Sleep Disorders and Insomnia

 Michael Bengston, M.D.

Sleep disorders affect a lot more people than you may realize -- up to 20% of Americans in any given year according to the National Institutes of Health. These disorders and the resulting sleep deprivation interfere with work, driving, and social activities. The most common sleep disorders include insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and narcolepsy.

How Much Sleep Do We Need? 

 

The amount of sleep each person needs depends on many factors, including age. Infants generally require about 16 hours a day, while teenagers need about 9 hours on average. For most adults, 7 to 8 hours a night appears to be the best amount of sleep, although some people may need as few as 5 hours or as many as 10 hours of sleep each day. Women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual. The amount of sleep a person needs also increases if he or she has been deprived of sleep in previous days. Getting too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," which is much like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid. We don’t seem to adapt to getting less sleep than we need; while we may get used to a sleep-depriving schedule, our judgment, reaction time, and other functions are still impaired.
People tend to sleep more lightly and for shorter time spans as they get older, although they generally need about the same amount of sleep as they needed in early adulthood. About half of all people over 65 have frequent sleeping problems, such as insomnia, and deep sleep stages in many elderly people often become very short or stop completely. This change may be a normal part of aging, or it may result from medical problems that are common in elderly people and from the medications and other treatments for those problems.
Experts say that if you feel drowsy during the day, even during boring activities, you haven’t had enough sleep. If you routinely fall asleep within 5 minutes of lying down, you probably have severe sleep deprivation, possibly even a sleep disorder. Microsleeps, or very brief episodes of sleep in an otherwise awake person, are another mark of sleep deprivation. In many cases, people are not aware that they are experiencing microsleeps. The widespread practice of "burning the candle at both ends" in western industrialized societies has created so much sleep deprivation that what is really abnormal sleepiness is now almost the norm.
Many studies make it clear that sleep deprivation is dangerous. Sleep-deprived people who are tested by using a driving simulator or by performing a hand-eye coordination task perform as badly as or worse than those who are intoxicated. Sleep deprivation also magnifies alcohol’s effects on the body, so a fatigued person who drinks will become much more impaired than someone who is well-rested. Driver fatigue is responsible for an estimated 100,000 motor vehicle accidents and 1500 deaths each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Since drowsiness is the brain’s last step before falling asleep, driving while drowsy can – and often does – lead to disaster. Caffeine and other stimulants cannot overcome the effects of severe sleep deprivation. The National Sleep Foundation says that if you have trouble keeping your eyes focused, if you can’t stop yawning, or if you can’t remember driving the last few miles, you are probably too drowsy to drive safely.

Insomnia 

 Almost everyone occasionally suffers from short-term insomnia. This problem can result from stress, jet lag, diet, or many other factors. Insomnia almost always affects job performance and well-being the next day. About 60 million Americans a year have insomnia frequently or for extended periods of time, which leads to even more serious sleep deficits. Insomnia tends to increase with age and affects about 40 percent of women and 30 percent of men. It is often the major disabling symptom of an underlying medical disorder.

For short-term insomnia, doctors may prescribe sleeping pills. Most sleeping pills stop working after several weeks of nightly use, however, and long-term use can actually interfere with good sleep. Mild insomnia often can be prevented or cured by practicing good sleep habits

Sleep Disorders: Sleep Apnea 

 

Sleep apnea is a disorder of interrupted breathing during sleep. It usually occurs in association with fat buildup or loss of muscle tone with aging. These changes allow the windpipe to collapse during breathing when muscles relax during sleep (see figure 3). This problem, called obstructive sleep apnea, is usually associated with loud snoring (though not everyone who snores has this disorder). Sleep apnea also can occur if the neurons that control breathing malfunction during sleep.
During an episode of obstructive apnea, the person's effort to inhale air creates suction that collapses the windpipe. This blocks the air flow for 10 seconds to a minute while the sleeping person struggles to breathe. When the person's blood oxygen level falls, the brain responds by awakening the person enough to tighten the upper airway muscles and open the windpipe. The person may snort or gasp, then resume snoring. This cycle may be repeated hundreds of times a night. The frequent awakenings that sleep apnea patients experience leave them continually sleepy and may lead to personality changes such as irritability or depression. Sleep apnea also deprives the person of oxygen, which can lead to morning headaches, a loss of interest in sex, or a decline in mental functioning. It also is linked to high blood pressure, irregular heartbeats, and an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. Patients with severe, untreated sleep apnea are two to three times more likely to have automobile accidents than the general population. In some high-risk individuals, sleep apnea may even lead to sudden death from respiratory arrest during sleep.
An estimated 18 million Americans have sleep apnea. However, few of them have had the problem diagnosed. Patients with the typical features of sleep apnea, such as loud snoring, obesity, and excessive daytime sleepiness, should be referred to a specialized sleep center that can perform a test called polysomnography. This test records the person's brain waves, heartbeat, and breathing during an entire night. If sleep apnea is diagnosed, several treatments are available. Mild sleep apnea frequently can be overcome through weight loss or by preventing the person from sleeping on his or her back. Other people may need special devices or surgery to correct the obstruction. People with sleep apnea should never take sedatives or sleeping pills, which can prevent them from awakening enough to breathe.

Sleep Disorders: Restless Legs Syndrome

Restless legs syndrome (RLS), a familial disorder causing unpleasant crawling, prickling, or tingling sensations in the legs and feet and an urge to move them for relief, is emerging as one of the most common sleep disorders, especially among older people. This disorder, which affects as many as 12 million Americans, leads to constant leg movement during the day and insomnia at night. Severe RLS is most common in elderly people, though symptoms may develop at any age. In some cases, it may be linked to other conditions such as anemia, pregnancy, or diabetes.
Many RLS patients also have a disorder known as periodic limb movement disorder or PLMD, which causes repetitive jerking movements of the limbs, especially the legs. These movements occur every 20 to 40 seconds and cause repeated awakening and severely fragmented sleep. In one study, RLS and PLMD accounted for a third of the insomnia seen in patients older than age 60.
RLS and PLMD often can be relieved by drugs that affect the neurotransmitter dopamine, suggesting that dopamine abnormalities underlie these disorders's symptoms. Learning how these disorders occur may lead to better therapies in the future.

 

Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy 

Narcolepsy affects an estimated 250,000 Americans. People with narcolepsy have frequent "sleep attacks" at various times of the day, even if they have had a normal amount of night-time sleep. These attacks last from several seconds to more than 30 minutes. People with narcolepsy also may experience cataplexy (loss of muscle control during emotional situations), hallucinations, temporary paralysis when they awaken, and disrupted night-time sleep. These symptoms seem to be features of REM sleep that appear during waking, which suggests that narcolepsy is a disorder of sleep regulation. The symptoms of narcolepsy typically appear during adolescence, though it often takes years to obtain a correct diagnosis. The disorder (or at least a predisposition to it) is usually hereditary, but it occasionally is linked to brain damage from a head injury or neurological disease.
Once narcolepsy is diagnosed, stimulants, antidepressants, or other drugs can help control the symptoms and prevent the embarrassing and dangerous effects of falling asleep at improper times. Naps at certain times of the day also may reduce the excessive daytime sleepiness.
In 1999, a research team working with canine models identified a gene that causes narcolepsy -- a breakthrough that brings a cure for this disabling condition within reach. The gene, hypocretin receptor 2, codes for a protein that allows brain cells to receive instructions from other cells. The defective versions of the gene encode proteins that cannot recognize these messages, perhaps cutting the cells off from messages that promote wakefulness. The researchers know that the same gene exists in humans, and they are currently searching for defective versions in people with narcolepsy.

Tips for A Good Night's Sleep

Getting a good night's sleep can be easier than you think, if you just keep in mind some of these helpful tips. Remember, sleep is supposed to be relaxing and helps to renew your body every night. Do not make sleep a competition or skimp for too long (longer than a few days) on getting a good night's sleep of at least 8 hours per day. Everybody has trouble sleeping from time to time, so don't worry if you're having a stretch of having trouble sleeping. Try these tips to help return to a restful, natural sleep.

• Set a schedule and keep a regular sleep schedule
  Go to bed at a set time each night and get up at the same time each morning. Disrupting this schedule may lead to insomnia. "Sleeping in" on weekends also makes it harder to wake up early on Monday morning because it re-sets your sleep cycles for a later awakening. Do not nap within 8 hours of bedtime.
  
  
• Exercise
  Try to exercise 20 to 30 minutes a day. Daily exercise often helps people sleep, although a workout soon before bedtime may interfere with sleep. For maximum benefit, try to get your exercise about 5 to 6 hours before going to bed. Do not exercise within two hours of bedtime.
  
• Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol
  Avoid drinks that contain caffeine, which acts as a stimulant and keeps people awake. Sources of caffeine include coffee, chocolate, soft drinks, non-herbal teas, diet drugs, and some pain relievers. Smokers tend to sleep very lightly and often wake up in the early morning due to nicotine withdrawal. Alcohol robs people of deep sleep and REM sleep and keeps them in the lighter stages of sleep. Avoid all of these things at least 6 to 8 hours before sleeping if you want a good night's sleep. Also, try to avoid eating any kind of large meal within two hours of bedtime.
  
• Have a relaxing bedtime ritual
  A warm bath, reading, or another relaxing routine can make it easier to fall sleep. You can train yourself to associate certain restful activities with sleep and make them part of your bedtime ritual.
  
• Sleep until sunlight
  If possible, wake up with the sun, or use very bright lights in the morning. Sunlight helps the body's internal biological clock reset itself each day. Sleep experts recommend exposure to an hour of morning sunlight for people having problems falling asleep.
  
• Don't lie in bed awake
  If you can't get to sleep, don't just lie in bed. Do something else, like reading, watching television, or listening to music, until you feel tired. The anxiety of being unable to fall asleep can actually contribute to insomnia. Return to bed when you begin feeling sleepy, and try to avoid sleeping in locations other than your bed.
  
• Control your room environment and temperature
  Maintain a comfortable temperature in the bedroom. Extreme temperatures may disrupt sleep or prevent you from falling asleep. Ensure a dark, quiet environment whenever possible. Try to avoid going to sleep with the television or radio on, because it can be a bad habit that leads to the need to have the TV or radio on every time you try and sleep.
  
• See a doctor if your sleeping problem continues
  If you have trouble falling asleep night after night, or if you always feel tired the next day, then you may have a sleep disorder and should see a physician. Your primary care physician may be able to help you; if not, you can probably find a sleep specialist at a major hospital near you. Most sleep disorders can be treated effectively, so you can finally get that good night's sleep you need. 

Circadian Rhythms 

Circadian rhythms are regular changes in mental and physical characteristics that occur in the course of a day (circadian is Latin for "around a day"). Most circadian rhythms are controlled by the body's biological "clock." This clock, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN (see figure 2), is actually a pair of pinhead-sized brain structures that together contain about 20,000 neurons. The SCN rests in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, just above the point where the optic nerves cross. Light that reaches photoreceptors in the retina (a tissue at the back of the eye) creates signals that travel along the optic nerve to the SCN.
Signals from the SCN travel to several brain regions, including the pineal gland, which responds to light-induced signals by switching off production of the hormone melatonin. The body's level of melatonin normally increases after darkness falls, making people feel drowsy. The SCN also governs functions that are synchronized with the sleep/wake cycle, including body temperature, hormone secretion, urine production, and changes in blood pressure.
By depriving people of light and other external time cues, scientists have learned that most people's biological clocks work on a 25-hour cycle rather than a 24-hour one. But because sunlight or other bright lights can reset the SCN, our biological cycles normally follow the 24-hour cycle of the sun, rather than our innate cycle. Circadian rhythms can be affected to some degree by almost any kind of external time cue, such as the beeping of your alarm clock, the clatter of a garbage truck, or the timing of your meals. Scientists call external time cues zeitgebers (German for "time givers").

What is Jet Leg?

When travelers pass from one time zone to another, they suffer from disrupted circadian rhythms, an uncomfortable feeling known as jet lag. For instance, if you travel from California to New York, you "lose" 3 hours according to your body's clock. You will feel tired when the alarm rings at 8 a.m. the next morning because, according to your body's clock, it is still 5 a.m. It usually takes several days for your body's cycles to adjust to the new time. To reduce the effects of jet lag, some doctors try to manipulate the biological clock with a technique called light therapy. They expose people to special lights, many times brighter than ordinary household light, for several hours near the time the subjects want to wake up. This helps them reset their biological clocks and adjust to a new time zone.
Symptoms much like jet lag are common in people who work nights or who perform shift work. Because these people'ss work schedules are at odds with powerful sleep-regulating cues like sunlight, they often become uncontrollably drowsy during work, and they may suffer insomnia or other problems when they try to sleep. Shift workers have an increased risk of heart problems, digestive disturbances, and emotional and mental problems, all of which may be related to their sleeping problems. The number and severity of workplace accidents also tend to increase during the night shift. Major industrial accidents attributed partly to errors made by fatigued night-shift workers include the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear power plant accidents. One study also found that medical interns working on the night shift are twice as likely as others to misinterpret hospital test records, which could endanger their patients. It may be possible to reduce shift-related fatigue by using bright lights in the workplace, minimizing shift changes, and taking scheduled naps.
Many people with total blindness experience life-long sleeping problems because their retinas are unable to detect light. These people have a kind of permanent jet lag and periodic insomnia because their circadian rhythms follow their innate cycle rather than a 24-hour one. Daily supplements of melatonin may improve night-time sleep for such patients. However, since the high doses of melatonin found in most supplements can build up in the body, long-term use of this substance may create new problems. Because the potential side effects of melatonin supplements are still largely unknown, most experts discourage melatonin use by the general public.

Dreaming and REM Sleep 

 

We typically spend more than 2 hours each night dreaming. Scientists do not know much about how or why we dream. Sigmund Freud, who greatly influenced the field of psychology, believed dreaming was a "safety valve" for unconscious desires. Only after 1953, when researchers first described REM in sleeping infants, did scientists begin to carefully study sleep and dreaming. They soon realized that the strange, illogical experiences we call dreams almost always occur during REM sleep. While most mammals and birds show signs of REM sleep, reptiles and other cold-blooded animals do not.
REM sleep begins with signals from an area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals travel to a brain region called the thalamus, which relays them to the cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain that is responsible for learning, thinking, and organizing information. The pons also sends signals that shut off neurons in the spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis of the limb muscles. If something interferes with this paralysis, people will begin to physically "act out" their dreams -- a rare, dangerous problem called REM sleep behavior disorder. A person dreaming about a ball game, for example, may run headlong into furniture or blindly strike someone sleeping nearby while trying to catch a ball in the dream.
REM sleep stimulates the brain regions used in learning. This may be important for normal brain development during infancy, which would explain why infants spend much more time in REM sleep than adults. Like deep sleep, REM sleep is associated with increased production of proteins. One study found that REM sleep affects learning of certain mental skills. People taught a skill and then deprived of non-REM sleep could recall what they had learned after sleeping, while people deprived of REM sleep could not.
Some scientists believe dreams are the cortex'ss attempt to find meaning in the random signals that it receives during REM sleep. The cortex is the part of the brain that interprets and organizes information from the environment during consciousness. It may be that, given random signals from the pons during REM sleep, the cortex tries to interpret these signals as well, creating a "story" out of fragmented brain activity.

 CHAMAKHE MAURIENI IS A MOROCCAN BORN FREELANCE WRITER,ENTERPRENEUR,AND AUTHOR.ADD HIM ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/chamakhe.maurieni
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America invaded Iraq to save Iran.

  Francisco Gil-White

Accusations against President Bush Jr.’s administration that it used phony intelligence to sell the current invasion and occupation of Iraq have become a growing clamor in the media, helping produce a consensus in the public that the officially stated reasons for going to war were lies. In consequence, there is a growing crescendo now in the United States about getting out of Iraq. For example, on 28 November 2005 Newsweek ran the headline:

“BUSH AT THE TIPPING POINT: A hawkish Democrat calls for an Iraq withdrawal setting off a bitter fight in Washington over how, and when, the troops should come home.”

The text of the article explains:

“After months of debate over the question of how the country got into Iraq -- who knew what and when about the absence of WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] -- the political center of gravity suddenly shifted to another question: how we get out.”

“The one-man tipping point,” according to Newsweek, is Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania. Murtha had been for the war, now he is loudly against, and his hawkish credentials -- he is “a favorite of the Pentagon generals” -- plus the growing anti-Bush climate, we are told, changed the debate. This could be the beginning of the end for the US troops in Iraq. So, with the public’s attention on Iraq thus focused, this is probably a good time for HIR to do what it does best: provide the historical context needed to understand the present and to produce reasonably constrained hypotheses about the future.

Given that a growing number of people no longer believe that the Bush administration’s officially stated reasons for attacking Iraq -- finding and destroying Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) -- were the real reasons, let us ask this question: Why did the US invade Iraq?

Opinions differ. A popular view is that the US invasion of Iraq has something to do with the appetite of the US ruling elite for cheap oil. This will seem like a natural hypothesis to many because opponents of the elder Bush accused that his 1991 war on Iraq -- the Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) -- was driven by hunger for oil. And now Warner Brothers has released a George Clooney production, Syriana, arguing that US foreign policy in the Middle East is generally a consequence of hunger for oil. But I don’t think the oil hypothesis is right. Oh, I will not deny that the US ruling elite likes making money with oil. And neither will I deny that keeping control over the Iranian oil fields was the main motivator of the 1953 CIA-engineered coup in Iran. But since 1979, I will argue, the main goal of US policy in Asia and the Middle East has been the growth of Islamist terrorism. So, with regard to the current war on Iraq, the hypothesis I will defend is the following:

George W. Bush attacked Iraq in order to ensure the continued growth of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East.

Here’s how I will go about it. I will argue that in order to understand Bush Jr.’s war on Iraq, one must first understand Bush Sr.’s 1991 Gulf War against the same country. And that war was not fought for oil; rather, it was launched to protect Islamist Iran. In order to show this, I need to examine US policy towards the Iran-Iraq war that came immediately before the Gulf War, and this will take us as far back as 1979, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini installed himself in Iran as the supreme leader in an Islamist coup d’État, after which he immediately provoked the Iran-Iraq war. In fact, we will have to dig even further back to the 1953 CIA coup that installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the US’s right-wing repressive puppet in Iran, sowing the seeds of discontent that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which Khomeini (another US asset) right away betrayed. The coming articles will construct and document this in some detail, but here is the claim:

Since 1979, US foreign policy towards Iraq has been consistently pro-Islamist, pro-terrorist, and pro-Iranian.

In other words, HIR’s series of articles will aim to show that if we look at Iraq from Iran, as I claim the US planners do, US foreign policy towards Iraq makes perfect sense, with nary a leftover absurdity. This is important, because political analysis requires inferring the intentions of the various actors. Their behaviors will appear absurd if we assign to them intentions that they probably didn't have, so the ability to resolve apparent absurdities is what reveals a political analysis to be on the right track. This is, in fact, the only test of a political analysis (though it is seldom applied).

HIR's articles on Iraq and Iran will be appearing in the coming weeks. Immediately, below, I will give you an introductory taste for why the view I defend makes sense, using a few things that Newsweek says to motivate my reflections.

The first hypothesis about any policy must be that its actual effects were intended; the effect of US policy in Iraq is to strengthen Islamist terrorism in general, and Iranian Islamism in particular.
_____________________

As you may know, there is a bloody civil war going on in Iraq, which the British daily The Guardian describes as follows:

“The rate of suicide bombings in Iraq continues its relentless rise: some days there are more than five attacks. Jihadist leaders are taking full advantage of the anger and despair of the many Iraqis who have lost family members at the hands of the occupation. The recruiters convince them that taking revenge is the way to please God and to defeat the infidels.”

In other words, the actual effect of the US invasion is to feed the growth of Islamist terrorism in Iraq.

But there are other sources of violence. Iraq is an ethnic and religious mosaic (see map at right). The main religious division is between Sunni Muslims (the backbone of Saddam Hussein's erstwhile power) and Shia Muslims (like those in Iran). What distinguishes Sunni from Shia Muslims is less important than the fact of their not getting along very well. There is a long history of Iranian support for armed Shia rebellions in Iraq, and the pattern continues. It is a major issue. For example, Newsweek tells us that, just recently, “[Mowaffaq al-] Rubbaie, Iraq’s national-security adviser,” made an official trip to Iran. He,

“and other Iraqi officials, chastised Iran for supporting Shiite militias [in Iraq] and aggravating the insurgency [i.e. the ongoing civil war in Iraq]. More gently, they asked for Tehran’s help… Rubbaie returned home with what he regards as an important prize: a memorandum of understanding with Tehran that commits the two governments to cooperate on sensitive intelligence-
sharing matters, counterterrorism and cross-border infiltration of Qaeda figures.”

Now, this is a bit strange. Will the Iraqi hens improve their security by having a chat with the Iranian wolf? I find it improbable, to put it mildly, that Iran will really honor an agreement to share intelligence against its own client militias in Iraq. I will therefore assume what is most likely: that Iran will continue to support them.

With this assumption, let us ask: Since these militias are fighting to install Iranian-style Shiite Islamism in Iraq, what is the likelihood of a Shiite Islamist government under Iran’s influence when the US soldiers leave? The answer is ‘relatively high,’ because the population of Iraq is about 60-65% Shiite, according to US Intelligence.

Could a Shia-dominated Islamist Iraq under Iran’s influence be what the US ruling elite wants?

Consider something else that Newsweek says:

“Iranian interference continues to haunt future scenarios for an independent, stable Iraq. [US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad, echoing other US officials, said he is hoping for a ‘significant withdrawal’ of US troops from Iraq next year. But the Bush administration worries that a fractured Iraq under weak leadership will be Tehran’s playground.”

It appears that Iraq is indeed expected to become “Tehran’s playground.” So the actual effect of the US invasion of Iraq will be to turn it into an Islamist puppet state of Iran.

But the text above bears scrutiny. If Khalilzad is “echoing other US officials” when he says he would like a major troop withdrawal by next year, then which “Bush administration” is it that “worries that a fractured Iraq...will be Tehran’s playground”? Isn’t the Bush administration composed of “US officials”? And isn’t Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, supposed to be mouthing the US’s official policy towards Iraq? And if the growth of Iranian power is not what the US ruling elite wants, then why are Khalilzad and other US officials calling for withdrawing the troops, a policy that will abandon Iraq to Iran?

The above excerpt from Newsweek appears to be an example of what George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called Newspeak: contradictions tumble one after another in sequence, as if nothing, there to impair the reader's ability to reason. Here's how it works. The reader assumes relative honesty, and basic intelligence, and so the hypothesis that total absurdities are in fact maliciously intended by a major publication such as Newsweek will not be put on the table. For to consider this hypothesis would be to challenge explicitly the very order of reality that the reader takes for granted: that the press is (at least reasonably) free. So the reader’s mind refuses, at some level, the exercise of skeptical analysis, passing over the contradictions in a haze. This is the opposite of reasoning, and it pushes the reader's mind into a kind of torpor of illogic that will accept anything -- the intended effect.

In this way, the reader is left with an invalid interpretation, because a valid one would have to take any apparent absurdities head on and resolve them. This is what HIR aims to produce. So, what we need is a hypothesis that will explain why:

1) on the one hand, US officials call for policies that will effectively give Iraq to Iran; and

2) on the other hand, these same officials claim in public that the US government would deplore this very outcome, which its policies are designed to produce.

Here is one such hypothesis: The US ruling elite favors the spread of Iranian-style Islamist terrorism, but cannot tell this to the American public, because the American public would be horrified to find that its own government is sponsoring the spread of Islamist terrorism.

Of course, this interpretation requires believing that US officials are misleading the American public. Shocking as that idea may be, Jared Israel of Emperors clothes has already produced a mountain of documentation and analysis to support his hypothesis that US geostrategy in Asia is generally geared towards the promotion of Islamist terrorism because it destabilizes the Asian giants -- Russia (earlier, the Soviet Union), China, and India -- which compete with the US for power there. The strategy works because the Asian giants have Muslim populations on their borders, inside and outside, so sponsoring Islamist terrorist movements in Asia is conducive to producing border conflicts and civil wars that drive these large countries to collapse.

From the perspective of Jared Israel’s hypothesis, then, US policy towards Iraq, which is to grind it down and serve it up for Iran to swallow, is just the latest installment in the overall game plan to promote Islamist terrorism as a tool of semi-covert imperialism. The US ruling elite will pull the troops out of Iraq in order to give Iraq to Iran, but will complain publicly about the outcome, giving the appearance of withdrawing the troops under pressure from the US public.

Consistent with this view, consider what the Toronto Star wrote on 24 November 2005, in an article titled “White House sets stage for pullback of troops”:

“Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, also told CNN this week he believed it would be possible to begin a withdrawal of American forces next year. The change in tone appears to be an acknowledgement of the increasing unpopularity of the war, with one national poll this week indicating 65 per cent of Americans would like to see the troops home by the end of 2006.”

The word “also” is appended to Khalilzad's opinion because he was echoing Pentagon officials and US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whose identical views were reported in the same article. But perhaps you will notice the contradiction in what the Daily News reported Khalilzad as saying only four days later:

“Bush’s ambassador to Iraq warned yesterday that pulling out of the country early would be disastrous. ‘Terrorists could take over part of this country and expand from here,’ Zalmay Khalilzad told Newsweek. ‘And given the resources of Iraq, given the technical expertise of its people, it will make Afghanistan look like child’s play.’

Since a withdrawal needs to be planned, and since Zalmay Khalilzad's preferred date for a major withdrawal -- “next year” -- is already upon us (this is November), Khalilzad is in fact calling for an immediate troop withdrawal even as he explains that “pulling out...early would be disastrous.” An absurdity? Not under my hypothesis: the US ruling elite wants the “disastrous” result, but knows that the American public will deplore it, so US officials must appear to deplore it also, and to be pulling out of Iraq reluctantly, under pressure from the American public. This is precisely why US government statements about impending withdrawal did not come before the polls began to show a strong US majority for it, as we see above.

Also consistent with my hypothesis is all this business about the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Clearly, the US ruling elite wanted the world to think that it didn't have a good reason to attack Iraq. Why do I say this? Because when the US ruling elite attacked Serbia, it had no problem mobilizing the Western press to allege that the Serbs were committing a genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, even though no such genocide took place. The official figures of NATO and The Hague Tribunal show that, contrary to NATO's claims of 100,000 and then 500,000 Albanian civilians supposedly murdered by the Serbian forces,

not a single Albanian civilian murdered by Serbian forces was ever produced,despite NATO complete military control over Kosovo,and despite forensic investigators being hirelings of Natos Hague tribunal.

.  You read correctly: not one body. Hence, there is simply no evidence to support the NATO allegations of Serbian massacres of Albanian civilians in Kosovo. In sharp contrast, evidence is not lacking for murders of innocent Serbs and Albanians by the US-supported KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), and by the NATO bombs themselves (consult the above footnote). But where is the scandal in the media about how the public was lied to in order to justify a war against the Serbs? Nowhere to be seen. The media covered for NATO in Kosovo.

What follows?

If the Western mass media can make up a genocide that didn't happen in Kosovo, and cover up the slaughters of Serbs that did happen, in order to make it look like NATO had a good reason to attack Serbia, then it can make up WMDs in Iraq, even if they weren't there. But the media told us instead that the government had lied about WMDs, and the government went out of its way to look guilty, so it appears that the US ruling elite wants its controlled media generating the impression that there was no good reason to attack Iraq. This has two main practical effects. The first is to make the US ruling elite appear to be directing gratuitous violence against Muslims, which will feed anti-Americanism and in consequence make the job of recruitment into Islamist terrorist organizations easier. The second is to feed domestic opposition in the US to the war on Iraq, allowing the US ruling elite to appear as if it will be reluctantly pulling out, under public pressure, deploring all the time in its official statements the mess that it will be leaving behind. But this mess is what it really wants: for Iran to swallow up Iraq.

The fact that Zalmay Khalilzad is the US official calling for a significant troop withdrawal next year is a good reason for expecting one. As Jared Israel has documented, Khalilzad is extremely powerful, and what Khalilzad says tends to get done. Right after the Iran-Iraq war, for example, when Iraq ended stronger relative to Iran in 1988, Zalmay Khalilzad argued forcefully for “strengthening Iran and containing Iraq.” And guess what happened? Immediately -- as the geopolitical clock ticks -- the Gulf War of 1991 followed, and it indeed destroyed Iraq, thereby strengthening, indeed, Iran’s theocratic Shiite government relative to its main rival: Iraq’s secular Baathist government. Then, for many years, US policy towards Iraq was indeed that of containment. In other words, it all happened just like Zalmay Khalilzad recommended, and consistent with the secret and illegal US arms shipments to Iran during the immediately preceding Iran-Iraq war (the 'Iran-gate' or 'Iran-Contra' scandal).

Once you adopt the hypothesis that the US ruling elite wants Iranian-style Islamist terrorism to spread westwards, it is no longer absurd that Newsweek should quote Khalilzad saying that Iran is “advancing its long-term goal of establishing [regional] domination,” even as he explains that he would like the US troops immediately withdrawn. Neither is it surprising to find Newsweek adding that “Iraqi officials are all too aware of how deeply Iran has infiltrated Baghdad.” The deed is done: Iraq belongs to Iran. All that remains is to withdraw the troops, as Khalilzad wants.

In sum, given

1) that the highly probable outcome of this US intervention will be to make Iran the regional Islamist hegemon; and

2) that this will be consistent with all previous US policy towards Iraq and Iran since 1979 (as I will aim to show),

then it is reasonable to conclude that fostering the spread of Islamist terrorism has been the real goal of Bush Jr.’s war on Iraq.

Moreover, given

1) that Muslim fundamentalism is antisemitic;

2) that there has always been a very close relationship between the Iranian mullahs and the PLO (as we shall see); and

3) that the Iranian president of late has been making loud calls for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” which is precisely what the PLO Charter has also always called for,

then if the US abandons Iraq to Iran it gets harder to argue that US foreign policy is pro-Israel, doesn’t it.

 CHAMAKHE MAURIENI IS A MOROCCAN BORN FREELANCE WRITER,ENTERPRENEUR,AND AUTHOR.ADD HIM ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/chamakhe.maurieni
  HIS LATEST BOOK IS TITLED FACEBOOK IS DECEPTION_- VOLUME ONE AND VOLUME TWO

New Year's Resolutions

Peter Goodchild

OK, it's nearly July, not January, so I'm off by six months.

1 Learn Latin.
2 Re-read the "milestones."
3 Find a permanent apartment.
4 Find land to the north.
5 Find a teaching job.
6 Get some rest.

I started Latin in school at age 14 but took no more courses after that. I finally got to the point where I could read Jerome's Latin Bible without grabbing the dictionary too often, but the Bible is easy reading in any language. My best foreign language is French, but my German got better over the last year, thanks partly to Frau K. In Japan I had learned Japanese, and in the Middle East and elsewhere from 2008 to 2011 I learned Arabic, Chinese, and Thai, all at what I'd call the conversational level. But I finally decided that western and eastern history should really be regarded separately. That means a westerner should focus on learning Latin, English, French, and German, perhaps even skipping everything else.

The "milestones" are the ten books that encapsulate western culture, at least from a somewhat anglophile perspective: Jerome's Bible, Njal's Saga, Thoreau's Walden, Beston's Outermost House, Quiller-Couch's New Oxford Book of English Verse, Matthiessen's Oxford Book of American Verse, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Low), Malory's Works (ed. Vinaver), Loomis's Medieval Romances, and Yeats' Collected Poems.

I'll try to stop reading detective novels. They often start off exciting, but at the end I have about the same feeling I'd probably have if I'd eaten a pound of sugar non-stop. What I particularly dislike in them is their frequent referral to "popular culture": films and so-called music. Since nearly all of these things are forgotten a year later, does the writer also intend that detective novel also to be forgotten a year later?

But we certainly live in an age that has largely abandoned books. By the year 1999, publishers were selling nine books I'd written, but since then I've had nothing accepted. And in the twelve years of this century, not one book has been published, by any author, that will still be read ten years from now. Orwell would have loved such a scenario. (Whoops! Again I'm referring to books.)

I need another title for the manuscript I've been calling "The Coming Chaos." Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Finding an apartment. I've always hated apartments, but the monthly cost of an apartment seems to be only a fraction of the cost of living in the country, so I might do better to consider having an urban domicile, with or without a rural one. And I have to start considering the fact that a few years from now I might not be able to use my double-bitted axe to clear a hundred acres before breakfast every day. Where I'm living right now is not bad at all. It's big, clean, and above all quiet. I guess Oman was the final straw in my sanity, and I'm now utterly obsessed with quiet. Shell shock does that to people. But in the last couple of days I've been wondering if I should take advantage of what people tell me is my old age. I wonder if, at age 63 (nearly), I can get into some sort of low-rent habitation available to seniors -- although K tells me that seniors can also be noisy, because they're deaf and think everyone else should be cranking up the volume. Still, I like the idea of having a more "corporate" landlord, so that I don't have to worry about quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Find land to the north. All my life I've had various obsessions, most of which cancel one another out. Living "off in the bush" is one of them. Well, Thoreau speaks of Walden as an "experiment," so perhaps that's the word I should use. Not something to succeed or fail necessarily, but more like something to study. But Thoreau paid $28.125 (don't forget that "5") for his cabin. Nowadays the cost would be about 4,000 times greater. That may partly explain why I don't have such a property at the moment. The dreadful rise in human population is also a big problem: it seems that every square meter that can be lived on is already occupied. And all the "greenies" like Suzuki and the Sierra Club fail to mention that overpopulation -- and over-immigration, God help us -- is to blame for the lack of space.

Still, I may keep looking for that square meter of sanity. I noticed yesterday that a realtor is offering 100 acres of land near Lake Abitibi for less than $4,000. That area is part of Ontario's Clay Belt, a vast area of arable but unpopulated land. The reason it's unpopulated, however, can be seen in the following description: "There are seven months of snow, two months rain, and all the rest is black flies and mosquitoes."

Find a teaching job. Since returning to Canada a year ago, I've had major expenses and no income at all. I'd like to find some source of income, and I suppose teaching English is still my best route. It's just unfortunate that education has reached the same rock bottom as everything else, so any serious teaching methods are forbidden. I had an interview a few months ago, and one of the questions was, "What would you do to get students to like you?" What a question. If I wanted people to like me, I wouldn't have become a teacher. And then when I received my rejection letter, it contained a terrible mistake in grammar. Oh, well, what does grammar have to do with language?

Get some rest. Even if I lived for another hundred years I wouldn't be able to finish all the things on my many lists. I might as well relax. When I asked somebody once what she'd really like to do with her life, she said, "I'd like to do nothing. Nothing." And that was somebody who was in fact usually very busy. So I think the same. It would be nice not to accomplish plans, not to finish projects. Since this is the end of civilization anyway, why bother? Everything will get swept away by the wave of universal chaos. It would be nice to sit on a rock. It would be nice not to look at clocks or calendars. The Indian Buddhist sage Tilopa had "six words of advice," and the sixth was "rang sar bzhag": "Relax, right now, and rest."

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com

Who is behind the current onslaught of racist pseudo-science?

FRANCISCO GIL WHITE

If we can conclude that Rushton and Entine are racists, the next question is, do they act on their own, or are they part of something bigger? By ‘something bigger’ I have in mind an organized campaign to attack black people with big money behind it. In this chapter I will demonstrate that behind Entine and Rushton are the vast powers of the American Establishment, and that indeed, big money is behind this. I shall begin by first taking a look at the activities of the Pioneer Fund.

 The Pioneer Fund, and Jon Entine’s defense of it
___________________________________________
The Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR) pointed out in 1998 that,

“For the past few years, University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton has replaced [Arthur] Jensen as the top individual beneficiary of Pioneer largess. Since 1981 he has benefited from more than a million dollars in Pioneer grants.”[1]

That’s real money that the Pioneer Fund is dispensing. If Rushton is now getting more of it than Jensen, it must be because Rushton is doing more of what Pioneer wants, or doing it ‘better’ than Jensen. We have already seen what both Jensen and Rushton do. Could it be that Pioneer is a racist organization? It certainly was when it was founded. ISAR explains that Pioneer is “a foundation established in 1937 to ‘prove’ that whites are genetically superior to blacks.”[2] This matters because institutions survive the passage of time when those who run them recruit people ideologically like themselves as replacements. So it appears that Pioneer has not been funding Jensen and Rushton by mistake.
The date of Pioneer’s founding, 1937, is significant, because this was the heyday of the American eugenics movement. Could it be that Pioneer is a eugenicist organization? Well, IQ ‘research’ was invented by the eugenicists, so the funding of Jensen and Rushton suggests that it might be. In fact, a definitive answer can be given to this question.
As you may recall from chapter 7, Harry Laughlin was the second most important man in the American eugenics movement—Charles Davenport’s right hand man (unless he was Davenport’s eminence grise, his Richelieu). Well guess what?

“The Pioneer Fund has been involved in the history of race science since its establishment in 1937. One of its founders, Harry Laughlin, wrote a model sterilization law widely used in both the United States and Europe.”[3]

As we also saw in chapter 7, Harry Laughlin’s “model sterilization law” formed the basis of the Virginia eugenics law, which in turn led to the sterilization of Carrie Buck, subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court as a rigged fight—organized by Harry Laughlin himself—so that Americans all over the country could also be sterilized and/or incarcerated against their will. Fascist forces in Europe, including those in Nazi Germany, modeled their own eugenic laws after the one drafted in the United States by Harry Laughlin. This is who founded Pioneer.
Moreover, as ISAR explains,

“The Pioneer Fund’s original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, scion of old-stock Protestant gentry… Colonel Draper, as he was often called by his friends and admirers was a man searching for a way to restore an older order. Draper believed geneticists could scientifically prove the inferiority of Negros.”[4]

The “older order” of the “old-stock Protestant gentry” was one in which the “old-stock Protestant gentry” got to own people of color outright, and for this a theory of their natural inferiority was needed. Draper recognized that, living in the time of science, he needed to give the old racist doctrine a pseudo-scientific veneer, and that’s what his Pioneer Fund was for.
Now, given all this, making a defense of the Pioneer Fund would seem to require a fearless racist. The following is from pages 240-41 of Jon Entine’s Taboo:

“[Stephen J.] Gould and other critics make a lot of noise about the supposed links between some contemporary scientists and eugenicists of the 1930s. The controversial Pioneer Fund has provided millions of dollars to bankroll research on intelligence at more than sixty institutions in eight countries. It was chartered in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, to improve ‘the character of the American people’ by encouraging ‘white persons who settled in the original thirteen colonies prior to the adoption of the constitution and/or from related stocks’ to increase their reproductive rates. It bankrolled numerous U.S. and German scientists, including the biologist Harry H. Laughlin, who drew up a model sterilization law that was used by many countries, including Nazi Germany, in drafting the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Ill Progeny, National Socialism’s cover for genocide. The fund embraced ‘race betterment’ and the forced sterilization of ‘inferior stock,’ reflecting the most aggressive tenants [sic] of the American eugenics movement. Yet such beliefs were mainstream enough to receive the blessing of...President Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Harry I. Woodring. Though eugenic thinking appears extreme to today’s sensibilities, much of it was certainly considered within the boundaries of reasonable policy in the thirties and forties.”

This is so brazen that the ordinary reader probably cannot imagine that Jon Entine could possibly be doing what he in fact is doing, and I therefore suspect most people read the above in a slightly confused haze, never realizing what has happened.
Entine tells us that the Pioneer Fund “was chartered in 1937,” when Adolf Hitler was of course already in power in Germany, and in fact only two years before the outbreak of the World War. Since Pioneer, as Entine explains, had the same ideology as the German Nazi Party, and therefore was interested in the demographic growth of white people (read ‘Aryans’), including by means of “forced sterilization of ‘inferior stock,’” this naturally means that when Pioneer “bankrolled numerous U.S. and German scientists” it was preparing the German Nazi Final Solution. And the bankrolling of US ‘scientists’ such as Harry Laughlin (Pioneer’s founder) had the same purpose because, as Entine also mentions, it was Harry Laughlin who built up the legal infrastructure that became “National Socialism’s cover for genocide.” This of course should make it impossible to defend the Pioneer Fund. And yet Entine states matter-of-factly that criticizing the Pioneer Fund for this history is to “make a lot of noise” because, in fact, even the highest echelons of the Roosevelt administration were backing all this. Okay, he says, so the extermination of an entire people and culture “appears extreme to today’s sensibilities,” but “it was certainly considered within the boundaries of reasonable policy in the thirties and forties.”
I stand corrected. The words ‘fearless racist,’ strong as they are, cannot begin to describe Jon Entine.
Entine’s apology for fascism and genocide is basically this: “Look, everybody was doing it, so back then it was okay.” This is naturally false. Everybody wasn’t doing it. The American eugenics movement was organized and funded by the wealthiest people in the United States, and its violence was directed against the lower classes. So the fact that Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was a eugenicist does not demonstrate that ‘everybody did eugenics,’ because it was the arch-wealthy classes, then as now, that controlled the US government. The working classes targeted for extermination by the aristocratic eugenicists, as you might expect, were not that crazy about this movement.
So learning that Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was a fascist makes a very different point, and it is this: The close cooperation between US government officials and the leaders of the American eugenics movement, covered in chapter 7, was still going on in the Roosevelt administration. Charles Davenport had succeeded in making the Galtonian dream an American reality: government-applied pseudo-biological theory as a tool of aristocratic state control; and this is precisely what the Nazis, encouraged and funded as they were by the American eugenicists, also said they were doing: “Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich, ‘National Socialism is applied biology.’”[4a] In what sense, then, were the US and Nazi ruling classes and governments ideological opponents?[4b] By pretending that the pervasiveness of eugenic thinking in the US ruling class, including in the Roosevelt administration, supposedly excuses fascism as ‘normal,’ Jon Entine prevents you from asking this question.
It is a question that must be asked. After all, even Entine himself concedes above that the German Nazis were doing what the American eugenicists—backed by the US government—told them to do. This agrees with what Edwin Black documents in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race, which is that the American eugenicists completely dominated the international eugenics movement.

“American influence rolled across the Continent. Finland, Hungary, France, Romania, Italy and other European nations developed American-style eugenic movements that echoed the agenda and methodology of the fount at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon the European movements learned to cloak their work in more medically and scientifically refined approaches, and many were eventually funded by such philanthropic sponsors as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. ... Some [nations], such as Lithuania and Brazil, enacted eugenic marriage laws. Some, such as Finland, went as far as forced sterilization. One nation, Germany, would go further than anyone could imagine.”[4c]

There are two problems with the above statement. First, the American sponsors of European eugenics were not “philanthropic.” Here is the meaning of that word, as rendered by Merriam Webster Online: “dispensing or receiving aid from funds set aside for humanitarian purposes.” The key word is humanitarian. So Black’s use of the word “philantropic” above completely contradicts what he himself has documented, which is that the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations sponsored the international eugenics movement with their eyes open, and with the backing of the US government, because they meant to exterminate certain classes of people (see chapter 7 of this book).
Black also says above that “One nation, Germany, would go further than anyone could imagine.” This again is perfectly false, and once again (!) the refutation is included in Edwin Black’s own book. There had been considerable talk about ‘euthanasia’—which was code for mass killing—in American eugenic circles, including much discussion of ‘lethal chambers’ using poison gas. Edwin Black gives a rather detailed account of such discussions in chapter 13 of War Against the Weak. So what the German Nazis did was certainly imagined by the aristocratic American eugenicists; they just couldn’t get away with it in the United States, as Black himself explains.
And in chapter 14 of War Against the Weak, Black documents that in everything the German Nazis were the junior partners to the American eugenicists. Of course, in the end it was the German Nazis who were able to get more done, while the American eugenicists watched with a mixture of paternal pride and competitive envy.

“Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act [which was followed as a model by the German Nazis], Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital [where lots of innocent American workers were being forcibly sterilized], complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, ‘The Germans are beating us at our own game.’”[4d]

But coming back to our main thread, I must point out that Entine has once again succumbed to his passion for self-refutation. Why? Because even if we were to accept his preposterous defense of American eugenics as a passing fad no longer worth worrying about, this will not work as a defense of Pioneer. You see, at the Pioneer Fund, eugenics never went out of fashion. As the Institute for Study of Academic Racism (ISAR) explains,

“Abandoned by the political mainstream after World War II, [Pioneer’s patron Wickliffe] Draper turned more and more to academic irredentists still dedicated to white supremacy and eugenics. Most prominent among these early recruits was Henry Garrett, Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941-1955. A Virginia born segregationist, Garrett was a key witness in defending segregation in Davis v. County School Board (1952) one of the constituent cases in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954).”[4]

You will remember Henry Garrett from chapter 9, where his testimony in Davis v. County School Board was examined, and he was shown to be an arch-racist who supported segregation. Since Henry Garrett was the “most prominent among these early recruits” of Pioneer’s in the post-war period, it follows that the Pioneer Fund was not embarrassed by the Holocaust and did not abandon its racist goals. At least it hadn’t by the 1950s, when Henry Garrett testified against black equality.
Jon Entine in fact will concede to this. Here is what he says:

“Columbia University anthropologist [sic] Henry Garrett, an outspoken advocate of segregation [i.e. of American apartheid], consulted with the Pioneer Fund to bolster his research on the intelligence differences between the races. Garrett and his colleagues launched two controversial magazines that are now considered the intellectual digests of extremist hereditarian theories of intelligence, The Mankind Quarterly in Britain and a more recent German off-shoot, Neue Anthropologie.”[4e]

And Entine further concedes that Mankind Quarterly “became a haven for hard-line eugenicists.” In fact, as Entine also concedes on the same page,

“Since 1978, Mankind Quarterly has been edited by Roger Pearson, a controversial British anthropologist. He founded the Northern League (also called the Pan-Nordic Cultural Society) in 1957, which recycled the pre-World War II belief in the natural superiority of northern Europeans. According to Pearson, humanity could only be preserved if we preserved ‘an aristocracy of mankind’ by selective breeding of ‘ideal’ types. That was a code word for the Nordic [i.e. the so-called ‘Aryan’] race.”

So, given that Henry Garrett was getting money from Pioneer, it follows that Pioneer was still in the business of promoting eugenics. And yet I remind you that Jon Entine's apology for the Pioneer Fund's fascist origins was that this was supposedly a thing of the past, just a symptom of the supposedly general ideology of the first half of the twentieth century. Nonsense. Once you take a look at who the Pioneer Fund has been supporting over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, it becomes perfectly obvious that, as you might expect, this organization has never abandoned its racist and fascist goals.

“…most of the leading Anglo-American academic race-scientists of the last several decades have been funded by Pioneer, including William Shockley, Hans J. Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Roger Pearson, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, R. Travis Osborne, Linda Gottfredson, Robert A. Gordon, Daniel R. Vining, Jr., Michael Levin, and Seymour Itzkoff—all cited in The Bell Curve.”[4]

What is The Bell Curve? This is a book that caused considerable controversy when it came out in 1994. The title makes clear why: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life.[5]

“Once a relatively obscure organization, Pioneer Fund entered the spotlight roughly two years ago following the publication of The Bell Curve, a book that attempted to prove that race and class differences are largely determined by genetic factors. Some critics took issue with the book’s scholarship, focusing specifically on its reliance on research subsidized by the Pioneer Fund.”[6]

Yes. When a book argues that “race and class differences are largely determined by genetic factors” one has a right to become suspicious if the supporting research is funded by an organization whose patron recruited “academic irredentists still dedicated to white supremacy and eugenics” because “[he] believed geneticists could scientifically prove the inferiority of Negros.”
And suspicion naturally grows when one finds that Pioneer Fund recipients have only one thing in common: they attack blacks. Thus, for example, consider the following three people in the list of names above: William Shockley, Michael Levin, and Linda Gottfredson. The first of these, Shockley, was neither a psychologist nor a biologist but a physicist:

“William Shockley. 1910-89, American physicist, b. London. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). After directing antisubmarine research for the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to work at Bell Laboratories. There he and two colleagues, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, produced the first transistor in 1947; for this work they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley taught electrical engineering at Stanford Univ. from 1958 to 1975.”[7]

So Shockley had zero training in psychology or biology. But that didn’t stop him from making certain claims:

“During the late 1960s Shockley became a figure of some controversy… He held that standardized intelligence tests reflect a genetic factor in intellectual capacity and that tests for IQ (intelligence quotient) reveal that blacks are inferior to whites. He further concluded that the higher rate of reproduction among blacks had a retrogressive effect on evolution.”[8]

Shockley was obviously a eugenicist, and he went out of his way to become a public racist. In fact, “He came to describe this work [i.e. his ‘work’ attacking blacks] as the most important of his career, although it severely tarnished his reputation.”[8a] The Pioneer Fund saw fit to give this man money, but obviously not because he was a good physicist—this was a prize for using his Nobel prestige to attack blacks.
Then there is Michael Levin.

“…the [Pioneer Fund] awarded $124,500 from 1991-1992 to Michael Levin, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York who has argued that black population growth must be slowed by ending public assistance.”[9]

What does a philosopher need $124,500 for? The answer is that he doesn’t need it. Philosophers do not conduct expensive research. Once again, this is just prize money for being a public racist, and for making arguments in favor of restricting the population growth of blacks, which is one of the things the original eugenics movement also called for.
And finally, let’s take a look at Linda Gottfredson.

“[Linda] Gottfredson [is] a University of Delaware researcher who said that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and have diminished capabilities in work and educational settings. The university rejected a $174,000 Pioneer grant toward her work, citing the fund’s racist history. Gottfredson sued, claiming she was a victim of political correctness, and the school eventually backed down to avoid a protracted legal battle.”[10]

Gottfredson is militant. In 1990 she got together with Phillipe Rushton and with Harry Weyher, the president of the Pioneer Fund, and wrote a letter to the British daily The Independent saying that “governments that want ‘effective’ public policies must listen to scientists who say blacks are genetically less intelligent than other races.”[10a]
The outspoken Linda Gottfredson once again is neither a psychologist nor a biologist, but a sociologist who teaches in the Department of Education at the University of Delaware. So we have a physicist, a philosopher, and a sociologist. What do they have in common with the IQ-testers? Other than that they attack blacks from their academic perches and collect their rewards from the Pioneer Fund, nothing.
It is clear what the Pioneer Fund is, then. In consequence, it is clear also what Jon Entine is, because, despite everything he conceded about this organization, he defends the Pioneer Fund and its recipients, as follows:

“Over the years, the Pioneer Fund has backed a virtual Who’s Who of race scientists, many brilliant, who have published more than two hundred books and two thousand scholarly papers, many with the view that inferior groups are ‘dumbing’ down society by disseminating inferior seeds.”[10b]

If I clip that just a little it becomes easier to see:

“...the Pioneer Fund has backed...race scientists, many brilliant, ...with the view that inferior groups are ‘dumbing’ down society by disseminating inferior seeds.”

This is pretty clear, but Jon Entine is not quite done.

“...The Pioneer Fund continues to funnel money to dozens of academics... Though almost all hold professorships at distinguished universities, it is not uncommon for them to be vilified as ‘professors of hate.’”[11]

Since according to Merriam Webster Online ‘to vilify’ means “to utter slanderous and abusive statements against,” Entine is saying this:

To attack the eugenicists who get money from Pioneer—and who, by the way, are really smart—as ‘professors of hate’ is a slander.

Next Jon Entine will defend the Pope against the supposedly slanderous accusation that he is a Catholic.
So what do we have? That Jon Entine is one cog in a rather large and well-organized anti-black movement, seeing as he goes out of his way to apologize for a well-funded effort to make racism respectable in academia, which effort traces itself all the way back to the odious eugenics movement (the same one that, as Entine himself admits, bequeathed us Adolf Hitler and German Nazism).
One might argue, however, that Entine is merely cheerleading a racist movement, that he does not directly coordinate his actions with those of Pioneer and other well-funded and well-organized racists. But I think I can show that Entine is no free agent. In Mexico, where I grew up, there is an old saying, “Tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you really are.” Of course, we have already seen who Entine really is, but let us take a look at his buddies anyway, for this will tell us who has an interest in promoting anti-black racism.

Jon Entine’s friends
__________________
Jon Entine calls J. Phillipe Rushton “Phil Rushton” in the acknowledgments section. Sounds friendly. Guess what?

“Since 2002, Rushton has been the president of the controversial Pioneer Fund.”[11a]

Really, how can there be a debate about whether the Pioneer Fund is still a racist organization? It has made Phillipe Rushton its president. Given that Entine defends Pioneer, and that Rushton is Entine's friend, and one who helped him out with Taboo, can there be a debate about Entine?
Entine has other such friends.
As mentioned earlier, Jon Entine wrote an article for Skeptic, a magazine, where he defended his views in a full-issue extravaganza that Skeptic devoted to Taboo. This was followed by a Skeptic symposium on Taboo at one of the most prestigious science schools in the US: Cal-Tech. So it is time for us to ask: What kind of magazine is Skeptic?
Let us first see what those running the magazine have to say about that. The Skeptic website explains the publication’s ‘mission’:

“Our mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on…controversial ideas and claims.”[12]

The Skeptic website also contains the Skeptic ‘manifesto,’ which explains as follows:

“Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena.”[13]

Putting them together, Skeptic says that it means “to serve as an educational tool” about “controversial ideas and claims” by honoring the “scientific method,” which is to say principles of “gathering data to formulate and test…explanations.”
Now, the editors of Skeptic have for years been attending the meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the same society whose journal published the refutation of Rushton I cited in chapter 10. I know they’ve been there because I have seen them there myself, and on more than one occasion I have ended up seated at the same table with them, and exchanged a few words. Therefore, all that the editors of Skeptic had to do was call or email some of the many human population biologists or biological anthropologists they have met there. This would have been the first rational step in “gathering data” about Entine’s claims.
By taking this step, the Skeptic editors could have quickly found out just how absurd Entine’s arguments were. Just as an example, since they have met me, it could have occurred to them to call me. Very low cost. It’s not like they don't know me, because they published a letter of mine protesting Vincent Sarich’s celebration of The Bell Curve in an earlier issue of Skeptic.[13a] But it didn’t have to be me; many others in the Human Behavior and Evolution society could have explained to the Skeptic editors that when Entine presents his views as the mainstream state-of-the-art in population biology, he is simply lying. At which point the obvious editorial decision is to print a refutation of Entine by a qualified biologist, because the Skeptic mission, they claim, is “to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on…controversial ideas and claims.”
But the editors of Skeptic didn’t do that. Instead, they invited Entine to make a defense of his book Taboo. They also invited Vincent Sarich to write another defense of the same.[14] For good measure, they had one of the editors of Skeptic, Frank Miele, write a glowing fan piece about Entine, once again defending Taboo and giving the full list of Entine’s ‘prestigious awards.’[15]
Did anybody take a critical view of Entine’s book? Michael Shermer, one of the editors at Skeptic, wrote a piece with a weak dissenting argument (compare to Carrie Buck’s lawyer’s weak defense of her, which we saw in chapter 7), and John Hoberman, a sociologist at the University of Texas, was also invited to write a piece against.[16]
What this means is that not one population biologist was asked to comment on Entine’s claims, even though this was, of course, the only way to satisfy the explicit Skeptic mission and manifesto. When it comes to Jon Entine, then, Skeptic abandoned skepticism entirely, merely producing the aura of scientific debate when it had in fact gone out of its way to stack the deck in Entine’s favor.
What could explain this?
To answer this question let us consider again the journal Mankind Quarterly. This journal was founded by R. Gayre. To get a sense for him, consider that he was called as an ‘expert witness’ for the defense in a trial against several individuals accused of publishing racist materials.

“In his evidence to the court he [Gayre] described blacks as being ‘feckless’ and he maintained that scientific evidence showed that blacks ‘prefer their leisure to the dynamism which the white and yellow races show.’ Largely on the basis of Gayre’s ‘expert’ testimony the defendants were acquitted.”[17]

Entine himself explained, as you may recall, that another founder of Mankind Quarterly was eugenicist and pro-segregation activist Henry Garrett. Entine conceded, further 1) that this journal “became a haven for hard-line eugenicists,” and 2) that “Since 1978, Mankind Quarterly has been edited by Roger Pearson,” who, as Entine also explains, defends the traditional German Nazi ideology.
How interesting, then, that Frank Miele, who, as we saw above, is one of the editors of Skeptic, has written extensively on ‘race’ for—guess which journal? Mankind Quarterly. Two examples from his corpus are:

Miele, Frank. “Morphological Methods and Racial Classification.” Mankind Quarterly 12 (April-June 1972): 220-227.

Miele, Frank. “Twin Studies and the Inheritance of Mental Ability.” Mankind Quarterly 13 (January-March 1973): 129-140.

And Frank Miele is also associated with Arthur Jensen’s work.[18]
It is now becoming much clearer why Skeptic magazine, and Frank Miele in particular, should have showcased and praised Entine’s book Taboo. Further enlightenment is to be had by consulting the acknowledgments section of Taboo, where, in addition to thanking Vincent Sarich for doing some heavy lifting in making Taboo as good as Entine thinks it is, somebody else is thanked in the same terms:

“Berekely geneticist Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, an editor at my favorite magazine, Skeptic, were generous enough to review the manuscript in detail, offering up dozens of critical suggestions.”[19] [my emphasis]

So this is a friendly little club. Small wonder, then, that the other friend, Vincent Sarich, was invited to contribute his own defense of Entine’s ideas in the pages of Skeptic, which ideas Entine of course got from… (?)
Wait just a minute.
As you may recall, Jon Entine got his ‘theory’ from Vincent Sarich (see chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5), whom Entine falsely presented as espousing the biological mainstream. Consulting Entine’s footnote, I find that Entine is not quoting a peer-reviewed publication of Sarich’s, but, if you can believe this, an email that Sarich sent to an informal internet list. Entine is popularizing the biological mainstream? Entine is popularizing an email. An email.[20]
They are playing us for fools, aren’t they?
Now Sarich has written an article for Skeptic defending Entine’s ideas of race. But the ideas are his, Sarich’s, and they were written in an email, not published in a peer-reviewed publication. Lunacy. If we wait just a bit, somebody may write an article for a low-grade pseudo-academic journal (perhaps Frank Miele, in Mankind Quarterly), this time citing Sarich’s Skeptic article. Then University of California at Berkeley Professor Emeritus Vincent Sarich can write another article for a somewhat more prestigious journal and cite Miele’s latest ‘academic’ article, always on the same idea. It is now a ‘respectable idea.’ See how this works? It is ‘out there’ and being discussed ‘in the literature.’ This is a page stolen from the tactical manual of the antisemites who deny the Holocaust, and whom Pr. Deborah Lipstadt has exposed.[21]
You might never suspect this, however, if all you knew about Skeptic was that Michael Shermer, one of its editors, had written a book in 2000 refuting the Holocaust deniers.[21a] This is much too clever. So clever, in fact, that the publicity for this book sports a plaudit from Jared Diamond, the same Jared Diamond who is a public anti-racist and whose work is so infuriating to the man whom Jon Entine affectionately calls “Phil Rushton.” This of course is the same Entine who is a Skeptic inner-circle amigo and whose racist and pro-eugenicist views Skeptic (which Michael Shermer edits) vigorously promotes!
It’s enough to make your head spin, and perhaps you need to read the above paragraph again.
Can it be explained? The following hypothesis springs to mind: Jared Diamond, who is Jewish and a public anti-racist, has fallen innocently prey to a maneuver meant to give Skeptic a pro-Jewish flavor by associating its editor prominently with the refutation of Holocaust deniers. And what is the point of that? The point is to get any African-Americans who discover just how racist Skeptic is to conclude that anti-black racism is connected with being pro-Jewish—an excellent way of alienating the African-American and Jewish-American communities. But would Skeptic have an interest in so dividing blacks and Jews? Certainly. As we have seen, Skeptic is pushing eugenics, and it should not be forgotten that the eugenicists suffered a quite important defeat at the hands of the Civil Rights movement, the backbone of which was a strong alliance between blacks and Jews (it is not a random coincidence that one of the five founders of the NAACP should have been Jewish: Henry Moscowitz, the only non-black founder[21b]).
Another aspect of the same policy is that Jon Entine tells the world that he is supposedly Jewish! In an interview he gave to United Press International about a book he is writing (slated to be released in 2005) on Jewish history, he talks about “the trauma of my bar mitzvah.”[21c] I have already shown that Jon Entine is dishonest, so how difficult is it to imagine that he is lying about being Jewish? Given that he is an apologist for German Nazism, as we saw, I would submit that this is not too difficult. What is difficult is to imagine a real Jewish person apologizing for those who exterminated the Jewish people. It would be like finding a black person defending the Ku Klux Klan.
Given all this, it matters that the American Establishment is fully behind Jon Entine, because from this we may conclude two things:

1) eugenics never went out of fashion in the hyper-rich American aristocracy, and

2) these American aristocrats have learned their lesson, because they appear to be taking quite sophisticated steps to sabotage unity between African Americans and Jews.

In the following section I examine the widespread support Jon Entine gets from the wealthy Establishment.

Jon Entine has friends in very high places
_____________________________________
As we saw in the introduction, Entine’s book was widely praised in the mainstream press. To those with an understanding of the race concept, population biology, categorization theory, and the history of IQ tests, it is obvious that Entine’s book is one lie after another. It follows, therefore, that the mainstream press did not ask qualified people to review this book.
Is that how the press usually does things? At least at The New York Times, the usual practice is to ask people to review a book who are professionally familiar with the book’s topic. I’ll give you three examples.

1) When The New York Times needed somebody to review The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth, by Alan Cutler, it asked Kevin Padian to do it. Why? Because the book examines the discoveries of a medieval geologist, and Padian “teaches evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley.”[22] Is a paleontologist a good choice for reviewing a book on medieval geology? Sure. Paleontologists cannot get their degree unless they understand geology.

2) When The New York Times needed somebody to review Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - From the Babylonians to the Maya, by Dick Teresi, it asked Stephen S. Hall. Why? Because this is a book about the history of science, and Hall writes on the history of science: “Stephen S. Hall is working on a book about the history of regenerative medicine.”[23] So this is right up his alley.

3) When The New York Times needed somebody to review The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic, by Frank Bourgin, it asked Pauline Maier. Why? Because this is a book about American history, and “Pauline Maier’s books include The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams,” so the presumption is that she knows something about American history.[24]

You get my drift. This newspaper is careful to match a book it wants to review to a person with the credentials to review it. But this is precisely what didn’t happen when it came to reviewing Entine’s book Taboo. For this one, The New York Times asked Jim Holt to do the review. His qualifications? “Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for Lingua Franca and The Wall Street Journal.”[25] Well, that’s very nice, but if Jim Holt is a serviceable jack-of-all-trades who writes for The Wall Street Journal, that doesn’t make him a population biologist.
And what did Jim Holt say? He wrote that Entine had made “a painstaking case that race and genetics are indeed ‘significant components’ of the ‘stunning and undeniable dominance of black athletes,’” and he defended Entine’s book, believe it or not, as an attack on racism, by suggesting that the thesis it defends “rankles white racial chauvinists, who until the last century clung to the myth that Africans were inferior to Europeans.”
This takes some nerve, because the “white racial chauvinists,” such as Henry Edward Garrett, have always said that blacks are “fine muscular animals” (see chapter 9).
Holt did mention in passing that Entine might be wrong. But that’s just the problem: it creates the impression of a debate when in fact there is none. What Holt should have said is that Entine’s book is a long string of incoherent absurdities, defended by misrepresenting a lot of nonsensical hogwash as the supposed findings of mainstream biology, and for good measure citing the findings of mainstream biology—which refute him—as if they supported him. And Holt probably should have mentioned, too, that Jon Entine apologizes for the eugenics movement that spawned the German Nazis.
Did The New York Times make an innocent mistake? This is quite impossible, because

1) the topic of the book is quite sensitive—in fact, politically explosive;

2) among educated people it is not a secret that biologists have been saying for some time that there are no human races;

3) The New York Times is run by educated people; and

4) quite a few people openly accused the book of being racist as soon as it came out.

Therefore, the obvious move here was for The New York Times to cover its back and make sure that an eminent population biologist reviewed the book—or at least somebody who had some reason to know something about population biology. What follows, then, is that The New York Times went out of its way to get this book reviewed by a layperson, even though it is precisely this book which, of all books, should have been reviewed by an expert.
There can be little question on this point because The New York Times—as if it were the marketing division for Jon Entine Inc.—did not give Taboo one review but two. Holt’s was the second, four months after the book first came out in January 2000.
The first NYT review of Taboo, in January 2000, by one Richard Bernstein, says this:

“Mr. Entine makes a careful and reasoned case for this point of view… Mr. Entine’s conclusion that racially distinctive features are an essential element of the picture is part of a sophisticated argument that, whether entirely persuasive or not, cannot be dismissed.”[26]

A ringing endorsement.
The funny thing is, about Richard Bernstein The New York Times cannot even say that he writes about science and philosophy: he is an utter layman. If you would like to know what Mr. Bernstein does, let me get out of the way so that he can tell you:

“My new book is a story of two journeys. One is that of a Chinese monk named Hsuan Tsang who in the seventh century traveled from the Tang Dynasty capital at Chang-an to the South of India and back, in search of the Buddhist truth. The second journey was my own retracing of Hsuan Tsang’s route over four or so months in 1999. I went for roughly 10,000 overland miles by bus, train, and Jeep, across deserts, Himalayan mountain passes, two former republics of the Soviet Union, Pakistan, India, and Nepal—and back.”[27]

How charming. I suppose this is why Mr. Bernstein is qualified to evaluate a book that makes claims about the supposed state-of-the-art in population biology.
So there is no doubting it: The New York Times went out of its way to get laypersons to review Entine’s book—not once, but twice.
And why? It is obvious: if an expert had reviewed Entine, he would have trashed it, as confirmed by how this book was reviewed in the biological journals. Here is how a review in the Quarterly Review of Biology wryly delivered the point that Entine (whose book it called “maddening”) had not supported himself with the work of mainstream genetics:

“The heavy reliance on anthropologists who support the race distinction [Vincent Sarich] does not strengthen the case and, indeed, serves only to highlight the pronounced and growing distance between mainstream genetics and anthropology. Much of the cited evidence derives from secondary and tertiary sources, and a fair amount of email, anecdotes, celebrity opinions, newspaper editorials, and unpublished communications masquerade as evidence.”[28]

Ouch. (Not that Entine feels the sting: he posted the review on his website!)
So if The New York Times went out of its way to get a complete layperson to review Jon Entine’s book—not once, but twice—this must be because it didn’t want a review like that in the Quarterly Review of Biology happening in its pages.
What does that suggest? That an attack on black people, backed by the big money of the American Establishment, is afoot.
More evidence for this point is hardly needed, because The New York Times is the king of print media: the ‘cream of the cream’ (in terms of prestige and circulation figures, if not quality). But if further evidence were needed, I remind you that The New York Times was hardly alone in praising Taboo. Across the board, all over the mainstream press, Entine received glowing reviews. Entine, of course, claims that there was great resistance to Taboo, but as I said in the introduction,

“If the Establishment had indeed tried to squash Entine’s book, we would expect Taboo to have been negatively reviewed, or not to have been reviewed at all, in mainstream publications. But in fact the opposite happened. The book was widely reviewed. The non-scientists who reviewed Taboo wrote that Entine had been ‘forthright enough to present hard evidence,’[29] and had ‘done a brilliant job’[30] of giving us a ‘balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data,’[31] which amounts to a ‘sophisticated argument that…cannot be dismissed.’[32] They warned that, although ‘There will be those who will refuse to listen,…his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of…the scientific evidence.’[33] They agreed that ‘Taboo convincingly argues that race does make a difference….’”[34]

These were the opinions of Kirkus Reviews, The Montreal Gazette, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Still not convinced that there is a well-funded and broadly based attack on blacks going on? Then consider where Entine’s book Taboo comes from. As Entine informs the public on his own website, and proudly displaying the NBC logo,

“TABOO is based on the 1989 NBC News documentary ‘Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction,’ produced and written by Jon Entine with Tom Brokaw. The program, which included an hour-long documentary and a forty-five minute discussion and analysis that followed, was awarded an Ohio State University Award for Excellence in Broadcasting and was named Best International Sports Film at the International Sports Film Festival.”[35]

Once again we see a prestigious news source going out of its way to promote Entine’s claims. Once again we see the Establishment showering praise in the form of awards.
NBC is a very big deal: in recent years the most important TV network. In fact, NBC is a much bigger deal than The New York Times, because although that paper is quite respected, not that many people read it, and book reviews are something that the overwhelming majority of those who do read this paper skip anyway. NBC, on the other hand, is watched by millions of people. Moreover, Tom Brokaw in particular was always considered a trusted newsperson, and in fact he rose to become the highest rated news anchor:

“Tom Brokaw’s retirement [December 2004] at age 64 ended a nine-year run as the No. 1 network news anchor as measured by Nielsen.”[34a]

A lot of ordinary people watching Brokaw’s program with Entine were undoubtedly influenced by NBC’s and Brokaw’s prestige, and thought to themselves that they were looking at a report on what mainstream biology had shown—because Brokaw and NBC would not be deliberately pushing racism, now, would they?
They would.
Jon Entine relates, on pages 6 and 7 of Taboo, the following comments by the former NBC news anchor concerning the program he put together with Entine:

“‘It was probably as complicated and controversial a story as I’ve ever gotten involved in, certainly up there with Watergate,’ Brokaw remembers. ‘There were times right before and after it aired that I worried if the storm would ever die down. Those were delicate moments.’ ... ‘Friends said ‘Don’t do it,’’ recalls Brokaw. ‘But I thought that it was important enough to address.’ ... ‘I had a friend who shall go nameless, who is a distinguished black American, had been an athlete, and excelled at the highest levels in other fields. He never raised the subject with me. He just quietly withdrew our friendship for about two years.’”

This is quite a lot to digest. Tom Brokaw created such a controversy with this program that he compares it to the Watergate scandal that forced president Richard Nixon to resign in order to avoid impeachment! There is of course no question that mainstream biologists informed Brokaw that Entine was a quack (after all, the show created a storm that seemed to Brokaw like it might never die down). And yet Brokaw went ahead with this program because he thought it was very important—important enough that he would do it even if it offended his black friends.
Tom Brokaw cares deeply about promoting Entine’s obviously fraudulent ideas.
The same can be said about the rest of the mainstream media, which went out of its way to praise the NBC Brokaw-Entine extravaganza. Of this Entine leaves no doubt because he quotes all the accolades on his website:

“This is a step forward in the dialogue on race and sports.” - Newsday

“This program—reported by Tom Brokaw and written and produced by Jon Entine—is very good, very fair and stands on its own. And this program is controversial, but only because it publicly suggests what countless avid sports followers know to be true and say privately.” - Los Angeles Times

“It is the best documentary NBC has put together in a very long time.” - Philadelphia Daily News

“The program opened the door to enlightenment on a controversial subject.” - Dr. Harry Edwards, University of California-Berkeley Sociologist

“‘Black Athletes’ presented a strong case that there are, in fact, fundamental physiological differences between blacks and whites.” - Houston Post

“Producer-writer Jon Entine and host Tom Brokaw offer us a thoughtful look at widely held beliefs about black athletic superiority.” - Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“The network should be applauded for its bold venture, for the willingness to tackle a sensitive subject such as alleged athletic superiority of blacks, and for taking risks in the name of truth-seeking.” - Denver Post

“Blacks have suffered so much cruelty at the hands of whites, they are now unwilling to accept what could be a compliment because they are scared to hidden meanings and implications. That’s sad for blacks. And if you think about it, it’s sad for whites, as well.” - San Francisco Chronicle.[35]

But if you are still not convinced that there is a big-money organized effort against blacks, I will ask you simply to remember that the Civil Rights movement is only a half-century old, and that almost every psychology department in the country continues to produce and teach so-called IQ research, even though this ‘research’ has been thoroughly discredited many times over, and even though the only point of it is to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities.
This is a big deal. A lot of Establishment support goes to convincing people that

1)  human races supposedly exist;

2)  that the prejudices ordinary Americans have about so-called ‘blacks’—which are derived from the ideological needs of those who oppressed Africans with slavery—are supposedly accurate; and

3)  that IQ tests—designed so that members of the lower classes (where blacks are overrepresented) will do poorly as a result of their environmental disadvantages—are valid measures of something called ‘intelligence,’ which is held to be innate and unalterable, but which is in fact a concept that the IQ test results themselves refute!

It is high time all this was exposed, and it is high time that ordinary black people became aware of what is being done to them, systematically, across the board, with subterfuge, and with the backing of big money.
A defense must be mounted.

 CHAMAKHE MAURIENI IS A MOROCCAN BORN FREELANCE WRITER,ENTERPRENEUR,AND AUTHOR.ADD HIM ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/chamakhe.maurieni
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