The IQ Resistance

Bruce Charlton's latest monthly Medical Hypotheses editorial is entitled Replacing education with psychometrics. Much of it will be familiar territory to HBD bloggers - indeed, the author acknowledges Steve Sailer at the end of the article, which may be a first for a science journal - but the idea most interesting to me was this:

If psychometric measures of IQ and personality were available, then it would be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system – with substantial and permanent loss of jobs and status for educational professionals of all types including teachers, professors, administrators and managers.[...]

The vulnerability of the elite institutions to IQ knowledge is because most of the assumed advantages of an expensive elite education can be ascribed to their historic ability to select the top stratum of IQ (and also the most desirable personality types): given the stability and predictive power of these traits the elite students are therefore pre-determined to be (on average) highly successful.

Consequently the most elite institutions and their graduates have in the past few decades, both via academic publications and in the mass media, thoroughly obscured the basic and validated facts about IQ. We now have a situation where the high predictive powers of IQ and personality and the stable and hereditary nature of these traits are routinely concealed, confused or (in extremis) explicitly denied by some of the most prestigious and best-educated members of modern society [17].

Elite educational institutions seem to be practicing a version of "Who? Whom?", i.e. if the science of IQ becomes better known and accepted, these institutions will be screwed, and if it remains obscure and contested, the status quo of elite institutions' money, power, and prestige remains, at huge cost to society.

Still, that some of the most intelligent people around deny the reality of IQ is not without humor.

The Upside of Health Care Rationing

In the NYT, Peter Singer advocates the rationing of health care. Singer's op-ed is full of sophistry - what did you expect? - like this:

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another.

Looks like the man has never read an economics textbook; otherwise, if it's a "scarce resource", why do we have so much more of it now than we did 30 years ago? It's called supply and demand. Health care isn't pumped out of the sands of Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, though Singer's totalitarian dream of the government controlling all of medicine may come to pass, there is an upside.

If health care is rationed, those in worse health will suffer the most. The healthy don't need health care.

Who are the unhealthy? The smokers, the obese, the couch potatoes, the alcoholics, those who practice unsafe sex with multiple male partners, the drug addicts. In short, and overgeneralizing, the unhealthy are the stupid and those with low future time orientation.

The healthy are those who take care of themselves. They're the smart and those with high future time orientation.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. Rationing health care will have consequences that its advocates don't intend.

First your teeth and gums rot, then your body falls apart

A great paper, Dietary Carbohydrates and Dental-Systemic Diseases by P. Hujoel, is a sort of dental "Good Calories, Bad Calories. The author discusses whether tooth and gum diseases are something on the whole superficial, or whether they are signs of something else, namely chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCDs), and comes down on the side of the latter.

Incredible as it may seem, no one ever stopped and thought that teeth and gums rotting away isn't something normal and to be expected. It's long been known, of course, that diet had a lot to do with it, but it was thought, without a lot of evidence, that "fermentable carbohydrates" - the paper's nomenclature, meaning refined carbs - were part of man's normal diet. Even more, since the rise of Ancel Keys' now all but discredited lipid hypothesis, refined carbs were considered healthy, and that poor dental health was just inevitable.

But dental disease and systemic disease correlate. For instance, tooth loss in young adulthood correlates to heart disease later. Primitive peoples with no exposure to Western diets not only have vanishingly low rates of heart disease and cancer, but have near perfect teeth and gums. The Iceman had no cavities.

Interestingly, the paper pokes a few holes in the argument that CNCDs could be caused by microbes. Treatment of dental disease with antibiotics seems to cause no decrease in CNCDs.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

A Cause of the Secular Decline in Violence

Steven Pinker writes on the well-known (in the Steveosphere) decline in violence from the Middle Ages to today, and suggests four possible reasons for the decline: wider governmental control, a sense that life is no longer cheap (from better sanitary and medical conditions etc.), greater incentives to cooperate, and an escalation in empathy, (Singer's "expanding moral circle").

He doesn't mention another and nearly proven possibility: evolution. Clark showed convincingly that England's population evolved over several hundred years up to 1800, with middle class personality traits increasing in incidence among the population. Cochran and Harpending have shown convincingly that evolution currently proceeds at a rate up to 100 times faster than before civilization; furthermore, they asserted that the breeding of docility is a process that civilization could be expected to encourage, so it would also be likely from living under expanded and more powerful governments.

Pinker writes:

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time.

Not necessarily, Dr. Pinker. Or if they did work to end it, some of their methods included the massive application of capital punishment and letting the poor starve, along with other measures that few would advocate today.

High IQ, Reproductive Success, and Dysgenics

OneSTDV discusses the implications of the apparent lowered success rate with women of highly intelligent men. The notion that high IQ men suffer from being nerds and are seen as relatively undesirable is a common one among practitioners of "game", the craft of the pick-up artist.

There seems to be some evidence for this. In a well-known essay on the social and psychological problems of the highly intelligent, "The Outsiders", the author notes that the higher the IQ, the likelihood becomes greater that its bearer will be "maladjusted", with a tendency toward isolation and an inability to suffer fools gladly. Though the author discusses maladjustment in terms of very high IQs, a tendency toward maladjustment is seen above a certain level, so it can be surmised that any man much more intelligent than the normal might well have problems here, including with women. (Likewise, anyone a couple standard deviations below the mean will have problems with social maladjustment too, which is why so many men in prison are stupid.)

OneSTDV's solution to this problem is to think in terms of race: if the highly intelligent have fewer children, they still are society's movers, shakers, capitalists, and scientists, and thus help promote their own genes insofar as they promote those of their own race or nation. If a race is just an extended family, this will be true.

In the past, however, high IQ was not associated with lower reproductive success, as Gregory Clark showed in his book A Farewell to Alms. In a society without government-provided social insurance or benefits, the wealthiest - presumably also the smartest - left more than twice as many surviving children as the poorest, the bottom 20% or so of the latter not even reaching replacement levels of fertility. Wealth also had a greater correlation with reproductive success than social status or literacy, further indication that the wealthiest were not just the best educated or best connected, but were those who most had their wits about them. (This is the same process involved in the increase in Ashkenazi IQ, along with no out-marriage and highly g-loaded work.)

It's often claimed that the dysgenic pattern seen in society today is due to the wealthier and more educated having fewer children than the poorer and less educated, which is true. But at certain times in the past, not only did the wealthier have more children than the poor, but many more of them survived to adulthood.

Today virtually all children, rich or poor, survive, and the lower birth rates of the better educated translate into fewer adult children. Society's average IQ will then shrink.

So the fertility disadvantage under which the highly intelligent seemingly labor can be ascribed at least partly to the modern welfare state, modern medicine, and the lamentable rise of feminism and serial monogamy, the latter causing a generalized fall in status of nearly all men, and especially the "maladjusted" high IQ men.

Except under conditions of barbarity (not wholly unthinkable anymore), modern medicine isn't going away. Only slightly less likely are the waning of feminism or the welfare state. Clark showed that medieval England supported a highly eugenic environment, the conditions of which were peace, stable and respected property rights, and a nearly laissez faire society in which each family was on its own.

How the Irish in America increased by an order of magnitude

Another nice piece of information from race/history/evolution notes, on "how 4.5 million Irish immigrants became 40 million Irish Americans". Basically, by identifying as victims, with a helping hand from the adversary culture:

The growth of ethnic populations, including the Irish, has three components: natural increase, intermarriage, and preference.[...]

For some ethnic groups, intermarriage thins out the ethnic heritage because few offspring of mixed marriages remember ancestors from that group. For other groups, intermarriage is a recruitment opportunity because the offspring of mixed marriages often think of themselves as part of that group, simplifying their mixed heritage with a single mention or expressing the sense that they "feel closer" to one group than to the other.

n/a asserts that being Irish by identification allows one "to be a colorful victim, diametrically opposed to the evil, dull WASP television and public schools have taught you to hate." The Irish-Americans themselves probably have a lot to do with this (speaking as someone with some Irish ancestry myself). The Irish - some Irish I should say - promote their victimhood at the hands of the English, and this notion is passed down for generations.

(With that, I'll be away from the blog for a few days.)

Calorie restriction effect on longevity driven by protein restriction

These are some notes I've collected which I place here while collecting my thoughts to write something longer.

Most will be familiar with the phenomenon of calorie restriction (CR) and the fact that it dramatically increases both mean and maximum lifespan in many different species of animals, from yeast to mammals.

It turns out that CR usually also amounts to protein restriction, and that is the true driver of the CR effect on longevity. Furthermore, recent research has determined that the restriction of only one amino acid is responsible for the increasing longevity seen in CR, and that is methionine. See this abstract for an explanation. (Interesting to note that a great deal of this work has been done in Spain, ranked 9th in the world in scientific output.)

Methionine restriction works through several pathways, such as increasing insulin sensitivity, decreasing visceral fat, and lowering IGF-1 levels, as well as decreasing the production of oxygen radicals by mitochondria. Methionine restriction also increases blood glutathione levels - that's a good thing.

A number of humans are attempting calorie restriction; however, it appears that until now they've been blowing it, at least partially, because they increased their protein intake, or didn't change it, and while they have received benefits in the form of lower blood pressure and better cardiovascular disease markers, their serum IGF-1 levels did not decrease, thus denying them full benefits. But (same paper), when protein levels were restricted, IGF-1 levels plummeted within weeks.

All this is interesting because calorie restriction, though it might bring huge health benefits for humans, is something that only highly disciplined people can carry out. But restricting protein ought to be pretty easy - no need to go hungry.

Which diet is lowest in protein? Score one for the vegans. (That's from my favorite journal.)

On the other hand, it's pretty clear that restricting carbohydrates in the diet is also a good strategy for health, and vegans usually have a high carb intake. (CR research has shown that neither carbohydrate restriction nor fat restriction is responsible for CR longevity effects.) It seems that a good strategy for those desiring to pursue both protein and carbohydrate restriction might be the Kwasniewski or "Optimal" diet.

From an evolutionary point of view, it's thought that CR works because in conditions of food scarcity, it allows an animal to "survive and fight another day". Methionine, the protein constituent which appears to be the driver of CR, is an essential amino acid in humans, found most abundantly in meat. Methionine scarcity - and I'm speculating here - appears to be an indication of scarcity in general; it would be the first dietary element to disappear when conditions of scarcity begin; so it makes sense that its restriction causes CR longevity effects.

(I also posted this to my new blog, an experiment for me, Biomedical Intelligence.)

What happened to the Old American ethnic group?

When I read that men of so-called Old American ancestry made better military pilots in World War II, it was the first time that I'd heard of this group of people referred to by this name. Defined as a person all four of whose grandparents were born in the United States, a group which would have included virtually everyone in my Southern California neighborhood when I was growing up, Old Americans were so taken for granted as a group that they didn't need any name other than "Americans".

A Google book search reveals that many or most of the books in which the term appears are not only anthropological in nature, but that most of them appeared before 1970. We learn, for example, that "Old American patients were more detached in their response to pain and they were more concerned with not bothering anyone." (A stereotype: stoic Northern and Western Europeans versus excitable and voluble Mediterraneans and Latins.) Many of the texts containing this term are older papers and books in sociology.

The term would seem to overlap with Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), but include other groups as well, such as in religion Catholics, or in ethnicity Scandinavians, Germans, and Irish. My father, for instance, who was an Army Air Corps bomber pilot, would qualify as Old American, though he was not a Wasp, but a Catholic of equal Irish and Dutch extraction.

So why doesn't anyone use the term anymore? One can only speculate, but the answer probably isn't difficult. Mass immigration, the civil rights era, and the rise of the diversity dogma have all made the term seem quaint, even offensive. If the only thing necessary to being an American is to live here, and if Americans whose ancestors built the country have no right to decide who in fact gets to live here - because that would be discrimination, the worst act in the history of the world - then all reference to Old Americans must be stopped immediately. The disciplines of sociology and anthropology are the two where this term has been used the most, and these days they are the two disciplines most likely to be infiltrated with leftists riding the long drive into the institutions, so there is unlikely to be any resistance to the abolition of this offensive and hegemonic ethnic designation.

A final note: even many well-meaning foreigners have difficulty comprehending that the U.S. is anything other than a nation of immigrants, that we have little history and certainly no dominant ethnic group. They can perhaps be forgiven as having been bombarded by Hollywood and other propaganda that asserts this. But I can assure them that this is not the case.

The Scientific Impact of Nations

Following up on yesterday's post, Chris pointed us to this (pdf) from Nature, 2004, called "The scientific impact of nations"; this study uses several different measures to determine a nation's scientific output. One measure is of citations per paper, adjusted for the particular field and year of publication, in an attempt to normalize results. This should give a good measure of the quality rather than quantity of a nation's scientific output, and avoid the problem of massive output of "papers on racism". For the years 1997-2001 (which would exclude the recent years in which Chinese science has allegedly accelerated), the list based on "rank order of nations based on share of top 1% of highly-cited publications" shows the U.S. at number one, and of the next 17, only Japan and Israel are not European.

Another ranking, the "citation rate per paper" shows Switzerland in first place, followed by the U.S., and of the top 20, again Japan and Israel are the only non-European countries.

In a measure of the ratio of all citations to per capita GDP, Switzerland came out way out in front, with the U.S apparently doing a little worse than the average. In other words, given our GDP, the U.S. ought to be producing even more highly-cited papers than it does.

But when compared to a group including the EU and the G8 nations, the U.S. produced more than 65% of the top 1% highly-cited publications.

The Top Ten Countries in Science

Rank	Country	Papers 1998-2008
1	United States	2,798,448
2	Japan	757,586
3	Germany	723,804
4	England	641,768
5	France	517,096
6	People's Republic of China	511,216
7	Canada	388,471
8	Italy	370,053
9	Spain	271,753
10	Russia	262,982

The table (link) lends some credence to Kanazawa's dictum that Asians can't do science. The population of Europe and North America combined are somewhat over one billion, with Asia at some 5.3 billion. Japan and China together produced some 1.3 million papers, while Europe and North America combined produced about 6 million papers. Papers/population for Asia: 0.00025. For Europe and North America: 0.006, or 24 times as many.

However, take a country like South Korea, which had 2.26% of the world's papers, with only 0.8% of the world's population. This would seem to be above average for the world; the U.S. by contrast has 34% of the world's papers (link) with 5% of the world's population. Must be all those Asian scientists engineers immigrating, without whom we wouldn't be competitive.

Sadly, the continents of South America and Africa are not represented on this list.

White people: we've still got what it takes.

Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans

Awhile back I noted a paper which showed that vitamin C abolished endurance training effects. It turns out that vitamin C isn't the only substance that will do this: Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans. This from the PNAS, a high-impact journal; this study isn't shoddy work, in other words.

The experimenters took two groups of young men, previously trained with endurance exercise, and previously untrained. Each group in turn was randomized to receive antioxidant supplements in the form of 400 IU vitamin E and 1000 mg vitamin C daily, or placebos. Then the men underwent 4 weeks of training, 5 days a week, including biking, running, and circuit training.

The result: those who had taken antioxidants saw no, repeat, no health benefits from exercise. The measurements done were of insulin sensitivity, TBARS (a measure of oxidative stress), and several others. In each of them, those who exercised, and did not take antioxidants, regardless of whether they had trained previously or not, saw an increase in insulin sensitivity, a decrease in TBARS, and so on, while these effects were abolished in those who took the antioxidants. Further, the promotion of muscle antioxidant defenses which is normally promoted by exercise was prevented by supplementation.

From the paper:

Most importantly, these changes in gene expression and the increase in insulin sensitivity following physical exercise are almost completely abrogated by daily ingestion of the commonly used antioxidants vitamin C and vitamin E. Thus, antioxidant supplementation blocks many of the beneficial effects of exercise on metabolism.

What are the larger implications here? What about that high fruit and vegetable intake that we are constantly told is so good for us? this is where it gets very interesting:

If transient increases in oxidative stress are capable of counteracting insulin resistance in humans, it is possible that preventing the formation of ROS by, for example, antioxidants might actually increase, rather than decrease, the risk of type 2 diabetes. While this remains to be determined, one metaanalysis of previously published studies (27) suggests that high dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, a source of antioxidants but also of numerous other bio-active compounds, may actually decrease the risk for type 2 diabetes. Nevertheless, and as stated by Hamer and Chida (27), all larger intervention trials evaluating the diabetes-preventive potential of defined antioxidant supplements have been unable to find any positive effects of supplementation (28–30). Moreover, antioxidant use in type 2 diabetics has been linked to increased prevalence of hypertension (31) and use of antioxidant supplements has recently been proposed to increase overall mortality in the general population (32). Taken together, these previously published findings tentatively suggest that fruits and vegetables may exert health-promoting effects despite their antioxidant content and possibly due to other bio-active compounds. [...]

Free radicals causing oxidative stress are an inevitable by-product of mitochondrial metabolism and have been proposed to exert repetitive damage to individual cells of the body promoting increased disease prevalence and aging (33). However, and in specific regard to exercise, antioxidants were incapable of further extending exercise-induced lifespan extension in rats (26). Repeated exposure to sublethal stress has been proposed to cumulate in enhanced stress resistance and ultimately increased survival rates due to a process named hormesis. By analogy, for sublethal ROS-dependent processes emanating from the mitochondria, the term “mitohormesis” was recently proposed on a hypothetical basis (34). Evidence for this novel concept has been provided in model organisms such as nematodes (15) and rats (17), and the current study would extend the concept of mitohormesis to the amelioration of insulin resistance in humans, suggesting that potential harmful ROS may exert health promoting effects via defined molecular intermediates (Fig. 3). [...]

Taken together, we find that antioxidant supplements prevent the induction of molecular regulators of insulin sensitivity and endogenous antioxidant defense by physical exercise. Consistent with the concept of mitohormesis, we propose that transiently increased levels of oxidative stress reflect a potentially health-promoting process at least in regards to prevention of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus. [My emphases.]

Reference was made above to nematodes, in this case the famous Caenorhabditis elegans, the subject of Cynthia Kenyon's longevity experiments. In the study referenced above:

Reduced glucose availability promotes formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), induces catalase activity, and increases oxidative stress resistance and survival rates, altogether providing direct evidence for a hitherto hypothetical concept named mitochondrial hormesis or "mitohormesis." Accordingly, treatment of nematodes with different antioxidants and vitamins prevents extension of life span. In summary, these data indicate that glucose restriction promotes mitochondrial metabolism, causing increased ROS formation and cumulating in hormetic extension of life span, questioning current treatments of type 2 diabetes as well as the widespread use of antioxidant supplements. [Link.]

My takeaway on all this: low carb diets promote health and longevity by, among other things but perhaps mainly, increasing insulin sensitivity, and along with it, decreasing inflammation. This is the lesson from Kenyon's worm experiments, in which insulin signaling is disrupted, causing the worms to have up to a 6-fold increase in longevity. But antioxidants appear to completely abolish this activity related to insulin signaling.

There have been many arguments on both sides of the antioxidant debate, but this one I find very convincing, enough so that it appears that antioxidants are bad for your health.

"Old Americans" more successful WWII pilots

From race/history/evolution notes (it pained me to write that all in lower case):

The principal extraction in all flyers was Old American, with the rest overwhelmingly Northwest European - British, Irish, Germanic, and Scandinavian, in that order. Four per cent were of Slavic and 1% of Mediterranean descent. Successful combat pilots were significantly more Old American in ancestry than cadets, an Old American being a person whose 4 grandparents were born in the United States. Twenty-two per cent of cadets and 60% of the successful combat pilots were Old American on both sides; on one parental side only, an additional 24% and 15%, respectively. This highly significant difference (p < .01) is hardly attributable to geographic provenience, since 10% more of the combat pilots than of the cadets were from the East coast, where recent immigrants are most numerous.

The quote is from a paper: Damon. Physique and success in military flying. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1955 Jun;13(2):217-52.

My father was one of those, with that Northwest European ancestry. The paper's result is one of those unexpected things that make you wonder. It also reminds me of an anecdote I once heard, on public radio I think, that might partially explain the results. The anecdote concerned a Jewish man who'd been drafted into the Army Air Corps during WW2. When his officer found out he was a Jew, he was sent to navigation school instead of pilot training, because, as the officer explained, "A navigator is nothing but a flying accountant."

Outsider Science

"Outsiders" is a term usually seen in connection with art, but outsiders exist in other fields, too, scholars or scientists who lack the credentials that are normally required to work in a particular scholarly field. In the old days, everyone was an outsider, there being no credentials either available or required to enter a certain are a of endeavor. Even fairly recently, Wittgenstein had no degree until he was given one on the strength of his book.

In science, one of the better known outsiders recently has been Margie Profet, a young woman with bachelor's degrees in political philosophy and physics who, by virtue of her own initiative, and serious study and thought, promulgated a number of highly-regarded and radical ideas in theoretical biology.

Recently, one Dr. Kenny De Meirleir announced that he had discovered the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, a dramatic piece of news. He believes that hydrogen sulfide, produced by gut bacteria, penetrates the patient's leaky gut, essentially poisoning the victim. Coincidentally, not only does Dr. De Meirleir believe that leaky gut and dysbiosis are at work, but he's also a Belgian.

It turns out that the hydrogen sulfide (H2S) hypothesis was conceived a couple years back, by an outsider, Marian Lemle, a middle-aged woman with a business degree. And it was Bruce Charlton, the editor of Medical Hypotheses, who (among others) encouraged her and published her paper:

“In Nov 2006 I attended a meeting in Washington where a prominent molecular biologist discussed an experiment where he gave H2S gas to mice and watched their metabolic and heart rates plummet as they entered a apneic-like low-level sleep state in which one part of their brain was always monitoring the environment. When he pumped oxygen back into the chamber the mice completely recovered. I started thinking about the kind of enervated torpor-like state that CFS patients experience and I asked him if this could be related to CFS. He thought it seemed possible.”

“From there I started turning over every clue I could. I prepared a short synopsis of my findings and asked the panel on ‘The Brain in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” at the IACFS/ME Conference in Miami in 2007 what they thought of my idea. One of the Japanese researchers (Dr. Watanabe or Dr. Kuratsune) thought it was an interesting question. The rest of them (including Dr. De Meirleir) showed little interest.” [...]

“I submitted the paper to the Journal of Medical Hypotheses early in 2008. The editor wrote back immediately and offered his help in getting a much shorter paper ready for publication. The abbreviated version of the original paper was e-published in September of 2008.”

It seems that outsider science is still alive and, at least in some quarters, still encouraged. If someone has an idea, can back it up and make it stick, he (or she) is in.

(The illustration is from The Prinzhorn-Collection of the Psychiatric University Hospital in Heidelberg, which contains art works created by psychiatric patients, the ultimate outsiders. My German is very rusty, but I believe the painting above reads, "A Dream of a Voyage to Heaven.")

Michael Bailey on Michael Jackson

The author of The Man Who Would Be Queen says that Michael Jackson possibly suffered from a paraphilia, that he may have been an "autopedophile".

Hey, inquiring minds and all that.

That he was such a freakazoid and yet immensely popular is a pretty depressing factoid, though.

The Evolutionary Enigma of Vitamin C

Vitamin C can be synthesized by "the vast majority of animals and plants" (Wikipedia), but not by many primate species including humans, guinea pigs, and bats. (Note: this is one reason that guinea pigs are desirable experimental animals - they're like humans in their inability to synthesize C.) It has been suggested that these animals lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C because it was present abundantly in their diets, although that is perhaps too simplistic an answer. This paper discusses some of the possibilities as to why primates lost the ability to make vitamin C.

On the other hand, vitamin C has been successfully used to treat many different illnesses, the pioneer in this area being Frederick Klenner, M.D., a general practitioner who lived in North Carolina. Klenner's feats using C were remarkable - no, almost incredible:

“Dr. Klenner remembers using (ascorbate) for a man, who was lying near death from severe virus pneumonia, but refused to be hospital­ized. ‘I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or 5,000 milligrams of vitamin C,’ he recalled. ‘When I went back later in the day, his temperature was down three degrees and he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating. I gave him another shot of C, 5,000 milligrams and kept up that dosage for three days, four times a day. And he was well. I said then, well, my gosh! This is doing something.’" (17)

Klenner devised an early office test for vitamin C. (18) He would go on to administer massive amounts of ascorbate against any and all viral diseases. And, in the course of some forty years of general practice, Klenner used vitamin C, often accompanied with high doses of other nutrients, to fight a striking variety of other illnesses. Smith (6) itemizes a list that includes Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, bladder infections, alcoholism, arthritis, leukemia, atherosclerosis, ruptured intervertebral discs, high cholesterol, corneal ulcer, diabetes, glaucoma, burns and secondary infections, heat stroke, radiation burns, heavy metal poisoning, chronic fatigue, and complications resulting from surgery. Additionally, Klenner also reported mega nutrient cures of tetanus (19, 20), trichinosis (21), venomous bites from spiders or snakes (22, 23), and, perhaps most controversially, multiple sclerosis.

The "Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C", based on Klenner's work, is here.

Further, most animals can radically increase their synthesis of vitamin C when under stress, as from illness or poisoning. Goats, e.g., produce up to 100 g of vitamin C daily when ill.

Why don't humans? It seems like such a huge advantage to be able to do so that it's a mystery as to why humans do not.

Quiz: Why did the second wife kill herself?

In the novel Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White) by Javier Marías, the following story takes place. (By the way, for those who interested in literary lineages, Marías is the son of the philosopher Julián Marías, who in turn was a student and friend of the great Spanish writer and reactionary José Ortega y Gasset.)

The narrator of the novel has an elderly father, and he knows that his father was married prior to his marriage to the narrator's mother. The father's previous wife, who died weeks after their wedding, was the sister of the next wife. The cause of death of the previous wife was suicide, which she carried out after their return from their honeymoon.

In the course of the novel, the narrator learns that not only was there a previous wife, but that before her there was yet another wife, who also died, this one after a year of marriage. So the narrator's father was married twice before he married the narrator's mother, both of his previous wives having died, the first in a fire, the second by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Later, the narrator learns the cause of the second wife's suicide: she did it because of something that the narrator's father told her on their honeymoon. Possibly relevant facts include that the time is Spain around 1950 and the wife and her family are religious, so divorce or annulment are not options. The father and his wife are roughly the same age, young, early to mid 20s.

What did the father tell his second wife that made her kill herself?

Update: Answer is in comments.

Moderates and Extremists

Accidental Dissent writes:

Guy [Guy White], you need to decide what you want to achieve. Is it just dismantling affirmative action, ending immigration, promoting white culture? Or do you actually want to secure permanent white existence? The former list of objectives doesn’t require staking out a “white nationalist” position. The second does.

If you’re going to aim for the second, then there are certain biological/sociobiological laws you need to take into account, first and foremost that (potentially permanent) racial survival/existence requires racially exclusive territory; there’s no way around this requirement, and yet it sometimes seems not one in one hundred “moderate WNs” are prepared to face this reality. If this reality is accepted, then what remains is to decide on the most effective means of securing such a territory.

The movement to secure such a territory is currently dominated by “extremists” and sadly all too many moderates — like Dennis Mangan — seem incapable of realizing that one doesn’t have to be an extremist to desire securing a racially exclusive territory.

In fact, pro-white racialism itself doesn’t require any form of “extremism” or even hatred/dislike.

AD says that moderates such as myself - and I'll cop to the "moderate" label - "seem incapable of realizing that one doesn’t have to be an extremist to desire securing a racially exclusive territory". I doubt that I do realize that, I could be convinced of that perhaps, but in any case AD, using his inimitable style, argues by assertion. He's said nothing convincing about this. True, you can't say everything in a blog post, but he's been asserting this since he finished throat clearing, and I haven't seen an argument for it yet from him, unless calling people who don't agree ignorant or whatever is an argument. He takes it as an unprovable axiom, rather than a theorem to be demonstrated.

The United States has existed throughout its history as a racially-mixed nation, with a confident white majority and small black minority. Two things have changed radically over the past 1.5 generations: a huge increase in the non-white population, and a loss in confidence by the white majority, both for reasons that will be well known. If the U.S. existed for 200 years as a racially-mixed society, it's possible that it could do so again. Of course, maybe not, and it's beginning to look like that may be the case, even to moderates such as myself, whose ideal is that of the old America.

As for "moderation", it all depends on where you stand. I take it that most Americans today would find my views rather extreme; indeed, a commenter the other day said that Pat Buchanan was being "divisive" by bringing up race and that that point of view would not and could not be a winner, the vast majority of Americans preferring not to go there. While I disagree, the point is that what pundits like AD see as self-evident isn't so at all to many others.

One other thing about being a moderate: forgive me for bringing this up again, an issue many readers will think tedious or self-serving, but I write under my real name. Therefore I have both a responsibility to myself, as well what I feel a greater responsibility in what I write than does a pseudonymous writer. That isn't to say that I'm better than that writer, but face it, anyone can write anything on the internet, and if one writes under one's real name, one is taken more seriously, for better or worse - at least, so I think and such has been my experience.

Going back to AD, he wrote:

...you need to decide what you want to achieve. Is it just dismantling affirmative action, ending immigration, promoting white culture? Or do you actually want to secure permanent white existence?

Those goals aren't exactly mutually exclusive. Before we can "secure permanent white existence", we'll have to end immigration and AA.

A quick note on comments

Some posts here get a lot of comments, many of high quality. I know that when I comment on other blogs, I find it nice to get a response, whether from the blogger or another commenter. Due to volume of comments and my own time constraints, I simply can't respond to every decent comment, so if I don't reply to your comment, please don't think it's because it wasn't worthwhile. I do often reply when one is either particularly good or unusual, but that shouldn't be considered a reflection on other comments.

Gifted Adults

A friend, along with his "profoundly gifted" (incredibly intelligent) son recently attended a conference of the Davidson Institute, an organization that is doing God's work (figuratively speaking, of course) in lending a hand to gifted children and their parents. As we all know from various recent discussions of tracking in schools (e.g.), it can be said with little exaggeration that schools do not care about intelligent kids, leaving these kids and their parents struggling for solutions.

My friend told me that he talked with a lecturer at the conference, who apprised him of the existence of "gifted adults". Of course we know that very intelligent adults exist, but this is a different phenomenon - one heretofore unknown to me. (Here is one site dealing with the issue.)

If you're a Stanford professor or a successful physician, you're probably not a gifted adult, because just as the professor and the physician will see little need to join Mensa, they won't see any need to define themselves as gifted adults. They've already obtained their validation. Gifted adults are almost by definition, it seems to me, struggling to discover who they are, why they're so different, and why the world seems so off base.

This topic is new to me, I can't say much about it, but the notion of a gifted adult in the sense I described sparks immediate recognition for me. The intelligent person - interested in ideas, with piles of books waiting to be read, whose greatest joys come in attempting to learn and understand - will feel quite out of place in a world where water cooler conversation revolves around sports, celebrities, and TV shows about sports and celebrities. The world can become a lonely place, and one gets tired to the point of self-reproof at the constant realization that, not to put too fine a point on it, most people are pretty dumb and pretty ignorant, and have no desire to do anything about it. (That goes double for whites who are ignorant and apathetic about what's happening in this country.)

Curiosity is related to the one of the Big Five personality factors, openness to experience, which in turn is correlated with IQ. I used to wonder at the incurious nature of, well, most everyone, seeing it as a vice. But I now think that most people can't help it; they're not smart enough to be curious.

Gifted adults are those who are smart enough to do almost anything, but haven't found their place in the world, and besides are confused about why the world doesn't value the same things they do. They can't relate. Fortunately, the internet has been a godsend for them.

Update: I added the map from the Davidson Institute, which shows whether states are actually willing to spend money on gifted students. (Link.) States in green signify that "gifted programming is mandated and fully funded", those in red neither, the others in between. Interesting that the seven states with the highest rating are Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska. Maybe it's because these states recognize that their school systems aren't the greatest and that the gifted need help. Among the lowest ranked states are Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and South Dakota, states with overwhelming white majorities with, one imagines, good schools in which the gifted already get everything they need. California ranks in the second category from the bottom.

California's demography today is America's tomorrow

And since California's budget crisis is largely connected to that demography, we can expect California-type financial problems to spread. Pat Buchanan:

Moreover, the demography of California today is the demography of America tomorrow, just as the social and fiscal policies of California in the last decade mirror those of the U.S. government today.

One-third of all U.S. wage-earners today have been amnestied from paying U.S. income taxes, as the top 1 percent haul fully 40 percent of that huge load. So, too, in California, the well-to-do and the wealthy are hammered, which is why many have quietly closed their businesses, packed and gone back over the mountains whence their fathers came.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end, and national health insurance.

California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation’s lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.

Demographically, California is where America will be in 2040.

White folks, who are leaving California as they did in the millions in the 1990s, are below half the population. Hispanics, their numbers surging due to legal and illegal immigration, are well over a third of the population. The African-American share of California’s population is also falling, as the Asian share is rising, again from immigration.

Los Angeles, which is what most large American cities will look like, is the most diverse city on earth. Has diversity been a strength?

By the way, for saying things like these and for supporting self-determination for white Americans, a campaign is underway to get Buchanan fired at MSNBC. (See here also.) Anyone who sticks up for white Americans gets labeled a racist, as at the two links.

A Few Good Links

Why do the Chinese save so much? So that men, outnumbered by their fellows in the marriage market, can afford a wife.

High GI carbs again implicated in cardiovascular disease.

Here's How The Community Reinvestment Act Led To The Housing Bubble's Lax Lending: John Carney has absorbed and agrees with the Sailerite thesis that lending to NAMs was a chief cause of the housing bubble.

Now that we are in this crisis, loans located in low income areas are almost twice as likely to be in foreclosure as other loans. There's also an unfortunate racial angle, with African Americans being 1.8 as likely to be in foreclosure as whites, and Latinos being 1.4 likely to be in foreclosure.

What's more, an enormous amount of subprime loans were made to lower-income borrowers target by the CRA. Forty-five percent of subprime loan originations went to lower-income borrowers or borrowers in lowerr-income neighborhoods in 2005 and 2006, where the foreclosures are almost twice as likely. This suggests that the kind of low income borrowers targeted by the CRA are likely to be responsible for the majority of subprime foreclosures.

The poverty of the notion of "animal spirits":

The best validated psychological concept in psychology is general intelligence, usually known as IQ and highly correlated with standardized tests results such as the American SATs, reading comprehension, and many other cognitive attributes. IQ has numerous economic implications, since both for individuals and groups IQ is predictive of salary and occupation. But Akerlof and Schiller ignore the role of IQ.

For example, they have a chapter on the question of “Why is there special poverty among minorities?’ in which they generate an unique ad hoc story to explain the phenomena. Yet there is essentially no mysterious ‘special poverty’ among minorities because observed economic (and other behavioural) differentials are substantially explained by the results of standardized testing (or estimated general intelligence). US minorities that perform better than average on standardized testing (e.g. East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, Brahmin caste Indians) also have economic performance above average; and vice versa.

The Latest - Updated!

I took down my last post. The topic attracts fanatics and I don't feel like dealing with that anymore. Sorry.

Update: In case some of you never scroll down the page, all the action has been taking place in the comments section of the next post down. We've been having a good old time.

We're supposed to volunteer while foreigners get real jobs

Latté Island wrote about Michelle Obama's call for "volunteerism": "We're supposed to volunteer while foreigners get real jobs".

When I heard about Mrs. Obama's speech, my thoughts were similar, but unprintable. In the video, Mrs. O says that, while the "adminshtrashun" has started "dramatic new investments in health care, energy", blah blah etc., they can't do it without our "help".

Stop immigration, and then I might begin to think about joining the Democratic Party's and Federal government's program to nudge us toward the new slavery, I mean volunteerism. Then I would quickly stop thinking about it.

This country has gone round the bend.

Paleo Diet and Ethnicity

Loren Cordain, one of the originators of the idea of "paleolithic eating", discusses here some possible objections to the idea that mankind has not evolved to eat grains. The objections usually are in the form of, "man has had 10,000 years to adapt evolutionarily to agriculture, and has adapted to other things in his environment, so in theory he could have adapted to agriculture." Cordain offers a long and involved response, but in essence his response is that 1)the gut and the digestive process are complex systems that need much more than a simple mutation to change radically, and 2)we see little evidence of such change.

Critics sometimes use the example of lactose tolerance as a change that occurred rapidly and that changed radically what humans can consume. Cordain:

Because humans normally maintain lactase activity in their guts until weaning (approximately 4 years of age in modern-day hunter-gatherers), the type of genetic change (neoteny) required for adult lactase maintenance can occur quite rapidly if there is sufficient selective pressure. Maintenance of childlike genetic characteristics (neoteny) is what occurred with the geologically rapid domestication of the dog during the late Pleistocene and Mesolithic [Budiansky 1992].

Whether humans can or did evolve in an adaptation to agriculture, specifically the eating of grains, there's a relatively easy comparison to make, whether different ethnic groups have differing nutritional requirements or physiology. Some groups have been exposed to agriculture for hundreds of generations, other for very few:

The complete re-arrangement of gut morphology or evolution of new enzyme systems capable of handling novel food types is quite unlikely to have occurred in humans in the short time period since the advent of agriculture. Some populations have had 500 generations to adapt to the new staple foods of agriculture (cereals, legumes, and dairy) whereas others have had only 1-3 (i.e., Inuit, Amerindians, etc). Because anatomical and physiological studies among and between various racial groups indicate few differences in the basic structure and function of the gut, it is reasonable to assume that there has been insufficient evolutionary experience (500 generations) since the advent of agriculture to create large genetic differences among human populations in their ability to digest and assimilate various foods.

Cordain, like myself, also doesn't think too highly of the "blood type diet", it being far too simplistic to make much sense.

What's up with that Italian bond seizure?

You've probably read the story of how Italian police seized $134 billion (with a 'b') of U.S. Treasury bonds from two Japanese travelers. These were so-called "bearer bonds", which I thought until now only existed in the movies. Here's a Bloomberg article that will get you up to speed.

The situation is so bizarre and twisted that it makes no sense. Were the "Japanese" really North Koreans? Were the bonds real? Why would anyone be traveling with a suitcase full of bonds worth $134 billion?

Oh, guess what. The travelers are gone. Released. Nowhere to be found. The U.S. Treasury has apparently not seen the allegedly counterfeit bonds before pronouncing them fake.

This could spell big trouble. If banks have accepted these bonds in the past, counterfeit bonds in other words, they're in trouble. On the other hand, if the bonds are real, we're in trouble, because that means either that the U.S. government has off-balance sheet debt - in which case a number of government officials need to be in prison - or it means that the Japanese secretly want to dump most of their U.S. Treasury bond holdings. In that case. we're still screwed.

Karl Denninger says that his "BS detector is ringing off the hook".

Another Proponent of the Unified Disease Theory

Molecular biologist Art Ayers, Ph.D., writes the blog Cooling Inflammation (thanks to Cristian Stremiz), and he appears to be an exponent of something like the unified theory of disease, i.e. inflammation causes most of the degenerative "diseases of civilization". For example:

It is shocking to me that omega-3 fish oils (EPA/DHA) or even flax seed oil, have been found to be effective treatments for numerous diseases that range from allergies, arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases, depression and even septic shock and multiple organ failure. Aspirin has been used to treat infertility and post partum depression, and at high levels to treat cancer.

That is, since omega-3 fatty acids have been found to be effective against a wide range of diseases, and since these fatty acids work by virtue of their anti-inflammatory properties, inflammation is behind these illnesses. The use of probiotics is another example where benefits exist over a wide range of illnesses, apparently by reducing inflammation arising from the gut.

Much, much more at Cooling Inflammation.

Self-Experimentation: Finding What Works

Seth Roberts is perhaps the best-known - to me anyway - exponent of self-experimentation. (His paper, Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight; a profile of Roberts in Scientific American.) A commenter at Seth's blog recently summarized the advantages of self-experiments as opposed to clinical trials:

I work in the investing industry, where return on investment, adjusted for risk taken, is the ultimate goal. Seth’s discoveries, and the “pathetically easy” other solutions he highlights on his blog, all have tremendously high returns on investment, with very little risk. A clinical trial, on the other hand, requires a huge investment of time and money, often with very little return in the form of new knowledge learned, and sometimes at significant risk to the patients enrolled. Furthermore, drugs that are discovered as a result of these clinical trials often themselves have low risk-adjusted returns for the patients who take them, when their costs, side effects, and the likelihood that down the road the establishment will revise its thinking about their efficacy are taken into account.

Just to take one example: compare the risk-adjusted return on investment for society of the Shangri-La Diet to that of Fen-Phen, both of which targeted the identical problem. There is no comparison, even if SLD turns out to work only for a minority of people.

An article attacking Roberts by John Ford, M.D., Trouble in Shangri-La, totally misses the point when he complains that Roberts hasn't rigorously proven his diet through clinical trials. Ford's true contention with Roberts is that the latter has invented (or discovered) a novel, safe, and effective weight-loss method and wrote a best-selling diet book, none of which he ran by the medical establishment first. Roberts doesn't claim "proof", he merely says that it works for many people, which is obviously true, and that he has a hypothesis as to its mechanism. Ford would rather have people struggle with obesity until "proof" arrives.

In his book Psychiatry and the Human Condition, Bruce Charlton also makes a case for self-experimentation and self-treatment:

Psychiatric signs and symptoms - such as anxiety, insomnia, malaise, fatigue - are part of life for most people, for much of the time. This is the human condition. [...] This book argues that obsolete categories of diseases and drugs should be scrapped. The new framework of understanding implies that clinical management should focus on the treatment of biologically-valid symptoms and signs, and include a much larger role for self-treatment.

Virtually everyone has some sort of health problem, whether physical or mental, and doctors are just not equipped to handle them all. Many of them also have the same standards of proof as Dr. Ford quoted above: if there hasn't been a double-blind clinical trial, then it's just something you read on the internet. Smart people who are willing to do a little digging can do much better than that.

Kanazawa: Asians can't do science

It's often said - even by occasional commenters at this blog - that the U.S. needs high IQ immigrants to stay competitive, we whites evidently not being either smart or creative enough to be competitive on our own. In that regard I found, via Steve Hsu, an exchange between the evolutionary psychologists Geoffrey Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. Kanazawa seems to enjoy being provocative, and this (pdf) is what he said about Asians and their ability to do science:

Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller's prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe. [...]

1. Asians can't think
And they certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science. [...]

This problem has long been known to East Asian specialists as the "creativity problem" (Eberts and Eberts, 1995, pp. 123-127; Taylor, 1983, pp. 92-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 89-90). Some argue that the ideographic Asian languages curb abstract thinking and creativity among Asians (Hannas, 2003). [...]

2. Asians can't write
Nor can they speak English. While Miller correctly points out that East Asians have slightly higher overall IQs, he neglects to mention the particular pattern of Asian intelligence. East Asians have much higher visualization IQ than verbal IQ (Lynn, 2006, pp. 121-148). For East Asians in Asia, in studies which assess both types of IQ, the mean visualization IQ is 108.6 while the mean verbal IQ is 101.4. Their high visualization IQs explain East Asians' relative success in mathematics and mathematics-based sciences such as physics and chemistry. Of the 27 Nobel prizes awarded to Asians in Table 1, 10 have been in physics, 5 in chemistry, and 3 in physiology or medicine; there have only been 5 Nobel literature prizes awarded to Asians, and 1 in economics (Amartya K. Sen).

Whoa! Kanazawa validates a few stereotypes too:

4. The conformist culture of Asia
Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology ("academic conservatism") is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution.
Once again, at LSE, we have an enormous problem of plagiarism among our Asian students. Despite the fact that each student, Asian or otherwise, must sign a declaration that their work is original and they have not plagiarized, many Asian students simply copy the work of established scholars. To them it is a venerable act of honoring their masters to "borrow" from them, by copying their words verbatim. No matter how much we tell them that it is wrong, Asian students simply cannot understand why it is wrong to honor their intellectual masters by faithfully reproducing their work. Needless to say, this is no recipe for scientific progress.

I merely pass this along.

Busting Blood Lipids Paleo-Style

William Davis, the cardiologist who writes The Heart Scan Blog, explains how a patient of his greatly improved his serum triglycerides. No drugs, either.

The method:

1. 3600 mg/d omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil. That's about 3 teaspoons daily.
2. Elimination from the diet of wheat, sugar, and cornstarch.

Result: triglycerides went from a nearly-incompatible-with-life level of 3100 mg/dl to around 200, a better than 90% reduction.

If this patient had gone to a "regular" doctor, he probably would have been placed on an expensive diet of pharmaceuticals, perhaps for the rest of his life.

Elsewhere Dr. Davis says, "I have absolutely no remaining doubt that wheat products have no place in the human diet." (Emphasis in the original.)

And since great minds think alike, I should point out that Davis is, like me, a big fan of magnesium, iodine, and vitamin D.

Bonus health link: Eades on statins:

The mainstreamers such as those quoted above don’t question the effectiveness of statins even though at least $2.5 billion has been spent to test them and found them lacking, but readily discount alternative medicines simply because they don’t fit with their belief system. Based on the evidence at hand, I wouldn’t give people Echinacea, shark cartilage and all the rest because the studies show they don’t work better than placebo, but for all the same reasons, I wouldn’t give a patient a statin either. In fact, I would probably give the Echinacea before I gave the statin because, as far as I know, no one has died taking Echinacea, of which the same can’t be said of statins.

Essentially Bogus

Half Sigma writes:

When will the NY Times tell us that all health recommendations are essentially bogus?

I assume that HS means that he agrees that "all health recommendations are essentially bogus", and if so, that's a totally bogus statement.

Just an isolated sentence, and everyone is entitled to get things wrong once in a while. But HS writes with such a sense of certitude in all of his posts, and comes to conclusions he is completely sure of - and furthermore boasts about how right he gets things - that a statement like this needs to be pointed out.

Elsewhere, he writes:

This explains Ron Paul's hatred of the Federal Reserve. It's an anti-Semitic thing.

Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It couldn't be because the Fed manipulates the money supply, could it?

I can't take him seriously anymore.

Ignorance, Madam, Sheer Ignorance

A blog post by one Geoffrey Falk (no permalink, entry for June 18) demonstrates pretty nicely how badly one gets things when one has no idea of what one is talking about. I've read Falk's blog before, and while he leans left he's got a wide curiosity that I thought made him worth reading; but when I see, as in his current post, that he writes about something that I know a bit about and gets it completely wrong, I have to wonder about the rest. The man obviously has never read a nutrition paper in his life. He knows nothing about which he writes, but he "did a little Googling" and proceeds to make a fool of himself.

The "Steveosphere" (i.e., Sailer's commenters) tends to attract people like Mangan, who theorize wildly and paleolithically without bothering to test their ideas beyond the realm of anecdotes, and with no idea about how to take a skeptical/debunking approach even toward obviously dodgy ideas. Sailer can get away with doing the same sort of thing largely because he's got such an amazing feel for human nature, and is working in "soft" fields where that approach can produce insights which are obviously correct, and where double-blind, randomized studies and math would be very hard to apply indeed, so you're arguably better off doing things merely qualitatively anyway. (Cf. the Austrian School of economics.)

Nutrition is not such a "soft" field. And trying to do things merely qualitatively there, without proper scientific testing of the hypotheses, leads you straight into dietary quackery like that purveyed by Roberts, McDougall ... and Mangan.

And of those three, McDougall's vegan diet is by far the least likely to harm its adherents (i.e., versus fructose, canola oil, and high-fat).

Gratuitous advice to Falk: next time, try reading a paper or book or two before you pontificate ignorantly.

More on Unified Disease Theory

Seth Roberts has been pounding the table for several months now on the benefits to health of fermented foods, including things like yogurt, kimchi, and kombucha. (See here for Seth's complete postings on the topic. See here for a complete discussion of kombucha, the "healthy beverage and natural remedy", about which its proponents could scarcely be more enthusiastic.) Since Seth Roberts invented - or rather discovered - the Shangri-La Diet, and since he was certainly correct (and I wasn't) about the benefits and naturalness of a low-carb, high-fat diet, he's worth heeding.

Seth theorizes that fermented foods, because they contain abundant bacteria and other microbes, stimulate the immune system by a kind of let's-keep-this-interesting method. That is, if the immune system "sees" the same microorganisms time and time again, it grows fat and lazy, so to speak, and stimulation keeps it tuned. There is some evidence for this, such as that being exposed to more dirt in childhood leads to lower rates of asthma.

However, based on what I've learned from the ideas of Michael Maes, I propose that fermented foods are beneficial because they prevent the immune sytem from being stimulated. I posted the following comment at Seth's blog:

"Let me immodestly suggest a modification to your hypothesis that fermented food is healthy because it stimulates the immune system.

The immune system outside the gut does not want to see lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which are breakdown products of bacterial cell walls, nor does it like to see the bacteria themselves. When it does, bad things happen, basically a chain reaction of autoimmune activation, inflammation, and free radical generation. Normally the gut is highly selective in what it allows into the body, but in cases of leaky gut, LPS as well as gluten and casein enter the circulation, causing fatigue, lupus, autism, and maybe lots more. Leaky gut in turn is caused by dysbiosis in the intestines, whether by candida or gram negative bacterial overgrowth. Therefore fermented foods work by restoring proper microbial balance in the intestines, sealing the leaky gut and killing candida and gram negative overgrowth. It might be almost the opposite of stimulating the immune system (outside the gut); it actually *prevents* stimulation and activation. Secretory IgA is the type of immunoglobulin most important inside the gut, and dysbiosis, e.g. from candida, causes a radical decrease in its production by the immune cells lining the gut. The right fermented foods ought to restore IgA production.

By the way, I also think that this could be such a problem in the modern world because of the emphasis of low fat, high carb diets, which probably foster dysbiosis."

It's known for instance that liver damage in alcoholism is mediated through increased intestinal permeability. Autism, autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, depression, some types of schizophrenia, and perhaps many more could be candidates for a major role for dysbiosis, leaky gut, and subsequent immune activation and inflammation. That this mechanism could be so general can also explain the notion that fermented foods like kombucha have wide, generalized benefits in many diverse medical conditions. Again, it's all about inflammation.

School's out forever

The photo came from a story about California 9th graders who are being faced for the first time with being held back a grade for being unable to pass a standardized test. With the California state government currently running a $24.3 billion deficit, the state is spending money on remedial education for the children of immigrants from Mexico.

How's immigration working out for us, again?

Hope these guys can get through high school, because the state is soon to be theirs.

A Unified Theory of Disease

A recent paper (pdf) by the Belgian scientist and physician Michael Maes (previous Michael Maes discussions) puts forth the idea that "inflammatory and oxidative and nitrosative stress" are the main processes that underlie chronic fatigue, somatization, and psychosomatic symptoms. Maes argues, first of all that, while all of these syndromes have been dismissed as "mere" psychiatric systems and the patients shuffled off to "nonsense treatment", they are in fact real illnesses with physical causes. Another recent paper, The inflammatory & neurodegenerative (I&ND) hypothesis of depression, summarizes Maes's thinking as to why current theories of depression are mistaken, and what the true underlying factors of depression are, namely the same things already mentioned, inflammation and oxidative stress.

I'll try to keep this brief, so you may be asking, what's this got to do with a unified theory of disease?

People with depression have up to four times the risk of suffering heart disease than others; likewise (same link), up to 50% of heart disease patients suffer from depression. People with major depression have a more than four-fold greater risk of death from all causes than others.

According to Maes: "Most if not all antidepressants have specific anti-inflammatory effects, while restoration of decreased neurogenesis, which may be induced by inflammatory processes, may be related to the therapeutic efficacy of antidepressant treatments." In other words, if this idea is correct, the theory that antidepressants work by modulating serotonin uptake or some other method is bunk. Antidepressants are anti-inflammatory drugs, full stop.

Statins are used to treat atherosclerosis, allegedly by lowering cholesterol. Once again, this theory appears to be wrong, as the decrease in cardiac deaths (but increase or no change in all-cause mortality) is independent of the degree of cholesterol lowering. Rather, statins appear to do what they do because they act as anti-inflammatory drugs. Aspirin, also used by coronary patients, is also an anti-inflammatory.

Diabetics have much higher rates of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, blindness, impotence, and so on. The high glucose and insulin levels of diabetics cause inflammation, leading to all of these complications.

Much attention has recently been given to omega 6/3 fatty acid ratios in the diet, which are a large, maybe the largest, factor in the development of heart disease and many other ilnesses, including cancer. Overabundant omega 6 fatty acids cause their mischief by mediating an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines and processes.

A key, perhaps the key, behind the aging process is increased inflammation.

Common to all of these is inflammation and oxidative stress. Even infectious illnesses cause much of their damage through inflammation and the generation of free radicals. The swine flu that has recently hit wreaks its damage through a so-called "cytokine storm", i.e. the body, in trying to mount a defense, causes inflammation on such a scale that it kills the patient. Pharmacological agents that fight many of these illnesses do so through an anti-inflammatory effect.

That's my unified theory of disease: it's inflammation all the way down.

Fear and Loathing in Luton

From The Sunday Times, David James Smith writes:

Later that day, after the soldiers’ parade had dispersed, Kier was walking across St George’s Square in his England shirt — “Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land!” the crowd had been chanting at the protesters. Kier was still feeling wound up by what he had just witnessed back by the Arndale. He had a cousin in the army, a family friend who had been killed in action. Bloody Muslim extremists, Kier was thinking to himself. How dare they!

Then he saw the mayor crossing the square, walking high and proud in his robe and chains. He was Asian. So far as Kier was concerned, he was a Muslim too, and it was all his fault. He was the head of the council; the council had given permission for the extremists to make their protest. F*** it, Kier thought. Kier ran up to him and fly-kicked him in the back. Councillor Lakhbir Singh, the mayor of Luton, a Sikh by faith, not in fact a Muslim at all, stumbled and fell forward, putting out his hands to stop himself falling. Kier turned around and, before the police could do anything, he ran through them and was away.

It would be farcical if it were not so sad and unpleasant, that brief moment in the life of modern, multicultural Britain. A Sikh in a turban had been mistaken for a Muslim by a white youth too ignorant to know any better, and apparently too angry to express himself other than with a kick.

In a very long article, it looks like the aforementioned Kier is the only one who gets called "ignorant", because he couldn't apparently distinguish between a Sikh and a Muslim. It would be interesting to discover how many Muslims in Britain could distinguish a Welshman from an Englishman, say, or a Catholic from a Protestant. Not too many, one would imagine.

The larger point: does it matter? Sikhs, Muslims, they are all cultural aliens who, at best, don't fit in with Britain and refuse to assimilate, and at worst, support terrorism. So Mr. Kier's "fly kick" (must be a soccer term), while deplorable, is merely an expression of anger at the takeover of his country by those cultural aliens, it matters not whether Sikh, Muslim, or Hindu. And, while deplorable, it hardly rises to the level of blowing up the tube.

The Singularity will be postponed - and offshored

The Singularity will be postponed and maybe offshored.

Since the Singularity is not a massive group effort like the Manhattan Project, but merely a name for a process that its proponents believe will converge into a technological explosion, in a certain sense it can't be stopped. Each individual strand is being pursued because there are advantages to doing so, for example to profit or to strengthen a nation's military. For example, a grad student has just invented a $20 blood test that appears to be able to detect any and all cancers, and one imagines that he and whomever he partners with will profit nicely, as they should.

And if the incentives are removed? What if medicine is socialized, if the military is downsized, if taxes return to confiscatory levels for "the rich" (anyone who makes over $250,000 a year, maybe less) - will anyone work at things like these? Probably yes, but at much reduced levels of activity. Even the Soviet Union had a few technological achievements.

But in this day and age, with the free flow of capital and with China emerging as a major world player, the Singularity won't stop just because Obama and his comrades are doing everything to do so. It will move offshore.

Kinsella murderers are "marked men"

An article in the Times of London states that the black murderers of white Ben Kinsella "'face retribution' during life jail term".

Earlier, lawyers for the three killers confirmed that they had received letters warning them they may be under threat from members of a notorious crime family.

The article is remarkably vague and leaves the reader wondering, but one can speculate that, since the murder itself was obviously an expression of hatred of whites by these black men, this "notorious crime family", which one would also imagine to be composed of whites, will exact revenge.

Each of the murderers got a 19-year sentence, absurdly light in the case of a cold-blooded murder of a 16-year-old who had the world before him. If governments would do their jobs, like for instance keeping men like the perps from immigrating, and punishing them severely when they commit crimes like this, there wouldn't be a need for extrajudicial revenge. As it is, can I root for the "notorious crime family"?

The case was discussed at VFR last summer.

Proximity to Canada

Even better than proximity to Canada is right inside Canada when it comes to "liveability", according to The Economist. The list of cities exhibits a strange pattern, one so strange and hard to understand that even the brilliant minds in the mainstream media won't be able to see it.

But, if we take the residents of those cities in the right hand column and get them all to immigrate to the U.S., they'll be able to leave those poor, slum-ridden neighborhoods behind and have a better life.