Nationalism and Superiority

A commenter named Mohamed made some interesting remarks. Here they are interspersed with my replies.

The reason people who are Euro nationalist focus on IQ is that its all they have to show for biological differences now that Darwinian theory is dead. But of course there is no gene in the body that have been found that determines the IQ a person has. But that's all they have.

Of course that is not why people like myself discuss - not "focus on" - IQ. Nationalism has no necessary connection with human biological differences. If I had to reduce to pithiness the reasons for discussing IQ, other than from purely scientific interest, it is because I live in a multiracial society whose leaders demonize whites for the failures of non-whites. (Note that whites get no credit for the success of some non-white groups, notably Asians.) Mohamed has, I assume, the luxury of living in a monoracial society.

The problem is that these Nationalist don't know how to promote their ethnic identity without some form of superiority. Ethnic nationalism exist all over the world. But rarely do you see any attempt to focus on IQ. Chinese and orientals have ON AVERAGE higher IQs that Europeans. But when is the last time you hears Chinese talk about such things?

Every ethnic group has historical and religious myths that confer legitimacy and pride on that group. However, in the case of "Euro nationalists", in my opinion an objective observer would have to conclude that European civilization, broadly construed, has been the wonder of the world. Nevertheless, the Euro nationalist case does not rest on objective superiority, any more than a Ghanaian or Pakistani nationalist need base his case on superiority. Europeans and their descendants can be justifiably proud of the achievements of their ancestors, and this lies in the realm of historical and national myths; not myths in the sense of being fictional, but in the sense of stories that people tell themselves. Ghanaians and Pakistanis have stories that they tell themselves too, and I've never heard of a Euro nationalist who wants to deprive them of their stories or their nationalism.

Objectively, we can talk about superiority and inferiority. Reality doesn't care what we think. Subjectively, nationalism requires that individuals consider themselves part of a larger group, usually united by a common language, ancestry, and geography, but usually with the added element of some form of superiority, a sort of national positive self-talk.

Ethnic identity and similar features and cultures are normal. But supremacy is not.

As noted, national myths usually involve some form of why the members of the nation are superior in some way, whether in valor, or having a correct view of the world, or even the greatness of their literature. That they are superior in their own eyes speaks to the justice of deserving their own nation. But it's normally difficult to convince others of the superiority of a nation to which they don't belong. Hence the confusion about supremacy.

Ten Books

A few years back I participated in one of those old blogospheric themes, "the book meme", in this case a discussion of books that have made an impact on ones thinking. (My brother also participated.) A new one is making the rounds: Tyler Cowen started with Books that have influenced me most. Terry Teachout and Ross Douthat also weighed in. Since I've been reading serious books for some 40 years, I probably can't even remember every book that has had an impact on me, but here are some memorable ones that have influenced me the most. Readers are encouraged to list some of theirs in comments.

The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer. See my first link above for my description.

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence Keeley. Completely explodes the myth mentioned in the subtitle and shows how and why death rates due to military violence in primitive societies were orders of magnitude higher than in civilized societies.

The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein. No commentary needed.

A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. How evolution caused the Industrial Revolution.

Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. See also the first link for my description. I would now put it in stronger terms that, while Russell is a fascinating writer and his books are eye-openers for anyone raised in the conventional wisdom that prevailed before our glorious modern world, his personal life was contemptible, based on my reading of the massive two-volume biography by Ray Monk. Also, since I now believe that the old conventional wisdom was largely correct, but am unwilling to go back and re-read Russell, he was probably more wrong than I was able to understand at the time.

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. The author demolishes the lipid hypothesis of heart disease, which has dominated thinking on public health for 40 years and did so much damage. A hundred years from now this book will still be seen as a landmark.

The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. When I decided that I wanted to know world history I read this. Yes, all 11 volumes, and never dull.

Class by Paul Fussell. Totally changed my view of the world as "a painfully accurate guide to the American status system". Hilarious, too. Today it would need serious updating to bring race into the equation, something even the iconoclastic Fussell, liberal that he is, wouldn't be up to.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Evolution by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending. I may be suffering from recency bias here, but this much-discussed book will change ones view of the world. Until quite recently, conventional wisdom said that human evolution stopped long ago, and this book will disabuse the reader of that notion. Must reading for anyone who still thinks Stephen Jay Gould was anything but a dogmatic Marxist.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I've read it four times, though I might be embarrassed if I went through it again. In my travels, I've always been surprised that not a single non-American I've spoken to has heard of this book that has greatly influenced American culture.

Another 100 Million People for the U.S.

The WSJ reviews a new book by Joel Kotkin, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. Both the reviewer, libertarian Nick Schulz, and Kotkin, sound just ecstatic that the U.S. will gain another 100 million people over the next few decades.

"In stark contrast to its rapidly aging rivals," Mr. Kotkin writes in "The Next Hundred Million," "America's population is expected to expand dramatically in coming decades." He points to a slowly rising birth rate and to the continuing in-migration of young workers from poorer countries. Most of America's population growth between 2000 and 2050, he notes, "will be in its racial minorities, particularly Asians and Hispanics, as well as in a growing mixed-race population." No other developed country, he says, "will enjoy such ethnic diversity."

For Mr. Kotkin, population growth translates into economic vitality—the capacity to create wealth, raise the standard of living and meet the burdens of future commitments. Thus a country with a youthful demographic, in relative terms, enjoys a big advantage over its global counterparts. In the next four decades, Mr. Kotkin observes, "most of the developed countries in both Europe and Asia will become veritable old-age homes" because of stagnant population growth. And the economies of these countries, already devoted to a vast welfare-state apparatus, will face crushing pension obligations—but without the young workers to defray the cost.

Inevitably, Europe and Asia will decline, Mr. Kotkin predicts, and America will thrive. Indeed, the U.S. will emerge, he says, "as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history." What about the billion-person behemoth across the Pacific? Not to worry. Mr. Kotkin thinks that, by midcentury, China's one-child policy will cause it, too, to suffer from the burdens of an aging population.

Where to start... First of all, for Kotkin, like for so many other immigration boosters, economics and "competitiveness" are all. Never mind what all those immigrants will do to our rapidly eroding sense of nationhood, they'll pay Social Security and Medicare taxes! The U.S. is nothing but an economic entity, a corporation writ large.

Kotkin also seems to think that ethnic diversity is something to "enjoy", thus demonstrating his profound ignorance of history. For someone who works at a think tank, he is surprisingly devoid of any real thought. Ethnic diversity brings conflict - is too much to say "always and everywhere"?

In any case, the U.S. already has more debt and more future obligations than it could possibly pay back, and increasing the population by 100 million people through immigration and higher birth rates, will do nothing but make things worse. Many or most of the new Americans will not be as productive or educated as the current average white American. Maybe Kotkin thinks that assimilation will somehow work magic, but recent history doesn't give us much confidence that it will.

Kotkin, like Friedman and Krugman, is a member of an elite for whom this nation is just a plaything whose people are to be manipulated so as to become part of the brave new global world. All three of them seem to think in nothing but PC cliches. If they did some real thinking, they might realize that things are not working out according to plan, nor will they.

The problem is that Kotkin may be right that by 2050 we'll add another 100 million to our population, and that it will largely be Hispanic and Asian. It will be the end of America as we know it - if it lasts that long.

Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Okies

Guy White has a post, The Most Politically Successful People, in which he writes:

… seem to be folks from Northern Ireland, commonly known in the United States as the Scotch-Irish.

Despite being 1.2% of the population, half of all Presidents, 22 out of 44, have significant Ulster ancestry.

Twelve Presidents are predominantly Scotch-Irish: Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.

Ten more Presidents with significant North Irish blood are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. [...]

The President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was also Scotch-Irish. So was KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Other famous Ulster-descended people are George Patton, Neil Armstrong, Steven King, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Johnny Carson, Johnny Cash, Eminem, Chuck Norris, Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne.

Where he goes wrong is relying on the statistic that 3.5 million people, or 1.2% of the population, identify as Scotch-Irish. While this statistic comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, the key word is "identify". The Scotch-Irish have been in this country since the 18th century, and are therefore much more likely to identify simply as Americans. I suspect that plenty of them don't even know what the term Scotch-Irish refers to.

The groups that received the denigrating epithets of rednecks, hillbillies, and Okies are to a great extent of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and the heritage of these people comprises a large part of what it means to be American, and what American culture is. The Scotch-Irish were the principal creators of bluegrass music, in a sense the folk music of American whites. The Scotch-Irish brought their taste for alcohol with them and created bourbon whiskey. Another quintessentially American institution heavily influenced by the Scotch-Irish is evangelical Christianity and revival meetings (the "Bible Belt"). Somewhere I read that Northern Ireland has more churches per capita than anywhere on earth, so if you want to look for the roots of exceptional American religiosity, look no further than the Scotch-Irish. The highly individualistic strain in American thought and politics owes a great deal to these people.

David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed is the classic work on the origins of the American culture and people in the British Isles, and which ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the nature of this unique place that is America and the unique group that is Americans. Among the four main British groups that founded the country and begat the American people were the Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scotch-Irish.

Who the Skilled Immigrants Are - and Aren't

Tino Sanandaji discusses the same Thomas Friedman column that I discussed the other day, and highlights the unspoken inferences of the column.

Well, let us note that fully 54% of the foreign born population of the U.S is from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Only 9% are from India and China. Even if you don't ignore illegal immigrants, there are several times as many legal immigrants from Latin America as there are from India and China.

Yet, of the 40 finalists, not a single one seems to be from Latin America! (correct me if I am wrong. John Vincenzo Capodilupo sounds Italian). His list is almost entirely made up of Indians and Chinese kids.

In 2008 only 15% of legal immigration was based on employment or skills, the remaining 85% is skill unrelated things such as having relatives in U.S. This is Americas current immigration policy: take a few high skilled people and masses of lower skilled immigrants.

Thomas Friedman presents us with a very valuable piece of information, which is that high-skill immigrants are very innovative. He inadvertently illustrated that low-skilled immigrants are not very innovative. Americas current immigration policy is taking mostly low-skilled immigrants, and few high skilled immigrants.

Yet instead of drawing the logical conclusion from it, the NYT farcically wants to use the success of the high skilled as an argument in favor or continuing the current American policy of mass-low skill immigrant.

Yes, the conclusion of Friedman and the NY Times is farcical, but then, the entire country has become a farce, so no surprise there. Praising skilled immigrants and using them to promote continued mass immigration of just about anybody is just a ruse to keep us rednecks in our place.

Paul Krugman, Hater

Paul Krugman's latest NY Times column, Fear Strikes Out, celebrates the passage of the National Socialist Health Care Act, parsing it in terms of "our better angels" on the Obama side, and the "callous cynicism" of the opposition. Krugman all but outright calls the opposition racists - always the mark of a subtle mind at work.

Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.

It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.

And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”

Earlier in the column, Krugman repeats the story that protesters "hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote." He also says that Newt Gingrich claimed that the health care bill would be as damaging to the Democrats as "civil rights legislation."

For one who so harshly derides the opposition for getting their facts wrong, Krugman plays pretty loose with them himself. An "editors' note" has been appended to the column that states that Gingrich did not say that about civil rights legislation, and furthermore, I've seen the video of the Black Caucus members getting razzed and I heard no racial epithets. But even if there were, Krugman is correct in his assumption that racism - defined by liberals as anything they don't like - is a far more damaging accusation than that of legislating Soviet-like policies or rationing access to doctors - so far down has the level of public discourse gone.

Krugman, Nobel laureate and star NY Times columnist, clearly demonstrates that he's just a hater, a hater of American liberties and, since he calls his opponents racists, a hater of whites - since they are the only group which it's acceptable to condemn as racists, and any political movement that's majority white and even slightly to the right qualifies as racist in the eyes of Krugman and his ilk.

PS: Doesn't the existence of Democratic and Republican economists cast some doubt on the validity of economics as a science? It would be as if physicists were divided into Unitarians and Trinitarians.

We're Doomed

The best commentary I've read about the passage of the health care bill comes from Roissy: Exporting Democracy, Importing Socialism:

If an alien race ill-disposed to America were to devise a plan to bring the US to her knees as quickly, efficiently, and bloodlessly as possible (so as not to arouse a mighty backlash of patriotic fervor, i.e. survival instinct) they could do no better than what we have done to ourselves over the past 50 years. A plan to drain the nation’s coffers and psyche — not to mention the good will of her allies — with half-cocked schemes to export democracy to shitholes around the world that are constitutionally incapable or unwilling to embrace democracy, coupled with a zeal for importing vast numbers of ethnically (and genetically) antagonistic and listless peasant stock who will vote 2 to 1, generation after generation regardless of the desperate political pandering to staunch it, for socialist politicians and the concomitant racial grievance spoils machine whose gears never stop thirsting for the slick blood of the hated enemy, would break the back of the nation’s people insidiously, cracking each vertebrae in the middle of the night with hairline fractures designed to avoid sudden jolts of pain. Numb any immunological reaction with the soul poison of feminism, enervating porn pills, mollifying technogadget distractions, and a PC shaming mechanism psyche-out that would make Orwell blush, and you have a perfect recipe for destroying a world-bestriding superpower in less than half a century without firing a single shot.

I don’t believe the Americans In Name Only [good one - ed.] who bought into this plan are stupid. No. It’s much worse than that. They are venal.

I am wishing for the day to come when the traitors swing from the lamp posts. Swing high sweet Benedicts.

Friedman, liberdroids, NYBTimes, RINOs, SWPLs, and the rest of you goddamned filthy fucks… never forget:

Proximity + diversity = war.

America has become the frog in the pot of gradually heated water, but the boiling point has been reached, and it's time to jump or die. We've imported our replacements, like some hapless employee forced to train the holder of an H-1B visa who will then take his job. After all, Americans voted for this; Obama made no secret of his plans to "reform" and socialize the entire medical system while he was campaigning. This is democracy in action. "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." Our people, our new people, know what they want, and we're all getting it, good and hard.

The Rubicon has been crossed.

In the NYT article on the bill's passage, we find this:

“This is the Civil Rights Act of the 21st century,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House.

Exactly.

Bastiat said that "government is that great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." While perfectly true, this statement needs updating. Government is that great fiction through which the incompetent, those with low future time orientation, and the stupid, form a voting majority and proceed to pick the pockets of the productive and prudent, aided and abetted by the prudently productive class's fear of being called racist or nativist.

Thomas Friedman, Immigration Fanatic

The egregious NYT columnist Thomas Friedman writes a paean to race replacement: America’s Real Dream Team. Almost every pro-immigration cliche and platitude makes an appearance there, along with his imitation of an enthusiastic puppy practically wetting himself over how smart immigrants and their children are compared to us hopeless rednecks.

O.K. All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

Indeed, if you need any more convincing about the virtues of immigration, just come to the Intel science finals. I am a pro-immigration fanatic. I think keeping a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country — whether they wear blue collars or lab coats — is the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we hope to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in an orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.

Friedman can barely contain himself over his discovery that there are so few Anglo-Saxon names among the Intel Science Talent Search honorees. Conveniently, he also overlooks the fact that the group whose members have comprised the vast majority of immigrants over the past few decades - Hispanics - have no names among the honorees either. A small fly in Friedman's ointment: the winner appears to be "white non-Hispanic", as we are now known.

For Friedman and his ilk, everything comes down to "competitiveness", and the need to import ever more people "is the key to keeping us ahead of China." I wonder whether he's ever thought about the fact that the U.S., over its entire existence, has always been "ahead of China", but only in recent years has there been a remote risk that we might fall behind. Clearly, over the past generation or so, something in our policies and practices has caused enough decay in American strength that we now worry about China leaping ahead. Those policies and practices are those that Friedman is most enthusiastic about: immigration, invasion, and insolvency.

Evidence for Beta Estrangement: Civil Wars

Satoshi Kanazawa has a paper on Evolutionary Psychological Foundations of Civil Wars, in which he finds:

I propose an evolutionary psychological perspective on wars and suggest that the ultimate cause of intergroup conflict may be the relative availability of reproductive women. Polygyny, which allows some men to monopolize all reproductive opportunities and exclude others, may increase the prevalence of civil wars, but not interstate wars, which did not exist in the ancestral environment. The analysis of the Correlates of War data support both hypotheses; polygyny increases civil wars but not interstate wars. Polygyny explains a greater proportion of the variance in civil war experience than democracy does in interstate war experience. If the democratic peace is the first law of international relations (interstate wars), then polygyny may be the first law of intergroup conflict (civil wars).

Of all the factors Kanazawa looked at, including democracy, income inequality, national IQ and others, polygyny was far and away the factor most correlated with civil wars, but not interstate wars. He suggests that young men without hope of reproductive success are not deterred - or not deterred enough - by the threat of death, and so may be inclined toward civil wars as a remedy.

The most that any government (authoritarian or otherwise) can do to control the behavior of its citizens is to threaten them with death. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, as Rubin himself (2002, 120–21) recognizes, the threat of death does not carry much weight for young men in highly polygynous societies faced with the distinct possibility of total reproductive failure because of a lack of reproductive opportunities. From the perspective of the genes, total reproductive failure—not leaving any offspring—is death. Thus, for the same reasons that polygyny (and a consequent lack of reproductive opportunities) inclines men to murder, rape and assault, despite the distinct possibility of state criminal penalty, the same desperate situation can lead them to wage civil wars for potential reproductive opportunities (Kanazawa 2007). There is very little the state can do to control the behavior of young men in polygynous societies even with the threat of death.

This doesn't provide evidence that American betas currently are estranged, or that significant numbers of them exist, but only for the notion that when they do exist in significant numbers they don't like their condition and cause significant trouble to remedy it. However, I do think there's much evidence that many American men are lacking in access to sex, as seen in divorce rates and increasing age of marriage, and if so, watch out.

Beta Estrangement

From the blog Virgin at 50:

After skimming the day’s misandrist missives, I read about a 2007 U.S. Department of Justice study that analyzed the prevalence of sexual misconduct in state and federal prisons and found that the majority of perpetrators were female staff who sexually assaulted male inmates. (By law, prisoners lack the capacity to consent to sex with prison staff.)

Female prison guards would rather have sex with convicts than have sex with me.

I then took a walk around my neighborhood and was accosted by a homeless guy with his female in tow who begged for change for “me and my woman.”

The homeless guy is getting laid, but I’m not.

I own a business that provides jobs. I created those jobs out of nothing. I know how to create things, build things, and fix things. Without guys like me, females would be shivering in dark, dank caves, wondering why there’s nothing to eat.

Feminists say that I’m pathetic, which is like a tapeworm calling its host pathetic. I say that a society in which females value convicts and the homeless more than they value a man who creates jobs is not only a pathetic society but a dying society.

Let me be the first to spit on its grave.

Here we see what can happen with the profound shift in sex relations over the past generation or so. Many productive, beta men can't or won't get married, and some of them can't even lose their virginity after a lifetime of trying. The result: estrangement from society and a willingness or even eagerness to see it collapse under the sheer weight of its degeneracy.

Generations of locked-out, loser men do not make for a healthy society. But many otherwise smart conservatives don't seem to see this. Imprecations from the pulpit to the effect that men should hang on to their values fall on the deaf ears of men who no longer care for the society that has betrayed them.

The Case for Physical Gold

It's Going To Implode: Buy Physical Gold - NOW: this article makes three basic points. One, debt loads everywhere are unsustainable; two, the US Treasury bond market could be on its last legs; three, most interesting, is the divergence between the paper and physical gold markets. More gold has been sold on paper than could possibly ever be delivered, and if enough of the buyers of futures contracts demand delivery, the paper gold market will implode, and the physical gold market explode higher. The London gold market, the world's largest in physical gold, is awash in rumors that much of the gold has quietly disappeared. Read the whole thing. The conclusion:

Physical Gold in your personal possession is the only thing that will survive the coming financial Armageddon. What we are witnessing right now is nothing but the calm before the storm. Keen observers are hearing rumblings beneath the ground signaling an imminent volcanic eruption. Once it blows it will be too late to take action. Trading paper markets for paper gains is like picking up pennies in front of the steamroller. It’s time to stop trading and just buy the physical metal. The window of opportunity to convert your casino chips (fiat money) into real money, i.e. Gold, is getting smaller by the hour. He who panics first, panics best.

Charlton will likely be fired as editor of Medical Hypotheses

Science reports that the Medical Hypotheses/Duesberg affair is near its end.

Elsevier to Editor: Change Controversial Journal or Resign

Martin Enserink

The editor of the journal Medical Hypotheses—an oddity in the world of scientific publishing because it does not practice peer review—will apparently lose his job over the publication last summer of a paper that says HIV does not cause AIDS. Publishing powerhouse Elsevier this week told Editor-in-Chief Bruce Charlton that it won't renew his contract, which expires at the end of 2010, and it asked that Charlton resign immediately or implement a series of changes in his editorial policy, including putting a system of peer review in place. Charlton, who teaches evolutionary psychology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, says he will do neither, and some on the editorial advisory board say they may resign in protest if he is fired.

The article is gated (despite the fact that your tax dollars largely pay for both Science and the research published in it), but I happen to have a copy. Get this:

Charlton says he is “agnostic” on the question of whether HIV causes AIDS but adds that even papers that are wrong can make interesting points that make the reader think. “If he believes that, he should have a great big health warning on every page saying, ‘This may be rubbish,’ ” says Nicoli Nattrass, an economist at the University of Cape Town who has studied the effects of AIDS denialism in her country. “This is not just some stupid academic debate. Many people in South Africa still don’t believe HIV causes AIDS because there are scientists who say so. And they are dying because of it.”

This Nicoli Nattrass, like the other AIDS totalitarians, is a harbinger of our brave new world, where only approved opinions will be published, and where those that publish unapproved ones will get the sack.

Dr. Charlton has informed me that his livelihood is not in danger, as he's a university professor and will just do more of that. He's a brave man for standing up for the rights of dissident scientists to be heard, and for the preservation of the unique voice that is, or now perhaps was, Medical Hypotheses. Elsevier has announced its intention to effectively neuter the publication by making it subject to peer review, which will ensure that nothing interesting will appear in it.

How the Israel lobby pushed the Iraq War

Stephen M. Walt says, "I don't mean to say I told you so, but...." In his post, he lays out the evidence, which he says vindicates him and his co-author Mearsheimer, that the Iraq war was largely an endeavor of neoconservatives, and actively supported by organized American Jewish groups. Israel itself was at first quite wary, having focused their own attention on Iran, which they thought the greater danger.

Blair's comments fit neatly with the argument we make about the lobby and Iraq. Specifically, Professor Mearsheimer and I made it clear in our article and especially in our book that the idea of invading Iraq originated in the United States with the neoconservatives, and not with the Israeli government. But as the neoconservative pundit Max Boot once put it, steadfast support for Israel is "a key tenet of neoconservatism." Prominent neo-conservatives occupied important positions in the Bush administration, and in the aftermath of 9/11, they played a major role in persuading Bush and Cheney to back a war against Iraq, which they had been advocating since the late 1990s. We also pointed out that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli officials were initially skeptical of this scheme, because they wanted the U.S. to focus on Iran, not Iraq. However, they became enthusiastic supporters of the idea of invading Iraq once the Bush administration made it clear to them that Iraq was just the first step in a broader campaign of "regional transformation" that would eventually include Iran.  

Of note, most American Jews were against the war, but it seems that their leaders were not.

So how did all that work out? Iraq was pretty much destroyed at a horrible cost in American lives and treasure, and now Iran is freer than ever to threaten Israel. Walt's article says that at first, neoconservatives and Jewish leaders didn't try to hide their involvement, as they thought that the war would be an astounding strategic victory. That didn't quite work out either. If we would have quit three weeks into the war, it would have been, but then, perhaps out of some kind of guilt over trashing the place, we had to embark on the utopian and never-ending project known as nation building.

Philip Weiss comments:

What’s always intrigued me about the argument that American Zionists/the lobby/American Jewish leadership had no responsibility for the war is that I grew up being told that Jews were the smartest people in the world and our ideas had changed history– Einstein, Freud, and Marx were the triumvirate my parents cited– and then the Iraq war happens, and basically it’s our ideas, or Zionist neocon ideas, and when the thing is a disaster everyone says that Bush and Cheney came up with it.

A clear case of the majority needing to reassert itself? The thing is, I recall that most Americans were all for it - having been convinced of the need, of course.

Cancer Treatment from an Evolutionary Perspective

In recent years, an approach that looks at human health and disease from an evolutionary perspective has become more common. In the area of diet, so-called paleolithic nutrition, which starts from the notion that agriculture has caused a profound shift from the metabolic environment in which man evolved, and that many of the modern diseases of civilization can be prevented or cured by returning to the ancestral diet, has had great success. Evolutionary medicine (or "Darwinian medicine" (!)), uses evolutionary theory to try to understand all aspects of health and disease. Bruce Charlton has used evolution to investigate psychiatry and the human condition.

So, a paper by Seyfried and Mukherjee, Targeting energy metabolism in brain cancer: review and hypothesis, uses evolutionary theory to understand and treat malignant brain cancer. The idea is that the genome of normal cells has been conserved, and that genome enables the organism to survive in wildly different metabolic environments. Cancer cells, however, have mutated, and in brain cancer specifically, cells depend almost exclusively on the metabolism of glucose for energy. If glucose is denied to the cancer cells, they either quit growing or die. This is effected by placing the patient on a ketogenic diet. It works like this:

Based on the differences in energy metabolism between normal brain cells and brain tumor cells, we propose a radically different approach to brain cancer management that combines metabolic control analysis with the evolutionarily conserved capacity of normal cells to survive extreme shifts in physiological environment. The adaptation to environmental extremes is conserved within the genome according to the ecological instability theory of Potts [96]. Consequently, only those cells with a flexible genome will be capable of surviving abrupt changes in metabolic landscape. Cells with genomic defects, which would limit flexibility, should be less adaptable to metabolic stress and therefore vulnerable to elimination through principles of metabolic control analysis. This strategy focuses more on the genetic capabilities of normal cells than on the genetic defects of tumor cells.

How effective is this?

This [that the diet has been shown to be quite effective but this information has been little heeded] is unfortunate as our recent findings in brain tumor animal models show that the therapeutic potential of the restricted KD [ketogenic diet], involving reduced glucose and elevated β-OHB, is likely to be greater than that for any current brain tumor chemotherapy [20]. Moreover, the KD would eliminate or reduce the need for adjuvant anticonvulsant and steroidal medications for brain tumor patients as the KD has antiepileptic and anticonvulsant effects and, when restricted in caloric intake, will naturally elevate circulating glucocorticoid levels [15,77-80]. These findings suggest that the KD would be an effective multifactorial diet therapy for malignant brain cancer and should be considered as an alternative therapeutic option. [emphasis mine]

Unfortunately, as Seyfried and Mukherjee write, few people are paying attention.

Economic Downturns Kill Male Fetuses

A new paper is called Selection in utero: A biological response to mass layoffs. I haven't seen the full paper, but a newspaper article describes it, saying:

To be precise, a research team from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health calculated the number of frail male fetuses that were spontaneously aborted by mothers facing economic insecurity. Looking solely at the state of California between April 1995 and December 2007, they estimate the number is just over 3,000. [...]

Specifically, their research supports the argument that when women receive signals that times are tough, their bodies retain the tendency, shaped over thousands of years through natural selection, to reject offspring less likely to survive.[...]

Such threats are bad news to small male fetuses because “a relatively large fraction” of them fall near “a critical rank below which gestations spontaneously end,” the researchers explain. If they are born, these small males are more likely to die than larger infants and females of equivalent size.

If layoffs in California killed 3000 male fetuses during the period of economic prosperity ending in 2007, imagine how many have been spontaneously aborted since then, and how many will be in the years to come. Many multiples, one would think. Extrapolate that to the entire country, and it would appear that sex ratios in the coming years will be skewed from normal, perhaps significantly.

Not only are economic downturns sexist, they're racist too. The U.S. Census recently estimated that nearly half of the children in the U.S. under the age of five are minorities. Since almost all of them were presumably born here, it would seem that births to minorities make up nearly half of total births, and therefore nearly half of the spontaneous abortions due to the economic downturn will be minority male babies. That's disparate impact.

It's been speculated in the Roissysphere and the HBDsphere that one reason Russian women, on the whole and of this generation anyway, are so beautiful might be due to the devastation of WW2, in which tens of millions of Russian men were killed. The remaining men then had their pick of the most beautiful women, leading to the next generation of more beautiful women. Who knows whether this really happened, but in theory it ought to work, so maybe something similar, on a smaller scale, will occur here. Another idea from the Roissysphere is that sex relations are malleable and have changed dramatically over the past generation or so due to economic and social changes, notably women entering the work force, birth control, and divorce law. So if the sex ratio changes in the coming years, that will bring about its own changes, such as a tendency to polygamy, maybe even a turn toward more traditional morality as women find it harder to obtain an alpha and become more willing to settle for a beta.

This sort of thing is another nail in the coffin for the notion that evolution stopped 10,000 years or more ago. Culture affects evolution, and economic depressions could have a large impact on the genetic makeup of the population. Whatever inborn characteristics are common to men and women that make them more susceptible to losing their jobs ought to become less common in the coming generations.

(Links via the interesting blog Planet Grok.

Hacking Evolution

A recent paper, Dietary amelioration of locomotor, neurotransmitter and mitochondrial aging, showed that giving mice a "complex dietary supplement" had favorable effects on aging. An earlier paper by the same group showed that a complex dietary supplement extends longevity in mice. The supplement's ingredients (here) include a number of items either not found in nature or in amounts not likely to be found; these include aspirin, green tea extract, n-acetylcysteine, and so on.

Nearly 20 years ago, it was found that dietary methionine restriction extends lifespan in rats, and this work has continued up to today, where it's something of a hot topic, and has been shown to be an important factor in the means by which calorie restriction extends lifespan.

Examples could be multiplied. These studies that show that dietary manipulations extend lifespan or inhibit aging lead to an interesting question: has evolution optimized the biological process, or can simple interventions like the ones above improve on evolution? For instance, if aspirin has a favorable effect on longevity, why hasn't nature discovered this already? Does aspirin extend life beyond what is "normal", or does it merely provide an optimum biochemical environment for longevity?

While man has learned to intervene in biological processes through medicine, I would say that the situation represented by these dietary interventions is different. An antibiotic, for example, intervenes in a war between two biological entities, a human being and a bacteria. Cancer surgery intervenes in a contest between a tumor and a human. But the interventions above intervene in normal processes. If that is the case, why hasn't evolution already figured this out, and devised its own solutions?

It might be said that these interventions are not optimal; for instance, calorie restriction is usually accompanied by a decrease in fecundity. But a recent paper in Nature (full text in pdf) has shown that, by manipulating dietary amino acids in the fruit fly, both extended lifespan and normal fecundity can be achieved. Again, why hasn't evolution figured this out already?

Maybe the process of evolution has not had time or opportunity to run through the myriads of permutations of organisms interacting with their environments that, by chance, might lead to optimum longevity. Instead, man's brain is able to hack the evolutionary process and discover the optimum on its own.

Science Nobels by Population

The table above shows the number of Nobel Prizes in science per 10 million people, from the blog Super-Economy of Tino Sanandaji. (HT: r/h/e notes.) For commentary, head over to Tino's blog as I can't think of anything to say at the moment.

See also The Top Ten Countries in Science and Kanazawa: Asians Can't Do Science.

Inverse Loyalty Pyramid

• Citizen of the world
• Employer
• Community
• Nation
• Race
• Family

The inverse gold pyramid shows how those with money react during bad economic times, and which asset classes they flee to in times of increasing risk. During economic expansion, money flows up the pyramid to assets of increasing risk, and in economic contraction, money flows down the pyramid, to the extreme case of gold.

To the right of the pyramid above is a list of putative loyalties. In times of political and economic stability, loyalties flow upward. That is, when times are good, people feel that they can leave their family, race, nation, etc., "behind", secure in the knowledge that both the family, etc., and themselves are secure on their own. But when times are bad, loyalties flow down the pyramid. Home (family) is where they have to let you in.

One could apply this scheme to nations as a whole. In countries where insecurity, poverty, and instability reign, family assumes great importance. The Western world has historically had the highest levels of wealth and stability, hence the highest levels of trust, and the people of the West have had the greatest propensity to move up the inverse pyramid of loyalties.

Neither the list of loyalties nor the concept are meant as definitive; this popped into my head in thinking about gold and economic stability, and it occurred to me that something similar could be said about mankind and its social structures as a whole.

Another AIDS Paper Permanently Deleted

A paper was published by Medical Hypotheses around the same time as the Duesberg paper came under fire by censors as well. The paper, by Marco Ruggiero, M.D., et al., is titled "AIDS Denialism at the Ministry of Health", and looks at official Italian government statistics and concludes that the Italian Ministry of Health may be convinced that HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS. The abstract:

We investigated epidemiological evidences regarding HIV infection and AIDS spread in Italy resorting only to official data published by the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) and by the Italian Ministry of Health (Ministero del Lavoro, della Salute e delle Politiche Sociali). Based on the data and documents provided for by the Italian Health Authorities, we came to the conclusion (hypothesis) that the Italian Ministry of Health appears to be convinced that HIV is not the (sole) cause of AIDS. Consistent with this hypothesis, according to the Ministry, AIDS can be diagnosed in the absence of signs of HIV infection; there is legal prohibition to communicate new HIV infections to referring physicians and Health Authorities as if HIV spread were not a threat to public health; consistent with the previous point, no national registry of HIV infection is implemented; and AIDS is not classified among relevant infective diseases nor among infective diseases that are susceptible of control interventions; one fourth of paediatric AIDS cases is not imputable to mother-son transmission.

Of note, the paper takes no position on HIV causation of AIDS, merely asserting that it looks as if some in the Italian government are HIV skeptics. However, the censors of science decided that it too must go. Following the complaints made to Elsevier about the paper, made at the same time as those about the paper of Duesberg et al., the publisher withdrew the article and sent it out for another rubber-stamp review at The Lancet - which looks like a conflict of interest there, as that journal is also published by Elsevier.

1 March 2010

Dear Dr Ruggiero and Dr Pacini,

I am writing regarding your article: ‘Aids denialism at the ministry of health’, which was withdrawn as a Medical Hypotheses Article-in-Press in August 2009.

As you know, following the recommendations of the external expert panel, the article was sent out for independent peer review, under the management of the Lancet editorial team. The article was sent to five external reviewers; the reviewers’ reports are also being sent to you along with this letter.

In light of the unanimous ‘reject’ recommendations by the reviewers, the Panel has recommended to Elsevier that your article should be permanently withdrawn. We are following this recommendation, and will adjust our withdrawal notice to read as follows:

“This Article-in-Press has been permanently withdrawn. [etc., same wording as for the Duesberg paper]

I do apologise that this process has taken so long to reach a conclusion.

With kind regards.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Lloyd
VP Health Sciences Journals
Elsevier

Alternative Right

Richard Spencer, formerly of Taki's magazine, has launched Alternative Right - "An Online Magazine of Radical Traditionalism". I have high hopes for this site, which represents one answer to the question which we conservatives have asked ourselves here over the past year or so: what is it exactly that we want to conserve? Alternative Right may show us a way to be right, without wishing to defend or conserve most of our rotting power structure and our stupid mainstream conservative leadership. See Richard Hoste's Why an Alternative Right Is Necessary for an elaboration of this theme. Dick Cheney as "Conservative of the Year", as Richard shows, exemplifies why today's mainstream conservatism does not represent us. Eight years of republican leadership in the White House has brought us nothing but invasion, immigration, and insolvency, and the current Democratic leadership appears to be just as conservative as Bush and Cheney.

Here's wishing Alternative Right great success.

We want to study easy stuff, and we want you to pay for it

Clash near UC-Berkeley comes ahead of 'Day of Action' over budget cuts:

BERKELEY — Yet another student protest turned violent at UC-Berkeley late Thursday and into Friday morning, when more than 200 people spilled out of a dance party on campus and trashed university buildings and smashed windows along Telegraph Avenue.

Forty-five officers from several law enforcement agencies responded, including the Berkeley and Oakland police, and the California Highway Patrol, officials said. At least two people — current and former students — were arrested.

Now there is much concern that Berkeley's on-campus violence could be a harbinger of far more damage next Thursday, when demonstrations against education budget cuts will take place all over the state.

I took a look at the major fields of study at Berkeley and how many students were to be found in each one. This document (pdf) gives the number of degrees awarded in the year up to June, 2009, by discipline. Social sciences was the largest category, with 20.8% of degrees awarded. Other notable fields include English, at 5.7%; psychology at 4.8%; area and ethnic studies at 3.4%; visual and performing arts at 3.3%; and communications/communications technologies at 2.4%.

Meanwhile, biological/life sciences came in at 13.8%; engineering at 11.4%; and physical sciences at 3.3%.

Why is the state of California supporting all those social science and ethnic studies majors? Granted, some sociologists may be necessary - though I can't really think of a good reason - and Berkeley is an elite institution, so if any university in California is going to educate people in social science, that may be the place. But the situation is duplicated all over the state, and I rather doubt that California needs to produce more than a half dozen sociologists a year. The University of California system has 10 campuses.

The Cal State system, the second tier of state universities, has 23 campuses and 450,000 students. Degrees conferred in 2007-08 at Cal State included 11.6% social science, along with a host of other semi-bogus majors, including "communications" (I guess that means journalism, to include how to read news in front of a TV camera), "interdisciplinary studies", public affairs and services, education, etc. Engineering stood at 5.3%, and the natural sciences were so low-ranked that they didn't even get a separate listing, presumably appearing under "all other disciplines".

Conclusion: start cutting. Just make sure the right departments get cut - though I have no faith that that would happen.