Striking Fear Into the Heart of Brussels

Rise of Populist Parties Pushes Europe to the Right. Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. Are a handful of small, rightist parties in small European states about to bring the European project crashing down? One can hope.

It is ironic that it is here in Finland -- a part of Europe that always seemed eminently European -- that a movement is now coming to power that inveighs against immigrants and abortions, considers Brussels to be the "heart of darkness" and rejects all financial assistance for what it calls "wasteful countries," like Greece, Ireland and Portugal. "We were too soft on Europe," says Soini, adding that Finland should not be made to "pay for the mistakes of others."

Not ironic, say I. The country with the best and smartest students in the world ought to be able to see better than others the grim future "Europe" is preparing for itself.

The election result from Europe's far north has alarmed the political establishment in Brussels. If Soini's party becomes part of the new government, there will be more at stake than Helsinki's traditional pro-European stance. The entire program to rescue the euro could be in jeopardy, because it has to be approved unanimously by the entire European Union.

The bailout is nothing but a means to protect the big banks from taking massive haircuts. The Irish are rebelling against putting themselves in financial bondage for generations, and so should the Finns and everyone else who would be forced to pay up.

Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament for Germany's conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), warns that solidarity among European countries is waning, a situation he calls "extremely dangerous."

Nonsense, IMO. European countries will not go to war against each other, for they know the cost.

The risk is substantial, as euroskeptics gain ground across the EU. In Denmark, the xenophobic Danish People's Party has supported a center-right minority government for almost 10 years. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte is dependent on the goodwill of right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders, who, with his tirades against Islam and the EU, captured 15.5 percent of the vote in the country's last parliamentary election. In Sweden, the nationalist, anti-European Sweden Democrats crossed the 4-percent threshold to gain seats in the parliament, the Riksdag, and in Italy Umberto Bossi's xenophobic Lega Nord, or Northern League, is even part of the government. Although the party is primarily active in the north of Italy, it is the third-strongest party on the national level. [My emphases.}

There you have in a nutshell what the establishment thinks of people and parties who dare to take their own side. They're xenophobes and speak in tirades.

Marine Le Pen, daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, is in the process of putting the fear of God into the country's traditional parties. She wants to shed the image of a racist, extreme party established by her father. As a politician, she appeals to middle-class and blue-collar workers, because she is young and wears jeans, and seems less aloof than the traditional elites that dominate politics in France.

Go, Marine!

It remains to be seen what effect all this will have, but it looks like a handful of those on the right are indeed striking fear into the new Soviet Europe. History is full of twists and turns, and the situation may not be as hopeless as many of us seem to think it is.

Poverty

Writing in Foreign Policy, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo question the dictum that huge numbers of the world's poor are hungry. An interesting passage describes Jeffrey Sachs's explanation for why certain countries are poor:

Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap."

I'm sure that Professor Sachs has debated these issues endlessly, and would probably have easy retorts for anything some blogger would say, but his explanation has a bit of the just-so story to it. For instance, what about a very cold, landlocked country with very inhospitable terrain, whose inhabitants use to suffer from iodine-deficiency goiter (which can produce mental retardation)? That would be Switzerland, one of the wealthiest nations on earth. What about a formerly malaria-infested, hot, crowded, island with virtually no agricultural land, whether fertile or not? Singapore. Or the hot, landlocked, malaria- and other disease-infested nation that was known as Rhodesia? Or a nation that must import virtually all necessities, is subject to devastating earthquakes, lost millions of war dead, and had two atom bombs dropped on it?

I think we can look for the sources of poverty elsewhere. As the article in Foreign Policy makes clear, the poor often make, well, poor choices, buying television sets and cell phones instead of more and better food, for instance.

In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agriculture and about 30 days in construction that year. Otherwise, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. All three men lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find enough money to give their children a good education. But they each had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone. [...]

We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

One might think that during some of the 265 days that these men had off that year, they could scrape together some sort of sanitation for their houses.

Darwinian Double Whammy

Helmuth Nyborg, a politically incorrect scientist, has produced a remarkable paper, The decay of Western civilization: Double relaxed Darwinian Selection (pdf). The issues discussed in the paper won't come as much of a surprise to readers here. The abstract:

This article briefly describes Lynn’s view on what makes modern populations rise and fall. It then provides a demographic analysis of what happens to modern sub-fertile high-IQ Western populations when Internal Relaxation of Darwinian Selection (IRDS) combines with External Relaxation (ERDS, in the form of super-fertile low-IQ non-Western immigration) into Double Relaxation of Darwinian Selection (DRDS). The genotypic IQ decline will ruin the economic and social infrastructure needed for quality education, welfare, democracy and civilization. DRDS is currently unopposed politically, so existing fertility differentials may eventually lead to Western submission or civil resistance. [My emphasis.]

Nyborg estimates that in Denmark, ethnic Danes will be outnumbered by those of foreign origin by 2085, that this will lead to a dramatic decline in the average national IQ. The results for Denmark can be extended, says Nyborg, to all of Western Europe.

Why were early dysgenic warnings neglected and the messengers demonized? Because too many leading scientists, politicians and intellectuals (Nyborg, 2003; in press) ignored Darwinian principles and started a historically hitherto unheard of voluntary, humanistic, democratic and financed replacement policy, whereby dwindling genetically weakened (Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg, 2009) sub-fertile Western European populations will rapidly be replaced by more fertile low-IQ non-European immigrants.

The Left is the real bastion of creationism; by denying virtually all systematic human differences except superficial traits - and some even appear to deny that when they speak of the social construction of race - they leave no room for natural selection. Anyone who speaks about these things is vilified a la Watson or Summers or any number of others. Only a few academics, such as Nyborg, Lynn, Jensen, and Rushton, largely ignored by the public and deliberately ignored by the science media, discuss these things amongst themselves.

Furthermore, although we are constantly reminded of the need for smart, talented people, who strangely enough almost always seem to come from abroad, there's little recognition that a modern, industrial society is generally dependent on a certain level of average IQ, as opposed to specific industries. The message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations has not reached the public sphere and shows no sign of doing so.

Can anything be done at this point about the grim European (and American) future predicted by Nyborg? Well, as he says, this "may lead to Western submission or civil resistance"? I'll hazard a guess that the economic crisis may turn out to be the thing that turns this around. So much of Western displacement depends on money, make-work jobs, welfare. Already there are some (few) signs that Europeans are waking up, which would have remained on the slow burner absent the financial crisis.

Educational Inequity

The L.A. Times has an article, Education: The Magic of Hard Work, which tells of a young, white, female teacher who works in a school in Compton, California, and who has allegedly produced some great results, which consist of bringing some of the students up to their grade level in math proficiency. The teacher got her job through Teach for America, the program that encourages young women to work for the advancement of inner city students while foregoing having their own children during their most fertile years.

In any case, the article uses the interesting phrase "educational inequity", without defining it. But, money is spent on black and Latino students at a rate at least equal to and in some cases higher than white students. So what could "educational inequity" mean? Is it a fancy way of saying that some students from some groups don't do as well in school as others?

No, what I think it subliminally imparts is that it's somehow unfair that some students do better than others. "Inequity" means an imbalance, "unequal". And if unfairness exists, someone must be causing it.

You know who that is.

The PhD Factory

From Nature, The PhD Factory discusses the worldwide glut of science doctorates and their subsequent dismal levels of employment. (Via Steve Hsu.)

United States: Supply versus demand

To Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who studies PhD trends, it is "scandalous" that US politicians continue to speak of a PhD shortage. The United States is second only to China in awarding science doctorates — it produced an estimated 19,733 in the life sciences and physical sciences in 2009 — and production is going up. But Stephan says that no one should applaud this trend, "unless Congress wants to put money into creating jobs for these people rather than just creating supply". [...]

In 1973, 55% of US doctorates in the biological sciences secured tenure-track positions within six years of completing their PhDs, and only 2% were in a postdoc or other untenured academic position. By 2006, only 15% were in tenured positions six years after graduating, with 18% untenured (see 'What shall we do about all the PhDs?'). Figures suggest that more doctorates are taking jobs that do not require a PhD. "It's a waste of resources," says Stephan. "We're spending a lot of money training these students and then they go out and get jobs that they're not well matched for." [...]

Nevertheless, production of US doctorates continues apace, fuelled by an influx of foreign students.

I've previously written about the poor prospects for American scientists, as well as the discouraging effect this has on smart kids who would like to get a doctorate in one of the sciences. The Nature article shows exactly why the constant hectoring of immigration enthusiasts to import more scientists and others with doctorates so that the U.S. can remain "competitive" is so wrong. We have more than enough people with the smarts and the education already, and the huge influx of foreign PhD holders - take a look at the authors of just about any scientific paper produced in the U.S. and you'll see what I mean - only means that native-born scientists and potential scientists are forced out of the job market.

As alluded to in the article, however, Congress, encouraged by institutions that benefit from cheap PhD's, wants to create more supply rather than understand why so many PhD's are un- or under-employed.

Subsidizing Dispossession

The Center for Immigration Studies has published a report by Steven Camarota, Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children, which in part reaches the following conclusions:

• In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
  
• Immigrant households’ use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Their use of cash and housing programs tends to be similar to native households.
  
• A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households with children is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009.
  
• Immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, even before the current recession. In 2001, 50 percent of all immigrant households with children used at least one welfare program, compared to 32 percent for natives.
  
• Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).

What about the impact of immigrants on the economy? Supposedly, all that talent has boosted our GDP and provided benefits for everyone. According to Gordon Hanson, an economist at UC San Diego, immigration lowers the GDP by about 0.1% annually. Another recent report from Steven Camarota said, "...100 percent of the net increase in jobs went to immigrants during the entire decade.[2000-2010]"

Not much I can add. Where's the outrage?

Wilson, Altruism, and Group Selection

Where does good come from?
Harvard's Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again:

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

So what is Wilson's outrageous idea? Group selection.

The alternative theory holds that the origins of altruism and teamwork have nothing to do with kinship or the degree of relatedness between individuals. The key, Wilson said, is the group: Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes — including the ones that predispose them to cooperation — are handed down to future generations. This so-called group selection, Wilson insists, is what forms the evolutionary basis for a variety of advanced social behaviors linked to altruism, teamwork, and tribalism — a position that other scientists have taken over the years, but which historically has been considered, in Wilson’s own word, “heresy.”

For Wilson to reject kin selection this late in his career has bewildered his many admirers. “It’s sad — he’s already an enormously famous and respected scientist, and it just sort of tarnishes him in people’s eyes,” said Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist who has written disapprovingly of Wilson’s latest work on his blog. Yet Wilson said he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. “I think that’d be a pretty poor scientist, who couldn’t reverse his view from new evidence,” he said.

Group selection would seem to explain at least one enduring feature of human life: religion. Many theories have tried to explain its persistence, from the obvious one that religions are all in some sense true, to recent evidence that at least some of us are hard-wired to believe in God. The fact that religions can and usually do cause the group cohesion of the believers seems to me the best explanation. (I'm an amateur, but fools rush in...)

The vehemence with which other biologists have greeted Wilson's thesis may of course be due to genuine grounds for dispute, but one would have to be obtuse not to notice the obvious consequences, namely that humans and other animals have a strong tendency to form groups, and that this is a biological function. In other words, the tendency to favor our own and disfavor others is... natural. Just like the controversy over sociobiology, in which the hatefacts of evolutionary psychology drove all the right-thinkers apoplectic, so Wilson once again can be the cause of cerebrovascular accidents in the universities.

Elite Scientists and the Arts

Robert Root-Bernstein - who by the way was at least at one time an HIV/AIDS skeptic - writes on scientists and the arts. Money quote:

In fact, I've just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences are actively engaged in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be an artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art with their scientific creativity.

However, Root-Bernstein's final sentence is unwarranted:

Stimulate the arts and you stimulate innovation.

That Nobel Prize winners are much more likely to be involved in the arts than non-elite scientists probably shows that they are so gifted that their talent overflows into the arts. Their creativity is so high that they see arenas for it outside their main pursuit, which is science. The alternative theory would be that learning various forms of artistic expression has helped the scientists in the pursuit of knowledge. But, the primary requirement for being an elite scientist is to be very intelligent; likewise, being an artist probably requires certain levels of the Big Five personality traits, for example more openness and extraversion and less agreeableness. The Encyclopedia of giftedness, creativity, and talent says that "creative people" have higher openness, lower agreeableness ("less conventional"), and lower conscientiousness. A study called "The Big Five personality traits of professional comedians compared to amateur comedians, comedy writers, and college students" found that "compared to college students, professional and amateur stand-up comedians on average showed significantly higher openness, and lower conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness."

Root-Bernstein mentions a great example of crossover talent, that of the composer George Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamar's invention of frequency hopping to be used in radio-guided torpedoes.

In any case, the Big Five personality factors have a degree of heritability similar to that of IQ, which is to say fairly high. So it no more follows that one can become an elite scientist by involvement in the arts than one can become one by attending a good university. One must be born with the appropriate mental qualities.

(HT: hbd chick.)

Inside Job

Last night I watched the movie that won the Oscar this year for best documentary, Inside Job, which documents the greed, fraud, and corruption behind the mortgage boom and subsequent financial crisis. While the film is worthwhile, I have some serious problems with it.

For starters, one of the film's main interviewees, one who maintains that he repeatedly warned Alan Greenspan and other government officials of his concerns for a financial train wreck due to irresponsible lending and securitization practices, was a man from the Greenlining Institute. This organization's mission statement reads:

The Greenlining Institute's mission is to empower communities of color and other disadvantaged groups through multi-ethnic economic and leadership development, civil rights, and anti-redlining activities.

In other words, they are a shakedown racket that pressures government to throw more money towards "communities of color"; money, you know, like subprime loans. (By the way, if you want to see some disparate impact, check out their board of directors. They couldn't have fewer whites - namely, zero - if it were planned. Nah, must be a coincidence.)

Other interviewees expressing their disgust for everything Wall Street and Big Bank included Barney Frank (one of the main enablers of Fannie Mae), French finance minister Christine Lagarde, and George Soros.

The point is, when housing was booming, when government was pushing banks to make loans to people unlikely to be able to repay, when the average person saw his house rising in value, no one complained. In fact, all parties concerned wanted more lending, and that includes the investors who ultimately bought the loans without apparently any due diligence, and who are now among the complainers. Now that the boom is over and the economy is in the dumps, scapegoats are wanted, and unsympathetic Wall Street types are conveniently at hand.

It's pretty obvious that some or even many people on Wall Street should be in jail, or at least forced to disgorge their obscene bonuses. But the government and the central bankers and the "community activists" who were as much or more responsible for the financial crisis will never be held to account, and neither are they held to account in this film. Hollywood doesn't award Oscars for politically incorrect movies, and this film assuredly isn't one.

Update: Steve Sailer's review of Inside Job.

Moronic American Exceptionalism

The recent news that Bill Gross, the manager of the world's largest bond fund, was shorting U.S. Treasury bonds brought out this response: Why You Should Buy U.S. Treasuries. Leaving aside the merits or demerits - strongly skewed to the latter, in my opinion - of buying U.S. treasuries, one of the arguments adduced in the linked piece is the following, which is typical for the mainstream financial media:

It has always been a bad idea to bet against America and our ability to prosper even against overwhelming difficulties. America will cut back its spending, innovate, and pay off its debts. We will earn our way out. It's just how we do it. Selling treasuries is a bet against our ingenuity, work ethic, and our breed of capitalism that has made more dramatic changes to the world in the last 100 years than during any other period in human history.

It may have always been a bad idea to bet against America, but that was then, this is now. America used to be 90% white, but is now down to probably 65%. While some of the new arrivals and their children are productive members of society, many are not, or at least not as productive as the average American of yore, and many are positively parasitic. Also, back in the day, say the post WWII era, much of the rest of the world lay in ruins, leaving us the default power.

"America will cut back its spending" - how, exactly? Politicians don't get re-elected by cutting back spending, and most of our new population is all for keeping the spending going, since much of it is wealth transfer. To them. Government spending is increasing faster than ever.

"Innovate" - Right, more iPads manufactured in China, more cable channels, and more cutting edge weaponry produced for a bloated military. But at least our weaponry earns us some foreign exchange.

"Pay off its debts" - Here is the clincher. It's going to be impossible to pay off our debts, and before long we won't even be able to afford to pay the interest.

"Selling treasuries is a bet against our ingenuity, work ethic, and our breed of capitalism" - Our so-called work ethic has become the desire to receive government benefits, especially since we can't flip houses anymore. Our breed of capitalism has morphed into a Wall Street/Washington Axis in which crony capitalists and revolving door government officials scratch each others' backs and print money to give to investment bankers so they can pay themselves bonuses in the tens of millions. Our ingenuity is now put to use in the making of structured financial products and high-speed trading.

People who say that America has always been at the forefront and always will don't seem to understand anything at all about why America got there in the first place. Mass immigration has all but ruined our two ocean advantage - as well as the Anglo-Saxon advantage - government intervention and money printing has ruined the economy, and feminism, immigration, and off-shoring have all helped to devastate the birthrate.

If we want the U.S. to become once again a place where treasury bonds are a decent investment, we need to change a host of things. Singing paeans to the old America won't bring it back.

Trump

I'm liking Donald Trump more and more. Sure, he's a grandstander, a publicity hound, but compared to the average American politician probably no worse on that score. He's saying that Muslims are haters. His taking on of the Obama birth certificate issue is refreshing; Obama potentially has a big problem there, but he's been protected by the media, who have denounced anyone who raises the issue as a nutcase. The Donald doesn't care, and everything he's said about it makes sense, and the public can see that. He's called the stationing of American troops in South Korea "a joke" and asks what advantage the U.S. gets from it.

It says a lot about the sorry state of American politics and public life that it takes a celebrity to speak certain obvious truths and to raise inconvenient questions. Virtually everything said by a U.S. politician is either an outright lie, a deception, or so self-serving that it can be dismissed out of hand.

Of course Trump is not a conservative, and no doubt he won't go near many important questions. But from what I've seen so far, he'd make a better president than Romney or God forbid Newt Gingrich. Maybe Trump's tactics will force other politicians to grapple somehow with real problems and actual truth.

The Curiosity Deficit of the East

This is from The Spectator, a list of summary points from Niall Ferguson's book Civilization. One of the points:

He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for … the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.”

So, they looked at historical, political, economic, and cultural factors, concluding that Christianity made the crucial difference. Notably absent from the list is "genetic".

Obviously, it would be hubris to rule out cultural, etc., factors, but there are just too many possible variables to consider in the rise and dominance of the West. Occam's razor might suggest that we look at the one difference between the Chinese and the West so glaring that it stares us in the face: the people are different.

My understanding of post-modern anthropology is that it says that cultural differences are largely arbitrary; but that must be wrong, since culture is the means by which a people transmits those practices which have been useful to it in navigating through life, in other words there must be a strong biological component to culture. Likewise religion: unsuccessful religions die out, successful ones grow. Shakers no longer exist.

In the book I'm currently reading, Toby Huff's Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution, there's a long chapter on the arrival of the telescope in China, brought by the Jesuits as part of their plan to introduce Western science there. (The idea was that once the Chinese saw the superiority of Western science, they would also see the superiority of the Westerner's religion. A brilliant idea, I think.) The Jesuits became involved in helping the Chinese with improving their calendar, and one of the Jesuits actually came to head the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. But the Chinese, according to Huff, showed a "curiosity deficit"; they were interested almost solely in their calendar, which provided them with auspicious and inauspicious days for astrology and the proper locations in geomancy. In the West, the invention of the telescope began a revolution in astronomy; in China, it produced virtually nothing.

Why the curiosity deficit? It could have been due to the "top-down" nature of society, in which the emperor and the court controlled everything and the lives of the ruling class were the only ones of any importance. But it could also be due to the collective personality of the Chinese, i.e. a heritable characteristic.

Ikea Workers Complain of Discrimination

From the L.A. Times, Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers
A union-organizing battle hangs over the Ikea plant in Virginia. Workers complain of eliminated raises, a frenzied pace, mandatory overtime and racial discrimination.

You don't really need to read the article, which is about how Ikea, having built a factory in "the fraying blue-collar city" of Danville, Virginia, now faces union organizing and, of course, complaints of racial discrimination.

Six African American employees have filed discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that black workers at Swedwood's U.S. factory are assigned to the lowest-paying departments and to the least desirable third shift, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

"If we put in for a better job, we wouldn't get it — it would always go to a white person," said Jackie Maubin, who worked the night shift in the packing department until last year, when she was fired on her birthday.

Swedwood has been trying to settle four of the discrimination complaints through mediation. The company initially offered Maubin $1,000. She settled for $2,000. She said she needed the money to keep her car from being repossessed.

So, why on earth would any business in its right mind build a factory in the U.S.? In Ikea's case, it can only be because the market here is substantial and the furniture weighs too much to make it cost-effective to ship it from elsewhere. But it provides jobs for an area that sorely needs it and gets accused of racism.

Evolution of Prejudice

Scientific American reports on a study that appears to show that monkeys exhibit "prejudice", that is, they distinguish group members from outsiders.

Overall, the results support an evolutionary basis for prejudice. Some researchers believe prejudice is unique to humans, since it seems to depend on complex thought processes. For example, past studies have found that people are likely to display prejudice after being reminded of their mortality, or after receiving a blow to their self-esteem. Since only humans are capable of contemplating their deaths or their self-image, these studies reinforce the view that only humans are capable of prejudice. But the behavior of the rhesus monkeys implies that our basic tendency to see the world in terms of “us” and “them” has ancient origins.

Psychologist Catherine Cottrell at the University of Florida and her colleague Steven Neuberg at Arizona State University, argue that human prejudice evolved as a function of group living. Joining together in groups allowed humans to gain access to resources necessary for survival including food, water, and shelter. Groups also offered numerous advantages, such as making it easier to find a mate, care for children, and receive protection from others. However, group living also made us more wary of outsiders who could potentially harm the group by spreading disease, killing or hurting individuals, or stealing precious resources. To protect ourselves, we developed ways of identifying who belongs to our group and who doesn’t. Over time, this process of quickly evaluating others might have become so streamlined that it became unconscious.

Jew Among You made the point that "if evolution lead all primates to distinguish between “us” and “them” in such a way, surely there is an advantage to this." Ignoring or deeming reprehensible a biological function such as prejudice makes about as much sense as doing the same for hunger or the sex drive.

On the other hand, people are easily divided into groups. Psychologists have performed experiments that demonstrate how easily people can be made to turn on each other, such as in Stanley Milgram's famous experiments. Even in an office, people who work in other departments can be perceived as outsiders and animosity towards them arise.

Freud thought - and this is in my opinion is just about his only worthwhile thought - that the most important function of civilization was the repression of certain biological drives, most notably the sex drive. We wear clothes and regulate sex through marriage, and these form a basis through which the sex instinct is repressed and we can focus our energies on making lives more secure and prosperous.

Condemnation of prejudice as intolerance and trying to ensure its disappearance makes about as much sense as treating hunger with amphetamines. Nationalism would seem to be a mechanism analogous to the function of civilization through which prejudice is minimized, allowing large numbers to form a group and to cooperate.

Ferd Throws Whites Under the Bus

In Mala Fide recently changed from a single-author blog to more of a webzine with many contributors, with topics spanning the anti-establishment gamut from men's rights to game to alt right to white racial consciousness. It seems that the one topic more outrageous than any other, one which the tough truth-seeking guys and gals who read In Mala Fide found so distasteful that they complained about it is the latter - which I'm not going to call "white nationalism", as that's an easy, pejorative term that its opponents use. Basically, it's just any expression that whites have legitimate political interests as whites and that TPTB are deliberately cheating them out of the country which they founded and in which they've been the majority from day one.

Ferdinand followed through with Whites Are Their Own Worst Enemies, a post not without plenty of truth but which also serves to distance In Mala Fide from white racial consciousness and to mollify all those who complained. It's Ferd's site of course and he can run it any way he wants, but the interesting thing here is that he found it necessary to throw whites under the bus so quickly, the reason being that white racial consciousness is so controversial that even a site replete with obscenities, graphic descriptions of sex, anti-feminism, game, and general anti-establishment ranting can't handle it.

That "whites are their own worst enemies" is true could hardly find better confirmation than Ferd's feeling that he needed to satisfy everyone that complained - which no doubt included plenty of white folks - even though he himself invited those very writers who wrote on the topic in the first place. That this is perhaps the most "controversial" topic in existence, i.e. the one that more people want to shut up and shout down, ditto. "Who, whom" is obviously at work here, rather than any real sense that the topic is morally repugnant, since every other racial/ethnic group in the country (or the world) can unabashedly promote and be proud of their racial/ethnic identities without fear and without controversy.

I don't think this point can be emphasized enough: if you're white and show any sign of being motivated by it or proud of it, a lot of people will hate you and want you silenced.

The Sleep Hypothesis

This is another hypothesis that appears to need slaying.

The sleep hypothesis - my formulation - is the notion that people need around 8 hours of sleep a night in order to be healthy and to function optimally. If you get less, you're "sleep deprived".

However, Daniel Kripke, a psychiatrist who studies sleep, along with colleagues, found that sleeping 8 hours or more is significantly associated with excess mortality. The lowest death rate was associated with 7 hours, and even those who slept only 5 hours had a lower death rate than those who slept 8. (Full paper in pdf; article about Kripke and his study.) Even controlling for other health conditions, such as heart disease or cancer, the excess mortality associated with sleep of 8 hours or more remained, which would seem to indicate that there's something about too much sleep in itself that increases mortality.

Furthermore, the study found that insomnia per se, that is, when not associated with a health condition that causes it (e.g. when pain produces insomnia), is not only not associated with worse health, but is in fact associated with a lower death rate.

Whence the sleep hypothesis? Sleeping pills are a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S., so we have constant propaganda to the effect that if you're not sleeping 8 hours a night, there's something wrong with you. In fact, it appears that one of the most effective treatments for insomnia is to sleep less. When people try to sleep for 8 hours or more, they can end up spending a substantial amount of that time awake, since their bodies cannot sleep that much, at least without chemical help.

Why would excess sleep be unhealthy? My speculation is that it may be due to sleep causing depression; because depression isn't merely behavioral but is either a cause or consequence of physiological and biochemical pathology, depression can double the mortality rate, even when suicide is excluded. One night of total or partial sleep deprivation induces rapid recovery from depression in the majority of depressed people.