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Meet the new year, same as the old year … From the New York Times’ news (not opinion) section:
James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race
“Decoding Watson,” a new film about Dr. James D. Watson explores the gulf between his scientific brilliance and his views on race.
By Amy Harmon, Jan. 1, 2019
It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.
In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”
Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Watson was likely referring to a major effort he had made to employ blacks from the slums as lab techs and the like.
Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there.
That’s called “getting Watsoned.”
He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public.
Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’
But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media.
Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized.
“I reject his views as despicable,” Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. “They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m sorry.’’
And yet, offered the chance recently to recast a tarnished legacy, Dr. Watson has chosen to reaffirm it, this time on camera. In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson,’’ to be broadcast on P.B.S. on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed.
“No,’’ Dr. Watson said. “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.’’
Dr. Watson adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and whites’’ and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful for schizophrenics,’’ he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists, we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better?”
Dr. Watson’s remarks may well ignite another firestorm of criticism.
In other words: Twitter, do your thing!
By the way, if you decide to send out dissenting tweets on this topic, please don’t copy Amy Harmon on them, because she will just use them to write a pity party follow-up article about how her New York Times article intended to “ignite another firestorm of criticism” of an infirm 90 year old scientist led to her receiving unappreciative tweets in her Notifications: that is Hate. In contrast, ginning up a Two-Minutes Hate against James D. Watson in the New York Times is Responsible Journalism.
At the very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take the measure of the man: How should such fundamentally unsound views be weighed against his extraordinary scientific contributions?
Why is James D. Watson talking about genetics when Amy Harmon, obviously, knows best?
In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”
No. Most experts on intelligence consider it an open question without a firm answer yet.
Here are some things I’ve written about Watson over the years:
James D. Watson – A Modern Galileo – October 21, 2007
Don’t Apologize for a “Gaffe” – October 28, 2007
Why Truth Is Better than Ignorance, Lies, and Wishful Thinking – November 4, 2007
Is James Watson Black? – December 10, 2007
James Watson and Passing – December 12, 2007
James Watson as a Leader – October 22, 2007
Francis Crick, James Watson’s DNA Partner, Also Guilty of Crimethink – January 12, 2008
Amy Harmon on the Watson Brouhaha in 2007 – November 10, 2007
Null Set Google Search: “Watson’s Defender” – November 15, 2007
My IQ FAQ – December 3, 2007
My Race FAQ – December 21, 2007
More on the Race-IQ Brouhaha – November 21, 2007
Nobel Laureate’s Talk on Cancer Research Deplatformed by Science Denialists – May 19, 2017
Taleb vs. Sailer on Race and IQ – December 26, 2018
“Watson was referring to a major effort he made to employ blacks from the slums as lab techs and the like.”
Winston: Thank you sir. May I have another?
O'Brien: No one ever seizes the narrative with the intention of relinquishing it. The object of academia is obfuscation. We shall abolish rational thought.~ George Sorowell, "2084"
In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence want to keep their jobs.
I posted this tweet on the previous thread, but it’s more appropriate here:
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.
I wonder what Amy Harmon has lurking about...
Anyway, to the point, Miss Harmon may realize that she no longer has any leverage on Dr. Watson, and his words may go completely off the PC rails. It may be better to find a younger, more status- and paycheck-bound target.Replies: @Marty T, @Unladen Swallow
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aisAAOSwenJcGiMH/s-l1600.jpg
Ironically, the reporter, Amy Harmon, won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting… As in: “Shut up! She explained.”
“Harmon won the prize for Explanatory Reporting alone in 2008 for a series titled “The DNA Age” about the ramifications of new genetic technology. The award formally cited “her striking examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing, using human stories to sharpen her reports.””
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Harmon
After Dr. Watson dies they will periodically dig him up and have another row at bashing him. The man is now 90 and out of the public eye and they still hammer him. And as to “environmental” differences, blacks often create their own environment. Happy New Year to all!
I foresee a federal judge stepping in to mandate this text be inserted in large, bold-face letters on Watson’s gravestone, when he leaves this Earthly plane.
A social justice epitaph.
There are elder abuse laws and the PBS numpties are playing gotcha w a 90 year old.
“Twitter, do your thing!”…you mean thanng as proper pronounced.
Tell that the the 94+ year old germans still being prosecuted for war crimes.Replies: @Marty T
–Never let facts get in the way of a good story.
–Facts inconvenient to The Narrative will be ignored.
–Diversity is our strength, except when difference is observable.
–We are all equal, except for our diversity–which is to be celebrated, or ignored depending on the PC/SJW fashion of the moment.
The ‘crime of noticing’–soon to be a felony in your jurisdictions.
Happy New Year to all those celebrating where it’s not a cultural appropriation.
A major newspaper publishes a column recommending it become a felony to call the cops on a black person committing a crime.
I just saw that Watson called Obama the smartest President since Lincoln. I’m not sure if he really meant it or whether it was part of his atonement campaign. In either case, sigh…
https://youtu.be/5hz6sAIUrXs
In 1865, there were not 57 states and there were not trans corpse-men in the ranks of the Union army.
He made the mistake of trying to appease them... they smelled blood...
As Vox Day recommends never apologize to SJW.Replies: @Forbes, @NickG
GHWB.
https://twitter.com/amy_harmon/status/1080102878742757376
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.Replies: @Forbes, @Hail, @Achmed E. Newman, @Hail, @Bubba
Apparently stating observable, documented facts is considered reinforcing a pernicious stereotype.
I wonder what Amy Harmon has lurking about…
The refusal and inability of the right and conservative side of this country to defend “The Bell Curve” will prove to be most pivotal to its eventual demise. If you don’t defend the curve, then you are essentially accepting the premise that blacks and whites and hispanics are all equal, essentially handing the left and liberal side a big stick to beat you up when they do not in fact turn out to be equal, which they have been doing it non stop since the 90’s.
Dr. Watson’s views are “unfounded” and “unsound”. There is a “gulf between his scientific brilliance and his views on race.” Do you got that, Goodthinkers? The NY Times has told you how to think. No further supporting evidence is needed. We know that we are right and Watson is wrong because… uh.. reasons. Who are you going to believe – us or your lying eyes? Don’t let us catch you drawing your own conclusions or you might get Watsoned too!
The link to the Crick story is a duplicate of the link to the “Watson as Leader” story.
I think the correct link is probably IQ-Race Crimethink Alert! Francis Crick, James Watson’s DNA Partner, Also Guilty (both dates and content match).
What happened to Watson is a travesty that speaks volumes about the capture of the administrative side of academia, by people who have nothing better to do than try to force the good ‘ol Marxian ‘radical transformation of consciousness’.
Mencken drew a precise bead on “World Improvers”: they are always second-rate individuals.
Obama must be the smartest ever. But Lincoln had multiple handicaps.
In 1865, there were not 57 states and there were not trans corpse-men in the ranks of the Union army.
I just saw that Watson called Obama the smartest President since Lincoln.
He made the mistake of trying to appease them… they smelled blood…
As Vox Day recommends never apologize to SJW.
There are elder abuse laws and the PBS numpties are playing gotcha w a 90 year old.
Tell that the the 94+ year old germans still being prosecuted for war crimes.
An interesting response from Dr. Collins here. The use of the word “primarily” is particularly intriguing. Either he’s being very skillful here (so as to not get Watsoned himself), or he’s making an attempt (honest or not) to summarise the results of surveys of expert opinion on this topic.
Either way, he seems to be leaving open the possibility of genetic differences accounting for some of the black-white IQ gap.
The only clear evidence on this question comes from Rindermann, Coyle and Becker (2013). They found that 42% of experts believe that 0-40% of the IQ gap is due to genetic differences (with 17% believing that the gap is entirely environmental in origin); 18% of experts believe that 50% of the IQ gap is due to genetic differences; and 39% of experts believe that 60-100% of the gap is due to genetic differences (with 5% believing the gap to be entirely genetic in origin).
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/isir-what-do-intelligence-researchers/
So, I suppose that a plurality of experts who voiced an opinion believe that the gap is primarily environmental in origin, but a majority of experts (57%) disagree that it is “primarily” environmental in origin.
60% genetic=firing offense to even say such a "discredited" claim.
40% genetic=completely mainstream.Replies: @ben tillman
--Facts inconvenient to The Narrative will be ignored.
--Diversity is our strength, except when difference is observable.
--We are all equal, except for our diversity--which is to be celebrated, or ignored depending on the PC/SJW fashion of the moment.
The 'crime of noticing'--soon to be a felony in your jurisdictions.
Happy New Year to all those celebrating where it's not a cultural appropriation.Replies: @AndrewR, @Kyle, @Dtbb
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.freep.com/amp/1207129002
A major newspaper publishes a column recommending it become a felony to call the cops on a black person committing a crime.
He wasn’t even the smartest president since
GHWB.
Amy Harmon bio
– 1968: Born in New York City
– 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
– ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
– ca. early 1990s: “moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science.”
– 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
– June 2000: Published “A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture’s Public Face,” for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
– ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter’s Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) “Sasha,” as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy’s partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name — Scott Matthews — but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):
– 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category “Explanatory Reporting” for series of ten articles published in 2007 called “The DNA Age.”
– 2013: Publishes first book, “Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You’re Not Wired to Connect.”
– Summer 2018: Harmon’s parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)’s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:
_________________
Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?
There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:
This is not the New York Times article-writer.
Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:
Q. Do any of Sailer’s Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger “PA World and Times” last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.
May 2013 interview with Amy Harmon: https://vimeo.com/66822422Replies: @Mr. Anon
Culture is a significant factor in most if not all racial disparities, and it’s mutable enough that it’s still intellectually respectable to focus on culture instead of genes. It’s not like these gaps are continuing to exist despite the best efforts of everyone involved to eliminate them.
Blacks are holy. It means they are full of wisdom, indeed born with it. So, how can a people so wise and noble not be intelligent? It’s blasphemous.
Black holiness is useful to Jewish power. If blacks are holy, then white mistreatment of blacks was akin to deicide, and so whites must atone forever. White Guilt becomes a spiritual matter and paralyzes white pride on a permanent basis. Then, white paralysis can be exploited by Jewish Power to do whatever deemed to be partially redemptive(like supporting Israel and fighting more wars in the Middle East). So, the idea that blacks are just another race of humans with some advantages(muscle power) and disadvantages(mental power) must be condemned as blasphemy. Blacks must be thought of as wise and even godly, meaning they are imbued with intelligence beyond that of whites. So, how dare Watson just state hard facts about racial differences?
Insanely off-topic,
Hosted a New Year’s Eve party at my house for the members of my campus conservative discussion group. For background, I had on the TCM That’s Entertainment marathon. The kids were really blown-away by Eleanor Powell:
Was this the only time where Fred Astaire was kinda/sorta outpointed by his partner?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Zq86LGbocReplies: @J1234, @donut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JzglMNH04Replies: @syonredux, @syonredux, @syonredux
At least the prize itself hasn’t been rescinded, as with Jim Thorpe.
Truth’s a bitch, ain’t it?
Ten thousand generations of environmental differences.
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
Are buck teeth hereditary, or the result of environment? Or from thumbsucking, which is neither, but may correlate with both?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jews
Maybe Amy Harmon can write a genetics article on the matter.
I noticed that the scientists she quotes contra Watson don’t exactly refute him. Like Edward (above) says, that Collins guy using the copout word “primarily.” And David Reich–what does he think? His only understandable quote is that racial differences are plausible in view of evolution. Plomin’s quote certainly doesn’t refute Watson. Do you suppose Harmon is aware of this? Is she subtly trying to undermine her own argument?
What will a reasonable layperson conclude?
A) I better not voice such views since they resulted in James Watson being trashed?
B) If the most renowned biologist since Darwin holds these views, maybe there is something to them?
Just maybe Ms Harmon is engaged in a ... "dog whistle"?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-elementary-dna-of-dr-watson-gllb6w2vpdr
[Access with temporary subscription]
The elementary DNA of Dr Watson
History will remember James Watson for the discovery of the double helix. But his pronouncements are often highly controversial. His former protegee examines the complex legacy of a Nobel laureate
Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
October 14 2007, 1:00am, The Sunday Times
The names Watson and Crick, it has been said, have “joined Darwin and Copernicus among the immortals”. The pair’s discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953, has been hailed by fellow Nobel laureates as the greatest single scientific achievement of the 20th century. Today the only one remaining of the two, Dr James Watson, 79, stands alone as “the godfather of DNA”.
When, sitting at a dinner in Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1996, this ageing geneticist gingerly leant over to the guest by his side – the formidable headmistress of a large girls’ boarding school – and said, “I’m looking for some girls,” he was met with an appropriately cold stare. However, when he explained he was in England to hand-pick two students, one male and one female, to live in his Long Island home with him and his wife, Liz, and work as geneticists for a year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, it was an opportunity too good to lose. The headmistress promptly replied: “Well, funnily enough…”
It’s August and I am standing on the shimmering forecourt of the laboratory’s towering neuroscience building. “You’re doing this for the future of women in science,” my headmistress had impressed on me, 10 years earlier, as I left to start my stint at the laboratory bench. Watson, she said, had come over specifically to recruit a girl – a change from the male-dominated programme to date. Glancing up, I see a familiar figure pacing briskly over sun-drenched paving slabs towards me. At 79, Watson looks remarkably unchanged, perhaps his scant wisps of hair a touch whiter and gait a little less sure. “Ah, Charlotte,” he says enthusiastically and, pausing to give me the wide, open-mouthed smile I remember well and fixing me with intense, pale grey eyes, he presses my shoulders and plants a kiss firmly on both cheeks.
I am back in Long Island to discuss the geneticist’s latest and, he tells me, final memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. His early life and academic career, peppered with useful tips for “those on their way up” as well as those “on the top who do not want their leadership years to be an assemblage of opportunities gone astray”. And – as befits the ultimate memoir of a forthright scientist – an inflammatory epilogue with eye-popping theories that will, undoubtedly, leave ethicists choking with disbelief. We are not alone, however. A rotund thirty-something man asks for a photograph, puffing his chest and beaming proudly into the camera lens. Later, Watson tells me that the visitor was a science reporter who confided he has a form of schizophrenia.
The visitor’s trust is well founded. Standing just a few hundred metres from the building, vast construction frameworks jut above the campus. This, Watson’s latest project – an impressive $100m new-build – heralds a new era of genetics. It will soon become Cold Spring Harbor’s platform for unravelling the genetic causes of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. He is convinced that within 10 years “we will be able to diagnose the problem of schizophrenia by looking at the patient’s DNA”.
James Watson, or Jim, as the majority of scientists call him at the lab, has an energy that’s infectious, almost childlike. Born in Chicago in 1928 into a family who believed in “books, birds, and the Democratic party”, his outgoing character comes, he tells me, from his mother, the well-liked and extrovert Margaret – a raven-haired beauty who worked enthusiastically for the Democrats, the basement of their modest house doubling as a polling station at election time. His father, James, worked for a correspondence school and was a quiet, kind character who introduced his son to books and instigated a love of biology with early-morning birding forays in the nearby park. Watson recalls that he was conditioned to accept his father’s disdain for “any explanation that went beyond the laws of reason and science”.
Caught up in the Depression of the 1930s, he slept in tiny attic rooms with his younger sister, Betty, in the middle-class neighbourhood of South Shore, playing evening games of “kick the can” and softball in bungalow-lined streets. Skinny-framed and physically weak in his teens, his only consolation from school bullies was his parents’ empathy, encouraging constant trips to buy milk shakes to “fatten him up”. He recalls how a pupil cheerfully told him how, given his social awkwardness, “none of my classmates thought I would amount to much”.
In his picture-lined office, sitting beneath a rough paper sketch of a twisting DNA helix, Watson leans back in his chair, excitedly discussing his book. “Not being boring isn’t sufficient to be a success in this world, but certainly,” he pauses, fixing me with a brilliant smile, “it helps.” He says he hopes the book will encourage people to go into science and – tilting the cover to the light points out a hidden “Other” between the words “Boring” and “People” – “One, I’m a snob; the other, I’m a realist!” He giggles in delight.
Watson didn’t grow up thinking he was particularly gifted. “I never was one of those boy geniuses who could do maths,” he admits. But he does remember his teachers liked him, commenting that: “I must have had some spark that I didn’t know I had myself.” At the extremely young age of 15, he was admitted to the University of Chicago; his mother knew the head of admissions, he says, and “I always thought I got in because they liked my mother”. For a brilliant but awkward teenager, university was the break he needed. “A world where I might succeed using my head – not based on personal popularity or physical stature – was all that mattered to me,” he writes.
Watson prefers to eat at Winship’s, the chatty, down-to-earth laboratory bar overlooking the harbour, named after my boss of the time, whom he describes as having the “second loudest laugh I’ve ever heard after Francis Crick”. He mingles enthusiastically, hands shoved deep in dark-red knee-length shorts, an orange floppy sunhat perched on his head. He remembers, as I do, being seduced by the informal and intelligent atmosphere of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, something he first encountered as a 20-year-old biology graduate on a summer course. He says that in these early days, molecular biology was a very small field and people “didn’t know what DNA was”. He was under the spell of Max Delbrück, the charismatic young German lab director who played tennis and wasn’t “stuffy”.
For Watson, the ability to socialise is a key skill, one he believes can help propel you far beyond your peers. “Gossip is a fact of life also among scientists. And if you are out of the loop of what’s new, you are working with one hand tied behind your back.” The trait is clear among his staff, who, chatting easily at the bar, have the “ungeeky” Watson touch. My headmistress recalls the geneticist wanting a “bright but not very boffiny candidate who had lots of other interests” and who, above all, was “sociable”.
When Watson arrived in the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University as a 23-year-old postdoc, thirsty for the truth about the genetic material in our cells, his sociable American ways encountered Francis Crick’s “extraordinary conversational ability”, and he was hooked. Suddenly it no longer mattered what Delbrück thought: “It became what Francis thinks.” The pair freely discussed their scientific findings with other researchers at Cambridge and King’s College London, and Watson says this was essential to the pair’s ability to work out the detailed structure of the DNA molecule.
But there was someone who seemed immune to Watson’s precocious intelligence and eager collaboration: the acclaimed x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Frankin – someone described by Watson and Franklin’s estranged research colleague Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel prize, as “hostile”. Whereas Watson admits to never having a problem asking for advice, writing that it is better for someone to “know my inadequacies than not to be able to go on to the next problem”. Franklin seemed unwilling to risk criticism, reportedly preferring to work on DNA in isolation, jealously guarding her results. Watson comments that “avoiding your competition because you are afraid that you will reveal too much is a dangerous course”.
As he chews a melted-cheese sandwich and sips an iced coffee in the bar, he reflects on his relationship with “Rosy”. “She was possibly somewhat Asperger’s,” he says quietly, “because she didn’t seem to even want to look at people and would hurry past them. I think she wasn’t good at knowing what other people thought and so she would insult them. She had some terrible interviews with the Medical Research Council and I think she cried afterwards. She was just awkward.” Then he softens: “I tell people, instead of feeling angry at awkward people, you realise it’s not their choice. It’s awful. And I think science selects for awkward people because you think in dealing with ideas, you don’t have to deal with people. But the moment you’re in science and you realise you can’t deal with other people, you’re at an enormous disadvantage.”
It is hard to ignore the accusations that emerged around that time. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, but by then Franklin – whose data was so crucial to the discovery – had died at the age of 37, her life cut short by ovarian cancer. But when, in 1968, Watson wrote an account of the DNA “race” in which he revealed that Wilkins had shown him Franklin’s data without her knowledge, and compounded it by being derogatory about her physical appearance, he was slammed by feminists riled by what they believed was a blatant case of sexism. Although the prize can only be shared by a maximum of three people in one category – and Franklin’s input was readily acknowledged – they claimed her contribution had been overshadowed. When, in an interview at the time, he was asked why it mattered how a woman looked, he said: “Because it’s important” – a statement surely grounded in the genteel influences of his early life, when manners mattered, and being unkind “just wasn’t the way to behave”. And occasionally, throughout the day, his “old-fashioned” ideals come through. He describes Max Delbrück’s wife, Manny, as someone he liked very much but “not the sort of wife he needed”, adding that she was a terrible cook and would never have enjoyed the entertaining and fundraising that comes with being a university president’s wife. He also refers more than once to his disdain for women turning men into “girly men”, which means “men who don’t have the courage to say anything – it’s absurd”.
Feminists are a constant source of trouble for him. I remember him turning to me the day the headline “Abort babies with gay genes, says Nobel winner” appeared in a British broadsheet 10 years ago. Eyes wild and voice uncharacteristically strained, he asked: “What should I do about the press?” He refers to the incident again at lunch. “It was a hypothetical thing,” he explains. “If you could detect it pre-natally, could a woman abort a child who was homosexual? I said they should have the right to, because most women want to have grandchildren, period. We can’t do it, but it’s common sense. Anyways,” he says, shaking his head wearily, “it was a bad day when that headline hit. I was just arguing for the freedom of women to try and have the children they want, not what is right or wrong.”
One former pupil, an eminent biologist and staunch feminist, is outraged at his account of her in his book. He describes her as having “bolted from the room” when the ex-Harvard University president Larry Summers gave his infamous lecture suggesting that the low representation of tenured female scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes – an “unpopular, though by no means unfounded” theory, Watson comments. “She can criticise men; men can criticise women,” he says. “People criticise me all the time and you just take it. If you enter the public arena then you’re subject to it.” On the subject of gender equality he says, adamantly: “All I care about is great science.”
But he happily admits to appreciating a pretty smile or a well-dressed physique. A love of things aesthetic is unmistakable – pictures, glass sculptures and his elegant wife, Liz, 20 years his junior. He once said that in the early days, “almost everything I ever did, even as a scientist, was in the hope of meeting a pretty girl”. However, on the subject of science, he seems impartial. He admits that Rosalind Franklin would have seen the double helix first “had she seen fit to enter the model-building race and been better able to interact with other scientists”, and makes a point of mentioning that a former female student whose career he “certainly encouraged” – who is now a high-powered biology professor – calls him “the first real feminist for women in science”. As I sit with him, another former female student is being derided for her poor personal hygiene. He jumps to her defence: “No,” he shakes his head, dismissing it. “She was very intelligent.”
We drive in Watson’s silver-grey Volvo between tall sycamores and past the laboratory basketball court – a favourite pastime for many of the staff, fulfilling his rule to “exorcise intellectual blahs” by incorporating “plenty of physical exertion to get outside your head regularly”. The road winds down to Ballybung, the Watsons’ peach-coloured Palladian-style home perching on the edge of Long Island Sound, which serves as a tranquil retreat from the bustling campus.
The lab is undoubtedly his second legacy. When he took on its directorship in 1967 at the age of 39, it was an ailing institution whose endowment was effectively zero, but it stands today as one of the world’s foremost genetic research institutes. Last year its budget stood at an impressive $115.4m. Success, he believes, comes from having the right objectives: “Ones that are important and which are achievable.” Is he proud of the achievement? “Yes, I always wanted anything we did to be in the top five in the world. But I achieved it by encouraging people and making people think that you’re good enough to do something very good and make sure you don’t waste your life with unimportant objectives.” He says Cold Spring Harbor couldn’t survive if the science was pedestrian: “It has to be unusual or you die.”
When he took on the directorship, he split his time between Cold Spring Harbor and his professorship at Harvard. At 39 he had been captivated by the Radcliffe sophomore Elizabeth Lewis, the young assistant in his university faculty. After a lightning romance, he memorably wrote a postcard to a close friend saying:
“19-year-old now mine.” As I wait in Ballybung’s homely kitchen, Liz breezes in clutching a bunch of sunflowers to “brighten up the hall, because they are so pretty”. A dark-haired beauty with wide-set eyes and a dazzling smile that, says Watson, “would always make me feel good”; it seems clear her intelligent and solid support contributes much to the laboratory’s success.
On late nights back from the lab, I would stumble over little presents and notes on the stairs to our annexe – timely reminders from Liz not to forget a drinks party that weekend. The Watsons, I soon discovered, never stop working. The house was invariably crammed with rich benefactors and potential donors. Unaware of funding concerns then, I find out that the new buildings I saw earlier will need an additional $100m on top of the building costs, to “attract researchers”. Jim is as blatantly direct about his fundraising tactics as about everything else. He writes: “Nothing attracts money like the quest for the cure for a terrible disease.”
But the quest for the root causes of mental illness is not driven only by a lust for the truth. Of his two sons – Rufus, 37, and Duncan, 35 – Rufus lives at home, seriously incapacitated by an ability to plan ahead. “Rufus couldn’t really do his schoolwork,” Watson says. “Even though he was bright, he could never write a term paper because he couldn’t really organise his thoughts. He can handle one day and that’s all that he wants to think about.”
Rufus was first hospitalised at the time of the 1986 meeting on the human genome. Watson realised that he would never really find out what was wrong with him until he could isolate the genes. But, as more is uncovered about the causes of schizophrenia, he wonders if he himself is to blame. “I worry that I was 42 with Rufus,” he says. “I read that the frequency of schizophrenia goes up with the age of both parents.” This leads him to expound his latest socio-biological theory, that “Viagra is fighting against evolution” – because if evolution has selected for erectile-dysfunction disorder, it is to prevent older men fathering children. He suggests that “men should store sperm at 15 to be used if they want to be fathers at 80”.
He talks of the “horror and destruction” of life that can arise from having a severely autistic child, and hopes that by diagnosing autism early, “we might prevent some [autism-prone] families having subsequent children”. His mother died young, at 57. He says her heart was weakened by rheumatic fever earlier in her life, and that his father died of lung cancer. It was the quest to understand the biology of cancer that ultimately lured him from his professorship at Harvard. As the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he could preside over seasoned professionals, focusing his efforts first on “recruiting scientists who cared as much as I did about the biology of cancer, and then on finding the funding they needed to make their ideas work”.
But what of the man himself? “I used to be three inches taller,” he says conspiratorially. “I used to be almost 6ft 2in and now I think I’m barely 5ft 101/2in.” His voice drops to a whisper: “You get smaller.” The other disconcerting thing for the geneticist is that, when they sequenced his DNA, he hardly had anything left of his Ychromosome – an evolutionary phenomenon that commonly occurs as men age. “I try not to think about it,” he chuckles. Acutely conscious of his physical appearance in his youth, he still finds looking at himself irksome. “The trouble is,” he says, as the photographer shows him a picture, “I don’t like the ones that look like me.” His ideal look? “Twenty-five,” he chuckles, “but I’d be satisfied with 35. A man, no matter how old, wants to think of himself as no more than 35, and to look at a wife who was 45… No! That would immediately tell you how old you are.”
As I sit on the plush tennis lawns of the nearby Piping Rock club, I am aware – as Watson powers formidable forehands cross-court – that even during his daily relaxation he is unfailingly competitive. “I play for two reasons,” he tells me. “To stay fit, and when occasionally I win a good point against a good player, I feel good.”
Does he ever reflect on his achievements?
“I don’t think back much. I’m still thinking can we find the genes for mental disease while I’m still mentally alive, and will we have stopped cancer in 10 years, and… will my tennis serve improve?”
We are waiting at a red light on the way back from tennis and, for Watson, a meeting with a potential sponsor. I remember that while I was thrilled when a sheet of familiar laboratory paper landed on my desk a few months ago, asking if I would like to interview him for his new book, I was wary of the ethical content. “If I believe something then I’ll say it,” the scientist says. “I figure, generally, at least half the time I am reflecting common sense, which is not a lie.”
Back in 1990, the journal Science commented: “To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.” When, in 2000, he left an audience reeling by suggesting a link between skin colour and sex drive – hypothesising that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos – some journalists suggested he had “opened a transatlantic rift”. American scientists accused him of “trading on past successes to promote opinions that have little scientific basis”. British academics countered that subjects should not be off limits because they are politically incorrect. Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said that “nothing should stop you ascertaining the scientific truth; science must be free of concerns about gender and race”.
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
When asked how long it might take for the key genes in affecting differences in human intelligence to be found, his “back-of-the-envelope answer” is 15 years. However, he wonders if even 10 years will pass. In his mission to make children more DNA-literate, the geneticist explains that he has opened a DNA learning centre on the borders of Harlem in New York. He is also recruiting minorities at the lab and, he tells me, has just accepted a black girl “but,” he comments, “there’s no one to recruit.”
Watson will no doubt enthusiastically counter the inevitable criticisms that will arise. He once commented to a fellow scientist – perhaps optimistically – that “the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians”. Even after a year at the lab, I am still unnerved by his devil-may-care compulsion to say what he believes. Critics may see his acceptance of “softer-science” studies – that attempt to link IQ with specific genes, but remove society and other factors from the equation – as a dangerously flippant approach to a complex issue. His comments, however, although seemingly unguarded, are always calculated. Not maliciously, but with the mischievous air of a great mind hoping to be challenged. I ask him how he placates those he offends. “I try to use humour or whatever I can to indicate that I understand other people having other views,” he explains.
As I motor back to New York, I reflect on a man who – at nearly 80 – is, and will remain, an immensely powerful and revered force in science. I wonder whether it’s possible, as his desire to shock seems so strong, that a fear of boring people really does play on his mind. Perhaps the best description of the man is from the driver. “Dr Watson’s so kind and still very young at heart,” he drawls as we leave the campus behind. “He’s got a lot of curiosity about everything and he’s always working. But to him it isn’t work: it’s a challenge to the mind. And if he runs into a problem, it’s fun time.”
Avoid Boring People by James D Watson (Oxford University Press, £14.99) is published on October 22. It is available at the BooksFirst price of £13.49, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
Dr Watson’s tips for success
– Always make necessary decisions before you have to
– Be the first to tell a good story
– Don’t back schemes that demand miracles
– Never be the brightest person in the room
– Only ask for advice that you will later accept
A great idea! At age 15, I had no place to store all the sperm I was releasing!Replies: @Anonymous
OT, but very relevant to iSteve:
The new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is interesting indeed. One of his principal causes is an organization called Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) that aims to stop left-wing indoctrination in schools. Mind you, it would also forbid right-wing indoctrination, in the unlikely event it should ever become a problem. I’m OK with that, actually, assuming the organization targets only public schools.
What do we know about this organization? Here is the website:
https://www.programaescolasempartido.org/
It’s in Portuguese, of course. You can translate the page, but for some reason the translation doesn’t happen in the central graphic, which is called “Deveres do Professor” (“Duties of the Teacher”). If you speak Spanish, you can pretty much figure out the duties in question. They are eminently sensible.
This seems like a movement that ought to be imported into the US, but in fact I don’t recall reading English-language publicity about it. Then again, I don’t get out much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_school
Maybe trolling? After all, how many people really think that Obama was smarter than Theodore Roosevelt or Herbert Hoover? Hell, I doubt that Obama was smarter than Richard Nixon (at 143, the president with the highest confirmed IQ score).
Why won’t he stop talking about it?! I don’t like when he talks. WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE HIM STOP TALKING ABOUT IT?!!
But anyone who names his son Rufus is OK in my book.
Dr James Watson is the definition of intellectual courage.
Either blacks are intellectually-genetically equal to whites,, or blacks are the victim of a racist white system. All this is prevented if you say there is no such thing as race.
But if there can not be no be such thing as race and and certain people who qualify for affirmative action on the grounds of race, it is pretty clear that what is going on is just a power game.
There’s been some fun shitposting on this topic between Anatoly Karlin and Niccolo Soldo on Twitter. Soldo’s position summed up:
https://twitter.com/chaqqn/status/1079563774757986304
I am surprised that the comments left below her disparaging tweets are mostly in agreement with her sentiments. Which is her feelings.
As stated, to display there is Science on her side, she cite someone who cannot say it is environmental. Primarily is not solely.
Like I can say the height of a human being is primarily from genetic, not environmental, differences. Because it is obvious the height you may end up having will depend on your nutrition too. So, you can have the genes to grow over 6′. If all you eat is rice growing up, then you won’t reach this height.
Then, let’s agree you cannot grow to your full IQ potential in certain circumstances. That some environmental causes impact the intelligence you will reach. Same as height, it seem likely nutrition will play a role too. If you have very low access to proteins, then your brain cannot grow to its full potential. It cannot function as intended.
Anyway, even when you claim the science is on your side… the guy is subtly telling you that you are wrong. To be PC, we can tell you it is partially… as we become more realistic and positivist in a Houellebecquian sense, we will find out it is primarily genetics. We always love to believe we are masters of our own destiny, but we all may be much more enslaved to our genes than we like to believe. Predeterminism is no longer a religious thing, it is somewhat a genetic fatalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Wainwright#Personal_life
People who work and are concerned about actually being right cannot just lie in wait, let everybody forget the corrections, and then retry the same scam. But that’s how Bezos-era journalism works.
Great headline, Steve, but face it, you brought this on yourself by continuing to subscribe to that rag. Of course, we appreciate your commentary.
BTW, what do you call a modern on-line newspaper that puts out crap, rather than a rag? I’m gonna think of something, but I gotta go and I’ll read the post later.
Hosted a New Year's Eve party at my house for the members of my campus conservative discussion group. For background, I had on the TCM That's Entertainment marathon. The kids were really blown-away by Eleanor Powell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37XhIuqsWVk
Was this the only time where Fred Astaire was kinda/sorta outpointed by his partner?Replies: @donut, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Anonymous
Eleanor Powell is hot !
Einstein also had a schizophrenic son.
The new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is interesting indeed. One of his principal causes is an organization called Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) that aims to stop left-wing indoctrination in schools. Mind you, it would also forbid right-wing indoctrination, in the unlikely event it should ever become a problem. I'm OK with that, actually, assuming the organization targets only public schools.
What do we know about this organization? Here is the website:
https://www.programaescolasempartido.org/
It's in Portuguese, of course. You can translate the page, but for some reason the translation doesn't happen in the central graphic, which is called "Deveres do Professor" ("Duties of the Teacher"). If you speak Spanish, you can pretty much figure out the duties in question. They are eminently sensible.
This seems like a movement that ought to be imported into the US, but in fact I don't recall reading English-language publicity about it. Then again, I don't get out much.Replies: @J.Ross, @Reg Cæsar, @Marty T
It’s a great idea but that’s without exaggeration their Golden Temple at Amritsar, it would unironically require Cheltingham Wainscotting. We are better off and looking at less work (and violence) abandoning and delegitimizing their institutions and building ours.
Either way, he seems to be leaving open the possibility of genetic differences accounting for some of the black-white IQ gap.
The only clear evidence on this question comes from Rindermann, Coyle and Becker (2013). They found that 42% of experts believe that 0-40% of the IQ gap is due to genetic differences (with 17% believing that the gap is entirely environmental in origin); 18% of experts believe that 50% of the IQ gap is due to genetic differences; and 39% of experts believe that 60-100% of the gap is due to genetic differences (with 5% believing the gap to be entirely genetic in origin).
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/isir-what-do-intelligence-researchers/
So, I suppose that a plurality of experts who voiced an opinion believe that the gap is primarily environmental in origin, but a majority of experts (57%) disagree that it is "primarily" environmental in origin.Replies: @Lot
Watson and the NIH scientist’s disagreement boils down to if it is more or less than 50% genetic.
60% genetic=firing offense to even say such a “discredited” claim.
40% genetic=completely mainstream.
https://twitter.com/amy_harmon/status/1080102878742757376
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.Replies: @Forbes, @Hail, @Achmed E. Newman, @Hail, @Bubba
Amy Harmon says:
Twitter response:
Amy Harmon replies:
(Note: Not an actual reply, but signs point to it being her thinking.)
The new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is interesting indeed. One of his principal causes is an organization called Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) that aims to stop left-wing indoctrination in schools. Mind you, it would also forbid right-wing indoctrination, in the unlikely event it should ever become a problem. I'm OK with that, actually, assuming the organization targets only public schools.
What do we know about this organization? Here is the website:
https://www.programaescolasempartido.org/
It's in Portuguese, of course. You can translate the page, but for some reason the translation doesn't happen in the central graphic, which is called "Deveres do Professor" ("Duties of the Teacher"). If you speak Spanish, you can pretty much figure out the duties in question. They are eminently sensible.
This seems like a movement that ought to be imported into the US, but in fact I don't recall reading English-language publicity about it. Then again, I don't get out much.Replies: @J.Ross, @Reg Cæsar, @Marty T
As opposed to non-partisan Carnaval samba krewe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_school
“At the very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take the measure of the man…”
Yes, Watson’s views on race and intelligence will pose a challenge to historians, who will be at a loss to explain or analogize his greatness, made all the greater by his unwillingness to lend his name and legacy to the popular lies of his time.
“One of his principal causes is an organization called Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) that aims to stop left-wing indoctrination in schools. “
Meanwhile English children are being fed this
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/
Finally had the "good fortune" to see Mary Poppins Returns a few days ago. I heard it was set in London, but I guess they must have meant London, Alabama.
All but one of the main characters, of course, were white. That's kind of essential since they're carryovers from the original made 50+ years ago. But they still had to throw in a half-dozen blacks in other roles: one of a pair of lawyers (the "good lawyer," of course), the main villain's secretary,a lead dancer, etc., etc. In fact there were probably more black actors in the movie than there were in actual 1935 London.
BTW, don't waste your money. The sets and costumes are great, a few of the animation sequences are fun, nut in no other way does it compare to the original. L-MM and Emily Blunt's performances are flat, and the music is atrocious.
This is just Bob Iger shamelessly raping and pillaging the Disney archives yet again to make even more $$$$$. Iger actually manages to make Harvey Weinstein seem like a decent human being, by comparison. At least a lot of Weinstein's movies were new and original.Replies: @Steve Sailer
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QvhbrdjyqqE/V-pNSU9wyKI/AAAAAAAAbkY/48h7QXQUPEAcp_Dd8aMECyJaZPZUHjSEQCLcB/s1600/Home___Our_Migration_Story.jpg
“smart” as in “most articulate & well-dressed”
Hosted a New Year's Eve party at my house for the members of my campus conservative discussion group. For background, I had on the TCM That's Entertainment marathon. The kids were really blown-away by Eleanor Powell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37XhIuqsWVk
Was this the only time where Fred Astaire was kinda/sorta outpointed by his partner?Replies: @donut, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Anonymous
Thanks! No one has ever been able to match, or even come close to, that woman’s dancing. Of course, anyone raised in her environment and willing to put in 10,000 hours of practice would be just as good. (/sarc)
60% genetic=firing offense to even say such a "discredited" claim.
40% genetic=completely mainstream.Replies: @ben tillman
His scientific brilliance is the reason for his views on race.
nglaer wrote:
Well, let’s see. She quotes the most famous living biologist, possibly the most famous biologist since Darwin, as steadfast in holding views that are officially denounced and condemned.
What will a reasonable layperson conclude?
A) I better not voice such views since they resulted in James Watson being trashed?
B) If the most renowned biologist since Darwin holds these views, maybe there is something to them?
Just maybe Ms Harmon is engaged in a … “dog whistle”?
Obama was plenty smart. Granted, as president he was largely ineffectual, but that wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence. Obama just didn’t have the cojones to stand up to the banks, the health insurance companies or the MIC.
https://youtu.be/hO0jNisMorUReplies: @Forbes
James Watson IS stupid. Literally everyone knows racism is outdated in 2019. The fact Watson doesn’t get this is primary evidence he is dumber than a rock!
Watson is a genius with the drive to hard work. You're a goon dickin around on the internet.Replies: @duncsbaby
No person can ever really be pulled back in unless they subconsciously hoped to make a return into the fray. As the paper of record, the NYT knew which buttons to push that would get Steve’s notorious noticing into high gear. Apparently the NYT couldn’t find Malcolm Gladwell to comment on something relevant and so James Watson had to suffice instead.
O’Brien: Only those who deny the existence of race may discuss race.
Winston: Thank you sir. May I have another?
O’Brien: No one ever seizes the narrative with the intention of relinquishing it. The object of academia is obfuscation. We shall abolish rational thought.
~ George Sorowell, “2084”
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
From “Alien”
So far Julian von Abele, the kid from Columbia who got into trouble back in early December for saying he loved white people and what they had contributed to the world, appears to be sticking to his guns on twitter.
Dr. Watson:
” I wont cuck, no. Least to of all to someone such as yourself. Do the work, and reading, then come talk to me. ”
Intelligence is highly heritable. Like athletic ability. Races, as sailer among others often stress, are simply long geographically, somewhat inbred and isolated genetic groups. This evinces itself in heritable disease and many other things measurable and not.
Watson is a genius with the drive to hard work. You’re a goon dickin around on the internet.
Black holiness is useful to Jewish power. If blacks are holy, then white mistreatment of blacks was akin to deicide, and so whites must atone forever. White Guilt becomes a spiritual matter and paralyzes white pride on a permanent basis. Then, white paralysis can be exploited by Jewish Power to do whatever deemed to be partially redemptive(like supporting Israel and fighting more wars in the Middle East). So, the idea that blacks are just another race of humans with some advantages(muscle power) and disadvantages(mental power) must be condemned as blasphemy. Blacks must be thought of as wise and even godly, meaning they are imbued with intelligence beyond that of whites. So, how dare Watson just state hard facts about racial differences?Replies: @Diversity Heretic
Excellent description of the Cult of Negro Veneration!
There’s a movement on to claim that Watson & Crick ‘stole’ the credit for discovering DNA from a woman, Rosalind Franklin. From National Geographic:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/
This despite the fact that Watson himself freely acknowledges her role:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
What’re the odds that Watson & Crick are stripped of their Nobels at some point in the future over this?
No she didn't; photo 51 was taken by a research student. I suspect he identified as male.
…They Pull Me Back in …
To what effect/end? — did you contact or in some way reply directly to the author? — what do you imagine is the overlap between people who read the NYT piece and those who read this blog post?
I posted something unlikely to get many views as it is far downthread in a several-days-old post (#213 in iSteve post, “Even in Massachusetts“), on which I think Julian Abele is a superb example of my point, as a White-gentile born in the mid 1990s:
If Abele were fifteen years older (b. early 1980s), the odds he would have taken his trajectory are a lot lower, say 3-in-10 instead of his own cohort’s 6-in-10 (numbers just suggestive, of course, not data-based; would be open to finessing the numbers but the point of a generational transition that is now past the halfway mark must hold).
What I think applies to Abele, in bold:
If one wants an example of this 20%, look no further than Julian Abele. The 20% “affected, reject” pool is rising (as is, unfortunately, the “affected, embrace system” Antifa pool.)
(On the “White youth Trump base”: Whites 18-35 went for Trump about 55-45.)
Note also:
To what effect/end? -- did you contact or in some way reply directly to the author? -- what do you imagine is the overlap between people who read the NYT piece and those who read this blog post?Replies: @eah
link — Amy Harmon’s Twitter feed filtered for the word “white” — does not really seem like someone amenable to argument.
Meanwhile English children are being fed this
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/Replies: @Anonymous, @Reg Cæsar
Meanwhile English children are being fed this.
Finally had the “good fortune” to see Mary Poppins Returns a few days ago. I heard it was set in London, but I guess they must have meant London, Alabama.
All but one of the main characters, of course, were white. That’s kind of essential since they’re carryovers from the original made 50+ years ago. But they still had to throw in a half-dozen blacks in other roles: one of a pair of lawyers (the “good lawyer,” of course), the main villain’s secretary,a lead dancer, etc., etc. In fact there were probably more black actors in the movie than there were in actual 1935 London.
BTW, don’t waste your money. The sets and costumes are great, a few of the animation sequences are fun, nut in no other way does it compare to the original. L-MM and Emily Blunt’s performances are flat, and the music is atrocious.
This is just Bob Iger shamelessly raping and pillaging the Disney archives yet again to make even more $$$$$. Iger actually manages to make Harvey Weinstein seem like a decent human being, by comparison. At least a lot of Weinstein’s movies were new and original.
Will 2019 be the year Steve accepts no amount of pithy blog posts and Boomer nice reasonableness will calm the insanity of the Left?
Let’s find out!
Finally had the "good fortune" to see Mary Poppins Returns a few days ago. I heard it was set in London, but I guess they must have meant London, Alabama.
All but one of the main characters, of course, were white. That's kind of essential since they're carryovers from the original made 50+ years ago. But they still had to throw in a half-dozen blacks in other roles: one of a pair of lawyers (the "good lawyer," of course), the main villain's secretary,a lead dancer, etc., etc. In fact there were probably more black actors in the movie than there were in actual 1935 London.
BTW, don't waste your money. The sets and costumes are great, a few of the animation sequences are fun, nut in no other way does it compare to the original. L-MM and Emily Blunt's performances are flat, and the music is atrocious.
This is just Bob Iger shamelessly raping and pillaging the Disney archives yet again to make even more $$$$$. Iger actually manages to make Harvey Weinstein seem like a decent human being, by comparison. At least a lot of Weinstein's movies were new and original.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I watched one of Weinstein’s last movies, Tulip Mania, which was a huge dud at the box office, but I could see how his stuff was popular and prestigious when he first got going in the later 20th Century: it was a fairly high IQ movie about painting and tulips in 17th Century Amsterdam.
[Access with temporary subscription]
The elementary DNA of Dr Watson
History will remember James Watson for the discovery of the double helix. But his pronouncements are often highly controversial. His former protegee examines the complex legacy of a Nobel laureate
Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
October 14 2007, 1:00am, The Sunday Times
The names Watson and Crick, it has been said, have "joined Darwin and Copernicus among the immortals". The pair's discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953, has been hailed by fellow Nobel laureates as the greatest single scientific achievement of the 20th century. Today the only one remaining of the two, Dr James Watson, 79, stands alone as "the godfather of DNA".
When, sitting at a dinner in Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1996, this ageing geneticist gingerly leant over to the guest by his side - the formidable headmistress of a large girls' boarding school - and said, "I'm looking for some girls," he was met with an appropriately cold stare. However, when he explained he was in England to hand-pick two students, one male and one female, to live in his Long Island home with him and his wife, Liz, and work as geneticists for a year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, it was an opportunity too good to lose. The headmistress promptly replied: "Well, funnily enough…"
It's August and I am standing on the shimmering forecourt of the laboratory's towering neuroscience building. "You're doing this for the future of women in science," my headmistress had impressed on me, 10 years earlier, as I left to start my stint at the laboratory bench. Watson, she said, had come over specifically to recruit a girl - a change from the male-dominated programme to date. Glancing up, I see a familiar figure pacing briskly over sun-drenched paving slabs towards me. At 79, Watson looks remarkably unchanged, perhaps his scant wisps of hair a touch whiter and gait a little less sure. "Ah, Charlotte," he says enthusiastically and, pausing to give me the wide, open-mouthed smile I remember well and fixing me with intense, pale grey eyes, he presses my shoulders and plants a kiss firmly on both cheeks.
I am back in Long Island to discuss the geneticist's latest and, he tells me, final memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. His early life and academic career, peppered with useful tips for "those on their way up" as well as those "on the top who do not want their leadership years to be an assemblage of opportunities gone astray". And - as befits the ultimate memoir of a forthright scientist - an inflammatory epilogue with eye-popping theories that will, undoubtedly, leave ethicists choking with disbelief. We are not alone, however. A rotund thirty-something man asks for a photograph, puffing his chest and beaming proudly into the camera lens. Later, Watson tells me that the visitor was a science reporter who confided he has a form of schizophrenia.
The visitor's trust is well founded. Standing just a few hundred metres from the building, vast construction frameworks jut above the campus. This, Watson's latest project - an impressive $100m new-build - heralds a new era of genetics. It will soon become Cold Spring Harbor's platform for unravelling the genetic causes of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. He is convinced that within 10 years "we will be able to diagnose the problem of schizophrenia by looking at the patient's DNA".
James Watson, or Jim, as the majority of scientists call him at the lab, has an energy that's infectious, almost childlike. Born in Chicago in 1928 into a family who believed in "books, birds, and the Democratic party", his outgoing character comes, he tells me, from his mother, the well-liked and extrovert Margaret - a raven-haired beauty who worked enthusiastically for the Democrats, the basement of their modest house doubling as a polling station at election time. His father, James, worked for a correspondence school and was a quiet, kind character who introduced his son to books and instigated a love of biology with early-morning birding forays in the nearby park. Watson recalls that he was conditioned to accept his father's disdain for "any explanation that went beyond the laws of reason and science".
Caught up in the Depression of the 1930s, he slept in tiny attic rooms with his younger sister, Betty, in the middle-class neighbourhood of South Shore, playing evening games of "kick the can" and softball in bungalow-lined streets. Skinny-framed and physically weak in his teens, his only consolation from school bullies was his parents' empathy, encouraging constant trips to buy milk shakes to "fatten him up". He recalls how a pupil cheerfully told him how, given his social awkwardness, "none of my classmates thought I would amount to much".
In his picture-lined office, sitting beneath a rough paper sketch of a twisting DNA helix, Watson leans back in his chair, excitedly discussing his book. "Not being boring isn't sufficient to be a success in this world, but certainly," he pauses, fixing me with a brilliant smile, "it helps." He says he hopes the book will encourage people to go into science and - tilting the cover to the light points out a hidden "Other" between the words "Boring" and "People" - "One, I'm a snob; the other, I'm a realist!" He giggles in delight.
Watson didn't grow up thinking he was particularly gifted. "I never was one of those boy geniuses who could do maths," he admits. But he does remember his teachers liked him, commenting that: "I must have had some spark that I didn't know I had myself." At the extremely young age of 15, he was admitted to the University of Chicago; his mother knew the head of admissions, he says, and "I always thought I got in because they liked my mother". For a brilliant but awkward teenager, university was the break he needed. "A world where I might succeed using my head - not based on personal popularity or physical stature - was all that mattered to me," he writes.
Watson prefers to eat at Winship's, the chatty, down-to-earth laboratory bar overlooking the harbour, named after my boss of the time, whom he describes as having the "second loudest laugh I've ever heard after Francis Crick". He mingles enthusiastically, hands shoved deep in dark-red knee-length shorts, an orange floppy sunhat perched on his head. He remembers, as I do, being seduced by the informal and intelligent atmosphere of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, something he first encountered as a 20-year-old biology graduate on a summer course. He says that in these early days, molecular biology was a very small field and people "didn't know what DNA was". He was under the spell of Max Delbrück, the charismatic young German lab director who played tennis and wasn't "stuffy".
For Watson, the ability to socialise is a key skill, one he believes can help propel you far beyond your peers. "Gossip is a fact of life also among scientists. And if you are out of the loop of what's new, you are working with one hand tied behind your back." The trait is clear among his staff, who, chatting easily at the bar, have the "ungeeky" Watson touch. My headmistress recalls the geneticist wanting a "bright but not very boffiny candidate who had lots of other interests" and who, above all, was "sociable".
When Watson arrived in the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University as a 23-year-old postdoc, thirsty for the truth about the genetic material in our cells, his sociable American ways encountered Francis Crick's "extraordinary conversational ability", and he was hooked. Suddenly it no longer mattered what Delbrück thought: "It became what Francis thinks." The pair freely discussed their scientific findings with other researchers at Cambridge and King's College London, and Watson says this was essential to the pair's ability to work out the detailed structure of the DNA molecule.
But there was someone who seemed immune to Watson's precocious intelligence and eager collaboration: the acclaimed x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Frankin - someone described by Watson and Franklin's estranged research colleague Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel prize, as "hostile". Whereas Watson admits to never having a problem asking for advice, writing that it is better for someone to "know my inadequacies than not to be able to go on to the next problem". Franklin seemed unwilling to risk criticism, reportedly preferring to work on DNA in isolation, jealously guarding her results. Watson comments that "avoiding your competition because you are afraid that you will reveal too much is a dangerous course".
As he chews a melted-cheese sandwich and sips an iced coffee in the bar, he reflects on his relationship with "Rosy". "She was possibly somewhat Asperger's," he says quietly, "because she didn't seem to even want to look at people and would hurry past them. I think she wasn't good at knowing what other people thought and so she would insult them. She had some terrible interviews with the Medical Research Council and I think she cried afterwards. She was just awkward." Then he softens: "I tell people, instead of feeling angry at awkward people, you realise it's not their choice. It's awful. And I think science selects for awkward people because you think in dealing with ideas, you don't have to deal with people. But the moment you're in science and you realise you can't deal with other people, you're at an enormous disadvantage."
It is hard to ignore the accusations that emerged around that time. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, but by then Franklin - whose data was so crucial to the discovery - had died at the age of 37, her life cut short by ovarian cancer. But when, in 1968, Watson wrote an account of the DNA "race" in which he revealed that Wilkins had shown him Franklin's data without her knowledge, and compounded it by being derogatory about her physical appearance, he was slammed by feminists riled by what they believed was a blatant case of sexism. Although the prize can only be shared by a maximum of three people in one category - and Franklin's input was readily acknowledged - they claimed her contribution had been overshadowed. When, in an interview at the time, he was asked why it mattered how a woman looked, he said: "Because it's important" - a statement surely grounded in the genteel influences of his early life, when manners mattered, and being unkind "just wasn't the way to behave". And occasionally, throughout the day, his "old-fashioned" ideals come through. He describes Max Delbrück's wife, Manny, as someone he liked very much but "not the sort of wife he needed", adding that she was a terrible cook and would never have enjoyed the entertaining and fundraising that comes with being a university president's wife. He also refers more than once to his disdain for women turning men into "girly men", which means "men who don't have the courage to say anything - it's absurd".
Feminists are a constant source of trouble for him. I remember him turning to me the day the headline "Abort babies with gay genes, says Nobel winner" appeared in a British broadsheet 10 years ago. Eyes wild and voice uncharacteristically strained, he asked: "What should I do about the press?" He refers to the incident again at lunch. "It was a hypothetical thing," he explains. "If you could detect it pre-natally, could a woman abort a child who was homosexual? I said they should have the right to, because most women want to have grandchildren, period. We can't do it, but it's common sense. Anyways," he says, shaking his head wearily, "it was a bad day when that headline hit. I was just arguing for the freedom of women to try and have the children they want, not what is right or wrong."
One former pupil, an eminent biologist and staunch feminist, is outraged at his account of her in his book. He describes her as having "bolted from the room" when the ex-Harvard University president Larry Summers gave his infamous lecture suggesting that the low representation of tenured female scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes - an "unpopular, though by no means unfounded" theory, Watson comments. "She can criticise men; men can criticise women," he says. "People criticise me all the time and you just take it. If you enter the public arena then you're subject to it." On the subject of gender equality he says, adamantly: "All I care about is great science."
But he happily admits to appreciating a pretty smile or a well-dressed physique. A love of things aesthetic is unmistakable - pictures, glass sculptures and his elegant wife, Liz, 20 years his junior. He once said that in the early days, "almost everything I ever did, even as a scientist, was in the hope of meeting a pretty girl". However, on the subject of science, he seems impartial. He admits that Rosalind Franklin would have seen the double helix first "had she seen fit to enter the model-building race and been better able to interact with other scientists", and makes a point of mentioning that a former female student whose career he "certainly encouraged" - who is now a high-powered biology professor - calls him "the first real feminist for women in science". As I sit with him, another former female student is being derided for her poor personal hygiene. He jumps to her defence: "No," he shakes his head, dismissing it. "She was very intelligent."
We drive in Watson's silver-grey Volvo between tall sycamores and past the laboratory basketball court - a favourite pastime for many of the staff, fulfilling his rule to "exorcise intellectual blahs" by incorporating "plenty of physical exertion to get outside your head regularly". The road winds down to Ballybung, the Watsons' peach-coloured Palladian-style home perching on the edge of Long Island Sound, which serves as a tranquil retreat from the bustling campus.
The lab is undoubtedly his second legacy. When he took on its directorship in 1967 at the age of 39, it was an ailing institution whose endowment was effectively zero, but it stands today as one of the world's foremost genetic research institutes. Last year its budget stood at an impressive $115.4m. Success, he believes, comes from having the right objectives: "Ones that are important and which are achievable." Is he proud of the achievement? "Yes, I always wanted anything we did to be in the top five in the world. But I achieved it by encouraging people and making people think that you're good enough to do something very good and make sure you don't waste your life with unimportant objectives." He says Cold Spring Harbor couldn't survive if the science was pedestrian: "It has to be unusual or you die."
When he took on the directorship, he split his time between Cold Spring Harbor and his professorship at Harvard. At 39 he had been captivated by the Radcliffe sophomore Elizabeth Lewis, the young assistant in his university faculty. After a lightning romance, he memorably wrote a postcard to a close friend saying:
"19-year-old now mine." As I wait in Ballybung's homely kitchen, Liz breezes in clutching a bunch of sunflowers to "brighten up the hall, because they are so pretty". A dark-haired beauty with wide-set eyes and a dazzling smile that, says Watson, "would always make me feel good"; it seems clear her intelligent and solid support contributes much to the laboratory's success.
On late nights back from the lab, I would stumble over little presents and notes on the stairs to our annexe - timely reminders from Liz not to forget a drinks party that weekend. The Watsons, I soon discovered, never stop working. The house was invariably crammed with rich benefactors and potential donors. Unaware of funding concerns then, I find out that the new buildings I saw earlier will need an additional $100m on top of the building costs, to "attract researchers". Jim is as blatantly direct about his fundraising tactics as about everything else. He writes: "Nothing attracts money like the quest for the cure for a terrible disease."
But the quest for the root causes of mental illness is not driven only by a lust for the truth. Of his two sons - Rufus, 37, and Duncan, 35 - Rufus lives at home, seriously incapacitated by an ability to plan ahead. "Rufus couldn't really do his schoolwork," Watson says. "Even though he was bright, he could never write a term paper because he couldn't really organise his thoughts. He can handle one day and that's all that he wants to think about."
Rufus was first hospitalised at the time of the 1986 meeting on the human genome. Watson realised that he would never really find out what was wrong with him until he could isolate the genes. But, as more is uncovered about the causes of schizophrenia, he wonders if he himself is to blame. "I worry that I was 42 with Rufus," he says. "I read that the frequency of schizophrenia goes up with the age of both parents." This leads him to expound his latest socio-biological theory, that "Viagra is fighting against evolution" - because if evolution has selected for erectile-dysfunction disorder, it is to prevent older men fathering children. He suggests that "men should store sperm at 15 to be used if they want to be fathers at 80".
He talks of the "horror and destruction" of life that can arise from having a severely autistic child, and hopes that by diagnosing autism early, "we might prevent some [autism-prone] families having subsequent children". His mother died young, at 57. He says her heart was weakened by rheumatic fever earlier in her life, and that his father died of lung cancer. It was the quest to understand the biology of cancer that ultimately lured him from his professorship at Harvard. As the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he could preside over seasoned professionals, focusing his efforts first on "recruiting scientists who cared as much as I did about the biology of cancer, and then on finding the funding they needed to make their ideas work".
But what of the man himself? "I used to be three inches taller," he says conspiratorially. "I used to be almost 6ft 2in and now I think I'm barely 5ft 101/2in." His voice drops to a whisper: "You get smaller." The other disconcerting thing for the geneticist is that, when they sequenced his DNA, he hardly had anything left of his Ychromosome - an evolutionary phenomenon that commonly occurs as men age. "I try not to think about it," he chuckles. Acutely conscious of his physical appearance in his youth, he still finds looking at himself irksome. "The trouble is," he says, as the photographer shows him a picture, "I don't like the ones that look like me." His ideal look? "Twenty-five," he chuckles, "but I'd be satisfied with 35. A man, no matter how old, wants to think of himself as no more than 35, and to look at a wife who was 45… No! That would immediately tell you how old you are."
As I sit on the plush tennis lawns of the nearby Piping Rock club, I am aware - as Watson powers formidable forehands cross-court - that even during his daily relaxation he is unfailingly competitive. "I play for two reasons," he tells me. "To stay fit, and when occasionally I win a good point against a good player, I feel good."
Does he ever reflect on his achievements?
"I don't think back much. I'm still thinking can we find the genes for mental disease while I'm still mentally alive, and will we have stopped cancer in 10 years, and… will my tennis serve improve?"
We are waiting at a red light on the way back from tennis and, for Watson, a meeting with a potential sponsor. I remember that while I was thrilled when a sheet of familiar laboratory paper landed on my desk a few months ago, asking if I would like to interview him for his new book, I was wary of the ethical content. "If I believe something then I'll say it," the scientist says. "I figure, generally, at least half the time I am reflecting common sense, which is not a lie."
Back in 1990, the journal Science commented: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script." When, in 2000, he left an audience reeling by suggesting a link between skin colour and sex drive - hypothesising that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos - some journalists suggested he had "opened a transatlantic rift". American scientists accused him of "trading on past successes to promote opinions that have little scientific basis". British academics countered that subjects should not be off limits because they are politically incorrect. Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said that "nothing should stop you ascertaining the scientific truth; science must be free of concerns about gender and race".
He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
When asked how long it might take for the key genes in affecting differences in human intelligence to be found, his "back-of-the-envelope answer" is 15 years. However, he wonders if even 10 years will pass. In his mission to make children more DNA-literate, the geneticist explains that he has opened a DNA learning centre on the borders of Harlem in New York. He is also recruiting minorities at the lab and, he tells me, has just accepted a black girl "but," he comments, "there's no one to recruit."
Watson will no doubt enthusiastically counter the inevitable criticisms that will arise. He once commented to a fellow scientist - perhaps optimistically - that "the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians". Even after a year at the lab, I am still unnerved by his devil-may-care compulsion to say what he believes. Critics may see his acceptance of "softer-science" studies - that attempt to link IQ with specific genes, but remove society and other factors from the equation - as a dangerously flippant approach to a complex issue. His comments, however, although seemingly unguarded, are always calculated. Not maliciously, but with the mischievous air of a great mind hoping to be challenged. I ask him how he placates those he offends. "I try to use humour or whatever I can to indicate that I understand other people having other views," he explains.
As I motor back to New York, I reflect on a man who - at nearly 80 - is, and will remain, an immensely powerful and revered force in science. I wonder whether it's possible, as his desire to shock seems so strong, that a fear of boring people really does play on his mind. Perhaps the best description of the man is from the driver. "Dr Watson's so kind and still very young at heart," he drawls as we leave the campus behind. "He's got a lot of curiosity about everything and he's always working. But to him it isn't work: it's a challenge to the mind. And if he runs into a problem, it's fun time."
Avoid Boring People by James D Watson (Oxford University Press, £14.99) is published on October 22. It is available at the BooksFirst price of £13.49, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
Dr Watson's tips for success
- Always make necessary decisions before you have to
- Be the first to tell a good story
- Don't back schemes that demand miracles
- Never be the brightest person in the room
- Only ask for advice that you will later acceptReplies: @BB753
““men should store sperm at 15 to be used if they want to be fathers at 80″.”
A great idea! At age 15, I had no place to store all the sperm I was releasing!
Amy Harmon has a BA in American Studies, so – obviously – she is more of an expert in genetics than is Nobel Prize Winning molecular biologist James Watson.
It is a fact that the average black IQ is 85. It is also a fact that we have no way of increasing IQ. Unless we can find a way to increase IQ, we are beating our heads against the wall.
Do you really believe that?
“And the film does a beautiful job showing the impossibility of reconciling this aspect of him with his scientific contributions..”
This is non sequitur. What needs to be reconciled? The man is a brilliant scientist who discovered the double helix. He’s also an unrepentant racist. Shame on him. But these aspects of him don’t affirm or contradict each other. In this womans informed opinion negative views on race cannot be reconciled with sciencey stuff. Positive views of other races and negative views of her own race are a known constants. Anything that contradicts these are BAD.
Let’s dissect her thought process. Her main stream of information on sciencey type things comes from Netflix/PBS documentaries, these are GOOD. Especially if she can sit on her couch with a bowl a pop corn while stroking her pussy cat, that really gets her endorphins flowing. This is VERY GOOD. Although the main scientist of the documentary who seems to be hogging all of the important discoveries is an old white man. Uh-oh, this could be troubling. Finally it is revealed that this old white man is actually a racist. This is problematic and very BAD.
Her emotions towards James Watson are both good and bad. She appreciates the discoveries he’s made, but she also thinks he’s a scummy guy for being a racist. Fair enough. She can’t reconcile her own feelings on James Watson. That is what can’t be reconciled.
It is her own emotions which can’t be reconciled, not James Watsons aspects. I’m nit picking but that was an odd thing to say. And she gets paid real money by the New York times. I’m too stupid to go to college. I’m not a bright guy, I can’t keep up with the coursework. I’m poor. I need to go finish putting a new clutch plate in my car or I won’t be able to drive to work in the morning. Woe is me.
It would be mildly interesting to analyze the various ways in which the tradition of “esoteric-exoteric” writing as uncovered by Leo Strauss could be used to illuminate contemporary discussions of race and iq. From a hardcore statist/leftist perspective, complete silence on the issue would seem to be the best strategic move. For those who think the issue should at least be open to discussion, the only way to proceed is pretend to accept the conventional wisdom (“THIS MAN BELIEVES EVIL THINGS!!!!” this is the exoteric message for those keeping score at home), thereby preserving your job while allowing those with eyes to see that… one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century thinks there is a genetic component to intelligence, other experts use coded language to denounce him, etc. etc. (the esoteric message.) On the other hand, it seems far, far, far more likely that journalists such as Harmon hold their views with a quasi-religious zeal, and wish to wage ideological jihad against non-believers… still it is kind of fun to imagine that she is trying to surreptitiously inform the public that science confirms common sense observation and experience…
Was it even two minutes into the year when the NYT posted it? The print version appeared on New Year’s Eve.
An iSteve prediction game while it's still Jan. 1 (Jan. 2 will do in a pinch):
"Which famous figure will be 'Watsoned' in 2019?" (excluding Watson himself)Replies: @BB753
https://twitter.com/amy_harmon/status/1080102878742757376
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.Replies: @Forbes, @Hail, @Achmed E. Newman, @Hail, @Bubba
Re 2nd tweet (or lower one, I don’t know WTF is up with tweets): I think she is ready to find another target – and I like her use of that word “target”. The problem with targeting Dr. Watson, presumably, is that he is possibly too old to give a damn about being excommunicated from polite society and the rest. I had no idea before about his selling of his Nobel Prize medal, BTW. That’s a real shame, but sure does drive home the point that you need to quit living paycheck-to-paycheck, no matter who you are, if you want to stand up for yourself.
Anyway, to the point, Miss Harmon may realize that she no longer has any leverage on Dr. Watson, and his words may go completely off the PC rails. It may be better to find a younger, more status- and paycheck-bound target.
Needed:
An iSteve prediction game while it’s still Jan. 1 (Jan. 2 will do in a pinch):
“Which famous figure will be ‘Watsoned’ in 2019?” (excluding Watson himself)
Let's find out!Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
I don’t know if Steve, or any of us, are trying to calm their insanity. They don’t make anything that strong. His commentary is meant to enlighten the sane but uninformed about the insanity of the Left.
The time for informing about insanity was a decade ago.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Meanwhile English children are being fed this
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/Replies: @Anonymous, @Reg Cæsar
Corblimeywtf? I’m guessing the pink, blue, and green are English, Scottish, and Irish, respectively, but that leaves yellow for Wales. Leeks = leaks?
And unless Big Pink there is the Channel Islands melted together, that’s an alien wog mass aimed right at Britannia’s crotch.
Note that Ulster is green, not orange. Which would imply a Welsh/English mix.
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/assets/images/OurMigrationStoryLogo.svg
Steve,
Here’s real estate blogging you can do in 2019: what’s going on in Detroit?
https://mobile.twitter.com/pulte/status/1080140666158616576
There was a brief window where great deals existed (amid fixer-uppers and lingering trouble spots). I knew a chick who got a perfectly good ranch house for $2000 cash at an auction. Foreigners swept in and bought up everything, being apparently unaware of the local racial situation, or of the fact that the best resolution was residence: a lot of those properties were not in future hot areas, but could make decent homes. So there were $2k homes but not any more.
Oh, and the local public radio cannot stop decrying the awful gentrification that's happening, "and how that affects local residents."
Watson is not terribly long for the world and should be thinking about his place in the history books. If he holds his ground and insists on the truth of race realism, he’ll be remembered as a hero in a hundred years. If he capitulates he will be remembered as a cuck.
If the race deniers and SJWs win, it won’t matter anyway. When white people fail there will be an implosion and die-off and no one will care. If we win, the few who told the truth will be heroes. There will be streets named after Oliver, Pierce, Covington, and after Bull Connor, Carleton Putnam, Kevin Macdonald, and dozens of others who stood fast.
A great idea! At age 15, I had no place to store all the sperm I was releasing!Replies: @Anonymous
In the future, most men will be asked to store sperm when they are in their early 20s so that if they prove to be great their line can continue on and if they prove to be duds the sperm will be destroyed.
--Facts inconvenient to The Narrative will be ignored.
--Diversity is our strength, except when difference is observable.
--We are all equal, except for our diversity--which is to be celebrated, or ignored depending on the PC/SJW fashion of the moment.
The 'crime of noticing'--soon to be a felony in your jurisdictions.
Happy New Year to all those celebrating where it's not a cultural appropriation.Replies: @AndrewR, @Kyle, @Dtbb
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Zq86LGbocReplies: @J1234, @donut
Eleanor was the best movie dancer of all time. Better than any of the men (including Fred) and better than any of the black females (who were, as a group, more athletic than white dancers, but often lacked the grace. She was better in all regards.) Of course, this opinion is from a guy who couldn’t dance his way out of a wet paper bag.
I’ve often wondered why she wasn’t the household name legend that some of the others were, and I think it may have been because she was relatively wiry looking. A little spindly and sinewy. So maybe less star appeal? I don’t know. She was famous back then, but not so much now.
If there aren’t big differences in IQ , crime, etc., why does the NYT home city now spend money on racial cleansing, er, providing better opportunities for certain groups?
An interesting thought experiment,
An SJW is transported to a parallel reality. The major differences between this world and ours are That IQ happens to be real, important for various outcomes, and Africans and American blacks are genetically less intelligent. The alt-American government enlists the SJW as an advisor? What would the traveler suggest they do?
More seriously, shouldn’t the left have some sort of game plan for what to when the reality of population differences in genes that influence traits with socially salient effects? Basically, what should be done when the normies realize that not even equal opportunity in a broad sense is possible? Do they think that with the media megaphone, academia and funding agency dominance at the top and replacement level immigration stuffing the voting booth the normies will never find out, and even if they did, there’s nothing they can do about it?
That seems short-sighted. China plans on being ahead of the US in various cutting edge technologies by 2025, and there’s a good chance they will be. Do they think China will keep accepting dollars for stuff when there is no more industrial base for us to export, or they’re beyond our state of the art in the industry we have left?
I heard on NPR the other day that Texas won’t be able to maintain its current economy with the human capital it will have, in I forget, 15 years, 20 years. If Texas is going to start economically regressing, then California is not far behind. Even if both states can keep ahead by immigration from abroad and from other states, how long will states with less impressive economies keep treading water? Not to mention the fantastic growth rates we’ll need to pay the pension tsunami?
The US is dying, do they have a plan? Is there really no inner party, and two minute hates against Watson, Richwine, and whoever is next is really all they have in their toolbox?
If they “prove to be great”, they won’t abandon their children in this way.
Animals have sires. Men have fathers. Somewhere.
Hosted a New Year's Eve party at my house for the members of my campus conservative discussion group. For background, I had on the TCM That's Entertainment marathon. The kids were really blown-away by Eleanor Powell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37XhIuqsWVk
Was this the only time where Fred Astaire was kinda/sorta outpointed by his partner?Replies: @donut, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Anonymous
Sounds like it was the coolest and straightest New Year’s Eve party ever. Did you also have Rock Hudson dancing on in the background?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C9CoAbwxy0Replies: @Anonymous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsoYyDlYU8M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aDOojXN0ko
https://twitter.com/amy_harmon/status/1080102878742757376
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.Replies: @Forbes, @Hail, @Achmed E. Newman, @Hail, @Bubba
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/
This despite the fact that Watson himself freely acknowledges her role:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
What're the odds that Watson & Crick are stripped of their Nobels at some point in the future over this?Replies: @dearieme, @Forbes, @gregor
“Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA that would change biology.”
No she didn’t; photo 51 was taken by a research student. I suspect he identified as male.
Our institutions, insofar as the existence of such a thing is attainable, would lack anything approaching the cachet of their established competition. The ambitious and talented would eschew them and their graduates would be barred admission to the corridors of power.
A lot of older people (apart from Derb, whose thoughts on the crucifixion of Fields are mine) seem oblivious to what has happened and how fast it has happened. There are no courts and no police protection. Most universities are not physically safe, and anyway will not grade you fairly. In some places antifa and similar criminals roam freely, not as part of a protest but for fun. Ricky Gervais just tweeted that there is no such thing as hate speech laws or Damoring.
https://twitter.com/rickygervais/status/1079784120945967104
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JzglMNH04Replies: @syonredux, @syonredux, @syonredux
Didn’t make the cut. This did though,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGk3tY4yP7kReplies: @syonredux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JzglMNH04Replies: @syonredux, @syonredux, @syonredux
And this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JzglMNH04Replies: @syonredux, @syonredux, @syonredux
And this
He made the mistake of trying to appease them... they smelled blood...
As Vox Day recommends never apologize to SJW.Replies: @Forbes, @NickG
Never apologize. Period.
You notice they don’t track down every researcher who has reported evidence of genetic difference between races in IQ? Just the too public, too clear-cut honest James Watson.
Because we live in Victorian times. Instead of sex, we have race and gender. One can talk about these things in appropriate venues, just not in public, i.e., in the Mainstream.
Of course, any scientist who writes or speaks non-PC truth can be “outted” by any news source eager to do so. Presumably, a person becoming a candidate for a high-profile position is searched on the Internet for evidence of crimethink.
This sort of discipline (like that associated with the Communist Party and other totalitarisn institutions must have a dulling effect upon the leadership of large institutions. The Organization (Wo)Man must also be a reliable Party member-
This is non sequitur. What needs to be reconciled? The man is a brilliant scientist who discovered the double helix. He's also an unrepentant racist. Shame on him. But these aspects of him don't affirm or contradict each other. In this womans informed opinion negative views on race cannot be reconciled with sciencey stuff. Positive views of other races and negative views of her own race are a known constants. Anything that contradicts these are BAD.
Let's dissect her thought process. Her main stream of information on sciencey type things comes from Netflix/PBS documentaries, these are GOOD. Especially if she can sit on her couch with a bowl a pop corn while stroking her pussy cat, that really gets her endorphins flowing. This is VERY GOOD. Although the main scientist of the documentary who seems to be hogging all of the important discoveries is an old white man. Uh-oh, this could be troubling. Finally it is revealed that this old white man is actually a racist. This is problematic and very BAD.
Her emotions towards James Watson are both good and bad. She appreciates the discoveries he's made, but she also thinks he's a scummy guy for being a racist. Fair enough. She can't reconcile her own feelings on James Watson. That is what can't be reconciled.
It is her own emotions which can't be reconciled, not James Watsons aspects. I'm nit picking but that was an odd thing to say. And she gets paid real money by the New York times. I'm too stupid to go to college. I'm not a bright guy, I can't keep up with the coursework. I'm poor. I need to go finish putting a new clutch plate in my car or I won't be able to drive to work in the morning. Woe is me.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Hey, WTH? Moderator! I thought this was a family site.
If you remember, Amy Harmon is the writer who did the weird milk-chugaluggin’ white supremacy “Could Somebody Please Debunk This?” piece last summer, in which a black high school student was razzed by classmates over IQ claims, and then set out to blow them away by researching the subject, but found that the evidence wasn’t quite there to debunk the claims.
Harmon took over the case and found that she too was having trouble getting any qualified genetics experts to go on the record over the issue, beyond a vague kumbaya statement. For some weird reasons, these researchers just don’t want to go on record with specific, scientific, detailed refutations. Some are happy to say “race is a social construct,” because what the hell does that even mean, and it’s probably true from some (beside-the-point, irrelevant) angles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/insider/science-genetics-white-supremacy.html
The great thing about articles like Harmon’s is, whatever their conclusions, they are ‘re-platforming” these issues and grappling with them on the scientific merits. This can only be good in the long run. Until now the strategy has been to try to slime and de-employ anyone raising the issues, ignore the facts, and move it to a discusstion of racism.
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
It’s laughably funny that Harmon has a BA in American Studies, wrote some articles on DNA, and proclaims herself an arbiter of permissible opinions on the science of genetics (DNA) and environmental (nurture) influence.
Yeah their arrognance and stupidity would be funny ... excpet our nation and civilization is headed down the tubes as a result.
“No. Most experts on intelligence consider it an open question without a firm answer yet”
I think real experts realize that intelligence is a function of both environment and inheritance, but realize that placing any credibility on inheritance is a career ender. When lies are official dogma speaking the truth is a criminal act.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/
This despite the fact that Watson himself freely acknowledges her role:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
What're the odds that Watson & Crick are stripped of their Nobels at some point in the future over this?Replies: @dearieme, @Forbes, @gregor
Fixed.
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
Looks like she could eat corn off the cob through a keyhole.
https://youtu.be/hO0jNisMorUReplies: @Forbes
There are a few of those clips around–with The Zero going off the teleprompter. He’s so bad at extemporaneous speaking, the clips are near-unwatchable.
--Facts inconvenient to The Narrative will be ignored.
--Diversity is our strength, except when difference is observable.
--We are all equal, except for our diversity--which is to be celebrated, or ignored depending on the PC/SJW fashion of the moment.
The 'crime of noticing'--soon to be a felony in your jurisdictions.
Happy New Year to all those celebrating where it's not a cultural appropriation.Replies: @AndrewR, @Kyle, @Dtbb
I would love for one these reporters to have to go on “Judge Judy” to defend their articles. She would skewer s/h/it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C9CoAbwxy0Replies: @Anonymous
Lots of Judy Garland too right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcYyxk_CAVsReplies: @Anonymous
Tell that the the 94+ year old germans still being prosecuted for war crimes.Replies: @Marty T
Ok but those are crimes of mass murder, and Watson’s are “crimes” of being courageous enough to tell the truth.
https://twitter.com/amy_harmon/status/1080102878742757376
The SJWs are ready to pounce on their next crimethinking scientist.
I wonder who.Replies: @Forbes, @Hail, @Achmed E. Newman, @Hail, @Bubba
What an evil woman – she is a proud Bolshevik who blindly follows the failed Trofim Lysenko genetic theory (Lysenkoism) that murdered/starved tens of millions of Ukrainians. Then the rational Lysenkoism deniers (Mendelian supporters) sentenced to death as enemies of the state. It must be in Amy Harmon’s DNA to destroy rational Mendelian genetic thinkers.
Any discipline that has “studies” as part of its name is a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGk3tY4yP7kReplies: @syonredux
Cyd Charisse has a certain something…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htv5FAe4T3s
Dean Martin, Cyd and MM were in Something's Got To Give, never finished because of Monroe's death. The studio wanted to replace Marilyn with Lee Remick. Although Remick was a good actress, no one would leave Cyd Charisse for her, as Martin knew, so he squelched the deal.
The film was reshot with Doris Day and James Garner.
Amy Harmon, bell curve denier!
The new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is interesting indeed. One of his principal causes is an organization called Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) that aims to stop left-wing indoctrination in schools. Mind you, it would also forbid right-wing indoctrination, in the unlikely event it should ever become a problem. I'm OK with that, actually, assuming the organization targets only public schools.
What do we know about this organization? Here is the website:
https://www.programaescolasempartido.org/
It's in Portuguese, of course. You can translate the page, but for some reason the translation doesn't happen in the central graphic, which is called "Deveres do Professor" ("Duties of the Teacher"). If you speak Spanish, you can pretty much figure out the duties in question. They are eminently sensible.
This seems like a movement that ought to be imported into the US, but in fact I don't recall reading English-language publicity about it. Then again, I don't get out much.Replies: @J.Ross, @Reg Cæsar, @Marty T
The right has to get serious about education. They need to force defunding of all college gender studies, ethnic studies, homosexual studies, etc. They need to force elimination of all “diversity” or Title IX positions as well.
Anyway, to the point, Miss Harmon may realize that she no longer has any leverage on Dr. Watson, and his words may go completely off the PC rails. It may be better to find a younger, more status- and paycheck-bound target.Replies: @Marty T, @Unladen Swallow
Maybe it’s time for Amy Harmon to be targeted. Let’s see how she likes it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcYyxk_CAVsReplies: @Anonymous
Cyd Charisse was smoking hot and a great dancer and all around person.
Dean Martin, Cyd and MM were in Something’s Got To Give, never finished because of Monroe’s death. The studio wanted to replace Marilyn with Lee Remick. Although Remick was a good actress, no one would leave Cyd Charisse for her, as Martin knew, so he squelched the deal.
The film was reshot with Doris Day and James Garner.
Why? What reason is there that a “studies” discipline should be any less than a discipline without studies in its name?
Amy’s writing indicates that she has continued to do a lot of thumb-sucking as an adult.
Anyway, to the point, Miss Harmon may realize that she no longer has any leverage on Dr. Watson, and his words may go completely off the PC rails. It may be better to find a younger, more status- and paycheck-bound target.Replies: @Marty T, @Unladen Swallow
Re Watson’s Nobel Prize medal, some Russian oligarch bought at it auction and gave it back to him.
Thanks for the update.
Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back in …
I recently rewatched Godfather III to see if it’s as bad as I recalled (it is) and that’s the only memorable line in it.
For some reason, they’re highly prone to the higher mumbo-jumbo.It might have something to do with the”interdisciplinary” approach that they encourage, which usually amounts to dabbling in a bunch of different areas without acquiring expertise in any of them…
Are there “studies” majors that aren’t junk? How are the geographic/cultural Area Majors, like Korean Studies, that were typically for people who wanted to be diplomats or the like?
*Never confuse Classical Studies for Classics. The latter is a serious discipline, requiring a thorough grounding in multiple languages, while the former is for dilettantes who enjoy letting "theory" do their thinking for them.
"Studies" has now been extended to majors that mostly deal in leftist political ideology under the rubric of "Black Studies", "Women Studies", etc. Theoretically, there's no reason why "Black Studies" would have to be any less rigorous than other liberal arts degrees. You could easily design a major where you had to study, say, Bantu languages, anthropology of blacks, black American literature, etc. in an objective, non political way.Replies: @Steve Sailer
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
It’s always a sad moment when someone who looks so nice writes so stupidly (I’ll charitably assume not deliberately falsely). Someday Ms. Harmon should ask herself, (1) If there are obvious physical differences between races, how can you exclude a priori differences in nonphysical traits? (2) Since we know already that there are some nonphysical differences, such as those that alter disposition to certain diseases, how can you know a priori that there aren’t others? (3) If any two people of the same race can have different intelligence, how on earth can you insist a priori that any two very large groups of people must have the same average intelligence? The thing that is hard to forgive on her part is her willingness to act as an enforcer of orthodoxy toward a man who towers above her intellectually. But the Times is very good at helping its writers surmount that hurdle.
The impression that I have is that they’re less rubbishy than stuff like Black Studies, Woman’s Studies, Classical Studies*, etc.
*Never confuse Classical Studies for Classics. The latter is a serious discipline, requiring a thorough grounding in multiple languages, while the former is for dilettantes who enjoy letting “theory” do their thinking for them.
He made the mistake of trying to appease them... they smelled blood...
As Vox Day recommends never apologize to SJW.Replies: @Forbes, @NickG
Nixon was way smarter than Obama.
An iSteve prediction game while it's still Jan. 1 (Jan. 2 will do in a pinch):
"Which famous figure will be 'Watsoned' in 2019?" (excluding Watson himself)Replies: @BB753
Reich or Pinker? Also, don’t forget about a possible double treat: #metoed and then Watsoned.
MeToo'ed and then Watsoned
or
Watsoned and then MeToo'ed?Replies: @BB753
Rufus has given up his tit-sucking ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Wainwright#Personal_life
Watson is a genius with the drive to hard work. You're a goon dickin around on the internet.Replies: @duncsbaby
Tiny Duck. with a period is a Godfrey Elfwick type parody of an SJW troll such as Tiny Duck, sans period.
Cyd Charisse was a far better all around dancer than Eleanor Powell, who was limited to tap–although she was indeed a stupendous tap dancer. Charisse was much better looking. But like Powell, she danced as an equal–they didn’t ever have to pull in another dancer (usually a guy) so that the male star could show his chops.
You’ve already included the best Charisse pairing with Astaire (Girl Hunt, which is a few steps ahead of Dancing in the Dark) and with Kelly (Broadway Melody). Note she’s a good two inches taller than both of them. Girl Hunt, in particular, is just stupendous. Charisse has the harder part.
That’s Entertainment II also has Bob Fosse’s first choreographed dance in Kiss Me Kate. It starts at 2:20 in this clip, but in order to really see history in the making, watch the two pairs before Fosse and Haney. Tommy Rall and Bobby Van were solid dancers, and Miller was an outstanding tap dancer, but the choreography is wildly different when you get to the last set.
And as long as we’re discussing female dancers who could keep up with guys, there’s Gwen Verdon, here dancing with husband Fosse. Verdon always said that Fosse was yelling at her to “Jump!” because, as she said, she’s not a jumper. But she should have been yelling “Kick!” at Fosse, because her kicks have at least half a foot on his. (note that she’s several inches shorter than him, but their hips are at the same height.) It’s fun to watch this segment first simply for enjoyment, then to notice the differences in their strengths–she’s jumping not nearly as high, he’s limited in his kicks.
No Country for Old Scientists.
For a multi-hued cast of humans with, dare I say, lesser IQs than Watson’s, it is easy to Tweet in unison, regurgitating the current zeitgeist: egalitarianism-on-steroids. It requires a lot of mental conformity and a low intellectual work ethic.
Watson might have just as much trouble getting Woke white folks to perform to his high standard as lab assistants.
Tweeting for racial and gender justice is so much simpler—requiring far less hard work, mental acuity and intense study—than discovering the DNA helix. When the current herd mentality is nothing but a blip in the history books, with most of “Wokerism’s” saints merged into one hysterical, un-canonized, fading memory, the scientific breakthrough of Watson & Crick will live on.
Watson, like Galileo, will outlast every one of his persecutors in historical memory.
The racial-equality shaming from liberal Tweet preachers is also a cover up for one of the periods in American history with the least income equality—a period that has seen many Democrats in high office, getting wildly rich off of public service while the gap in economic outcomes widened to Grand Canyon size, with the once-mammoth American middle class ending up barely visible somewhere near the bottom.
The zeal to persecute anti-PC heretics is more intense because of defensiveness in the guilty conscience of the Democratic Party—a party once associated with standing up for American workers, a party that has abandoned labor issues in favor of lazy, race-based pandering.
What a classy move!
Thanks for the update.
Let’s hope historians ignore Amy’s dudgeonesque crab pieces when they take Watson’s measure.
- 1968: Born in New York City
- 1990: Graduated from Michigan (BA, American Studies)
- ca. 1990-91: Reporter for Los Angeles Times covering the Detroit auto industry
- ca. early 1990s: "moved to Los Angeles and started writing mainly about digital technology and science."
- 1997: Joined the New York Times staff
- June 2000: Published "A Limited Partnership: The Black Internet Entrepreneur Had the Idea; The White One Became the Venture's Public Face," for which she won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize (article available in full for free at Pulitzer.org; scroll down to June 11, 2000)
- ca. 2004: Daughter Sasha Matthews is born. (In the present-day, Amy Harmon promotes her daughter's Twitter account @rumblecomics in her own Twitter profile.) "Sasha," as a given name in the U.S., points to a Jewish origin possibility; Harmon/Harman is likewise a possible Jewish surname. Amy's partner and father of Sasha (the two are seemingly not together now; either never married or divorced) has a gentile-sounding name -- Scott Matthews -- but is more Jewish looking than Harmon (see below):http://turnstyle.com/project-history/photography/DSC08582.jpg - 2008: Amy Harmon wins second Pulitzer in category "Explanatory Reporting" for series of ten articles published in 2007 called "The DNA Age."
- 2013: Publishes first book, "Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect."
- Summer 2018: Harmon's parents both publicize their child (then between eighth and ninth grades)'s far-left and vulgar political cartooning:https://twitter.com/RumbleComics/status/1011631887733985280_________________Q. What does Amy Harmon look like?There are a lot of Amy Harmons, so searcher beware. One is a fiction author who looks like this:https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341709289p5/5829056.jpghttps://www.authoramyharmon.com/uploads/4/6/3/2/46322333/7363153.pngThis is not the New York Times article-writer. Below is the Times staffperson Amy Harmon from whom we get the latest broadside against Dr. Watson:http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kwmu/files/styles/medium/public/201611/111716_KM_slotaamyharmon.JPGQ. Do any of Sailer's Laws of Female Journalism apply? Blogger "PA World and Times" last year proposed a Third Law that may bear consulting here.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @El Dato, @Forbes, @ThreeCranes, @Toño Bungay, @Hail
Being awarded her 2nd Pulitzer (spring 2008), months before her 40th birthday:
She wrote the race-bait story that would win her first Pulitzer in spring-summer 2000, before she turned 32. The race-hustle gravy train sells, even for non-Blacks.
But Amy Harmon is no run-of-the-mill Methodist from Michgan or somewhere. On top of the circumstantial evidence that Amy Harmon is Jewish (her looks; her NYC origin; her unexplained rise to the top, hired by NYT at age 28 or 29, in a field requiring connections; her politics), here we have her confirming it in a 2006 article:
So it would appear that Amy Harmon (BA, American Studies; landed in high-end journalism in a manner unexplained) may be interested in genetics specifically because of her Jewish identity. Take your Jewish identity and hold it firm, Amy, but why lead a highbrow pitchfork mob against us White Christians all the time? Give us a break.
Her Pulitzer profile pic:
May 2013 interview with Amy Harmon: https://vimeo.com/66822422
Nothing on that here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jews
Maybe Amy Harmon can write a genetics article on the matter.
Before Stalin wacked his political enemies, he had a show trial where they would recant their blasphemies against Soviet Marxism. Looks like Watson’s show trial in the NYT is dragging on because he’s just not cooperating.
Watson was given another chance to recant and he told the establishment to pound sand: he’s a Scientist and he’s going with the conclusion that the evidence supports. As a Nobel winner, Watson’s opinion carries a lot of weight. Should be good fun watching the establishment squirm and twitch over this one.
I think anyone who sees something like Desmond_is_Amazing and isn’t immediately clued in isn’t going to be convinced by “Awwh shucks” Boomer nice.
The time for informing about insanity was a decade ago.
11,000,000 page views in '18 may be mostly "heavy users", but maybe a few million that'll get a clue.
“Studies” originally implied an interdisciplinary or specialized course of study and degree. An “American Studies” degree is basically a degree in American history with more courses in cultural and intellectual history and literature according to the particular student’s interests and department requirements. History degrees typically focus on political history. Area Majors like Korean Studies are similar but also include language study and other topics like archeology. They’re analogous to the old field of Egyptology, which studied everything about Egypt – history, language, literature, culture, religion, etc. But it sounds awkward to call things “Americanology,” “Koreanology”, etc. today for every country or area of the world. I wouldn’t say these majors are junkier than the typical liberal arts majors since they’re basically the same academic disciplines. It depends on the student and individual departments. A very motivated student can make an area studies major a lot harder than a normal liberal arts one by taking lots of language classes and pursuing some arcane topics.
“Studies” has now been extended to majors that mostly deal in leftist political ideology under the rubric of “Black Studies”, “Women Studies”, etc. Theoretically, there’s no reason why “Black Studies” would have to be any less rigorous than other liberal arts degrees. You could easily design a major where you had to study, say, Bantu languages, anthropology of blacks, black American literature, etc. in an objective, non political way.
The time for informing about insanity was a decade ago.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
I just looked up that kid drag queen. Thanks for nothing! Sure, Jack, any sane person that keeps up with modern infotainment has got to figure we’re near Peak Stupidity, but they may not know who are or what are the causes.
11,000,000 page views in ’18 may be mostly “heavy users”, but maybe a few million that’ll get a clue.
That’s a separate process. The time will come when the cities will starve and the critical theory analysts need a plumber.
A lot of older people (apart from Derb, whose thoughts on the crucifixion of Fields are mine) seem oblivious to what has happened and how fast it has happened. There are no courts and no police protection. Most universities are not physically safe, and anyway will not grade you fairly. In some places antifa and similar criminals roam freely, not as part of a protest but for fun. Ricky Gervais just tweeted that there is no such thing as hate speech laws or Damoring.
Here's real estate blogging you can do in 2019: what's going on in Detroit?
https://mobile.twitter.com/pulte/status/1080140666158616576Replies: @J.Ross
Two words: Dan Gilbert, or, wtf, I now love unaccountable Jewish billionaires. Everything that functions properly downtown comes from and is guaranteed by Gilbert. The police defer to his camera systems. There is a perfectly reasonable thirty-second period for compliance, as opposed to the old system, where they just lit everything on fire.
There was a brief window where great deals existed (amid fixer-uppers and lingering trouble spots). I knew a chick who got a perfectly good ranch house for $2000 cash at an auction. Foreigners swept in and bought up everything, being apparently unaware of the local racial situation, or of the fact that the best resolution was residence: a lot of those properties were not in future hot areas, but could make decent homes. So there were $2k homes but not any more.
Oh, and the local public radio cannot stop decrying the awful gentrification that’s happening, “and how that affects local residents.”
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/
This despite the fact that Watson himself freely acknowledges her role:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
What're the odds that Watson & Crick are stripped of their Nobels at some point in the future over this?Replies: @dearieme, @Forbes, @gregor
The first thing I did after clicking the article was Ctrl-F “Franklin” and sure enough ….
These people are so predictable.
A reference to muh Rosalind Franklin is now obligatory in any article mentioning Watson.
This bit is interesting:
So this Lander guy got in trouble for toasting Watson a decade after the controversial statements. Not only is Watson unpersoned, but anyone showing him any cordiality whatsoever even without expressing or endorsing any controversial viewpoints is also at risk of being unpersoned. I think these Bolsheviks know that common courtesy isn’t an implicit endorsement of a particular view. But they know that allowing people to abstain from the unpersoning would make it ineffective and before you know it people would just be casually sharing their actual opinions!
Lander’s over-the-top ceremonial denunciation is truly embarrassing.
How linked in culture and race?
https://twitter.com/MikePFanAccount/status/1080658055019192320
It would be funny … except we are actually ruled by the propaganda from these innumerate yikkers with BAs. People who profess to believe in “evolution” but can’t figure out that that requires people living in different environments for thousands of years to be … uh … different. People who blather about “nation of immigrants”–i.e. mass immigration forevver–and can’t figure out that inherently means becoming a shithole.
Yeah their arrognance and stupidity would be funny … excpet our nation and civilization is headed down the tubes as a result.
More of an overarching point:
When you find a person lies to you it’s a huge tell of their low character. Likewise with ideologies and their adherents.
And the modern multicultural left–minoritarianism, blank-slaters, feminists, i.e. globohomo–just can not stop lying.
"Studies" has now been extended to majors that mostly deal in leftist political ideology under the rubric of "Black Studies", "Women Studies", etc. Theoretically, there's no reason why "Black Studies" would have to be any less rigorous than other liberal arts degrees. You could easily design a major where you had to study, say, Bantu languages, anthropology of blacks, black American literature, etc. in an objective, non political way.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
It’s funny how the term Grievance Studies has caught on in a big way since the Grievance Studies Hoax of a few months ago.
Which is more likely to be ‘causal’ of the other:
MeToo’ed and then Watsoned
or
Watsoned and then MeToo’ed?
Remember that Hawkins was MeTooed and then Watsoned posthumously.
I didn't mention Murray because I understand he's already a non-person for the establishment.
MeToo'ed and then Watsoned
or
Watsoned and then MeToo'ed?Replies: @BB753
The former : MeTooed and then Watsoned.
Remember that Hawkins was MeTooed and then Watsoned posthumously.
I didn’t mention Murray because I understand he’s already a non-person for the establishment.
It now can be watched online:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/american-masters-decoding-watson-full-film/10923/
James Watson won’t stop talking about race.
Whereas those who preach “diversity” can’t stop talking about race either.
‘Good’ race talk versus ‘bad’ race talk.
non stop since the 90s? Probably since the 50s.
May 2013 interview with Amy Harmon: https://vimeo.com/66822422Replies: @Mr. Anon
Ethnic nepotism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Zq86LGbocReplies: @J1234, @donut
She’s got legs only a white woman could have .
Firings needed in the New York Times Fact Check Department