Tag: history

Measles: the actual risks

Since there is so much ridiculous ignorance being blathered about, particularly on the pro-vaccine side, I thought it would make sense to remind everyone of the actual facts of the matter. First of all, vaccines have had even less impact with regards to measles than I’d shown yesterday, because 1912-1916 was not the peak of the pre-vaccination era. From the CDC:

1900-1909:   8377 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1920-1929:   6659 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1953-1962:    444 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1959-1962:    404 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.

To be more precise, lets look at the actual annual deaths recorded in the years leading up to the introduction of the vaccine. Remember that the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.

1950: 468
1951: 683  
1952: 618  
1953: 462  
1954: 518  
1955: 345 
1956: 530  
1957: 389  
1958: 552  
1959: 385  
1960: 380  
1961: 434  
1962: 408

Obviously, the reduction of deaths from 8,377 to 408 is even better than the decline from 5,300 to 450 cited in the Oxford Journals study yesterday. That means that  95.1 percent of the decline in measles mortality had NOTHING to do with vaccination. It could not have. The vaccine had not yet been introduced.


However, even this astonishing reduction in measles mortality doesn’t fully account for the reduction in risk, because the population of the USA was much larger in 1962 than in 1909. 186,537,737 in 1962 versus 92,228,496 in 1909, to be precise. So, the risk of measles mortality was 1 in 11,010 in 1909 versus 1 in 457,200 in 1962.

In other words, 97.6 percent of the population-corrected decline in measles mortality took place prior to the introduction of measles vaccination. And this was despite the fact that 90 percent of the population was infected with measles at one point or another.

It might be tempting to conclude that with a 2014 population of 318,881,992, the worst case scenario for the USA is 697 measles deaths per year. (Just to put it in perspective, this is very close to the 677 annual bicycle deaths per year.) However, this assumes medical care circa 1962, which is obviously incorrect. So, we need a proxy to provide us with an estimate how the improvement in medical technology over the last 53 years would likely affect the rate of measles mortality.

Age-adjusted death rates per 100,000 persons (standardized to the 1940 U.S. population) for diseases of the heart (i.e., coronary heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, and rheumatic heart disease) have decreased from a peak of 307.4 in 1950 to 134.6 in 1996, an overall decline of 56%

As of 2011, the age-adjusted death rate had further declined to 109.2, indicating a probable 64.5 percent reduction of measles mortality. So, the reasonable worst case scenario for a completely unvaccinated US population is 248 measles deaths per year.

And so I would ask the pro-vaccine advocate, precisely how much human liberty are you willing to sacrifice for a mere 248 deaths per year. If you’re convinced that is a sufficient justification, how can you possibly justify permitting your child to be a passenger in a car, ride a bike, or even take a bath if you believe that the use of government force and the elimination of parent right to medical consent is justified in order to eliminate the 1 in 1,287,026 risk that so frightens you.

NB: “Each year approximately 800 school-aged children are killed in motor vehicle crashes during normal school travel hours.” If you genuinely want to save children’s lives, don’t stop unvaccinated children from going to school, stop ALL children, vaccinated or unvaccinated, from going to school.

Science and the Middle Ages

Tim O’Neill explains why the false view of science coming to a halt during the Middle Ages is not merely incorrect, but is the result of anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda.

The
standard view of the Middle Ages as a scientific wasteland has
persisted for so long and is so entrenched in the popular mind largely
because it has deep cultural and sectarian roots, but not because it has
any real basis in fact.  It is partly based on anti-Catholic prejudices
in the Protestant tradition, that saw the Middle Ages purely as a
benighted period of Church oppression.  It was also promulgated by
Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire and Condorcet who had an axe to
grind with Christianity in their own time and projected this onto the
past in their polemical anti-clerical writings. By the later Nineteenth
Century the “fact” that the Church suppressed science in the Middle Ages
was generally unquestioned even though it had never been properly and
objectively examined.

It was the early historian of science, the
French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem, who first began to
debunk this polemically-driven view of history.  While researching the
history of statics and classical mechanics in physics, Duhem looked at
the work of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution, such as Newton,
Bernoulli and Galileo.  But in reading their work he was surprised to
find some references to earlier scholars, ones working in the supposedly
science-free zone of the Middle Ages.  When he did what no historian
before him had done before and actually read the work of Medieval
physicists like Roger Bacon (1214-1294), Jean Buridan (c. 1300- c.
1358), and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382) he was amazed at their
sophistication and he began a systematic study of the until then ignored
Medieval scientific flowering of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.

What
he and later modern historians of early science found is that the
Enlightenment myths of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age
suppressed by the dead hand of an oppressive Church were nonsense. 
Duhem was a meticulous historical researcher and fluent in Latin,
meaning he could read Medieval scientific works that had been ignored
for centuries.  And as one of the most renowned physicists of his day,
he was also in a unique position to assess the sophistication of the
works he was rediscovering and of recognising that these Medieval
scholars had actually discovered elements in physics and mechanics that
had long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and
Newton.  This did not sit well with anti-clerical elements in the
intellectual elite of his time and his publishers were pressured not to
publish the later volumes of his Systeme de Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic
– the establishment of the time was not comfortable with the idea of
the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age being overturned. 

One thing I learned in writing The Irrational Atheist was to never trust “what everybody knows” about history. It’s more than MPAI, it’s more than a general ignorance about history; the fact is that most people who consider themselves to be educated with regards to history are, in demonstrable fact, maleducated. They’ve been given a false narrative that is belied by the actual documentary evidence.

The Wilsonian century

David Stockman explains that the 20th Century was a massive mistake and much of the blame for it can be laid at the feet of America’s second-worst president to date, Woodrow Wilson:

My humble thesis tonight is that the entire 20th Century was a giant mistake.

And that you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President in American history……..well, except for the last two.

His unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of national interest. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.

Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was to obtain a seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.

But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.

Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it:  Intervention positioned Wilson to play “The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.  America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World.

Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention. It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists—-when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.

By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.

These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial complex.

They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary central planning.

So, too, flowed the Bush’s wars of intervention and occupation,  their fatal blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the imperialist map-makers at Versailles and the resulting endless waves of blowback and terrorism now afflicting the world.

And not the least of the ills begotten in Wilson’s war is the modern rogue regime of central bank money printing, and the Bernanke-Yellen plague of bubble economics which never stops showering the 1% with the monumental windfalls from central bank enabled speculation.

Consider the building blocks of that lamentable edifice.

First, had the war ended in 1917 by a mutual withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front, as it was destined to, there would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government, or subsequent massive mutiny in Petrograd that enabled Lenin’s flukish seizure of power in November. That is, the 20th century would not have been saddled with a Stalinist nightmare or with a Soviet state that poisoned the peace of nations for 75 years, while the nuclear sword of Damocles hung over the planet.

Likewise, there would have been no abomination known as the Versailles peace treaty; no “stab in the back” legends owing to the Weimar government’s forced signing of the “war guilt” clause; no continuance of England’s brutal post-armistice blockade that delivered Germany’s women and children into starvation and death and left a demobilized 3-million man army destitute, bitter and on a permanent political rampage of vengeance.

So too, there would have been no acquiescence in the dismemberment of Germany and the spreading of its parts and pieces to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Austria and Italy—–with the consequent revanchist agitation that nourished the Nazi’s with patriotic public support in the rump of the fatherland.

Nor would there have materialized the French occupation of the Ruhr and the war reparations crisis that led to the destruction of the German middle class in the 1923 hyperinflation; and, finally, the history books would have never recorded the Hitlerian ascent to power and all the evils that flowed thereupon.

In short, on the approximate 100th anniversary of Sarajevo, the world has been turned upside down.

The war of victors made possible by Woodrow Wilson destroyed the liberal international economic order—that is, honest money, relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration—-which had blossomed during the 40-year span between 1870 and 1914.

That golden age had brought rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment, prolific technological progress and pacific relations among the major nations——a condition that was never equaled, either before or since.

Now, owing to Wilson’s fetid patrimony, we have the opposite: A world of the Warfare State, the Welfare State, Central Bank omnipotence and a crushing burden of private and public debts. That is, a thoroughgoing statist regime that is fundamentally inimical to capitalist prosperity, free market governance of economic life and the flourishing of private liberty and constitutional safeguards against the encroachments of the state.

So Wilson has a lot to answer for—-and my allotted 30 minutes can hardly accommodate the full extent of the indictment. But let me try to summarize his own “war guilt” in eight major propositions——a couple of which my give rise to a disagreement or two.

There is more, considerably more. Read the whole thing. He is not wrong, except in claiming that either Bush the Younger or Obama are worse than Wilson, or that Wilson was worse than Lincoln.

Fertilizer is not prevention

I very much enjoy reading VDH’s historical works, but I’ve never seen a better historian so completely unable to correctly apply the lessons of history to current events:

The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.

Under such conditions, history’s wars usually start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.

He’s correct that a large war is looming. Where exactly it will start, or which sides the various parties will take, is presently unknown. But VDH appears to have completely ignored the lessons of the Athenian adventure at Syracuse about which he wrote so informatively, and to have ignored that the collapse of the “nation-state” in the Levant was always inevitable due to the artificial and externally imposed nature of their creations; they were never nations in the first place.

That is why we can safely assume that the “nation-states” in Africa will continue to collapse as well. And, of course, that is why the “powerful” United States has been rendered increasingly impotent; it is no longer a homogenous white Christian nation committed to Anglo-Saxon ideals. Indeed, one cannot truly consider it a nation at all, it is best described as an imperial multi-national, multi-ethnic state akin to the Byzantine, Roman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

A refusal to learn

We have learned nothing from history and so we are bound to repeat it:

We’ve known for 5,000 years that mass spying on one’s own people is always aimed at grabbing power and crushing dissent, not protecting us from bad guys.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 2,000 years that wars are based on lies.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for millennia that torture is a form of terrorism.

We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for centuries that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands are dangerous for free markets.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government.

We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else.

It’s not different this time. There will be ethnic cleansing and probably several incidents of mass slaughter, although whether it will be the immigrants or the native people on the short end is yet to be determined.

There will be series of economic crashes and the ongoing depression will deepen and widen, because the incipient credit busts in 1987 and 2001 and 2008 were all papered over with more central bank “money” created ex nihilo.

There will be wars, both due to the great clash of civilizations and pro-globalist elites clinging to government power in the face of furiously nationalistic people denied their will through the limitations and legalistic perversions of representative democracy.

These things are all inevitable. Not likely, inevitable. There is no force on Earth that can stop them, because in our arrogance and foolishness, we have again decided this time it’s different. But it’s not. It never is. And if you’re still a Republican defending income inequality because communism or a Democrat defending big government because poor people or a Libertarian defending open borders and free trade because individual, your entire political perspective is outdated and irrelevant. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

Some thoughts on reading Israeli history

I’ve been reading an intriguing history, The Land of Blood and Honey by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, and a thought occurred to me. One thing that comes across very, very clearly throughout the book is that contra American and European assumptions, the Israelis are not a farsighted people. In fact, by European standards, they are unstable, prone to oscillating between overconfidence and despair, deeply paranoid, and arrogant. They are also brave, creative, hard-working, and intelligent, and their military strategists are competent, if not necessarily as brilliant as their public relations would have it.

(On that note, I was particularly amused to run across Israel’s finest general, Moshe Dayan, making precisely the same observation I have made concerning the IDF’s military accomplishments. As he observed in a manner obviously intended to deflate some of the more overly excitable cheerleaders after the Six-Day War, while the IDF was massively victorious, it was Arab divisions they defeated, not German ones.)

It’s not just van Creveld’s observations that led me to these conclusions either, as I read a piece about Israeli marketing that pointed in precisely the same direction. But it is also apparent that at the highest levels, the Israelis feel they cannot do anything without at least the tacit permission of the USA, and, to a lesser extent, the European nations. This is every bit as true today as it was when they were ordered back from the Suez Canal by President Eisenhower.

So here is the thought. Many Americans and Europeans have long regarded the Jewish support for flooding their nations with third worlders, particularly Africans and Arabs, to be fundamentally aimed at destroying the white nations. And there is some evidence for that on the basis of various statements that have been made by American Jews. But after reading more about Israel, I’m not so sure that is the true target. The Chinese are probably a more dangerous long-term competitor than the Europeans and there are no similar anti-Chinese campaigns on that front. Keep in mind that Israelis are not American Jews, in fact, they often appear to be mildly contemptuous of them, as they have been tested, and continue to be tested, in ways the American Jews have not. They tend to view American Jews in much the same way front-line troops regard support troops, as REMFs whose opinions are ignorant, misguided, and irrelevant.

And on that basis, my hypothesis is simultaneously less sinister and considerably more cynical. Ever since the first intifada, a majority of the Israeli people have wanted to push the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank and claim the entirety of what they call “the Land”. The religious hardliners have demanded that from the start, or at least since the 1967 war. However, Israelis know very well they can’t seriously hope to do anything of the sort without at least tacit approval from the West.

So, what better way to get approval from the West for ethno-religious cleansing than for the West to be engaged in precisely the same activity on an even larger scale? Is it not possible that Israel (and therefore AIPAC, and therefore American Jewry) has been pushing for third world invasion of the West, particularly Muslim mass immigration, in order to spark the very reconquista that more and more Westerners are beginning to demand?

If this hypothesis is correct, then we should see American Jewry gradually shifting from a pro-immigration position to a pro-deportation one. I am not, of course, saying this is correct, nor am I privy to any information on the matter one way or the other. It’s just a thought. But the more I learn about the Middle East, the more it seems to me that if Israel is ever going to successfully claim and colonize the entire Land, it is going to have to do so under the political cover of a second Western reconquista.

The beginning of the end

This 1978 speech given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is not only prophetic, but appears to have fallen entirely on deaf ears:

How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success. There were no geographic frontiers [limits] to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility and friability.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious — and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of subservience, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world’s rifts, I would have concentrated on the East’s calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

Solzhenitsyn even foresaw the vicious and unending assault of the Social Justice Warriors: “Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.” Social Justice Enforcers would be a more apt term. The SJWs are nothing less than the mutaween of the godless West, the self-appointed enforcers of the would-be globalist elite’s hellish parody of morality.

This is the time to make your choice. This is the time to stand up for what you believe. This is the time to show courage rather than to keep silent in the hope that you will be overlooked and the rabid mob will pass you by. This is the time to support those who stand with you and abandon those who don’t. This is the time to stop trying to appease the voracious, insatiable rabbits, who have tasted blood and discovered that they rather like it.

This is not the time for cowardice.

Sooner or later, the end will come. Every society ever known to Man has come to an end and ours will not be an exception. But if it ends in our time, let us be found with wounds in the front of our bodies and broken, bloody swords in hand. And if it ends in our children’s or grandchildren’s times, let them be able to look to us, as we look to Solzhenitsyn, and know that we prepared them for the battles they must fight.

The Great War 100 years later

esr reviews Collision of Empires, a history of WWI:

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided with the reality of machine guns and indirect-fire artillery.

Concentration on the Western Front is understandable in the U.S. and England; the successor states of the Western Front’s victors have maintained good records, and nationals of the English-speaking countries were directly involved there. But in many ways the Eastern Front story is more interesting, especially in the first year that Buttar chooses to cover – less static, and with a sometimes bewilderingly varied cast. And, arguably, larger consequences. The war in the east eventually destroyed three empires and put Lenin’s Communists in power in Russia.

Prit Buttar does a really admirable job of illuminating the thinking of the German, Austrian, and Russian leadership in the run-up to the war – not just at the diplomatic level but in the ways that their militaries were struggling to come to grips with the implications of new technology. The extensive discussion of internecine disputes over military doctrine in the three officer corps involved is better than anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

There is more at his site. However, as a corrective to this obviously
deficient history of the Great War, allow me to recommend the book I just
finished reading, namely, CATASTROPHE 1914 by Max Hastings, which can be
summarized as follows.

  1. The Great War was the inevitable consequence of dastardly German militarism. Since the
    Kaiser didn’t forcibly stop Austria from invading Serbia, the Germans
    are entirely to blame for making British lads volunteer to travel to the continent
    and die in the mud.
  2. Moltke was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  3. French was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  4. Churchill was an excitable loon wholly unsuitable for command of any unit larger than a company.
  5. If it were not for the brave and heroic British Expeditionary Force
    defending freedom, justice, and democracy, the Germans would have broken
    through the French lines and conquered the continent.
  6. The French did a little fighting too. So did the Russians. The Serbs
    killed lots of Austrians. None of this had any serious effect on the
    war, which was won by British courage and pluck.
  7. The death of millions was worth it in the end, because Germany is bad and if the Central Powers had won, Europe would not have the European Union today.

Jack the Ripper was an immigrant Jew

It’s rather like finding out Big Ben was made in Hong Kong. But apparently, immigration has been lethal in Britain for longer than we knew:

The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes.

Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match.

The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London.

It’s quite a fascinating story. And yes, the fact that the killer was an immigrant was integral to his eventual unmasking. I wonder if the English will be disappointed to learn that they cannot take credit for London’s most famous murderer. I have to confess, I always favored the Sir William Withey Gull theory. This is the face of Jack the Ripper, who, interestingly enough, was always one of the prime suspects and had been named by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in his notes.

esr calls BS on tor.com

Specifically, with regards to their woefully misplaced glee concerning an asserted discovery of “women warriors”:

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit.

What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking migrants were female, which is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The leap from that to “half the warriors were female” is unjustified and quite large.

There’s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.

It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons – knives, swords, and polearms in particular. I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.

I also know a good deal about Viking archeology – and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my review of William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat.) We’ve both read saga literature. We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.

And I’m calling bullshit. Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost no such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women. Tellingly, they are almost always archers.

Here we go again. Who do these science fiction SJW idiots think they’re trying to fool? That retarded Hugo-winning blog post about how women have always fought notwithstanding, all these women – and it is mostly women – have proven with their insane inventions and historical misrepresentations is that they have never, ever, stepped into a ring with a man.

As I have previously mentioned, I have fought women. I have fought female black belts. And it’s like fighting very flexible 12 year old boys, only the women usually quit faster. I’ve never fought a full two-minute round with a woman where I didn’t ease off; most times they will simply quit after the second time you knock them down. They are slow, small, and weak. They are much slower and weaker than you probably imagine if you have never kicked one in the face or punched one in the stomach.

I found the occasional look of betrayal some women would show to be particularly amusing. Yes, I did just hit you in the face. Yes, I’m sure it did hurt. No, I won’t stop because you’ve got tears welling up in your eyes. What on Earth do you think you are here for? That sort of dojo bunny never stuck around for long. The sort that did ended up marrying both of our senseis.

More importantly, there is the evidence of historical logic. Any society that made use of women warriors wouldn’t have survived for long. From Families and Demographics in the Viking Age:
 
“A typical woman probably bore 7 infants during her lifetime,
29 months apart on average. During pregnancy, women were expected to continue
working. After the child’s birth, the mother typically returned to work with
little delay. Evidence suggests that mothers nursed their children until the age
of 2 years, which may have dictated the interval between the births of a
couple’s children. A typical couple probably had 2 or
3 living children at any one time. Few parents lived to see their
children marry. And fewer lived to see their first grandchild.

So, a female warrior would have had to be not just as good as her male counterparts, but exceptional, and kill AT LEAST seven enemy warriors before being killed herself for the opportunity cost of her warrior womanhood to be considered break even from the tribe’s perspective. Then again, it’s not impossible for at least one bygone society to have been this stupid and shortsighted. After all, our society observably is.

The idea that the Vikings were sexually egalitarian is hysterical if you have ever read the account of a Viking funeral written by Ibn Fadlan in 921, when he was serving as the secretary of an embassy from the Baghdad Caliphate to the Bulgars. By my count, sixteen men have sex with the slave girl who “volunteers” to be slain with her master before she is stabbed and strangled on the ship that is subsequently burned. Wikipedia has a partial description, which appears in full in the revised edition of THE HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS by Gwyn Jones.

And even the mythical warrior woman Brynhildr followed the practice in the human sacrifice she offered for Sigurd.
    Bond-women five
    shall follow him,
    And eight of my thralls,
    well-born are they,
    Children with me,
    and mine they were
    As gifts that Buthli
    his daughter gave.