vote for leftist Democrats. This is particularly true of illegal immigrants from Mexico who have little education.
For generations, Mexicans have lagged in academic and financial success. In short, they become part of apermanent underclass with a vested interest in getting as much from the government as possible. Essentially, they become wards of a Democrat socialist government.
Immigration is America’s biggest problem. Most immigrants, especially those from Third World countries, do not come from cultures which value individual freedom and the rule of law.
They come to make money and have little interest in the Constitution. Our schools no longer teach traditional American values but instead instill ideas of socialism and balkanization through multiculturalism.
Democrats understand this and accordingly are enthusiasts of massive immigration as a way to increase government dependency and a solid base of future voters.
By increasing the number of government employees and those dependent on government, the Left is building a coalition which will ensure socialism into the future. That is what they have done in European countries like Britainand that is the plan here.
prosperous middle class is the best insurance of our survival. By undercutting wages with imported cheap labor, Republicans may make business interests happy in the short term but will destroy us in the long term.
Still, the Republicans represent American best chance to insure that American values will continue. But the GOP must stop pandering to immigrant groups and start acting in the nation’s best interests.
I hold out little hope that the federal government will deter the illegal invasion.
In the end, it does not matter if we build an underclass illegally or legally, the result will be the same—the loss of our liberties and the prosperity which made America the best country in the world’s history.

S. Sailer: What The Flotilla Furor Says About America’s Jewish Elite


What The Flotilla Furor Says About America’s Jewish Elite

By Steve Sailer
I haven't had anything to say previously about that fatal Israeli naval encounter with the Gaza-bound flotilla on May 31, 2010 … because I don't much care. Israel is not the 51st state; it’s one of a couple of hundred other countries. If Israel wants to push around the Palestinians, well, that’s their business much more than it is my business.
What I do care about is America. My particular bias is that free, insightful public discussion is better for America than spin, ignorance, or wishful thinking. So I'm interested in the flotilla frenzy to the extent it has implications for the quality of American discourse.
Chosen, but not Special is a long op-ed in the June 4th New York Times by the gifted Jewish-American novelist Michael Chabon. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, an impressively researched historical novel that manages to be both literary and entertaining. It’s about two Jewish teens in New York who invent a Superman-style comic book superhero during Hitler’s ascendancy in 1939-1942.
In the NYT, Chabon uses Israel’s PR disaster to wrestle with the important question of Jewish intelligence. Awareness of higher average Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence happens to be the essential key to understanding the peculiarities of what you are allowed to write about in modern America.
Chabon discusses Jewish discomfort with the handful of gentiles who dare write about the fact of higher median Jewish IQ:
"For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. "
Yiddish kops is, of course, Yiddish for "Jewish brains." In contrast, goyisher kops means "gentile brains." The New Joys of Yiddish notes that the latter phrase "is not, alas, complimentary."
Chabon continues:
"These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled "Jewish Genius," or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile."
Chabon frets about the perceived dangers of gentiles talking about the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews:
"Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction."
Chabon, who is obviously stronger at creative than analytic thinking, announces, with no cited evidence other than the flotilla fiasco, that "Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people."
What’s valuable about his op-ed, however, is how it illuminates much about the subject of Jewish intelligence that is normally obscured---such as how convinced Jews are of their own intellectual superiority.
Chabon begins:
"’GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity’ declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis—and, indeed, for Jews everywhere—this felt like headline news."
Why? According to Chabon:
" … for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness."
It shouldn’t have appeared unprecedented: the most obvious predecessor to Israel’s raid on the flotilla was its1967 attack in roughly the same international waters on the USS Liberty, when the Israeli military killed 34 American seamen. Blockheadedness is the most innocent explanation that has yet been offered for Israel’s two-hour long air and sea assault on the clearly-marked American intelligence-gathering ship.
Personally, I care more about the Liberty than this Turkish-organized flotilla.
Of course, how many other Americans remember the Liberty? This event is certainly not frequently commemorated in our domestic media. Chabon, for instance, doesn’t mention it—is he even aware of it?—although it might be the best example he could find in support of his rather flimsy thesis.
Chabon has much of value to say on how convinced Jews are of their own average brilliance:
"… Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power."
He continues:
"As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people ofMaimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics."
By the way, Chabon’s mother was a lawyer, while his father was both a lawyer and a doctor.
Ockham’s Razor would suggest that the reason why smart Jews like Chabon’s relatives think that Jews tend to be pretty smart is—because Jews tend to be pretty smart. But William of Ockham’s Anglo logic is too simplistic for Chabon. You see, there are exceptions! And that, somehow, disproves the generalization:
"In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over—God love them—any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder."
Chabon has a more complicated (and, thus, in his mind, better) explanation:
 "… to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of Goodbye, Columbus from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before—Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people—but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them."
That’s so smart it’s stupid.
If meeting stupid Jews always comes as a shock to Jews, even to one as brilliant and scornful as the author ofPortnoy’s Complaint, then the straightforward explanation is that they are, indeed, relatively rare.
Exceptions don’t disprove tendencies. In fact, when exceptions are famous for their exceptionality, that’s evidencefor the pattern. Unfortunately, in an intellectual climate where pointing out that a generalization is a "stereotype"(i.e., many people have noticed it) is consider a crushing refutation of its truthfulness, few grasp these logical rules.
In sum, Chabon is just being blockheaded in the socially approved manner.
Why do modern people congratulate themselves on being smart when they proclaim that something as interesting and important as Jewish intelligence is just a socially constructed myth? Do they have any idea how much work it requires to come up with a reasonable theory for Jewish brains?
Moreover, it’s absurd for Chabon to say that Jews have been brought up to ignore stupid Jews. Calling each other stupid was the favorite pastime of Eastern European shtetl Jews. AISH.com says:
"Face it. We Jews don't bear fools lightly. Who had time? So is it surprising that we have more words in Yiddish for fools than there are Golden Arches?"
Yiddish is the world’s best language for pointing out fine distinctions in your neighbor’s cognitive impairment:schnook, schlemielschmoyutzputzschmuckyeklschlub, golemnaryold.
In reality, characteristic Jewish mistakes tend to arise from overthinking, from their facility at intellectually bullying dissidents reliant merely upon common sense.
Consider how many Jewish Communists spent the 22 months from the signing of the Nazi-Communist Pact on August 23, 1939 to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 thinking up reasons to denounce Churchill’s resistance to Hitler. That kind of astonishing doublethink inspired George Orwell’s 1984.
Tellingly, even though most of Chabon’s masterpiece, Kavalier & Clay, is set in 1940 and 1941 in Jewish New York City cultural circles, and even though Kavalier has recently escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe through the Soviet Union to Japan, the characters never mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In reality, the Hitler-Stalin accord was an obsessive topic for New York Jews at the time, but it’s a little too disturbing for modern readers.
In essence, as Chabon’s Passover stories imply, Jewish liberal egalitarianism is a hoax. Jewish leftist intellectuals like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose have been the foremost volunteer thought policemen on IQ differences, not because leftist Jews believe that all ethnic groups are equal in average intelligence, but because they don’t.
The root of political correctness is the Rube Goldbergian fear that if the goyisher kops are allowed to be exposed to realism about human differences, they will eventually realize that Jews tend to be smarter than them, and then they will come after the Jews with torches and pitchforks.
It’s a characteristic example of Jews using all those IQ points to overthink what’s increasingly a non-problem, only to wind up exacerbating bigger problems, such as contemporary immigration policy.
Of course, worrying about peasants with pitchforks in 2010 is laughable. And that’s what everyone—gentiles and Jews—should do with this line of thinking: laugh at it. Satire is the solution. If Jews were as amenable to kidding by gentiles as WASPs had been to Jewish comedians, they would be less prone to inflicting their complexes upon American policy.
Sadly, Chabon doesn’t get the joke. He concludes with a long peroration about how everyone, Jew and gentile alike, should just forget the "myth," the "nonsense," that Jews tend to be smarter and just hold Israel to the same standard as everywhere else.
That’s fine with me, but what about America?
Allow me to suggest a completely different moral. The clear evidence of higher average Ashkenazi IQ implies that American Jews should take to heart an admirable bit of 20th Century Jewish wisdom, one with which an expert on comic books like Chabon ought to be familiar---Stan Lee’s line in Spider-Man"With great power comes great responsibility."
If, say, as reported by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Jews make up over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400, and if Jews make up half of the 2009 Atlantic 50 of most influential political pundits, then that implies that Jews, owing in part to their higher average cognitive functioning, should embrace greater responsibility.
Instead of viewing themselves as beleaguered victims, they should admit that they now comprise an elite within America---and that they should apply to themselves an updated version of the old cavalier concept of noblesse oblige.

JUDAISM AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP


JUDAISM AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP

NETUREI  KARTA

It is one of the basic tenets of our faith that the Jewish people must be just and ethical in their dealings with all mankind. The Torah (Jewish teachings) calls upon us to maintain gratitude and loyalty to the nation in which we reside.
Many Torah Jews live in the United State of America, a land that has provided us with a home since its founding. We are ever mindful of this fact and the debt of passionate good citizenship that it obligates.
Our opposition to the existence of the state of "Israel" is such that it pains us to see many American politicians supportive of that government's every move and whim. We understand that this support is well intentioned. It had its roots in the past -- World War II American sympathy for the terrible fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust and their plight thereafter. For these good intentions of the United States government we are also grateful.
However, we must emphasize that, in truth, the existence of the state of "Israel" is not a positive thing for the Jewish people. It has reaped an awful harvest both spiritually and physically. Rather than expend so much money, political effort and military arms to maintain it in existence, it would be far better to work towards the peaceful dismantling of the state of "Israel" and transferring its governance to others. This is the true path to peace, being that this is the will of the Almighty.
The Jewish law dictates that the Jewish nation is forbidden to have their own entity in exile, prior to the coming of the Messiah. At that time, the glory of the Almighty will be revealed and all His creations will understand to be subservient to Him and to serve Him in harmony. Accordingly, the creation of a state of "Israel" is against the Jewish religion, most certainly this state, which is not governed by the Torah law. Ironically, this state makes it a policy of trampling on the Jewish laws, and on those that strictly abide by those laws.
The Torah states that if you will transgress the word of the Almighty, you will not be successful; The state of Israel cannot be successful (verse of Torah).
May we merit to see, soon in our days, the peaceful and speedy dismantlement of the State of "Israel", and the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophesies "And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. No nation will lift its sword against any other, nor will they learn warfare anymore", the day when all humanity will recognize the rule of the One G-d and serve Him harmoniously in peace and happiness. Amen.