Reactionary New Year!

Reprise: Georges Prêtre conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the Austro-Hungarian Empire's theme song, The Radetzky March, by Johann Strauss Sr., on New Year's Eve, 2008. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's New Year's concerts are a longstanding and legendary institution. Traditionally, the concert's penultimate piece is An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), by Johann Strauss II, the ultimate piece being the one presented here. Radetzky is Field Marshall Count Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, hero of Austria-Hungary's army.

Thanks to everyone for coming here this past year. May you have a Happy, Reactionary, New Year.

Notable Posts of 2009

Here are some notable posts for the past year, based in part on the number of comments each one generated. I limited myself to choosing only one per month. Posts on Auster, theism and atheism, game, and HBD seem to be those that readers find the most comment-worthy.

An Open Letter to "The Korean"

Your Anti-Racist Seal of Approval

Don't take statins if you need a functioning brain

Anti-White Movie of the Year: Australia

How a NYT economics reporter was screwed by the state, went subprime, and lost everything

Fear and Loathing in Luton

What happened to the Old American ethnic group?

Auster to BioCons: Drop Dead

Is Christianity or HBD a bigger threat to the Left?

The History of Science as a History of Rejected Papers

Seeing Through All the Lies

Sentimental Theists

Fatherhood, Democracy, and Future Time Orientation

Laura Wood writes:

The ideal citizen in any high-functioning democracy is the father. He is more important politically than the mother; more important than the young man without children or the single woman; more important as a type than even the property owner. If I were to build an infant republic, I would limit the franchise to fathers, possibly making ownership of property an additional qualification.

Personally, my infant republic would have the fatherhood and property qualifications the other way around, but that's minor. Responsible, married fatherhood is the ultimate in future time orientation, which is exactly what a nation needs, and which our own nation is currently almost entirely without. A nation must look beyond the lifetimes of its own members. The father looks beyond his own lifetime and his own welfare to that of his children and their children.

That different people possess different future time orientations is obvious but, as with so many other obvious things, is controversial in a culture that preaches equality. A few years ago, the economist Hans-Herman Hoppe got himself into a spot of bother when he suggested that homosexuals, being childless (most of them), have a lower future time orientation than others. This was taken to be hate speech and bigotry, but is in reality just an observation about incentives.

Some people are more fit to have a say in society than others.

Duesberg on the Repression of Science

Noted HIV skeptic Peter Duesberg wrote the following email to an executive of Elsevier, the publisher of Medical Hypotheses. (Published with permission.)

Dear VP C--- L---,


Thanks for your letter.

Ever the optimist, the good news is that Elsevier has not acceded yet
to the pressures of the HIV-lobby to "withdraw" our preprinted paper,
based on undocumented and anonymous charges.


It seems bewildering to us, however, that an "expert review panel,
the members of which are all medical journal Editors" would not have
been able to decide, whether our paper is "potentially [be] damaging
to global public health" and "libelous" after reviewing it since last
August.  Isn't this task close to the job description of medical
journal editors?


I have consulted with my co-authors, and we are unanimous in
objecting to further reviews of our paper after it had been accepted
and published by the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, Bruce
Charlton (cc'd) - particularly now that even a "panel of medical
journal editors" was unable to confirm these anonymous charges in 4
months.


In view of this I would like to ask you, why the panel has not
rejected the charges against our paper, and what our rights in this
new "external review" process are that you are conducting now:


1) What do the "expert reviewers" mean by "'broad criteria of what is
scientifically plausible" when our main point is that official
numbers from Statistics South Africa differ by a factor of 20 from
those in the paper we are responding to?  Why could your "expert
panel ... of medical journal editors" not answer their own question,
whether our paper meets the "broad criteria of what is scientifically
plausible"?


2) If our objection to the new review is over-ruled by Elsevier, can
we propose other journals, particularly a non-Elsevier journal for
this review, rather than the Lancet?  Obviously, we did not submit
our paper to the Lancet, because the editorial policy of the Lancet
is 100% HIV-mainstream.


3) Wouldn't the Lancet reviewers also have to fear for their careers,
if they decided against the requests of the HIV-lobby to "withdraw"
our paper?


4) If a new Lancet review of our paper comes up with objections, will
we have a right to respond?


On a positive note:  We welcome the panel's recommendation to publish
our paper "with commentaries when it is published both from those who
reviewed it, and 'mainstream' content experts who oppose its
arguments".  Indeed that is exactly the scientific method we are
trying to defend - against censorship.


Looking forward to your responses,


Merry Xmas and happy new year,


Peter Duesberg

Duesberg's objections are compelling, and Elsevier's plan appears to be one that would give them "objective" cover to continue to shut out Duesberg and his co-authors. As Duesberg points out, those who would do the review would be jeopardizing their careers were they to rule in his favor. The issue of "scientific credibility", which the reviewers would rule on, is frankly absurd: whether Duesberg is right or wrong on HIV, his theories are eminently credible, that is, plausible, and his opponents, rather than argue their case, would deny him the right to be heard on the grounds that they have proved their case and the debate is over.

Since I first started writing about the suppression of Duesberg's paper, we've seen the scandal of Climategate, in which a group of scientists flagrantly tried to suppress opposing views, shut their opponents out of journals, and claim that the debate on global warming is over. (Not to mention destroying data and probably violating the law.) The same thing is happening in the present case. Such is how a great deal of "science" operates today.

Thought Criminals

First, They Came for HBD Books… Richard Hoste found that certain websites are not fit for viewing from a hospital bed, and were blocked by, well, whatever does the blocking, filtering software used by an ISP, I suppose. Go read his list of blocked vs. unblocked sites; there are some surprises. This site is on the blocked list. Hoste comments:

Quite a random policy!  Mangan’s is blocked for Political Extreme/Hate/Discrimination; Illegal Drugs.  The poor guy can’t get a break.
Roissy is listed as pornography.  Well, I can see that.

Yeah, I guess I could see that too about Roissy. Meanwhile, I guess I'm officially a thought criminal. Should I flee to Brazil?

The list of thought criminals includes several openly anti-Semitic sites, some of which I'm unfamiliar with but whose content can be readily surmised, as well as an anti-anti-Semitic site, VFR. Yet Kevin MacDonald is not blocked.

It's probably barely worthwhile to say this, but I reject the notion that this site contains extremist views or hate, not to mention advocacy of illegal drugs, and I attempt to write in measured terms backed by the facts. Moreover, I doubt that anything here goes further in sensitive matters than does VDare or Sailer. Maybe we just have to conclude that the filtering software or whatever is inefficient or just plain bad. Nevertheless, I'm not happy with this development.

Cheap Longevity Trick

Both calorie restriction and resveratrol promote longevity due in part to their actions on autophagy, the controlled self-destruction that cells use to rid themselves of defective organelles and proteins. One of the hallmarks of the aging process is a gradual diminution of cells' ability to perform autophagy, thus if one could increase the aging body's ability to do this, one would drastically slow aging. Wulf Droge, whose work we discussed in Aging, oxidative stress, and what to do about it, describes the decline in autophagy, which is intimately connected with the insulin receptor function, as "the first cause of death".

So what can you do about it? Besides taking NAC, you can drink water.

Night-time autophagic activity can be increased by drinking 3.5 to 16 ounces of water about 2-3 hours before breakfast. This will temporarily dilute blood plasma concentrations of leucine and other regulatory amino acids, triggering autophagy to the point where the original equilibrium of regulatory amino acids is restored. Since the cysteine and leucine content of muscle protein is comparable, an autophagy-mediated increase in plasma leucine will be accompanied by a similar increase in cysteine, thus facilitating glutathione biosynthesis.

Feds Need to Issue $2 Trillion in Debt in 2010

Brace For Impact: In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else.

The gist of this story is that, with the record debt that the federal government issued in 2009, most of it was bought by the Federal Reserve, i.e. it printed money to be used for purchases. But next year, the choices faced by the government and hence by the country look grim. Here they are:

1. Announce a new iteration of Quantitative Easing [money printing]. This will be met with major disapproval across all voting classes (at least those whose residential zip codes do not start with 10xxx or 068xx), creating major headaches for Obama and the democrats which are already struggling with collapsing polls.
2. Prepare for a major increase in interest rates. [...] The result would be a huge blow to a still deteriorating economy.
3. Engineer a stock market collapse. [...]

There's no way that the U.S. government will ever be able to pay its debts, no matter what Paul Krugman says. The debt crisis could come to a head much sooner than most people think, as early as next year. It would mean the dollar going into free fall, setting the stage for a hyperinflationary depression.

Meanwhile, unlimited bailouts for Fannie and Freddie continue.

The government has handed its ATM card to beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Treasury Department said Thursday it removed the $400 billion financial cap on the money it will provide to keep the companies afloat. Already, taxpayers have shelled out $111 billion to the pair, and a senior Treasury official said losses are not expected to exceed the government's estimate this summer of $170 billion over 10 years.

The country is headed for interesting times.

Why do little girls, but not little boys, scream?

It seems to me that if you could figure out the answer to this question - Google even has an autofill for "why do little girls scream" - you could be let in on some important secret of the universe. Since girls but not boys scream, it must be something sexual, yet the girls who scream are prepubescent (and pretty annoying to those who like peace and quiet). Maybe there's something cultural there, if girls only scream in certain cultures. (Do they?) They scream the most when they're happy and playing, so it wouldn't seem that it is an indication of vulnerability or to frighten an intruder, which it might be if they only screamed when afraid.

Any ideas?

National Origins of Significant Composers - updated

A commentator noted how many of the top twenty composers were of German origin, and it's indeed striking, with 65% of them having German as a first language. (You have to use "of German origin" or "language" because all were born in countries that no longer exist, either Austria-Hungary or in various German principalities.)

To get a larger sample, I went to Murray's appendix, "The Western Music Inventory, Roster of Significant Figures". Murray defines "significant" in this context as "those who are important enough to the development of a field that a well-versed student of that field is likely to be familiar with them". They will be "mentioned in at least 50% of the qualified sources". To narrow down a little, as there are 522 significant figures in the Western music inventory, I chose only those whose point scores were at least 10, so that most amateurs will have heard of most of them. (E.g. C.P.E. Bach, but not J. Christoph Bach.) I then tallied them according to each one's native language to account for countries no longer existent. The results:

24 German
16 French
12 Italian
6 Russian
2 Czech
2 English
2 Hungarian
1 Dutch
1 Flemish
1 Norwegian
1 Polish
1 Swedish

Which countries are absent? Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, virtually all much of eastern and southeastern Europe, the U.S., and all of Latin America.

A little more: Commentator "a Finn" asks about the apparent absence of Sibelius and Finland. This illustrates the problem we face with determining nationality. Sibelius was born in the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of Russia, and his family was ethnically and linguistically Swedish. He himself did not learn the Finnish language until adulthood. Therefore his is the only listing under "Swedish" above. Murray lists the origins of both Dvorak and Mahler as Bohemia, but the former spoke Czech, and the latter was a German Jew, therefore I placed them under Czech and German respectively. Similarly, when the Norwegian-speaking Edvard Grieg was born, it was in Sweden, Norway at the time not existing as an independent political entity.

Three on the list are, to my knowledge, Jewish: Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Mahler, all German-speakers. The majority above, despite the predominance of Germans, may well be Catholic: virtually all of the French and Italians, plus those born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Weber were, for instance, all German-speaking Catholics.

The Great Composers According to Charles Murray

I've been rereading Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment. An item of particular interest to me, as an aficionado of classical music, is his list of the greatest classical composers. Murray uses objective criteria to formulate his lists of the great achievers, so these are not his personal choices. Here are the top 20 classical composers, the "giants" of "Western Music", along with the point scores he calculated.

1. Beethoven    100
2. Mozart         100
3. Bach             87
4. Wagner         80
5. Haydn          56
6. Handel          46
7. Stravinsky     45
8. Debussy        45
9. Liszt             45
10. Schubert       44
11. Schumann     42
12. Berlioz          41
13. Schoenberg   39
14. Brahms         35
15. Chopin          32
16. Monteverdi    31
17. Verdi             30
18. Mendelssohn  30
19. Weber           27
20. Gluck            26
    

One can certainly quibble with some of these rankings, but since these are meant as an objective compilation of the opinions of important musicologists and critics, my remarks here can be only those of an interested amateur.

At least two different criteria can be discerned from this list, one being sheer artistic achievement in the sense of great works of music considered to be on the heights of art, the other being achievement in the advancement of the art form. For example, take Schoenberg and Monteverdi: so far as I know, hardly anyone listens to them for pleasure today. Monteverdi probably was listened to for pleasure at one time, but he has been largely superseded. Schoenberg is valued in the same way that, say, Joyce is valued in literature; yet not many people read Finnegan's Wake for pleasure or for artistic insight. In fact, I'd say that Schoenberg is widely reviled.

Bach, though he certainly has many fans, is in the same general mold, admired more for bringing the Baroque to its logical conclusion than for soul-stirring music. However, that may be at least in part a function of our exposure to romanticism, a movement non-existent in Bach's day, and which still holds sway. In a conversation I had with a very sharp music critic, the critic asserted that Wagner is far more important to the history of music than Bach, yet he is ranked lower on the list.

Murray was careful to place exemplars of accomplishment in separate categories, in order to avoid invidious comparisons. Hence these composers are listed under "Western Music". But face it: Western music as high art just is the only one worth considering. ("World music" blows.) So here we have another category of achievement in which white European males stand head and shoulders above any other group.

An appendix to the book lists all of the significant figures in Western music, along with point scores. One favorite composer of mine, the obscure 19th-century Swede Franz Berwald, receives a score of 2. (Compare to 100 for Beethoven and Mozart.) This composer of lovely music, though outranked by hundreds of other composers, is still in my opinion a creator of great art, greater than almost any art any non-Westerner has created, which is more evidence of the astounding domination of the West in the world of music and art.

Cafeteria Christianity and Hellfire

One STDV made some very good additional commentary to our discussion on religion and morality. He believes that Christianity in its modern form does not do nearly what its proponents say it does with regard to the enforcement of morality:

In a transparent effort to court adherents, religion, especially Christianity, has morphed into a self-help deal where past failures and acts are forgotten as long as one buys into the system. Gone are the rigid proclamations of John Edward. Gone are the Scarlet Letter and hellfire afterlife awaiting sinners of great magnitude. Instead, Christianity offers everyone a second chance no matter the gravity of one's misdeeds.

In this formulation, what motivates one to avoid immoral acts? If the standard for guaranteed forgiveness is set at simply accepting Jesus, then how does religion police its believers? Quick answer: It doesn't. Modern Christianity needs to return to its roots for it to have a practical impact. They must discard the "anything goes and everybody's welcome as long as you accept Jesus when you die" mentality of today's smiling preachers. Only then can Christianity compete with secular institutions, like prison and social shaming, in motivating moral behavior.

When I lived in Sierra Leone and worked at a Catholic institution there, I often had the thought that the good Catholic priests, brothers, and sisters whom I worked with and who ministered to the bodies and souls of Africans, should have emphasized hellfire much more than they did. (Which they hardly did at all, so far as I could see.) Sierra Leone was and is quite the dysfunctional society, and telling the people that they ought or ought not do certain things because God wanted them to did not seem to produce much in the way of results. (It's may be that nothing much in the way of exhortation could produce any results.)

A related note: the classic reactionaries, and even a few progressive types, have held that the masses can only be controlled (or self-controlled) through religion or punishment. It has been said of de Maistre that he believed that throne, altar, and gallows were the three essential social institutions. We noted previously that many atheists behave morally, and many Christians do not, but much of this could be simply due to atheists being drawn generally from the ranks of the more intelligent and conscientious, while many Christians are not. A majority of black Americans, for instance, are Christians, while probably many Jews are in reality atheists, or in any case are not very motivated by religious concerns. Deviant social behavior among Christians is largely found in denominations that outsiders find unsophisticated, for instance Baptists or various brands of fundamentalism or Pentecostals, as opposed to, say, Episcopalians. But this is probably due more to the types of people or groups found in these sects rather than the sects' teachings. The greater demands made on adherents, for instance the proselytizing Jehovah's Witnesses consider an essential part of their faith, usually correlate with the lower SES of those adherents. Those in higher SES brackets don't need such heavy demands - they can make it quite well on their own.

Kanazawa on Tiger

Satoshi Kanazawa asks why we're surprised about Tiger Woods:

Highly successful men have sexual affairs, not because they want to (if what men want mattered, all men would have a maximum number of affairs), but because women choose them.  As I have said again and again, sex and mating among humans and other mammals is an entirely female choice, not a male choice; it happens whenever and with whomever women want, not whenever and with whomever men want.  What men want doesn’t matter, because it’s a constant.  What matters is what women want.
And Elin Nordegren and other “wronged wives” cannot really complain about their husbands’ affairs.  As I explain in an earlier post, it’s not like women want their husbands to cheat on them, but then it’s not like they don’t want them to cheat on them either.  They have chosen to marry the men precisely because they are the type of men who would cheat on their wives.  If they were the kind of men who wouldn’t (and, more importantly, couldn’t), then they would not have been attractive enough for the wives to marry.

And yet, in the recent past it was not the norm for successful men to have extramarital affairs. Men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Arnold Palmer were and are, so far as I know, completely faithful to their wives. The difference lies, in my view, on a couple of things. One is religion. With Christianity as both the norm and widely believed in, fewer men cheated, though no doubt plenty did. Adultery isn't new.

The other thing that has changed is consequences. People find the Tiger Woods story compelling because of the contrast with his squeaky clean image. He has indeed suffered some consequences, such as the loss of endorsement income and presumably now a divorce. But in reality he'll make it all up in spades. The PGA won't ban him from golf, as it might have in the old days.

Sentimental Theists

This is a test: spot the name that doesn't belong.

E.O Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Larry Anhart, Dennis Mangan

If you answered "Richard Dawkins", you are correct. He's the only non-American on the list.

I had to make that dumb joke, because I was amused to see my name on that list in a post at VFR, Atheists who believe in moral behavior but have no basis for believing it. We've been over this ground here before, but if you can stand it, I'll reiterate a few points.

Throughout the post, which refers to one written by Todd White, Atheism: Autopsy of a Failed Faith, it is just assumed that religion, or at any rate, belief in a deity or deities, is necessary for people to behave morally. However, that's a big and, in my opinion, unwarranted assumption. We know that many atheists, perhaps the great majority, behave morally, e.g., they care for their children, are not common criminals, and so on. Therefore moral behavior does not require religious belief.

On the other hand, how would religious belief require, or buttress, or in some way determine, moral behavior? It doesn't, as Socrates discerned over two thousand years ago. The effect of a belief in God on moral behavior comes down to obeying (perceived) authority, and the expectation of punishment or reward. Yet one is neither responsible nor praiseworthy - nor moral, nor immoral - for performing an action either for money or with a gun pointed at one's head.

White writes:

Yes, Mangan might be the best example of a "sentimental atheist" because--unlike Wilson and Dawkins who are left-wingers--Mangan is a conservative and seems to have a healthy respect for the uniqueness, fragility, and beauty of Western Civilization. That's what makes his religious views so perplexing. As you point out, there is a contradiction between his personal lack of faith and his love of a civilization which desperately needs faith to sustain itself. Not to sound like Hegel or anything [don't worry, Todd], but I believe that--over time--major philosophical contradictions are unsustainable.

White here takes at least a couple of simple-minded views, one, that one needs to be a theist to respect and love Western civilization, and two, that one believes in God based not on whether one finds compelling reasons for that belief, but because it is useful for something else, i.e. the defense of Western civilization. Both are false. Auster has been trying to read me and other so-called "Darwinists" out of the ranks of conservatism for some time now, but I'm not budging; there's no contradiction between atheism and the defense of the West. White says that "there is a contradiction between his personal lack of faith and his love of a civilization which desperately needs faith to sustain itself"; where's the contradiction. When I realized that I no longer believed in gods, am I supposed suddenly to say, "Bring on mass Muslim immigration! Bring on gay marriage and socialized medicine!" Please. There's no connection.

Many religions have done their part in creating civilizations, even Islam, yet that provides no basis for belief in any of them. As Nietzsche said, belief in a falsehood can be more powerful and life-enhancing than believing the truth.

As I've said before, and will say again, we believe because we are compelled to believe, not because of any other considerations. Given what I think I know about the world and about human history, I feel no compulsion to believe in gods, so I don't, regardless of whatever benefits or disadvantages it brings to me or anyone else. Belief in gods is either true or false, it isn't true or false because of any alleged benefits.

Addendum: Todd White abruptly stopped commenting on this blog when he realized that we were not a bunch of one-world, you're-all-welcome-in-this-country-so-long-as-you-love-the-Constitution types. But now he's the arbiter of real conservatism?

Further addendum: In comments, Todd White says, "In your entire blog post today, you never articulate what is the motivation for an atheist to be moral. That’s because there is none. What looks like motivation is merely the product of being born and raised in a Christian-Enlightenment culture, and developing an understandable attachment to such a great culture." I'm glad he brought that up, because I meant to touch on it. Communities and societies cannot exist without morality, which is simply the code of conduct that members of a society must adhere to in order for the society to exist. A society without morals is a mob engaged in the war of all against all. It wouldn't even have the cohesion of a wolf pack. Societies exist because they confer advantages on their members, and morality evolved to regulate behavior.

As for the motivations for an atheist to be moral, they're the same motivations others have, like approval and disapproval, reciprocity, love of family or fellows, or aversion to prison time. Plenty of Christians are in prison, after all - looks like belief in gods doesn't exactly guarantee being moral. Our society today is far less violent than Christian Europe during the Middle Ages.

Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.

The Non-Epidemic of Mad Cow Disease

What happened to the epidemic in new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? This paper is from - where else? - Medical Hypotheses, the journal that the AIDS establishment, and I shouldn't wonder lots of other medical and scientific establishments, would like to destroy. The abstract:

The first recognised case of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was in 1995 and it was only a short time thereafter that this extremely rare fatal condition was attributed to the contamination of beef products by the putative aetiological agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. While the United Kingdom government appeared to bend over backwards in both accepting this attribution and in funding myriad research to support such an heretical conclusion many scientists while being extremely sceptical of such a possibility remained cautious in the light of an impending epidemic of human disease. Ten years further on there is no sign of any such epidemic and it is time to put politics aside and grasp the nettle of scientific consensus which must be that new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was not caused by affected individuals eating beef products which were contaminated with bovine prion protein.

The entire paper is gated, but I have a copy. So here's a little more:

In 2001, in response to an article by George Venters in the BMJ [1], I argued that the politics and not the science of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) had turned the aforementioned ‘gravy boat’ of infectious prion into a ‘gravy train’ of affective prion research [2].

For more "gravy boat" research, see AIDS and global warming.

Putting aside the scientific debate and even allowing for the possibility that BSE prion was the aetiological agent in vCJD the numbers of affected individuals in 2001 (20 deaths) were so small as to make vCJD an extremely rare neurodegenerative disease and regardless of the scientific merit of its study its incidence was not demanding of the high level of funding received from, for example, research councils such as the BBSRC and the MRC. Considering the scientific credibility of such august organisations and the expected competition for research grants one is left with the assumption that the disproportionate level of funding awarded to research on vCJD (for example, by comparison to Alzheimer’s disease) was a knee-jerk-reaction to political interference by the United Kingdom government.

Politics and grant money are driving science, as can be seen in this and many other examples, and not driving merely the direction of research, but outlining the limits of acceptable results.

Cigarette Smoking Paradoxes

Kitava is an island in Melanesia whose inhabitants have been studied fairly extensively, due to their low rates of diseases of civilization. At the Paleo Diet site, we read, "Amongst the traditional horticulturalists of Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, hyperinsulinaemia and abdominal obesity are absent or rare." Yet in the abstract to Cardiovascular risk factors in a Melanesian population apparently free from stroke and ischaemic heart disease: the Kitava study, we discover that

This study tested 151 males and 69 females aged 14-87 years with 76% and 80% smokers over 20 years.

Hmm, over three quarters of both men and women smoked cigarettes, and they are "free from stroke and ischaemic heart disease".

According to this article on AOL Health, the country with the world's highest per capita cigarette consumption is Greece, with 3,000 cigarettes on average annually smoken by each adult. Yet the rate of heart disease in Greece is about 2/3 that of the U.S., and half that of Ireland. The Japanese have one of the highest smoking rates in the world, yet the rate of heart disease in Japan is one of the world's lowest.

I deliberately used the word "paradoxes" in the post title, as I think it's become clear that when scientists use "paradox' to describe their findings, that means that the original hypothesis needs some serious adjustment. E.g., "the French paradox" in heart disease.

The Scientific Scandal of Anti-Smoking

The Scientific Scandal of Anti-Smoking, written by two professors at Monash University, Australia, one of whom is Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Statistics, argues that no study has ever established that cigarette smoking lowers life span. (HT: Overcoming Bias.) You want a contrarian opinion? This is about as contrarian an opinion as I've ever come across. The authors basically argue that none of the studies that have been conducted have ever controlled for selection effects, i.e. they were not truly randomized. The results could simply mean that smokers are destined to die earlier, regardless of whether or not they smoke.

So what were the results of the Whitehall study? They were contrary to all expectation. The quit group showed no improvement in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rates due to heart disease, lung cancer, or any other cause with one exception: certain other cancers were more than twice as common in the quit group. Later, after twenty years there was still no benefit in life expectancy for the quit group. [...]

Above all has been the repeated and world-wide directive that smokers should quit and live longer when every controlled trial without exception has demonstrated this claim to be false.

Is there anything that can be said with certainty about the health and life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers? The evidence indicates little difference. One important fact often causes confusion: an agent can be a certain cause of death and yet have the effect of extending life. Smoking could be a major cause of lung cancer or even the only cause yet also be associated with long life. The Japanese are amongst the heaviest smokers in the world. They also live the longest. The Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment smoked for a hundred years before dying at 122 as the world’s oldest ever person. [...]

It may be argued that this is news about an old and settled subject. And who cares about smoking anyway. But smoking is really a secondary issue. The primary issue is the integrity of science. This has no use-by date. When the processes of science are misused, even if for what seems a good reason, science and its practitioners are alike degraded.

Robin Hanson comments:

So I dug further; bottom line: Johnstone & Finch are right. We usually see strong correlations between death and smoking, and we see those same correlations within each random arm (i.e., group) of a randomized trial. Nevertheless, we see no significant net death differences between control arms and arms induced to smoke less.

While the process of inhaling smoke that contains hundreds of carcinogenic chemicals, hundreds of times daily over a period of decades, seems intuitively bad for health, selection effects may account for much or most of the damaging effects of cigarettes. Simply put, smokers are presumably also those with lower IQ, greater impulsivity, lower socioeconomic status, and if their parents smoked as well, lower birth weight, all of these being correlated with worse health. That said, I have a hard time believing it, but all studies done so far provide little evidence that smoking, in and of itself, lowers longevity.

Linkage, Hump Day Edition

Ferdinand B. of In Mala Fide usually includes me in his linkage posts, so I thought I'd return the favor. His Chastising the slaves for leaving the plantation is a fueled-by-anger post that gets to the heart of the matter on the white flight to suburbia: crumbling cities, lousy government, and high taxes to pay for it all. We've all heard of white flight before, but noteworthy here is FB's j'accuse aimed at journalists - not that we haven't heard of dishonest and/or stupid journalists before.

I’ve become convinced that there is a massive, sick conspiracy among American journalism schools. Some time between the young, fresh-faced kids’ arrival at university and their graduation into the big, bad world, they are kidnapped and given full frontal lobotomies. It’s the only way to explain how reporters everywhere can consistently churn out idiotic stories, like this one from the Albany Times Union on the flight of the rich from the Capital District’s major cities. [...]

People with the means to do so DON’T choose to live in decaying, decrepit, disgusting cities? Straight from the No Shit, Sherlock Department.

A French-language pro-Western, race-realist blog, L'Occident, has a "Liste de blog racialistes en Anglais":

Le sujet est encore tout récent en France. Néanmoins aux USA on en parle depuis le début du millénaire, et il existe un grand nombre de blogs traitant du sujet.


HumanBioDiversity Books
Arthur Kemp
Audacious Epigone
One Standard Deviation
Inductivist
Genes Expression
Guy White making sense on race
Mangans
Parapundit

J'en ajouterai d'autres au fur et à mesure de mes découvertes....

It's good to see that we have some brothers in France. If I were writing a list like this for an uninitiated European, I would be sure to include Sailer and Auster.

Deogolwulf calls out Ben Goldacre, The Guardian's "Bad science" columnist, for ignoring a glaring example of bad science: global warming.

It is ironic that Ben Goldacre, who has made a journalistic career out of professing to be against bad science, would speak in favour of a magnificent and glaring example of it, though we should hardly be surprised. He is another small example of why posterity, if there might still be a sapient and merry remnant of it, will laugh its head off.

Steve Sjuggerud writes about a Haitian cab driver he knows; he's moving back to Haiti because he thinks the opportunities for him are better there than in the States.

Prepare for the Hyperinflationary Great Depression

From Zero Hedge:

John Williams, who runs the popular counter government data manipulation site Shadowstats, has thrown down the gauntlet to deflationists, and in an extensive report concludes that the probability of a hyperinflationary episode in America over the next year has reached critical levels. While the debate between deflationists and (hyper)inflationists has been a long and painful one, numerous events set off in motion by the Bernanke Fed (as a direct legacy of the Greenspan multi-decade period of cheap and boundless credit) may have well cast America as the unwilling protagonist in the sequel of the failed monetary policy economic experiment better known as Zimbabwe. [...]

The intensifying economic and solvency crises, and the responses to both by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve in the last two years, have exacerbated the government's solvency issues and moved forward my timing estimation for the hyperinflation to the next five years, from the 2010 to 2018 timing range estimated in the prior report. [...]

The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat dollars (not backed by gold or silver) will come the eventual destruction of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets.

I recommend that you read the whole thing.

While predictions are difficult to make, especially about the future, Williams marshals the facts that support his analysis. Runaway government spending, aided and abetted by massive printing of dollars by the Federal reserve, have doomed the dollar. It is only a matter of timing.

A hyperinflation will be accompanied by political upheaval and, in my opinion, could see the end of the U.S. as we know it. What shape that upheaval would take is anyone's guess.

PS: For those who think along the same lines that I've set out here previously, see also Capital controls are a foregone conclusion.

The Hashish Army

The Campaign of Terror Against Afrikaners

In a couple of recent posts we saw that the white, Afrikaans-speaking population of South Africa suffers a very high murder rate, and that since this rate is so high and those committing the murders are virtually all black South Africans, some suggest that the word "genocide" is appropriate to describe the situation. However, it's pretty well-known that South Africa's murder rate is high, although according to Wikipedia, "only" the 9th highest in the world. (Second highest is Sierra Leone, where I lived once.)

So, are Afrikaners merely the victims of a very high crime rate, or are they deliberately targeted? Another possible consideration is that they are considerably wealthier than black South Africans, so maybe they're targeted in robberies.

Adriana Stuijt, a retired South African journalist who writes the blog Censor Bugbear - from which I based my two previous posts on this topic - makes a convincing case for genocide: Open Letter on the Genocide of Afrikaaners (2008). Afrikaners, according to Stuijt, are murdered at a rate some 30% higher than their share of the population. Furthermore, usually the murderers steal very little of value when carrying out their crimes, lending credence to the notion that these are not robberies. And finally, several South African politicians and leaders regularly engage in what Stuijt terms "hate speech" - real "hate speech", not the kind that merely offends some group - which leads Stuijt to write:

All these activities are an indication in my view that South Africa is becoming leaderless—to such a degree that the country is increasingly being ruled by local-level criminal warlord-ruled gangs in which activities even the local police are seen to participate.

The remaining South African whites are, in my view, now living in a very quickly-increasing atmosphere of violence and a dramatic increase in hate-speech targetting this highly visible minority group.

With all that, I'll state that "genocide" may not be the best description here, and that "a campaign of terror" might be better. The South African government is not equipped to carry out a genocide, even should it wish to do so overtly; but a terror campaign, orchestrated by the government through demonizing of Afrikaners and encouragement of the wilder elements in South African society, would appear to fit the case better. That said, the murders are all too real, and finding the best description doesn't change that.

The blog I Luv SA recently had this to say about our two recent posts here:

The first post on Boer genocide attracted some interesting comments, which are worth taking note of. Americans, it seems, are not unconcerned with the plight of South Africans.

From one commentator:
The silence is sickening, like most of the violence of Africa makes me sick. I understand why our colonial ancesters believed they had a mission to civilize.

I can only speak for this American, but no, I am not unconcerned with the plight of South Africans. These murders are absolutely repulsive, and as the commentator said, the silence is sickening. The so-called civilized world needs to demand that these murders stop. But since the murders are of whites, and the murderers not only black but the government the successor to the one created by St. Nelson Mandela, it's a pretty sure bet that the world will remain silent.

Random Thought: Crime and Enforcement

Crime and law enforcement exist in an equilibrium; if enforcement is increased, crime decreases, and vice versa. According to Gary Becker, criminals make rational choices and include in their calculations the severity of punishment, possibility of being apprehended, etc.

Society and its instrument, government, decide on the level of enforcement and therefore, other things being equal, on the level of crime. The Founding Fathers of this country enshrined in the Constitution such things as the requirement for a warrant before persons or property could be searched. They surely knew that this would lead to an increase in crime, but were willing to take the trade-off between that and the potential for government oppression.

But even within the Constitution, not to speak of other countries as well, a wide latitude for enforcement exists. The government's agents decide the degree of enforcement.

Even in a democracy, the people's wishes are imperfectly translated into action. If democracy were perfectly fluid and transparent, the government's level of enforcement would presumably reflect that of the median citizen's desired level. The situation suffers from the principal-agent problem; the government does not have the same motivations to fight crime as the people do. My impression is that in the U.S., the government's desired level of enforcement is much lower than the median citizen's.

Random Thought: Decline of Religious Belief

At times I get ideas that might be offbeat or interesting but which I'm either unable to flesh out or which, on closer examination, are perhaps not all that coherent. Sometimes they might be trite or already well-known ideas or findings, just not well-known to me. Rather than flail around trying to write a blog post with one of them, maybe I'll set them down like this in the form of a random thought.

Evolutionary psychologists see religion as a strategy in group selection. Religious belief helps bind members of a society to one another. Religions arose to fill a need, which is how to build loyalty and a sense of belonging in people unrelated to each other.

Modern society is increasingly characterized as one of social atomization and urban anonymity, which situation has come about through capitalism and meritocracy. Members of a society don't need each other in the same way as in the past; they now relate to others chiefly through considerations of self-interest.

Therefore, religious belief is not needed by (many) individuals, and therefore they cease to believe.

Rather than the decline of belief driving social atomization or decay, atomization drives the decline of belief.

Boer Genocide

Still ongoing, with dozens of white South African farmers murdered just this year. Quote:

Dr Gregory Stanton, the US-based legal expert who founded Genocide Watch after investigating the Cambodia Pol-Pot genocide, said in the SA TV documentary ‘A BLOODY HARVEST’ – after he had viewed SA police forensic videos of the scenes of murdered farm families – that the reasons for these cruel mutilations and the repeated pattern of murderers’ ‘decorating victims’ bodies” (usually with Afrikaans bibles) are warnings that these vctims were seen as ‘Inhuman vermin which had to be exterminated’- and that a ‘genocide was already in progress in an advanced stage’ against this small 3-million-strong, highly visible minority in South Africa.

But, they're only innocent white people, so the world looks the other way.

Sea Levels Won't Rise

From The Telegraph (HT: Seth Roberts), Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told':

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

Imagine that, Dr. Morner actually measured sea levels instead of tweaking a model.

BHO: Neocon

At NRO, Abe Greenwald believes that Barack Obama has been mugged by reality:

During his Nobel Peace Prize–acceptance speech today, Barack Obama said, “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.” He cited the historical example of Adolf Hitler and the present-day example of the Taliban. This rounds out a year that has seen a succession of real-world object lessons that bear out the claims of the intellectual tendency known as neoconservatism...

Greenwald thinks that the real world "bear[s] out the claims of... neoconservatism"? I'll have what he's smoking.

In these, three convictions often linked with neoconservative thought have been affirmed:

1. No matter how technologically advanced and interconnected the world becomes, there will be bad actors, and their obstinacy will remain intact. Every regime cannot be made to acquiesce through appeals to common humanity. Some can only be made pliant through threat and, if necessary, force.

Claim number one, insofar as it means that the world is a rough neighborhood, is trivially true, and neoconservatives get no credit for proposing this. That regimes will resist American hegemony is also trivially true.

2. Populations living under despotic leadership are at all times engaged in a desperate struggle for liberty. Moreover, these populations look to America, the world’s longest-running constitutional democracy, for moral and material support.

That people living in despotic regimes "are at all times engaged in a desperate struggle for liberty" is false; this is a mere rephrasing of the Bush doctrine that everyone wants democracy. China's people arguably live under despotism, but they seem to be quite happy with it at the moment. And, even were they to "look to America.. for support", that support costs Americans their blood and treasure.

3. A willingness to apply overwhelming and innovative military force remains critical to America’s wars — regardless of their asymmetric natures.

Well, we're certainly not doing that! If we were willing to apply overwhelming force, Afghanistan and Iraq would be wastelands by now - but that begs the question of why we would want to do that.

Evil demands defeat.

Dear God, why us? America is for Americans, not for the establishment of the Universal reign of Peace.

Invasion, Immigration, Insolvency: that's what the neocons believe in. Why any conservative would profess loyalty to a regime that is hell-bent on using the country for its own purposes, and simultaneously replacing the population, is beyond me.

Copenhagen Climate Summit: Not Enough Limos to Go Around

The Telegraph:

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

I'm shocked.

Decline of the Dollar

The chart is from a piece by James Turk. For those unfamiliar with the dollar index, it's the USD measured against a basket of foreign currencies, and as can be seen, it's in a long term decline.

Over the past week, gold has declined nearly $100/oz., from around $1240 to $1140, and paperbugs everywhere have been saying that the gold bubble has burst. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. Bubbles don't burst in one week, and gold has been in a secular bull market for a decade. The price of gold is driven by lack of confidence in the USD, and nothing has changed that would increase confidence in it. Bernanke and colleagues are still happily printing away, debasing the dollar on a daily basis.

Are we headed for a Weimar-style hyperinflation? Obviously, no one knows with any certainty, but the conditions that would cause a hyperinflation are all in place and show no signs of letting up. Ben Bernanke and company are making it up as they go along; they exude confidence, but the reality is that we and they are in uncharted lands.

That's your dollar that they're debasing, and whether or not gold and silver go on to new highs - a near certainty, in my opinion - the dollar is headed down. Anyone holding dollars or being paid in them is being royally screwed, by our very own democratically-elected government.

James Grant recently wrote:

Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head.

Get out of the dollar.

Update: New Obama plans:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" until more Americans are back at work.

Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient.

"We avoided the depression many feared," Obama said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. But, he added, "Our work is far from done."

Translation: we have not yet begun to print.

Sudden Jihad Syndrome in New York

Atlas Shrugs has the story: Muslim Grad Student Stabs to Death Jewish Convert Professor.

The perp is apparently an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, the professor the author of Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Movements and a convert from Islam to Judaism.

Of course you've seen this all over the news, right? Pamela Geller: "If it were a white guy killing a black professor, or a Jewish guy killing a muslim, they would be clubbing us like baby seals with it."

Protein, Longevity, and Obesity

This is from the latest issue of Aging: Macronutrient balance and longevity:

Dietary restriction (DR) without malnutrition is widely regarded to be a universal mechanism for prolonging lifespan. It is generally believed that the benefits of DR arise from eating fewer calories (termed caloric restriction, CR). Here we argue that, rather than calories, the key determinant of the relationship between diet and longevity is the balance of protein to non-protein energy ingested. This ratio affects not only lifespan, but also total energy intake, metabolism, immunity and the likelihood of developing obesity and associated metabolic disorders. Among various possible mechanisms linking macronutrient balance to lifespan, the nexus between the TOR and AMPK signaling pathways is emerging as a central coordinator.

Further down in the paper, the authors state:

Additionally, it has been reported over many years, notably in the early work of Morris Ross, that protein restriction, and of methionine in particular, extends lifespan in rodents [15-19].

However, suboptimal levels of protein promote overeating and obesity, therefore simply restricting protein in itself won't work to promote longevity.

To this point we have concentrated on evidence that increasing the ratio of protein and non-protein energy in the diet decreases lifespan; but as seen in the example from male crickets discussed above, if this ratio falls too far there is an increased risk of decreased longevity associated with obesity. The reason for this is that in omnivores and herbivores studied to date, protein intake is more strongly regulated than that of carbohydrate and fat [20]. As a result, protein appetite drives overconsumption of energy on low percent protein diets, promoting obesity and metabolic disorders with consequent effects on longevity. Overconsumption of energy on low percent protein diets has been reported for insects (e.g. [21]), fish (e.g. [22]), birds [23], rodents [24,25], nonhuman primates [26] and humans [20,27].

Here's a theory on a cause of obesity that's new to me: the consumption of low protein diets. Since dietary fat has been demonized, and since protein and fat often go together (meat), perhaps the avoidance of fat leads to a low protein intake and hence to a higher calorie intake, most of which is carbohydrate.

We have seen that the longevity effects of calorie restriction are due to protein restriction, and even more specifically the restriction of a single amino acid, methionine. But it appears that balance is needed: too little protein will cause obesity, hence it will lower longevity.

In Obesity: the protein leverage hypothesis, the authors (from Oxford) state:

The obesity epidemic is among the greatest public health challenges facing the modern world. Regarding dietary causes, most emphasis has been on changing patterns of fat and carbohydrate consumption. In contrast, the role of protein has largely been ignored, because (i) it typically comprises only approximately 15% of dietary energy, and (ii) protein intake has remained near constant within and across populations throughout the development of the obesity epidemic. We show that, paradoxically, these are precisely the two conditions that potentially provide protein with the leverage both to drive the obesity epidemic through its effects on food intake, and perhaps to assuage it.

One of the mechanisms behind the weight-loss effects of low-carbohydrate diets could be that they are high in protein as a percentage of calories and thus cause greater satiety of appetite, and indeed, many of the low carb diet gurus, such as Dr. Eades, emphasize this.

As you were

Alright, this blog has made a reappearance. I attempted to contact Google twice, but no replies were ever forthcoming, and no notice was given either before the blog's disappearance or reappearance.

All this must be trying the patience of readers of this blog almost as much as it does mine, so after this I won't write more about myself and my tribulations. However, I'm faced with a decision as to blogging, and I've decided that I'll do so here. Everything is now backed up to a mirror site, and I'll continue to back up periodically, so I'll be prepared for anything G**gle can throw at me. The fact is, this blog ranks fairly high on a lot of G**gle searches and gets a fair amount of traffic, so going elsewhere may have some advantages but it would be too much like starting over.

As as I said here, I'm extremely grateful to everyone who helped out, posted, or commented, as well as grateful for your patience.

Bill Vallicella today had an interesting take as to what may have set off the problem:

I see that Mangan's old blog has been restored by the powers that be.  Interestingly, if you Google 'Mangan's' you are shown a link to his Racial Consciousness.  It  is but speculation on my part, but I should think that it is posts like this that certain people find objectionable, and that got him blacked out,  if only temporarily.

Go read the post and ask yourself if there is anything in it that a reasonable person could find 'hateful' or 'racist' or sufficiently objectionable to warrant censure.  If you answer in the affirmative, then you brand yourself as hopelessly morally and intellectually obtuse.

Bill's idea could be right, but I think that we'll never know. I do feel that this was no technical glitch, however, because not only was the blog deleted, but my G**gle account was 'temporarily disabled" for a "terms of service violation". It's just possible that our complaints, together with the minor publicity given to the fiasco on the internet, caused the "don't be evil" guys to change their minds.

Update: Several people including commenters here have convinced me that staying on Blogger is not a good idea. However, for various reasons both Typepad and WordPress don't work for me and I'm exploring alternatives. For now, new posts will be here, and I'll let everyone know when I make the switch.