Jezebel: james watson

She's Spent Sixteen Years On Your Trail…

Moe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Hillary suffered a coughing fit in South Dakota today and might give up altogether tomorrow. I have been suffering coughing fits all weekend and I haven't even managed to give up smoking, so I'm not placing any bets, but apparently there's a deal in the works for the Obama campaign to Bernanke her Bear Stearns. [Huff Po]
Speaking! Krugman defends Bernanke on the grounds that there are no unions in America sending inflation spiraling of control with their wage demands like there were in the seventies. But hello Paul, you know what the Chinese were making in the seventies? [NYT]
Also, I bet Americans had slightly less than a trillion dollars in credit card debt in the seventies. [WSJ]
Stuff we did have in the seventies besides unions: regulations and trade barriers. Without those things to eradicate economic growth may be so hard to achieve that Barack Obama can call himself the "growth candidate" with his proposals to focus on preschool. [Wash Post]

Ahmadinejad said something about how Jesus will come back and kill all the Jews this time. [Breitbart]
Sadr City: 110 degrees, lacking potable water or a decent sewage system, but — your boss will be so stoked! — there's totally decent BlackBerry service! [WSJ]
"I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do we find such men? For the job of swabbing out the White House stables, yes. But for any task involving the weighing of words?" Hitch suggests you forego Scott McClellan's tell-all in favor of Doug Feith's epic defense of Don Rumsfeld, on account of a bunch of bullshit retorts to straw arguments no one seriously makes — "that there was no consideration given to postwar planning," for instance; oh please — and also, Feith's superior prose style. Natch. [Slate]
Can "parenting classes" save the next generation of inbred underage incest victims from the clutches of Fundamentalist Mormon mind control? Well… [AP]
Ted Kennedy's brain surgery was successful. Now comes the fun part: radiation and chemo. Good luck.[WSJ]
Matt Drudge as microcosm for the nation's ideological shift. [Politico]
Henry Louis Gates talks to James Watson and finds him to not be a racist but a "racialist"; Gates explores his own love-hate relationship with DNA; generally depressing story reveals James Watson has a low IQ. [TheRoot]

Geneticist Apologizes To Africa; It Was All A Case Of Wishing He Was A Jew

Moe — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:30:18 EDT

Hey, remember how double helix discoverer and nasty old Nobel laureate James Watson thinks black people are stupid and all homos and ugly women deserve to be aborted? Well, now he says he doesn't actually believe all of that. "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief," is his new line. Which is not to say that he doesn't think scientists should look for one, according to today's "What I've Learned" feature on the Esquire website, which can be summarized thusly: "The world would be so much better if everyone just had my DNA, or alternately, that of the Ashkenazi Jews, who are so much smarter than everyone else it is only natural and warranted that people hate them, because they have all the money, and we should probably pay them even more money since they are greedy and that is how you motivate these people, to have more children."

It's all because he desires world peace! "If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars," he says. Not to mention, way better weapons!

What I've Learned [Esquire]
Nobel-Winning Biologist Apologizes For Being Worse Than O'Reilly [CNN]

Nobel-Awarded Geneticist: Black People Are Stupid Sex Fiends, All Women Should Be Hot Blondes

Moe — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:00:56 EDT

So it's Day 2 into that "People are more likely to believe gossip than they are actual facts," story, which is conveniently being used on the morning programs to explain America's obsession with celebrity tabloids although it might be more useful towards explaining why 40% of Americans or whatever still believe Saddam Hussein helped orchestrate 9/11 or why vast swaths of the Middle East can deny the Holocaust — although hey, who wants to hear about facts when Larry Craig is defending his heterosexuality on TV? — when what pops across my web browser but... a story about Nobel prize-winning double helix discoverer James Watson. Like Ann Coulter, he has a new book out! And according to all the reviews, he's quite the "gossip." Which might explain his latest statements:

The 79-year-old geneticist said 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." He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

WTF, Mr. Watson? Wethinks someone is overdue for the Bill O'Reilly Tour Of Harlem!

After all, if someone as inclined as Bill to reject basically all factual information in favor of nebulous strains of whatevphemera that support his own preexisting prejudices can find enough anecdotal evidence to actually change his mind about black people over the course of a mere half-generation, there's still hope for someone who has heard of the "scientific method", right? Maybe it's time to hire a new, evolved, black employee to erase the memory of the other insubordinate black employee who alienated you because you were such a racist shithead?

*And wait! "all our policies" have sort of been predicated on the notion that whose intelligence is the same as ours? Because here in America we have long predicated all our policies on the notion that no one's intelligence is the same as ours. It gets us into trouble sometimes!

*And wait!

He has been reported in the past saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.
In addition, he has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos.

He also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

Oh fuck, you know, whatever, he'll be dead soon and from all anecdotal evidence I've gathered I would hold out hope that the two sons who inherited his DNA are not genetically bound to be irredeemable bigots.

Top Scientist Claims Black People 'Stupid' [Times of London]