Revealed: “nooffensebut” is Walter Ward, Floridian retiree.

As an experiment, I submitted my last blog to Taki’s Magazine. You can judge the result for yourself. Their use of a scarred Rwandan above the title, “The Thug Gene?” was an interesting choice, I guess. Renaming MAOA seems unnecessary to me, since it was already widely known as “the warrior gene,” and ABC News also renamed it “the gangsta gene.” Likewise, yours truly has a new moniker:

“Walter Ward is a retired biology teacher. He lives in Florida and has eight grand children [sic].”

For the record, none of that is the case. I would prefer not to reveal my identity at this time, but lying, especially when the identity so easily fits a dismissible stereotype, seems counterproductive.

A couple edits to the essay changed my meaning. The article now claims that less than 1% of the whites in Rosenberg et al had the 2-repeat allele of MAOA. Just to be clear and precise, that study claimed that 2% of whites had alleles other than 3-repeats or 4-repeats, but it did not detail the exact percentage with 2-repeats for whites or African Americans. Also, the article now claims that there were four men included in the 14 total “afflicted” with Brunner syndrome, who also “escaped having the syndrome.” What I wrote was that these four had the mutation but not the syndrome. As I re-examine the only paper to mention these men, I see that there is some ambiguity as to whether they were included in the total 14, but they did not have a diagnosis by the standard of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, the Bible of psychiatry).

Overall, I was impressed that the editors at least wanted to check my sources. I wish they had been so careful when Michelle Malkin attacked the First Lady’s attempts to promote breastfeeding with the flippant and apocryphal claim that “the health advantages of bosom over bottle are short-lived.” Malkin gets an official pass from me though because she is soooooo gorgeous. What can I say? I recently became a very dirty, old man.