Evolutionary Psychologist Satori Kanazawa Uses Bogus Science to Suggest Black Women Are Less Attractive

Last week Dennis Romero of the LA Times reported about the backlash from a blog posted on the Psychology Today Website by Japanese "Evolutionary Psychologist" Satoshi Kanazawa (pictured left).

In an article entitled, "Why Are Black Women Rated as Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?", Kanazawa puts forth the absurd conclusion that Sisters are less attractive based on a survey and his interpretation of black female intelligence and data about body mass index.

Kanazawa's Wikipedia page lists a strange list of controversial sociological theories that have raised eyebrows before; such as his assertion that people in some countries had poor health because they were less intelligent rather than because of poverty.

According to Wikipedia, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, P.Z. Meyer, identifies Kanazawa as "the great idiot of social science."

One has to seriously wonder if any of the editors at Psychology Today actually read Kanazawa's piece before they posted it on their Website - and what he's doing as a member of the faculty at the London School of Economics.

Insane! Trump & Buchanan Move from Proof of Birth to Obama's GPA

Republicans just keep getting crazier.

With President Obama's surprise morning news conference to release his long-form birth certificate to confirm what he and other legal experts have been saying since 2007 (that he was born in America) still reverberating in political circles, the right wing extremists who currently dictate the GOP's agenda and policy direction struck back.

Apparently undaunted by factual proof that the entire basis for the "Birther" movement is in fact, not true, members of the right immediately moved on to questioning the President's qualifications for getting into Columbia and Harvard.

In one of the most overt displays of racism I've ever seen, quasi-Presidential hopeful/media whore Donald Trump along with former-Presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan launched into a bizarre attempt to discredit the President's academic qualifications for getting into college and law school.

Meanwhile Media Matters reports that since March 2nd, Fox News has stoked the irrational flames of the Birther movement by promoting the Birther story an astounding 52 times - 84% of those reports went unchallenged or uncorrected.

At least it's evident to Americans that the 2012 GOP presidential campaign will be about one thing - the President is black.

Russia's Treatment of Foreigners Seeking Asylum Echoes an Ugly Trend of Hate, Intolerance & Violence

An interesting investigative report by the BBC on the treatment of foreigners seeking asylum in Russia echoes a steady rise in extremism under the oligarchy of Russian Prime minister Vladimir Putin. Check out the 2007 Pod from Current TV on the right.

I visited Russia in the summer of 1987 as part of a high-school trip when it was still the Soviet Union. While Russia had a much stronger "law & order" central government authority back then and I met many, many cool Russian men and women of all ages; I still saw evidence of the kind of blanket racism directed against people of color the report talks about.

A Russian professor I had dinner and conversation with told me that Russian racism against people of color usually stems from resentment rather than the kind of indoctrinated, systematic racism based on ignorance (birthers) and fear one finds in the US.

When the Soviet Union was at the height of it's ideological and Cold War battles against the West in the 60's/70's, they made huge efforts to forge ties with poorer African, South American and Caribbean nations in an effort to extend their sphere of Communist/Socialist influence and gain access to the wealth of minerals, oil, gold/precious metals and crops. One of the results was that the Soviets allowed thousands of Africans to come to the Soviet Union and attend their best universities for free. Many working class Russians were locked into a rigid class system (despite Communist propaganda that touted an equal "worker's state"..total BS, never existed) that left them shut out of being able to send their kids to the best universities to become engineers, doctors, scientists, lawyers, musicians etc to gain entry to the "privileged class". Only rich and influential Soviets could send their kids to those schools - with rare exceptions (i.e children of high-ranking military officers, gifted athletes etc.)

So when many Russians SAW Africans in their country, they had a "built-in" internalized resentment towards them that was only magnified by the stark difference in skin color, race, language and physical characteristics. They saw these Africans as having access to privileges they themselves couldn't afford, and they hated them for it. It's still happening.

What's sad is Russia is such a rich, beautiful nation with a rich cultural history that stretches across music, literature, science and math. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, you saw the lifting of a heavy blanket of authority that had kept regional conflicts subdued under the proverbial "iron fist". The conflicts in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia for instance, exploded after the Soviet authorities departed and we all know the horrible ethnic cleansing, murder, torture and violence that resulted from simmering conflicts between religions and peoples that stretch back centuries that were allowed to rage.

Clearly Africans (or African-Americans) Cubans are NOT the only victims of racism within Russia. Nationalist movements and extremist groups that embrace violent Neo-Nazi ideology and fascism (curious given that ACTUAL Nazis murdered tens of MILLIONS of Russians in WWII...yes, racism is THAT ignorant) in recent years have targeted Jews, Muslims, political opponents of Vladimir Putin, journalists, human rights activists, foreigners and other ethnic minorities from various parts of the former-Soviet Union.

What frightens me is how some Russian state authorities quietly tolerate these groups, refuse to persecute them and essentially condone this behavior by doing very little about it. There was an excellent article on the bbc Website yesterday about how Russia treats foreigners seeking political asylum; housing Africans in leaky, cheap, substandard trailers in one of the poorest and most remote regions in Russia; people fleeing violence, civil war or worse for a chance to work and live in peace - worth a look to see how Russian immigration authorities "welcome them".

Outrage Over Orange County GOP Member Marilyn Davenport's Racist E-mail

Orange County, California may be known as "Reagan Country" for it's large conservative voting base but give OC Weekly journalist R. Scott Moxley credit for calling out the GOP's growing tolerance of overtly racist ideology within it's leadership ranks.

A recent e-mail sent by Republican Party central committee member (and Tea Party activist) Marilyn Davenport has outraged even GOP members from her own party who have called for her to resign. The image (pictured left) is basically a photo-shopped image of the President's face on a baby chimp that suggests his parents were Apes - the image was accompanied by the words "Now You Know Why No Birth Certificate."

Davenport's callous use of the image and her stubborn denial to even acknowledge that it is in fact, racist shows just how ingrained the dehumanizing, warped image is in the global sub-conscious.

Depicting peoples of African descent as apes, gorillas or monkeys actually predates the United States and goes back to the earliest European encounters with Africans in the 16th and 17th century. In drawings and writings, European explorers and "scientists" first promoted the "Negro-Ape metaphor" to explain away differences in skin tone, facial characteristics and hairstyle and soon thereafter, justify the enslavement of Africans and their forced entry into the global financial juggernaut that was the slave trade.

A long line of people, from French philosophers, to Popes, to scholars have entwined bogus scientific theories with warped images of blacks to present them as sub-human savages and justify pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority.

So people like Marilyn Davenport, who use these images, do so for a very simple reason; to promote centuries-old stereotypes of peoples of African descent as savage animals, devoid of Judeo-Christian values and justify an extremist ideology that treats non-whites (including the President of the United States) as less-than-human. Can you imagine the GOP e-mails that we DON'T see?

Beck is Out - Roger Ailes' GOP Spin Network Cuts Ties With Delusional Television Host Glen Beck

Fact-challenged Fox News host Glen Beck tried to play off his being booted from his daily TV slot, but the reality is that his lies, distortion of truth and fear-mongering have negatively affected the Fox News brand, which is desperate to re-connect with the main-stream American audience that will ultimately decide who will win the White House in 2012.

As the 2012 Presidential race begins to take shape, clear signs are emerging that the GOP is going all-out to distance itself from the extremist radical fringe element that has dominated the party's agenda in the past few years.

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Americans are over perpetual- Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's empty, right-wing soundbite politics and ceaseless wavering over whether she'll actually step into the ring as she criss-crosses the nation racking up speaker fees.

Palin is now tied with former President George W. Bush with a 25% approval rating; that's just one point above Richard M. Nixon according to the Politicususa.com Website; a fact that only confirms whisperings in Washington that the GOP was quietly working to move the former vice-president candidate and her baggage out of consideration for the Republican Presidential nominee slot.

Hoping to capitalize on these setbacks for the Tea Party, Donald Trump has stepped forward to flog the dead horse of Obama's citizenship issue with a string of TV appearances apparently aimed at the fraction of Americans who think the President is not an American citizen.

While the short term gains from such a blatant media stunt might temporarily nudge The Donald's approval ratings above Mike Huckabee's, no serious candidate is going to win the White House stoking Birther's bizarre theories - and ultimately, it's just going to drain away support from the more main-stream Republican candidates who actually might have a chance to score with mainstream American voters - the majority of whom view the GOP as obstructionist and disapprove of their attempts to force a shut-down of the entire government over their ideological budget cuts.

The GOP has a ways to go before it get it's own House in order - but pushing Palin back to the fringe where she belongs and severing it's brand with Glen Beck's strange conspiracy theory nonsense is a decent start.

Welcome to 1984! Wisconsin Republicans Demand Access to Professor Cronon's E-mails

A March 15th blog post about the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor William Cronon (pictured left) that laid out the truth about the American Legislative Exchange Council. His blog got a huge number of hits and he wrote a fascinating Op-Ed in the Times showing that Wisconsin actually passed unemployment insurance, worker's compensation and public employee bargaining legislation in the early part of the 20th century with the support of Republicans.

Apparently offended that a scholar would dare to disagree with efforts to further erode America's dwindling middle class, Stephan Thompson, deputy director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin is heading up efforts to subpoena Cronon's personal e-mail correspondence using a freedom of information request. Now I'm not debating the right of anyone to use freedom of information requests for legitimate reasons.

But Wisconsin Republicans trying to sift through the personal/work correspondence conversations of a history, geography & environmental scholar who is the president of the American Historical Association because he wrote something they didn't agree with?

It reeks of vindictive pettiness and an effort to elude substantive debate on a controversial measure to strip state employees of their bargaining rights.

What's next? A tap on his phone? Attacking a history professor? Really?
What a thuggish, McCarthy-like retaliatory tactic.

The Ghost of Diallo Haunts Miami - Chief Miguel Exposito Under Fire in the Wake of Travis McNeil's Shooting

Add 28 year-old Travis McNeil of Miami, Florida to the list. And what was his crime? He was unarmed and sitting in parked rental car when he was shot in the chest. When will it end and where's the oversight?

It's been more than ten years since Amadou Diallo (pictured left), an innocent civilian from West Africa who spoke five languages and was armed only with his wallet, keys and beeper was shot more than 19 times by four over-zealous white New York Police officers from the NYPD's "elite" Street Crimes Unit while standing in the vestibule of his own apartment on a cold February night.

An autopsy later showed 15 of the 41 bullets fired entered Diallo's back and sides; one shot even hit the bottom of his foot.

As an African-American male living in Manhattan at the time I vividly recall the sickening sense of fear, revulsion and anxiety all New Yorkers, and indeed, people around the globe of races, religions and backgrounds felt in the wake of one of the worst incidents of excessive police force ever recorded in the United States.

I was instantly reminded of the incident when I read the March 22nd New York Times article by Don Van Natta, jr. profiling a string of 7 killings of unarmed black American citizens in the past 8 months by the Miami police department.

The disturbing cultural similarities between the hyper-aggressive "elite" police units are disturbing. The NYPD's Street Crimes Unit motto "We Own the Night" befitted a rogue police unit with an abstract mission and little organizational oversight that patrolled any of the five boroughs. Their members were known to wear custom t-shirts emblazoned with the famous Ernest Hemingway quote:
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."

Who actually shot Travis McNeil? According to Don Van Natta's New York Times piece Detective Reinaldo Goyo, a member of Miami's gang unit who appeared in a controversial reality television series called "Miami's Finest SOS" wearing a hoodie with the word 'Punisher' on the front. Another member of the gang unit, Officer Ricardo Martinez, killed two different men within 9 days in August, 2010. And so it continues. And continues. And continues.