The Mortgage Monsters Meet The Immigration Invasion. They Like Each Other.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently acknowledged…Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… are expanding because of an “implicit subsidy” at a “pace beyond that consistent with systematic safety.”…

In other words, federal policy has created a massive financial distortion—and an interest group, Fannie and Freddie’s shareholders and employees, are in favor of that distortion continuing.

What Peter Brimelow has called the Mortgage Monsters have become financial Frankensteins.

And the Mortgage Monsters are allying with another interest group: the immigrant lobby. Immigration is one of the main engines of growth for the giant mortgage lending institutions. And few companies have more openly tied their fortunes to immigration than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…

NY Times:

By [Dr. Nancy L. Segal's] definition, virtual twins are unrelated children born within nine months of each other who enter a family, through birth or adoption, in the first year of life. Since 1991, Dr. Segal has been studying 137 such sets of siblings, whose average age difference is three months.

As scientific subjects, virtual twins provide a rich pool of material for researchers tackling the nature-versus-nurture question. In Dr. Segal’s studies, as in so many involving biological twins, it seems that nature is winning.

Raised together essentially from birth, or at least since infancy, virtual twins may be genetic strangers, but they share an environment from an early point in life.

...

Several major twin studies over the last 20 years, particularly those following twins raised by different families, have provided what scientists say is clear evidence that genetics play a greater role than environment in intelligence and a range of personality traits. Dr. Segal’s research, believed to be the first to examine virtual twins as a subset of the twin population, has bolstered the prevailing view through another lens.

...

Dr. Segal has found that identical twins were the most alike in their thinking, fraternal twins somewhat less so, and virtual twins strikingly different. When it comes to intelligence, for example, her research has found that only 25 percent of the differences between twins — virtual, fraternal or identical — can be accounted for by their environment, 75 percent by genetics.

of those incompetent idiots? I'm proud to announce that a group of real professionals are entering the retail tech support space:

Detailing its growth plan a day ahead of its annual meeting, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on signaled Thursday that it's very interested in expanding into installation and repair services in its fast-growing electronics segment

Fairfax May Junk Study on Behavior: Staff Report Shows Racial, Ethnic Gaps Among Students

Fairfax County School Board members said they are likely to abandon a staff report that showed racial and ethnic gaps in some measures of student behavior, including in the demonstration of "sound moral character and ethical judgment."

The board had delayed an April vote to approve the report after concerns were raised that findings were based on subjective measures, such as elementary report card data, and that they would fuel negative stereotypes.

Board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence) said yesterday that he plans to propose at a June 19 meeting that a vote on the report be postponed indefinitely. Several board members have indicated their support, he said.

Board member Martina A. Hone (At Large) said that the original report is "fatally flawed" and that it doesn't make sense "to work on fixing it." She said she is pleased with the way the board is rethinking it. "I think we have come out a stronger school board," she said.

The school system's report was an early attempt to measure progress on a host of goals the board considers "essential" for success in the workplace. It identified disparities among groups of students in several skills, including the ability to contribute effectively in a group, resolve conflicts and make healthy choices, and in the demonstration of moral character and ethical judgment.

BBC Two:

Forty years after Enoch Powell's infamous speech predicting that mass immigration would lead to violence on our streets, filmmaker Denys Blakeway explores the impact of the maverick Conservative MP's words and legacy.

Powell was a member of Edward Heath's Shadow Cabinet when he made the Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, so-called because he quoted the Roman poet Virgil's prophesy: "I see the Tiber foaming with much blood". He was immediately sacked, but not before sparking furious debate, with his words dividing the nation.

This film examines Powell's speech in unprecedented detail, discovering how his core argument was ignored in favour of his incendiary language. It questions what led him to speak out in the first place and traces the speech's effect on immigration policy in Britain.

Below the fold: all six parts of the program as embedded YouTube clips.

[see title]

Free-fallin'!

The MacHeist bundle is a damn good deal for Mac software.

Mark Pagel

The last thirty to forty years of social science has brought an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. People of Siberian descent, New Guinean Highlanders, those from the Indian sub-continent, Caucasians, Australian aborigines, Polynesians, Africans — we are, officially, all the same: there are no races.

Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like miniscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

The new figure for us, then, is significant.

We need to upstage these folks.

Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh have sent Nazi skinheads from Halliburton and/or Blackwater to silence truth-teller Randi Rhodes. She was badly beaten and has lost some teeth. She is now denying that an assault by right-wingers occurred, which just goes to show how intimidating the ReTHUGlicans can be. If they can silence this truth-teller, they can silence any of us.

Independent:

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

BBC World Service is reporting that Africa is still fucked up.

link

Research suggests [...] that faith in diversity is being sorely tested. New studies confirm earlier evidence that, at least in the short- to mid-term, diversity weakens civic ties, fostering mutual mistrust and detachment. Beneath all the ''happy talk'' about diversity, many Americans harbor a deep ambivalence about where it will lead.

[...]

The [research] is complemented by a massive national study by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who reports that in the face of large-scale immigration, many Americans are overwhelmed by diversity. Putnam calls it ''socio-psychological system overload.'' With stunning regularity, he found Americans in more diverse locales tending to ''hunker down and pull in like a turtle,'' suspicious not just of the new or different, but of everybody.

I'm looking for something that will let me organize different types of network information into layers, and to display (or not) those layers depending on the zoom level of the viewer. So if you zoom out all the way, you see WAN links between sites, but if you zoom in to a particular node, you see MAC addresses and kernel versions (or whatever).

This would work in much the way that Google Earth decides to display information depending on the viewer's altitude or distance from the geographical feature.