A test to predict Alzheimer's?

This finding is not terribly surprising. Verbal ability is the biggest single component of IQ and mechanical ability is quite highly 'g' loaded too.  And we have long known that high IQ peole have better health across the board.  So finding that people who are bad with words are more likely to develop Alzheimer's fits with that.  It's another part of the syndrome in which IQ is an index of general biological fitness

A test given to hundreds of thousands of students, including rock stars Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, nearly 60 years ago could hold the answers to whether a person will develop dementia.

Researchers at the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, which administered the test to some 440,000 high school students across the US in 1960, have been studying the teen's answers and believe they have found a link to student's who scored low on the test and Alzheimer's disease.

According to the Washington Post, researchers compared results for more than 85,000 testers with their 2012/2013 Medicare claims and expenditures and found that warning signs of memory loss may present itself as early as adolescence.

The study found specifically that those who scored low on mechanical reasoning and memory for words had a higher risk of dementia later in life. Researchers found that low-scoring men were 17 per cent more likely to get dementia, while low-scoring women were 16 per cent more likely.

The test, called Project Talent, was administered to high school kids from 1,353 public and parochial schools across the country. It was funded by the US government.

SOURCE 






MeToo tyranny claims another undeserving victim

The ousting of the NYRB editor confirms MeToo is now a witch-hunt.

MeToo has officially entered its McCarthyism stage. The ousting of Ian Buruma from the New York Review of Books is confirmation, for those who still needed it, that this hashtag movement is more about vengeance and censorship than justice. For Buruma’s crime was not to touch a woman without her consent or verbally harass his female workforce. It was merely to publish an essay by a man (Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi) who was accused of sexual assault and then acquitted in a court of law. When an esteemed editor can be expelled from polite society for publishing the words of a man who has not been found guilty of any crime, you know we live in dark, ugly times. MeToo is the midwife of this medieval-style policing of dissenting speech.

More than any other incident so far, the Buruma affair sums up the illiberal excesses and outright hysteria of the MeToo moment. Buruma’s speechcrime was twofold. First, he dared to give space to Ghomeshi to write about the accusations made against him and, sin of sins, even to make some jokes about today’s sexually straitened climate that is chewing up and spitting out men like him. Ghomeshi, who was accused by various women in 2014 of having non-consensual ‘rough sex’ with them — accusations that either didn’t make it to court or, in the cases of three women, were thrown out of court — says in his NYRB piece that he is a victim of ‘mass shaming’. And secondly, Buruma gave an interview to Slate in which he said Ghomeshi’s previous behaviour is not ‘really my concern’.

For this — for commissioning an essay and defending the right of an individual to continue to have a public presence after he has been acquitted of criminal offences — Buruma has been driven out of New York’s literary circle. It is unclear whether he resigned or was sacked, but it’s clear that he’s out because he dared to suggest we need nuance in the discussion about sexual misdemeanours and harassment. Nuance is tantamount to a sin in the binary moral universe of the MeToo witch-hunt. One of the things that most outraged feminists is that the cover of the NYRB that featured Ghomeshi and others mulling over MeToo ran with the headline ‘The fall of men’. That is ridiculous, men-pitying tripe, they said, even as they helped to bring about the fall of Buruma. Buruma’s fall, for mere editorial daring, proves his cover story was all too apt.

This affair confirms that any questioning of MeToo is not allowed. Witness also the rage against Matt Damon, Sean Penn, Catherine Deneuve, Anne Robinson and comedian Norm Macdonald, all of whom simply uttered heretical doubts about this new movement in which men can be cast out of work and into the shadows of shame simply upon the accusation of one woman. A couple of weeks ago, Macdonald made the blasphemous comment that it is about time the MeToo movement ‘slowed down a little bit’ and the even more sinful suggestion that the likes of Louis CK — the comic whose career was destroyed following accusations that he masturbated in front of some women — should be allowed to come back. Macdonald was due to appear on The Tonight Show but he pulled out after producers told him to make a public apology for his comments at the start of the show. ‘Publicly retract your comments, or else…’ — what century is this?

The Macdonald and Buruma incidents show how difficult it is for public figures to criticise MeToo. And in turn, they show how necessary it is to criticise MeToo. Any movement that becomes this arrogant, this punishing of challenge or rebuke, must be urgently subjected to the light of serious, reasoned debate. Sean Penn was dead right this week to express ‘suspicion’ of a movement that is consumed by ‘great stridency and rage’ and which is ‘without nuance’. ‘And even when people try to discuss it in a nuanced way, the nuance itself is attacked’, he said. This is precisely what has happened to Buruma: he has been expelled from literary society for calling for nuance. Nuance is not allowed in the MeToo era. You must simply point and scream and revel in people’s downfall.

The truth is that Buruma, in keeping with his intellectual output of recent decades, is making a very humanist argument. His comments to Slate are being taken out of context. Everyone is referring to his remark that Ghomeshi’s previous behaviour is ‘not really my concern’. What he actually said was: ‘I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation. How can I be? All I know is that in a court of law he was acquitted, and there is no proof he committed a crime.’ Here, Buruma is doing something very civilised: he is refusing to act as a one-man mob and conspire in the permanent exclusion of Ghomeshi from public life because he prefers to believe that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. And Ghomeshi has not been found guilty. Of anything. It used to be considered socially conscientious to treat acquitted people, and even ex-cons, fairly and humanely. Now it is seen as a social crime. MeToo wants everyone who is merely accused to be punished forever. That is a nasty, Stalinist and utterly unjust approach to public life. Buruma is defending the pillars of the free, civilised society; MeToo is attacking them.

Not content with conflating everything from a hand on the knee and actual rape; not content with presenting women as the frail victims of male wickedness; not content with instituting a situation where accused individuals can lose their careers and in some cases their lives (there have been four MeToo-related suicides) — now MeToo wants to shut down criticism, shut down nuance. Buruma shouldn’t be ousted, he should be cheered, for he has helped to start a very important discussion about the dire impact MeToo is having on freedom, justice and sex. We should defend him, and the other MeToo heretics, before it’s too late. Before we end up in a world where anyone who wants a job in journalism, culture, politics or entertainment is first asked: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a critic of MeToo?’

SOURCE





Trump Expected to Advance Religious Liberty at the UN
    
Every year, without fail, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for religious freedom. Persecution of religious minorities is rampant and deeply ingrained in government institutions, and Christians are high on the list of those who are at risk, especially Christians who have converted from Islam.

The most recent State Department report on International Religious Freedom notes that between 2010 and 2017, more than 600 Christians were imprisoned solely for the practice of their faith. The same report points to an upsurge in anti-Christian sentiment within Iranian state media, accompanied by more frequent and aggressive raids on home-based churches.

International human rights groups can naturally be counted on to back up the State Department’s findings and to push for activism on behalf of at-risk individuals and populations in the Islamic Republic.

Of course, this goes to show how deeply Islamic extremism is ingrained into the identity of Iran’s theocratic regime. Every time that regime prosecutes someone for national security crimes on the basis of membership in a religious minority, it is effectively admitting that the regime cannot survive in the presence of religious freedom. As such, the mullahs tacitly admit this fact almost every single day.

There is no sensible reason for any modern, democratic government to dispute that fact. And yet the previous White House did just that when it joined the European Union in pursuing negotiations with the Iranian regime on the expectation that this would promote “moderation” among the leadership. More than three years after the signing of a nuclear deal that was supposed to usher in this moderation, the naïvety of this view has been clearly exposed.

As was revealed recently, some of the Obama administration officials have not given up hope for keeping this deal afloat. John Kerry, for instance, has met with his Iranian counterparts and advised the ayatollahs to wait until the Trump administration is out. His conduct is hard to fathom, and it is very damaging to U.S. national security imperatives as well as prospects for promoting religious liberty in the Middle East.

Fortunately, the current presidential administration has no such impulse to turn away from systematic violations of religious freedom and other human rights while waiting for Tehran to correct its own behavior.

In fact, the Trump administration has commendably made religious freedom a major focus of its foreign policy. This was demonstrated in July when the State Department hosted its first ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. And it will be demonstrated again this week when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attends the Values Voter Summit to participate in a discussion of international religious liberty. None of his predecessors in the office has done the same.

The significance of these gestures is amplified, particularly where Iran policy is concerned, by the fact that the Trump administration has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to assertive foreign policies that will actually hold Tehran and other repressive governments accountable for violations of the rights of Christians and other minorities. The U.S. is now in the midst of reimposing the sanctions that were suspended in the wake of shortsighted international negotiations, and this is being done with the express purpose of compelling the Iranian regime toward a comprehensive change of behavior.

To complement its correct policy, the White House should publicly recognize that there is a viable alternative to the clerical regime, which has already specified unqualified religious freedom as part of its vision for Iran’s democratic future. The 2018 Iran Uprising Summit to be held this week will echo this message.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran — the coalition of Iranian opposition movements with the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) at its core — is that alternative. The longstanding pro-democratic Resistance has made itself known in recent months as the driving force behind a far-reaching protest movement that speaks for the economically disenfranchised, for the wrongfully imprisoned, for persecuted minorities, and so on.

In January, the supreme leader of the Iranian regime credited MEK with facilitating the rapid spread of the protests, and used that fact to spur a more aggressive crackdown. But even after 8,000 arrests and 50 deaths, the Iranian public remained ready to take to the streets again, and the protest movement showed a significant resurgence in March, following a message from NCRI President Maryam Rajavi calling for “a year full of uprisings” in pursuit of “final victory” over the Iranian regime. In August, protests erupted in more than two dozen cities and towns. Anti-government protests have become a new feature of the Iranian political landscape.

The Trump administration has done something very admirable by giving international religious freedom a place of prominence in its foreign policy. But it can only truly follow through on its commitment to that principle if it partners with local actors who share the same commitment.

Although Iran is presently one of the world’s most troubled areas in terms of religious liberty and human rights, it is also home to one of the most active, organized, and well-established movements in favor of Western-style values and democratic governance. There is no better or more obvious way of promoting those values in Iranian society than by endorsing and supporting MEK and its allies. President Trump presiding over the UN Security Council session on Sept. 26 provides a unique opportunity for the U.S. to make a stand for universal values including religious freedoms and to make a clear case for greater multilateral pressure on Iran.

SOURCE






A hate group sets out to co-opt major corporations

Color of Change, a radical leftist group campaigning to censor conservatives and right-leaning groups, exploited the 2015 Charleston church shooting to go after the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Freedom Center’s investigations had exposed Color of Change, but the leftist group’s campaign to silence the Center briefly succeeded last month.

“Bloodmoney,” Color of Change’s smear campaign, seeks to shut down the fundraising abilities of conservative organizations by pressuring credit card companies and payment processors to deny access to conservative groups blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Color of Change falsely accuses all of these groups of promoting violence and white supremacy.

Two weeks ago, the group’s pressure campaign successfully misled Mastercard into refusing to process donations for the Freedom Center, until an outcry forced the company to change course. Though the battle may have been won, Color of Change’s censorship campaign continues.

Color of Change’s “Bloodmoney” campaign is a blood libel. The effort falsely links conservative organizations targeted by the SPLC—including some run by African-Americans and Jews—to the Charleston church shooting and the violence in Charlottesville. The leftist group founded by CNN’s Van Jones and funded by George Soros is out to censor conservative organizations by choking off their fundraising.Color of Change’s blood libel accuses credit card companies and payment processors of taking “blood money” and financing “violence” and of complicity in “white supremacist murders” if they process donations for conservative organizations, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

“Financial service companies doing business with white supremacists are profiting from hate,” the campaign alleges.

The truth behind the blood libel is that Color of Change is a racialist partisan group trying to cut off financial services to mainstream conservative groups using shameless lies.

The Freedom Center previously had exposed Color of Change’s malicious dishonesty. Its list of “white nationalist groups” appears to be based on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s thoroughly discredited list of hate groups, while excluding black racist groups, such as Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, from the list. Even so, the list of “white supremacists” that Color of Change had tried to force credit card companies to stop doing business with included a black church, organizations run by Jews, Arabs, and former Muslims, not to mention the American College of Pediatricians.

James Rucker, the executive director and co-founder of Color of Change, is a board member of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Color of Change’s list is just the SPLC wearing political blackface.

Some companies were smart enough not to fall for Color of Change’s censorship scam.

Bloodmoney lists Amazon, Stripe and Discover as not “engaged,” which means those companies aren’t taking orders from an organization founded by Van Jones, who called the 2016 election a “whitelash,” and tarred 62 million Trump voters as racists.

But American Express and Visa are “engaged.” That means Color of Change has an open door to them. And Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay are listed as “proactive.” And that proactive censorship is why MasterCard made the mistake of blocking payments to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Fueled by Shoddy, Antisemitic Research

Yet the only research that Color of Change presents in its attack on the Freedom Center is one quote that the SPLC, in its haste to score points against political foes, even fails to attribute. And the source of the SPLC’s smear appears to be a recycled Center for American Progress attack on the Center.

That attack, which claimed that a Jewish conspiracy was spreading Islamophobia, was put together by a team that included Matt Duss and Eli Clifton, whose Center for American Progress work was described as “infected with Jew-hatred” by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and led to a rebuke from the Obama White House. CAP also includes Faiz Shakir, who had co-chaired Harvard events that included a Hamas charity front fundraiser, and Wajahat Ali, whose blog had included a defense of Sami Al-Arian, a senior member of Islamic Jihad.

This is the rotten foundation of bigots, extremists, and antisemites upon which Color of Change’s blood libel against the Freedom Center rests. This was why Mastercard cut off the Freedom Center.

Mastercard has since reversed its decision, but the damage has already been done.

The message has been sent that a recycled seven-year-old smear put together by bigots and terrorist sympathizers on behalf of a partisan organization is enough to incite immediate action by a major corporation. Mastercard used “Bloodmoney’s” list to put the Freedom Center on a list of organizations “advocating for violence”.

The partnership of corporations and lefty groups trying to force conservatives off the internet claim that their work is based on research. The only research here consisted of an unsourced claim (because it’s derived from discredited sources) treated as fact with no further diligence.

That’s not only a profound failure. It’s a profound threat.

The Danger at Hand

Conservatives are being censored, deplatformed, banned, demonetized and kicked off services based on the mere word of a leftist group. No actual evidence necessary. The SPLC in June paid $3.375 million in a settlement after falsely accusing a Muslim of being an anti-Muslim activist. It inspired an actual domestic terrorist attack. Yet companies keep taking its word.

Color of Change didn’t even pretend to provide evidence. Mastercard took its word anyway.

Why are Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay, Visa and American Express “engaging” with a group whose sole purpose is to censor its political opposition without even providing evidence for its easily disproved lies?

Color of Change also fields Color of Change PAC, which endorses candidates for public office. They share office space and staff. Color of Change PAC-endorsed candidates include Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a former member of the Nation of Islam racist hate group, whose bigotry has been criticized by the Freedom Center.

Money has poured into the Color of Change PAC from George Soros, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s dark money machine, the Accountable Justice Action Fund, MoveOn, Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together, and Color of Change itself.

Many of these were exposed and criticized by the Freedom Center. Silencing the Freedom Center and organizations like it would help Color of Change elect its own slate of candidates. And those of its wealthy partisan backers. That’s why Color of Change wants to take down the Freedom Center.

“White Supremacy” as All-Purpose Cudgel

When Mastercard did the bidding of Color of Change, it provided a partisan advantage to the far Left.

James Rucker, the executive director of Color of Change, started out as the director of grassroots mobilization for MoveOn. He’s also a co-founder of Soros’s Secretary of State Project.

David Horowitz and the Freedom Center long have been critics of Soros and his organizations. Last year, MasterCard announced that it was teaming up with Soros on a “philanthropic” project.

Did this influence Mastercard’s willingness to collaborate with Color of Change, also funded by Soros?

Color of Change is just another one of many interchangeable and intertwined front groups. James Rucker, its executive director, is married to Heidi Hess, a white co-director at CREDO Action. Hess helped found COC and served as its board secretary. Rucker also sits on the board of MoveOn. The organizational structure and finances of Color of Change look strange, but the tiny group wields outsized influence.

Hess led one of the infamous harassment protests outside Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s home. The white and uncivil leftist insisted, “the civility and respectability politics are also just maintaining the institutionalized white supremacy that it is at the core of Trump’s agenda.”

To Hess, civility is white supremacy. To her husband, the Freedom Center, a black church and counterterrorist groups run by Middle Eastern immigrants are also examples of “white supremacy.”

Rucker, Hess, and the rest of the Left recklessly use “white supremacy” as a smear directed at their political opponents and at anything that gets in their way. It’s the responsibility of companies like Mastercard to look beyond the smears of partisan leftists and radical scam artists to get the facts.

Blood libels succeed because companies allow leftist politics to overcome their standards. The Freedom Center won the freedom to fundraise again because it fought for the facts. And when it did, Color of Change’s blood libel quickly fell apart. But the real fight is just beginning. As long as the Southern Poverty Law Center, Color of Change and other partisan groups continue to have an open door into major corporations, the censorship, and the blood libels will go on.

And the Freedom Center will go on fighting them.

“What those of us who care about free speech must do now is form a coalition across party lines and ideologies in defense of free speech. Freedom of speech is the most basic freedom we have because all our other freedoms are dependent on it,” the Freedom Center’s David Horowitz said. “If we cannot preserve freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, we cannot defend any of our freedoms, and we will have lost everything.”

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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