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Anti-race is anti-science

It should be interesting to see the likes of Jared Diamond attempt to explain away the undeniable genetic differences between the various human subspecies; his reference to the Flat Earth Society is as clear a case of emotional projection as one could hope to find. In a chapter entitled “The Human Experiment”, Nicholas Wade observes that criticism-averse biologists are playing a shell game that provides sociologists who don’t understand the relevant science with sufficient cover to deny the scientifically undeniable:

Many scholars like to make safe nods to multicultural orthodoxy by implying that human races do not exist. Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is the title of a recent book by a physical anthropologist and a geneticist, though their text is not nearly so specific. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” writes Craig Venter, who was the leading decoder of the human genome but has no known expertise in the relevant discipline of population genetics.

Only people capable of thinking the Earth is flat believe in the existence of human races, according to the geographer Jared Diamond. “The reality of human races is another commonsense ‘truth’ destined to follow the flat Earth into oblivion,” he asserts. For a subtler position, consider the following statement, which seems to say the same thing. “It is increasingly clear that there is no scientific basis for defining precise ethnic or racial boundaries,” writes Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in a review of the project’s implications. This form of words, commonly used by biologists to imply that they accept the orthodox political take on the nonexistence of race, means rather less than meets the eye. When a distinct boundary develops between races, they are no longer races but separate species. So to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.

A few biologists have begun to agree that there are human races, but they hasten to add that the fact means very little. Races exist, but the implications are “not much,” says the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Too bad—nature has performed this grand 50,000 year experiment, generating scores of fascinating variations on the human theme, only to have evolutionary biologists express disappointment at her efforts.

From biologists’ obfuscations on the subject of race, sociologists have incorrectly inferred that there is no biological basis for race, confirming their preference for regarding race as just a social construct. How did the academic world contrive to reach a position on race so far removed from reality and commonsense observation?

The politically driven distortion of scientific views about race can be traced to a sustained campaign from the 1950s onward by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who sought to make the word race taboo, at least when referring to people. Montagu, who was Jewish, grew up in the East End district of London, where he experienced considerable anti-Semitism. He was trained as a social anthropologist in London and New York, where he studied under Franz Boas, a champion of racial equality and the belief that culture alone shapes human behavior. He began to promote Boas’s ideas with more zeal than their author. Montagu developed passionate views on the evils of race. “Race is the witchcraft, the demonology of our time, the means by which we exorcise the imagined demoniacal powers among us,” he wrote. “It is the contemporary myth, humankind’s most dangerous myth, America’s Original Sin.”

In the postwar years, with the horror of the Holocaust weighing on people’s minds, Montagu found ready acceptance of his views. These were prominent in the influential UNESCO statement on race, first issued in 1950, which he helped draft. He believed that imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism were driven by notions of race and could be undermined by showing that races did not exist. However much one may sympathize with Montagu’s motives, it is perhaps simplistic to believe that an evil can be eliminated by banning the words that conceptualize it. But suppression of the word was Montagu’s goal, and to a remarkable extent he succeeded.

“The very word race is itself racist,” he wrote in his book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Many scholars who understood human races very well began to drop the use of the term rather than risk being ostracized as racists. In a survey taken in 1987, only 50% of physical anthropologists (researchers who deal with human bones) agreed that human races exist, and among social anthropologists (who deal with people) just 29% did so.

How unfortunate for the self-styled anti-racists that scientody is bound, in the end, punch right through the most firmly lodged dogmas of scientistry. It’s a bit ironic that a member of the most tribal people in human history, (and one of the most scientifically accomplished, for that matter), the Jews, should be responsible for this profoundly anti-scientific triumph of propaganda; imagine if Montagu had instead waged a similarly successful campaign against the fundamental evils of a belief in gravity.

Instead of marveling at the amazing coincidence of people being beaten to death in the wrong part of town, we would be wondering how it was possible that so many people were being mysteriously found dead on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

But the scientific fact is that race exists, it is a concept based on observable genetic differences that are the result of human microevolution, and those differences have a significant impact on human behavior. The Collins position, which is that while race exists, it does not matter, is weaselly, incorrect, and scientifically outdated.

Lewontin’s thesis immediately became the central genetic plank of
those who believe that denying the existence of race is an effective way
to combat racism. It is prominently cited in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,
an influential book written by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu with
the aim of eliminating race from the political and scientific
vocabulary. Lewontin’s statement is quoted at the beginning of the
American Anthropological Association’s statement on race and is a
founding principle of the assertion by sociologists that race is a
social construct, not a biological one.

But despite all the
weight that continues to be placed on it, Lewontin’s statement is
incorrect. It’s not the basic finding that is wrong. Many other studies
have confirmed that roughly 85% of human variation is among individuals
and 15% between populations. This is just what would be expected, given
that each race has inherited its genetic patrimony from the same
ancestral population that existed in the comparatively recent past.

What
is in error is Lewontin’s assertion that the amount of variation
between populations is so small as to be negligible. In fact it’s quite
significant. Sewall Wright, an eminent population geneticist, said that a
fixation index of 5% to 15% indicates “moderate genetic
differentiation” and that even with an index of 5% or less,
“differentiation is by no means negligible.” If differences of 10 to 15%
were seen in any other than the human species they would be called
subspecies, in Wright’s view.

It is more than a little ironic that it is those who so loudly proclaim that they “fucking love science” are among the most terrified of the genetic science that touches most closely upon who and what they are. Perhaps it is because I am tri-racial that I don’t give a damn about the racial pieties; what do various pretensions to White supremacy or Asian supremacy or the intrinsic superiority of La Raza  mean to one who is all-of-the-above?

In matters of race, as in all things, the facts are what they are, not what anyone might wish them to be. And the sooner that we face those facts and begin to deal in terms of objective and scientific reality rather than wishful thinking, the sooner that our social and personal policies are likely to meet with success rather than inevitable and cataclysmic failure.

Why Brendan Eich had to go

It looks rather like the failure of the Mozilla executives to defend CEO Eich from the Gay Mafia campaign being waged against him may have been at least in part due to the desire to remove a major obstacle to DRM being added to Firefox. Consider these three blog posts from three Mozilla figures, including Eich:

“With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content they want to enjoy. Read on for some background on how we got here, and details of our implementation.”
– Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, 14 May 2014 

“Mozilla will be adding a way to integrate Adobe Access DRM technology
for video and audio into Firefox, via a common specification called
Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).”
– The Mozilla Blog, 14 May 2014

“the W3C willfully underspecifying DRM in HTML5 is quite a different matter from browsers having to support several legacy plugins. Here is a narrow bridge on which to stand and fight — and perhaps fall, but (like Gandalf) live again and prevail in the longer run. If we lose this battle, there will be others where the world needs Mozilla.

“By now it should be clear why we view DRM as bad for users, open source, and alternative browser vendors:

    Users: DRM is technically a contradiction, which leads directly to legal restraints against fair use and other user interests (e.g., accessibility).
    Open source: Projects such as mozilla.org cannot implement a robust and Hollywood-compliant CDM black box inside the EME API container using open source software.
    Alternative browser vendors: CDMs are analogous to ActiveX components from the bad old days: different for each OS and possibly even available only to the OS’s default browser.

“I continue to collaborate with others, including some in Hollywood, on watermarking, not DRM.”
– Brendan Eich, 22 October 2013

Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox. Now that he’s gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests. It’s also interesting to note that the justification for Mozilla making this change is given as fear that users will abandon them. That demonstrates that the campaign to #uninstallfirefox was based on a sound principle, even if it was not quite as successful as I would have liked it to be.

As of yesterday, Firefox still represents 21 percent of the traffic here at VP, although it is down from 34 percent historically. But at least 8 percent of the overall traffic, (and nearly a quarter of the former Mozilla traffic), now uses Pale Moon. If you haven’t switched yet, I encourage you to try it out. Perhaps Mozilla’s embrace of DRM will convince you to do so.

Intra-Democrat war

This promises to be an interesting political battle, featuring Vibrant Americans vs Jewish women.

“If it’s not handled by… the start of next season, I don’t see how we’re playing basketball,” NBPA vice president Roger Mason Jr. said in an interview with Showtime’s Jim Rome. “We have player reps, we’ve got executive committee members…  Leaders of the teams, they’re all saying the same thing, ‘If [Sterling] is still in place, we ain’t playing’. … I was just in the locker room three or four days ago. LeBron and I talked about it. He ain’t playing if Sterling is still an owner.”

Mason clarified that the ultimatum applies equally to Shelly Sterling, too. “No Sterling deserves to be an owner of that franchise any longer,” Mason continued. “And I’ve gone down the line from LeBron to the other guys in the league that I’ve talked to and they all feel the same way. There’s no place for that family in the NBA.”

James, who scored 49 points in a Game 4 victory over the Nets in the Eastern conference semifinals on Monday, took a public stand against both Sterlings earlier this week.

“As players, we want what’s right and we don’t feel like no one in his family should be able to own the team,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

It’s bad enough to argue that a man should be deprived of his property due to his private speech, but on the other hand, there are details related to Mr. Tokowitz’s signature on various NBA documents that appear to considerably complicate the matter. But the former Miss Stein didn’t do or say anything objectionable, so one wonders on what ground Mr. Mason and Mr. James could possibly argue that she should be deprived of her property.

I could not care less about the NBA, but this could provide some amusement. It should be interesting to see how fast the NBA reverses direction once Mrs. Tokowitz starts playing the sexist card and the media takes note of the fact that the league has no female owners.

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS

Today we are officially announcing the publication of ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, a curriculum created by Dr. Sarah Salviander, a research scientist whose areas of particular interest are quasars and supermassive black holes. She is a research scientist at the University of Texas, is one of the authors of “Evolution of the Black Hole Mass – Galaxy Bulge Relationship for Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7” and “Narrow Emission Lines as Surrogates for σ * in Low- to Moderate-z QSOs” in addition to many other scientific papers, and teaches classes as a visiting professor of physics at Southwestern University. Dr. Salviander describes the new curriculum at Castalia House:

“Look around the web for a high-quality, modern-science astronomy homeschool course and you won’t find much. There are a handful of scripture-based astronomy courses that seem to cover little more than the seasons and motions of the night sky, and one very expensive software-based curriculum. I realized there was a need for a comprehensive, modern, and affordable astronomy homeschool curriculum, and set out to develop one based on my years of teaching astronomy at the university level. A couple of years ago, I mentioned this in an offhand way to Vox Day; it turns out Vox had been contemplating offering a series of affordable, electronically-available homeschool curricula, and so we began to discuss the possibility of making astrophysics the first of many such courses.”

 So we are pleased to announce ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, the first offering in the Castalia Homeschool line. The curriculum is available only through the Castalia House store and costs less than $60.00. No further expenditures are necessary for the course as the textbook is available online, although we recently received permission to publish the primary textbook and will soon offer it accordingly at an affordable price. Our objective is to keep the price of all curricula under $100.

The curriculum is designed for students aged 13+. It has been described as “a top-notch astronomy curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn, author of Trivium Pursuit. As per suggestions from the readers of this blog, sample PDFs from all four books of the curriculum have been made available for free download on the relevant product listing of the Castalia House store. If you are, or if you know, a homeschool mother of teenagers now preparing the fall course schedule, I encourage you to take a close look at ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS and consider using it for the next school year.

Genetic segregation

“The regional nature of selection was first made evident in a genomewide scan undertaken by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, in 2006. He looked for genes under selection in the three major races—Africans, East Asians and Europeans (or more exactly Caucasians, but European genetics are at present much better understood, so European populations are the usual subjects of study). Copious genetic data had been collected on each race as part of the HapMap, a project undertaken by the National Institutes of Health to explore the genetic roots of common disease. In each race Pritchard found about 200 genetic regions that showed a characteristic signature of having been under selection (206 in Africans, 185 in East Asians and 188 in Europeans). But in each race, a largely different set of genes was under selection, with only quite minor overlaps.”

The primary theme of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance is repeated over and over by Wade in the early chapters like a drumbeat, as if he knows the critical reader is not going to read very far into the book and will misrepresent what Wade is asserting: human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. It is also apparent that Wade knows why his words are likely to be twisted and attacked: “The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.”

Genetic science has already exploded most of the equalitarian mantras. We are not all the same under the skin. Race is not a social construct. Race is not only skin-deep. The content of your character can, on average, be estimated by, if not necessarily the color of your skin, the sum total of your superficial features. Human evolution did not stop at some point in the distant past. Civilization is not magically bestowed by geographic location. Education is not the answer.

The reason even professional biologists are afraid to discuss the current scientific evidence coming out of the genetic laboratories is because it leads to one inescapable conclusion: all of the social policies based upon the idea of basic human equality are doomed to failure. And worse, when combined with other evidence from other disciplines, it leads to a second conclusion: most of the social policies designed to improve the lot of the so-called disadvantaged are not merely doomed to failure, but are intrinsically dyscivic in nature and are more likely to drag the genetically advantaged populations down into semi-barbarism than to help the genetically disadvantaged populations become fully civilized on average.

Not all of the specifics of these known genetic differences are known, much less the full extent of their effects on human behavior. Some of them are, of course, trivial. But they are not all insignificant. Consider, for example, the example of the MAO-A gene, which is connected to the control of aggression.

“As it happens, the promoter for MAO-A is quite variable in the human population. People may have two, three, four or five copies of it, and the more copies they have, the more of the MAO-A enzyme their cells produce. What difference does this make to a person’s behavior? Quite a lot, it turns out. People with three, four or five copies of the MAO-A promoter are normal but those with only two copies have a much higher level of delinquency…. He and his colleagues looked at the MAO-A promoters in African Americans. The subjects were the same 2,524 American youths in the study by Shih mentioned above. Of the African American men in the sample, 5% carried two MAO-A promoters, the condition that Shih had found to be associated with higher levels of delinquency. Members of the two-promoter group were significantly more likely to have been arrested and imprisoned than African Americans who carried three or four promoters. The same comparison could not be made in white, or Caucasian, males, the researchers report, because only 0.1% carry the two-promoter allele.”

Does this mean that all African-Americans are prone to violence? No, it proves the exact opposite. The vast majority are not. But it does mean that with regards to this single factor related to an individual’s ability to control his own aggression, an African-American male is 50 times more likely to have a genetic handicap in comparison with a white male. Therefore, social policies that blithely assume that African-American males have the same intrinsic ability to control their aggression as white males are not only unscientific, but can be reliably predicted to fail. That is just one significant genetic distinction that has been discovered. There will be more. There will be many more.

Equality is not merely unscientific, at this point it is now objectively antiscientific. The undeniable fact of human genetic segregation does not intrinsically justify the eugenic excesses and ethnic cleansings of the past. But sooner or later, as the science advances, it will force the eventual discussion of whether the costs of playing equalitarian make-believe are too high for Western civilization, if that civilization wishes to survive.

Mailvox: pulp future

JG observes the likelihood that one day, the 90-pound ninja princess will be seen as painfully dated too:

Last night I was catching up on my DVR and I watched The Misfits (1961) with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable.  So, I’m watching Marilyn with her 1950’s pointy-bra mams, her tiny waist, her fertile hips, her squeezable booty, her small feet, her delicate jaw line, and her high-pitched, almost musical uber-feminine voice, and for some reason I had the following thought: 

If she suddenly started doing kung fu and beating the crap out of all these cowboys….. that would be absolutely f***ing retarded. 

Fortunately, that didn’t happen.  Nonetheless, I’ve come to the conclusion that in 60+ years, IF we still have the technology to enable things like films, DVRs and TV, people will look at all those action flicks from this decade starring Scarlett Johansson and laugh in much the same way we laugh at “guy in a rubber suit” monster movies from the 1950s.   

It’s not hard to imagine the utterly retarded nature of our entertainment will one day be seen as the absurdist Whedon years. Joss Whedon will probably be viewed as a crazy neo-Dadaist clown famous for his over-the-top equalitarian lunacies.

Sic semper tyrannis

Instapundit on “the proper response” to deal with criminal government thugs:

 If I lived in Venezuela, I’d find out where the guardsmen lived, and shoot them when they walked out the door in the morning. That is, of course, the proper response to dictators and their minions of every stripe, even Hollywood-backed socialists.

These are the sort of moments when you realize that the “A” in “fuckin-A” stans for “Amen”.

It also makes me wonder if those infamous FEMA camps aren’t intended to imprison revolutionary Americans, but rather, to protect the families of the government thugs.

Marital sex is never rape

Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law.

A Delhi court has ruled that sex between a husband and wife, “even if forcible, is not rape.” The judge’s decision, which was made public Saturday, upheld section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which does not recognize “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age,” as rape.

The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so. Reality is not defined by politics; we cannot settle the question of evolution by natural selection by simply passing a law that declares God created the world and everything in it last Tuesday.

Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed. And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.

The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.

Slouching towards barbarism

In his book A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade points out what he believes to be two of the most important steps in building an advanced Western civilization. The first is the more fundamental one:

How then was the profound transition made from the chimplike society of the joint ancestor to the hunter-gatherer societies in which all humans lived until 15,000 years ago and in which kinship was a central institution? The likely steps in this process have been persuasively worked out by the primatologist Bernard Chapais. The critical behavioral step, in his view, was formation of the pair bond, or at least a stable breeding relationship between male and female….

Having a dad around makes all the difference to social networks. In highly promiscuous societies like those of chimps, an individual knows only its mother and the siblings it grows up with. With pair bonding, people know not only their father as well as their mother, but all their father’s relatives too. The males in a community now recognized both their daughters and, when their daughters dispersed to a neighboring group, a daughter’s husband and his parents.

The development of the heterosexual pair bond, which eventually developed into monogamous marriage, appears to have been crucial in the development of tribalism. It therefore follows that the modern sexual free-for-all and the weakening of the vital pair bond involved is not only dyscivic, but downright dehumanizing.

The second significant step Wade identifies comes much later, and enables the escape from tribalism. This was accomplished most successfully, and fully, in England, but also took place in East Asia:

The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state.

The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population’s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

But this break from tribalism required a eugenic and eucivic mechanism, one that Wade rather generously labels “natural selection”: the English rich consistently having a little more than twice as many children as the poor.

As it happens, Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work….

“The surname evidence confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and the criminal,” Clark concludes. “Their extra reproductive success had a permanent impact on the genetic composition of the later population.”

Clark’s data provide substantial evidence that the English population responded genetically to the harsh stresses of a Malthusian regime and that the shifts in its social behavior from 1200 to 1800 were shaped by natural selection. The burden of proof is surely shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence it had suggested to Darwin.

If Wade and Clark are correct, this has terrible implications for the profoundly dyscivic mechanisms we are witnessing across the West today, where the dependent classes and the imported barbarians have considerably more children than the productive classes. While this part of the book is more logic based on statistical and historical observations than science, its scientific aspects are fairly firm. Blank slatists attempting to dismiss it unread, (the ever-inept PZ Myers being but one example), will soon find themselves forced to take scientifically indefensible positions.

Retroactive capital controls

The economic death knells are beginning to ring louder for the USA:

I read a troubling story in the Financial Times about Pfizer’s bid to take over British drug company AstraZeneca. One of the prime reasons that Pfizer is so interested is because the takeover would afford them the opportunity to redomicile the business in England.

Why do this? Because right now they’re paying US corporate tax… which is substantially higher than in the UK. So by moving the business abroad, the company would save shareholders billions. Uncle Sam has a big problem with this. And Congress is jumping all over Pfizer to block the deal… even going so far as to propose RETROACTIVE legislation.

In other words, they’re willing to go back in time to kill the deal before it even gets started.

The FT quotes Oregon Senator Ron Wyden as saying “I don’t approach retroactivity in legislation lightly, but corporations must understand that they won’t profit from abandoning the US…”

Ummm, actually that’s the whole point, Senator. The tax situation is so onerous that people do profit when they leave the US. That’s WHY people leave the US. Duh.

But like the drug companies themselves, Congress isn’t looking at the root cause. They’re treating the symptom. In this case, the symptom is American businesses heading overseas to escape the highest tax regime in the developed world.

The federal corporate tax rate alone can be as high as 38%, and that’s before including state corporate taxes, or personal taxes on the dividend distributions to shareholders.

It’s getting very, very obvious that the US government is desperate for tax revenue, to the point that they’ve entered a vicious circle of negative returns on their efforts. More inquiring minds might wonder what is driving this observable sense of desperation.