Links

The G-20 summit in Toronto cost $1.1 billion. No worries, they can just print money to cover the bill.

Whites and Asians are being cheated out of medical school slots in favor of blacks and Hispanics. Grossly cheated. Also, you might want to think twice before trusting your life to a recently graduated black doctor.

Credit Where It's Due Department: 850 Orthodox rabbis agree: Elena Kagan will hasten "society's already steep decline into Sodom and Gommorah."

British towns where one worker in two is a foreigner. Quote: "And last night, immigration minister Damian Green said: ‘This shows why we need a limit on work visas as well as a better trained British workforce.

'British workers need to be able to benefit and take the jobs available.’"

Mr. Green, that particular horse is long gone from the barn. Now that the British have effectively been displaced, you want to limit work visas?

Jew Among You: Interesting blog of a self-described race-realist, Zionist, Jewish white nationalist.

WASPs' Triumphant Decline?

Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the NY Times, makes his case that the new lack of a single Protestant on the Supreme Court in reality represents the triumph of WASP values.

It is cause for celebration that no one much cares about the nominee’s religion. We are fortunate to have left behind the days when there was a so-called “Catholic seat” on the court, or when prominent Jews (including the publisher of this newspaper) urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 not to nominate Felix Frankfurter because they worried that having “too many” Jews on the court might fuel anti-Semitism.

But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

You can bet that if every Supreme Court justice was some type of Christian, many people would care very much about the nominee's religion. But Feldman's thesis, namely that WASPs have been true to their values of meritocracy and inclusion, and thus paved the way for the current situation, while of some small merit, conceals the larger reality.

No one much cares about the nominee's religion because no one among the elite much cares about religion. On the other hand, the Protestant elite has either ceased to care or been made to feel guilt about its ethnicity, for which "Protestant" is shorthand, while Jews have very much not ceased to care, and do not feel guilt. White guilt arises from feeling ethnic solidarity; Jewish guilt arises from not feeling enough ethnic solidarity. That's why this "decline" is a "triumph" - for some people. I doubt that Feldman and those like him are very much concerned with their relations with God; for them, "religion" means their people.

From modest, quotidian institutions like Prospect Park, to the highest and most significant like the Supreme Court, white Christians, especially the founding stock of Protestants, are being displaced. The ruling class, as exemplified in this case by Feldman, are at some pains to reassure those of us being displaced that it's for our own good, and to reassure themselves of their noble motives, a sort of window-dressing for the soul.

Feldman praise for WASPs consists essentially in their willingness to step aside. He must be snickering to himself, for in this willingness they have been foolish. It's time that they - we - realize how foolish we've been, and time to understand that arguments like Feldman's are just special pleading disguised as objective analysis.

Let me just add, for those of you who believe I've been harping on this topic too much lately, what exactly is one supposed to make of a Jewish member of one of the nation's elite institutions telling white Christians, in the pages of the New York Times, that their ever decreasing voice in running the country and the ever increasing voice of his co-ethnics is for everyone's good? If the shoe was on the other foot, one rather doubts he'd be so sanguine.

Guest Post: Stranger in a Strange Land

The other day I was complaining to a friend about my sense of alienation from just about everyone around me. I've long since lost religion - that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die - so that consolation is out, but more important for our purposes, the nation I live in doesn't seem any longer my own. As for the poet, working all day and getting half-drunk at night doesn't really work. My friend, who lives in New York, replied with the following, reprinted with permission.

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Late this afternoon I went for a 3-mile walk around Prospect Park. It was a horrible, hot, humid day, with not a breath of wind, and the park was like a teeming Third World country. The first thing I saw as I entered was a huge gathering of "Arab-Americans" (I know that's what they were, because they had a big sign up) who had staked out an area for a barbecue. Fat men smoking hookahs, and fat women in headscarves, with boom-boxes blaring Mideastern disco music. Beyond that was the usual throng of blacks and Hispanics barbecuing away, with hip-hop and salsa music competing to drown each other out. The trash cans were overflowing, and garbage was strewn everywhere. The air was thick with greasy smoke. It was nauseating.

After a mile or so I came to the Peristyle, an elegant classical structure placed at the southeastern edge of the park by the park's designer, the great Frederick Law Olmstead. Here's a picture:

As I walked by today it was inundated by a crowd of Haitian and other Caribbean immigrants, also barbecuing (inside the building, mind you, blackening it with soot), blaring music, and strewing trash. It put me in mind of the Sack of Rome. This gracious, rambling park is one of the greatest masterpieces of 19th-century landscape architecture, and its designers had in mind that it would be enjoyed by civilized people. This is like using a Kandinsky watercolor as a place-mat at Bob's Big Boy.

Throughout, I heard almost nobody speaking English. I felt like an alien in my own country.

Can't wait for winter, when we Ice People get the park back. I love New York, but it is getting harder and harder for me to feel that I want to live here any more, or that I even belong. It's horrible. I hate it, and I resent it.

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Addendum: After I posted this, my friend, whom in comments I characterized as until recently a mildly conservative type but who's become more reactionary, wrote:

"Reading that at your site, even I can't help thinking that your friend must be a real racist asshole...

The area around the park is certainly no whiter than it used to be. Brownstone Brooklyn used to be old-school Catholic (Irish, Italian), and Jewish; now it's just white yuppies.

Whoever wrote that first comment should have been in the park yesterday. It's not just the vibrant Diversity; it's the coarseness, the blaring noise, the bling, the sagging pants, the tattoos, the vulgarity, the trash and decay, the ugliness, the sense of civilization falling apart.

I wish I hadn't written that "I hate it, and I resent it". That word "hate" really jumps off the page. And of course I don't bear any ill will toward the people in the park themselves. They are just human beings, going where the opportunities are. If I were one of them I'd have wanted to get out of my sweltering shithole of a country and come here too, and they can't help being what they are. I just wish the USA hadn't gone out of its way to create this disaster."

I replied to him that writing "I hate it" isn't at all bad, that he (and I) have every right to hate it, and that things will not begin to change significantly until we and a lot of others begin to "hate it" a whole lot.

Decline and Fall of the Roman, American, and British Empires

The first chart shows how governments stole money from the people before the invention of paper or electronic money, while the second chart shows the new modern way of theft by government since 1913, the date of the creation of the Federal Reserve.

For comparison, here's the decline of the pound sterling in dollars since 1900. Since the dollar itself has declined over 97% in purchasing power - the dollar chart above only goes to 2001 - and the pound has declined about 70% in terms of dollars, according to my calculations that means that one pound sterling today is worth about 4.5 cents in 1913 U.S. money, compared to about $5 in 1913, for a decline of 99.1%.

I expect the U.S dollar to lose another 97% of its current purchasing power, only this time it will take far less than 97 years - more like 10 to 20 years.

Meanwhile, China accumulates gold while Americans waste away watching reality TV.

Anyone unprepared for the next few years will see their wealth confiscated through devaluation.

For anther comparison, here's the price of gold since 1900 in dollars. The comparison isn't exact, since the price of gold was fixed at $20.50/oz. until 1933, when it was revalued to $35 and made illegal for Americans to own. Since 1971, the gold price has risen nearly 36-fold.

Israel Doesn't Want Friends Like Geert Wilders

Miriam Shaviv, who is foreign editor of the Jewish Chronicle in Britain, hence I assume someone of some influence or representativeness, firmly rejects the pro-Israel stance of Geert Wilders and others: Israel Doesn't Need Friends Like Geert Wilders and the English Defence League.

Israel needs friends in Europe, but there are some friends that it could do without.

In June, the English Defence League, a thuggish anti-Muslim group known for its raucous (and sometimes violent) street protests, launched a Jewish division, attracting at least a handful of Jews among the 500 fans on its “Jewish Division” Facebook page. The EDL had previously brandished Israeli flags at demonstrations to taunt its Muslim opponents, and even announced its intent to join a pro-Israel rally organized by Britain’s Zionist Federation following the recent Gaza flotilla crisis. (The rally’s organizers distanced themselves from the EDL, which has been condemned by mainstream Jewish communal groups; ultimately, EDL members weren’t much in evidence at the rally.)

While the EDL may be a fringe group, its embrace of Israel activism is part of a growing trend. Over the past few years, a string of politicians and factions on Europe’s far right, particularly those with anti-Muslim agendas, have taken to expressing strong support for the Jewish state.

The most prominent example is Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who led his Freedom Party to stunning success in Holland’s recent national elections, more than doubling its number of seats to become the third-largest party in parliament.
While Holland’s mainstream parties talked about the economy, Wilders campaigned on an explicitly anti-Islam platform. He has called for a ban on the Quran (which he calls a “fascist book”), an immediate end to Muslim immigration to Holland and a special tax on women who wear headscarves. [...]

Granted, there are distinctions that can be drawn regarding motives. Wilders’s affection for Israel seems to be sincere. As a teen he worked for two years on a moshav, and he claims to have visited Israel 40 times since.

At the end of the day, however, for Israel and its supporters, these are distinctions that shouldn’t make much of a difference. Israel is currently battling systematic attempts to delegitimize it. A favored tactic of its opponents is to paint Israel as a racist, apartheid country that discriminates against its Arab citizens and Palestinian neighbors. Israel simply cannot afford to be linked to real bigots, no matter how friendly they appear to be.

So, for all of Wilders' posturing about "litmus tests", changing Jordan's name to Palestine, and his impeccable liberal - other than towards Muslims - credentials, all his Israel-love remains unrequited. Even Shaviv seems persuaded that the real reason Wilders, the EDL, and others embrace Israel is to avoid the charge of fascism and racism; she's having none of it, as she really believes that these people are fascists and racists. Gentiles are only supposed to support Israel; if they also support nationalism for their own countries, they've ceased to be even useful idiots.

Last year Shaviv wrote a similar article on Nick Griffin and the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, openly calling the BNP "racist" and revealing one reason many Jews dislike Kaminski:

Kaminski, who leads an important rightist bloc, has been disliked in Jewish circles since he declared in 2001 that the Poles should not apologise for the massacre of Jews by Polish residents of Jedwabne in 1941, unless "the whole Jewish nation [apologises] for what some Jewish Communists did in eastern Poland". There were also concerns that he had worn the Chrobry Sword, a symbol of the Catholic ultra-right in Poland and that he still maintained these unsavory connections.

Shaviv's (barely) unstated assumption is that support for Israel is fine, but it must be accompanied by white/Euro self-loathing and at least indifference to the dissolution of one's own nation. Otherwise you're a loathsome fascist.

In my opinion Geert Wilders is a tool. With a reputation as "a flamboyant philosemite" and after having visited Israel some 40 times (sic), he is treated as a pariah by both Jews and by respectable public opinion in Europe, one reason for the latter being the former. Wilders supports gay marriage and all the other usual liberal suicide memes, but he's made an unprincipled exception for Muslims, which has been enough to garner the support of some supposed conservatives.

Civilizational Capabilities in Decline

Bruce Charlton believes that human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined, basing his argument on manned spaceflight to the moon.

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer *wanted* to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we *cannot* do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to. [...]

But since the 1970s there has been a decline in the quality of people in the key jobs in NASA, and elsewhere – because organizations no longer seek to find and use the best people as their ideal but instead try to be ‘diverse’ in various ways (age, sex, race, nationality etc).

In a second post, Charlton asserts that the moonshot is a valid measure of our capabilities because it was a goal imposed by politicians, not a "retrospectively designated problem" of modern R&D.

I'd say that the analogy to an 80-year-old professional cyclist doesn't quite work. The cyclist is simply incapable of competing no matter how much he wills it or trains for it. The U.S. on the other hand has willed itself not to return to the moon, because it would rather do other things with the money and available talent. But, if it willed another moonshot, with all that that entails, including setting aside issues of diversity, affirmative action, lawsuits, environmental protection, bureaucracy, spending money on social programs or the military, then it's hard to see why it couldn't be done.

But we don't will to do so, so in that sense we might as well have lost the capability for a manned flight to the moon.

A similar situation may well exist respecting our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of which it's been often remarked that we spent far less time defeating Japan. The difference of course that we willed the utter destruction of Japan if need be, whereas we do not with Iraq and Afghanistan. When the Iraq war began, the commentariat filled the ether with self-congratulatory opinion on how this was going to be a walkover, and in fact the first month or two of the war indeed were.

The problem we do not know how to solve is that of bringing peace and democracy to peoples not ready for them. The British Empire solved the problem - of peace but not democracy - rather easily, by imposing the rule of law through strength, and consequently promoting a prosperity that made the native inhabitants more or less satisfied with British rule. But apparently we Americans no longer have that capability, if in fact we ever did.

Summer Officially Arrives

Mexican Drug Cartels Control Part of Arizona, and your government not only turns a blind eye, but attacks the State of Arizona.

Intelligence positively correlates with openness to novel experience, but what is a novel experience? Something that has always perplexed me is the average person's immense lack of curiosity. Apparently the average person's intelligence has something to do with it.

Obama and the War Against Israel. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, writing in National Review, cite Joe Biden's deliberately late arrival at a dinner party in Jerusalem as one of their main pieces of evidence that the current administration is at war with Israel.

Paul Gottfried on WASPs (via Richard Hoste):

Certainly many other groups have been more oppressive than American WASPs. Human history is full of them. But no other group, except for their pathological German cousins, seems to enjoy quite as much as WASPs the ecstasy of wallowing in guilt. And no other group seems quite as easily swayed to engage in moral crusades, perhaps to atone for their past sins as racists, sexists, or whatever. Unfortunately these crusades show our WASP population at their worst, trying to save the rest of the world with confected “human rights” after laying waste to their countries. If there’s anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American democracy. But for some reason my Republican WASP neighbors think such devastation is alright and may be redemptive for its victims. After all, blowing up non-democrats is not reprehensible in the same way as refusing to let other ethnicities into WASP country clubs or being against affirmative action for Australoid transvestites.

That animal is savage; when attacked, he defends himself. (I searched for this quote, which I believe is in French in the original, but G--gle doesn't have it. If anyone knows its origin, please let me know.) For those of you deluded enough to think that my writing about Auster recently is some sort of gratuitous personal attack, I recommend Pat Hannagan's comment. Quote: "This is an extraordinarily personal attack (even by Auster's regular standards) that goes to the very substance of Mangan's moral worth." But read the rest.

Imperial County, California: Unemployment Epicenter

The Wall Street Journal reports that California's Imperial County has the nation's highest unemployment rate.

Cities here in Imperial County, a vast swath of desert wedged against the borders of Arizona and Mexico, are stuck in a deep malaise. A few years ago, California's housing boom promised to transform the largely agricultural region. But now, the county's unemployment rate is 28%, making Imperial the metropolitan area with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Food banks are overwhelmed. Families splinter as members leave to find work in San Diego or Los Angeles, more than 100 miles away.

"It's just bad and doesn't seem to be getting better," said Guadelupe L. Ponce, a community-services director for Campesinos Unidos, a social-services agency in Brawley, a farm town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border. "Sometimes I have sleepless nights thinking about it."

The Census Bureau reports the following statistics for Imperial County, which is located in California's southeast corner, bordering San Diego and Riverside counties, Arizona, and Mexico.

Population, percent change, April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2009: 17.2%

Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2008: 76.8%

Foreign born persons, percent, 2000: 32.2%

The WSJ indicates that until the housing bubble, the region was chronically depressed, but once the free money started flowing in, it boomed. Now that lending standards have tightened and the world has gone into the diversity depression, Imperial is headed back to its normal state, that of being an outpost of Mexico.

Immigration: how's that working out for us?

Reverse Colonization

Frank Salter wrote a couple of sentences in his recent article on the malice and imprudence behind open borders that I believe can explain much of modern times.

No one likes to be ruled over by a different ethnic group or to see his own people worse off than others. The result is resentment or contempt, depending on the perspective taken.

One of the most salient features of the post-war world has been the decline of white hegemony over much of the world and the corresponding rise in the importance of the Third World. The anti-colonialist upheaval which saw the end of the British Empire (as well as the French, such as it was) was driven by the sentiment behind Salter's two sentences quoted above. When the anti-colonialist ball got rolling, public sentiment lined up with Third World aspirations, agreeing that major ethnic groups were entitled to self-rule. The unstated assumption behind the agreement was that it was wrong for one ethnic group to rule over another, wrong even for one ethnic group to live in another's territory - see Rhodesia.

All that has been forgotten now that whites in the US, Europe, and Australia are on the receiving end, yet the sentiment that Salter expresses is still very much operative. Indigenous whites are beginning to understand that they are being colonized, and they are beginning to resent it. In this case, those promoting colonization of their countries are their own elites, who are using the unlimited supply of Third World peoples to promote their global vision. Stubborn whites stand in the way.

Ethnic resentment isn't going away anytime soon, and the reverse colonization taking place in the West is a prelude to, in order of increasing severity, civil unrest, dictatorship, or disaster.

Salter on Open Borders

Frank Salter, the author of among other books On Genetic Interests, has written an excellent piece on The Misguided Advocates of Open Borders. Much of his discussion centers around the ethnic interests of a people and why they are perfectly rational to want their own nation, in which they form a clear majority. (I touched on this theme in The Proposition Nation Is No Nation.) Salter:

Prof. Bagaric writes off the nation as essentially racist. Mr. Berg thinks that “[t]here’s really nothing that special about national borders or the nation itself.” This is a strong claim but it becomes clear that Mr. Berg thinks that a nation is a state, failing to make an elementary and important distinction.[xvii] A nation is at its core an ethnic group living in its homeland, with shared elements of culture and means of communication. A nation can exist without its own state, an example being the Kurds. And most states are not limited to one nation’s territory. All nation states are built around a founding ethnic core.[xviii] However even without this distinction Mr. Berg is wise to state that: “A nation is the most convenient mechanism by which the institutions of liberty can be delivered.” (p. 4) True enough, but is that not a good reason for libertarians and all who treasure civil rights to defend national integrity?

The intellectual void surrounding the concept of the nation becomes most apparent when Mr. Berg wonders why an otherwise consistent libertarian, Murray Rothbard, thought that culture is worth defending by restricting immigration (p. 6). He quotes Rothbard’s reason thus: “[A]s the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples.” Not a bad reason. It could be supported by other examples of regimes that have used the demographic weapon, such as China in Tibet or Indonesia in West Irian. The extraordinary thing is that Mr. Berg offers no comment after quoting Rothbard. It is as if the concepts being used, “ethnic” and “destroy the culture and languages” failed to register. But they are real. Australian policy makers should bear in mind that ethnic nationalism is still a powerful force that tears countries and empires apart and creates new nations. Recent examples are the dismemberment of the Soviet and Yugoslavian empires in the 1990s. When people are allowed to choose they vote for policies that make or keep them as the ethnic majority. The result is that spreading democracy creates relatively homogeneous small states with heightened social capital and its flip side of social stability, efficient government, low corruption, more democracy, and higher economic growth.[xix] Why would a libertarian want open borders? Why would anyone want to become a minority in his own country?

By the way, one can add to Rothbard’s excellent reason for defending the cultural integrity of nations. All the benefits of relative homogeneity (and thus of assimilation and prudent immigration) documented above belong to nations, not to multi-ethnic states. One can also extend Rothbard’s reasoning. The Soviets attempted to Russify Estonia and Latvia as a means of controlling those territories. They assumed that the ethnic-Russian minorities would maintain their identity distinct from that of the target nations. As these national communities shrank in relative size they were meant to become just another competing ethnic group, national unity would be replaced by a multi-ethnic state, and the capacity of the original Estonian and Latvian nations to strategise on their own behalves would be diminished. This is what Rothbard was getting at. And who would put it past the Soviets to have reckoned that if demographic transformation could be continued long enough, the original nation would die. Another might arise in its place but that would take a long time and would not replace what was lost to the original nation. [My emphases.]

Most of Salter's line of reasoning, while put into an impeccable intellectual framework, will be familiar to those of us on this side of the immigration battle. Nevertheless, that such simple and vital home truths need to be enunciated, and the open borders advocates routed, speaks volumes for the idiotic level of public discourse surrounding this topic, which has of course occurred because those who control the conversation ensure that it remains idiotic.

As Salter writes, the effect of mass immigration of culturally incompatible people is ultimately nation-destroying. So, to the extent that those who control the discourse know exactly what they're doing, they're certainly not idiots. In fact, they're quite clever.

The Idea of Europe

I recently began rereading Peter Watson's Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud. In his introduction, Watson mentions the curious fact that many thinkers who have surveyed all of history have used tripartite schemes with which to subsume world history. The following are a few examples of ideas or transitions that important thinkers have thought crucial to history.

Isaiah Berlin: individualism, Machiavelli and differentiation between personal and political ethics, romanticism.

Crane Brinton: humanism, Protestantism, and rationalism most important for the making of modernity.

Giambattista Vico: history divided into age of the gods, heroic age, and human age.

Thomas Carlyle: "the three greatest elements of modern civilisation are gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion."

There are more, but you get the idea. Watson himself decided that the three most important ideas in terms of impact on history were "the soul, Europe, and the experiment".

Note that all three of these can be seen as products of Western civilization. The notion of the soul as had its expressions in other cultures, but the concept as we know it originated in Hellenism. Europe is, well, Europe, and the experiment is both a cause and effect of the scientific revolution, a product of the West.

If the idea of Europe is truly one of the most important ideas ever - and space doesn't permit an exploration of its truth or falsehood - then has there ever been a deliberate attempt, until now, to abolish the results of one of mankind's greatest advances?

Europe as an idea virtually took over the world. Even Chinese leaders wear suits and ties, all over the world people want to learn English, and classical (i.e. Western) music is admired by the discerning of every nation. Yet now the leaders of the West want to deliberately abolish the idea of Europe, by allowing and encouraging mass immigration of non-Westerners and perhaps more importantly by delegitimizing the importance and natural rights of the people who invented the idea of Europe. It must be unprecedented in history.

Tone-Deaf "White Nationalism"

A piece by Greg Johnson on building a white movement begins:

White Nationalism is at present confined largely to the political right, i.e., the people who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad.

At the least, Mr. Johnson is amazingly tone-deaf, at most a Nazi sympathizer. While I'm inclined to think - or want to think - that it's the former, in either case a sentence like that makes me want to run in the opposite direction.

There is simply no sense in which the "the political right" to which I and presumably just about every reader of this blog belong, has been "on a losing streak since Stalingrad". A statement of that kind does more to fill the coffers of the $PLC and the ADL than just about anything.

Many white advocates, Pat Buchanan among them, identify the aftermath of World War II as the beginning of the reign of liberalism and multiculturalism, and of the start of the West losing faith in itself. If perhaps that sort of idea is what Greg Johnson has in mind, I wish he'd say so and leave Stalingrad out of it. As it is, it just brings the term "white nationalism" into further disrepute and certainly doesn't make me want to have anything to do with it.

Assorted

An idea a day: Bruce Charlton is blogging again, now that the Medical Hypotheses affair is over.

St. Nicholas: Addendum to a discussion on Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas at Israeli Water Engineer: the late emperor was canonized a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church. Not too difficult to look saintly compared to his successors, one imagines.

Los Angeles Opera performs the complete Ring Cycle this month, and my brother Tim has got complete coverage. Tim also test drove Southern California's most storied martini, at the famed Musso and Frank's, so you can try it before, after, or maybe even during the Ring Cycle. Götterdämmerung will never look so good.

Gold hits new all-time high price, and Marc Faber's "Must Watch 2010 Presentation". I haven't watched it yet, but I've got a good idea what he's going to say, and it won't be optimistic. Talk about Götterdämmerung, it looks like we're going to get a dose of it. Make my martini a double.

Faithful Remnant

Steve Burton liked the video of the purse thieves enough to repost it, and remarked, "Hat-tip to Dennis Mangan, (who's always right about everything.)" My thanks to Mr. Burton. However, several commentators there beg to differ on his assessment.

I read Mangan frequently but he will often write stuff like this and I'm reminded that there are conservatives out there who stand in the way of Western survival...

You're right Andrew. With posts like that I wonder why he keeps talking.

I hate to pile on, but Larry Auster rightly calls out Mangan in this post:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/016636.html
making him seem like a distasteful character at the very least.
But, I generally favor a big tent approach to my conservatism, so your strong endorsement gives me pause w/r/t totally ignoring him.

Well, gee, I didn't realize how unpopular I was in certain quarters.

It appears that anyone who doesn't share their views down to the jot and tittle is not only to be disagreed with, but read out of decent society, because he "stands in the way of Western survival" and is "a distasteful character at the very least". Before too long, they'll subtract enough people from their group that they'll get down to a half dozen or so, then the conservative movement will be ready to roll. Storm Washington and all.

While I realize that tolerance is overrated, any sort of party or coalition requires at least a small dose of it. You don't see me reading people out of conservatism. (Not that I have the power to do so.) That's the job for Auster and these fine folks, who would rather think themselves right than win.

Why Men Die Younger but Reproduce Longer

Here's another very interesting paper by Mikhail Blagosklonny, Why men age faster but reproduce longer than women: mTOR and evolutionary perspectives.

If we take into account that aging is a quasi-program, the flip side of growth and development, it follows that an organism that matures faster also ages faster. Since in evolutionary terms, men have died from violence and accidents at a young age at much greater rates than women, those men that have survived have been more likely to be those that matured faster, i.e. they were more robust, hence they also aged faster after survival. Fast maturation, along with the fast aging that accompanies it, have been selected for in men.

There is a very noticeable jump of mortality in the late teens in men [1]. Young men are often engaged in competitive, reckless, and dangerous activities. Therefore, even in modern society, the accidental death rate is high in young men. Historically, the accidental death rate in men was much higher than it is now. (Due to a fierce competition for status and mates, due to fights and wars, young men were killed at a very high rate). So, historically, men had lower chances to survive into old age than women had. And, according to evolutionary theory, a high accidental death rate determines fast aging [3-5]. If most men died young from accidental death, then they could not live long enough to experience aging. Then there was no natural selection to postpone aging. So accelerated aging in men is predictable from evolutionary perspective. But accelerated aging is also predictable mechanistically.

The following piece of evidence is striking; it shows, or purports to show, that men who are more aggressive, presumably the alphas and getting their genes into the pool at a greater rate than the betas, also die younger from age-related diseases.

Noteworthy, "competitive, aggressive personality" among men is associated with atherosclerosis and earlier death from age-related coronary disease [80].

As for why men retain reproductive capability longer than women, Blagosklonny dismisses the "grandmother theory" of menopause and posits (in some detail) that the female reproductive system is so complex and dependent on fine tuning, that when women age it's one of the first things to go.

A Healthy Society

The video comes courtesy of Pat Hannagan and shows what I'd say is a healthy society, a key component being non-diversity. When one of your co-ethnics gets robbed - even by another co-ethnic - the defensive reactions kick in. Everyone fighting the thieves appears united in the knowledge that everyone will help out. Great use of furniture; as Pat calls it, "the office furniture of death".

I don't know which country this happened in. I'm guessing Taiwan.