Richard Hoste

Richard Hoste

Richard Hoste is the editor of the HBD blog at Alternative Right. He writes prolifically on race, immigration, political correctness and modern conservatism. His blog is HBD Books, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these topics.

Monday, 23 August 2010

Kill'em All Conservatism

Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

The Washington Post has an unintentionally funny headline “Gun-toting soccer moms a scary thought in D.C. area, but not out west.”  It turns out that what’s good for Sharon and Cheryl isn’t necessarily what’s best for Shaniqua and Shantay.

PHOENIX -- In the red rock and sand of the Arizona desert, just past the retirement villages and golf greens that have made this sun-worshipping city famous, sits the biggest public shooting range in the United States.

Not far away are the Wal-Marts where Arizonans pay Sun City retirees to wait in line when a new ammo shipment arrives, lest the supply run out. Residents have the right to carry handguns openly, and starting last month residents who have no criminal records and are at least 21 also are able to carry concealed weapons just about anywhere, without the bother of getting a permit.

The full embrace of firearms is just as fervent to the north in Montana, where nearly two-thirds of all households have firearms. Montanans feel so strongly about their right to own guns for hunting, fending off grizzlies and -- if it comes to it -- fellow humans that lawmakers passed a measure last year that challenges the federal government's authority to regulate guns made and kept in their state.

This is the gun culture of the American West, and it is from here that the latest challenge to the District's firearms laws has come. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) have proposed a law that they say would sweep away overly stringent regulations imposed by the D.C. Council after the Supreme Court struck down the city's 32-year ban on handguns.

Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) said the McCain-Tester bill could gut the District's regulatory powers, including laws that are stricter than most states about keeping guns away from people with records of domestic violence. He also said the law shows a disregard for the realities of the District, where guns mean drive-bys, holdups and intimidation more than sport, tradition and the American way.

"The national debate about guns just misses that they are very different cultures," Mendelson said of the District and much of the rest of the country. "It's like a psychology, a mind-set, as to how people as a group think about guns."

What does one say to this kind of journalistic malpractice?  We should at least be happy that they’re admitting that it’s the quality of the population which determines how much crime there is, not the gun laws.  On the other hand...come on!  The lie by omission is so blatant that one thinks it must smack awake the most mindless Huffington Post-reading and PBS-watching liberal. Maybe the author here is a crypto-white nationalist who wanted to make it as obvious as possible without spilling the beans and getting fired.  If so, job well done.

 

Tuesday, 03 August 2010

An Alliance with Whom?!?

I’m more than a little surprised and baffled by Richard Spencer’s suggestion that those on the Alternative Right might form some kind of alliance with right wing elements in Israel. I’m quite certain that if he took some time to consider the issue more carefully he would find that such hopes are based on little more than specious arguments about “common interests” that don't exist and wishful thinking.

When talking about alliances, the first thing we must ask is whether the group you’re thinking about joining together with has anything to offer you and what the cost of calling them your friends may be. Spencer differentiates between American Leftist Jews, whom he sees as the enemy, and his potential partners among the far Right Likudites:

Your average eastern seaboard liberal Jew, who takes his marching orders from the New York Times and reads Phillip Roth in his spare time, will likely never want to have anything to do with the far Right -- even if his life depended on it. Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are a different story…

Israelis might learn to prefer… an isolationist regime, which would give them a free hand, as opposed to the ever-meddling Democrats and Republicans.

For the sake of argument, let’s momentarily pretend that there will come a time when Israeli far Right decides that all they really want from the United States is to be left alone (!), instead of financed and protected from international censure. At the same time, they trust ethnically conscious whites to simply stay out of the Middle East. I suppose gaining the support of the most right wing 1 percent of the world's Jews would have a few benefits. On the other hand, Western traditionalists might instead seek an alliance with those who find Zionist excesses repulsive: that is Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Latin America, the world’s one billion Muslims, Leftist Jews and even China and North Korea (in other words, the rest of the planet). I don’t think Netanyahu’s support is worth it.

The United States, along with Britain, France, Russia and China, are the only countries with veto power on the UN Security Council. According to John Mearsheimer, "since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members." In other words, America spends more international political capital defending the Jewish state than the other four main UN powers use on all other issues combined. We must ask, when they have a country this slavishly devoted to them, why on earth would the Israeli Right risk throwing their support behind a new revolutionary movement that has to hold symposiums on whether or not they’re anti-Semitic and-best case scenario-in Spencer’s words “wouldn’t likely express strong opinions about who wins or who loses in various land disputes in the [Middle East]?" What more could we give them that they don’t already get from the United States and why would they prefer a neutral America to the present arrangement? Another consideration: what political sense does it make for us to ally with the only political movement on the planet less popular than authentic Western conservatism? Zionism is a sinking ship, both demographically and in its relations with the rest of the world. Their only friends are those that make up the American establishment, who just happen to be our main adversaries.

The suggestion that Likud might throw themselves into our arms because they fear “[the] next generation of Latino politicians will likely make Obama seem like Eisenhower,” in other words that they stay up at night worrying about a Mestizo march through the institutions, is completely risible. The Israel Lobby correctly understands that if it loses its power over the American government it’ll be because of opposition from American whites who've thrown off the shackles of political correctness or, even less likely, Leftist Jews, not a politically apathetic group with an IQ of 90 which will make up a third of the population in a few generations. 

It has been argued that conservative whites should at least back Israel in order to defend the idea of the ethno-state. The fact of the matter is one could support the Palestinians or Turks by the same reasoning. Beijing and Moscow seem capable of opposing the most blatant cases of Zionist expansion and aggression without having their ethno-nationalist regimes collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.  There's no reason that a conservative Western Europe or America wouldn't be able to do the same. 

There’s one final issue that needs mentioning, something I'm surprised nobody has brought up. It seems that some paleoconservatives and white nationalists have internalized the Left’s worst stereotypes about themselves. “We basically want the same thing as Zionists, so we can work with them.” I believe most WNs and traditionalists simply want to be left alone, not to seize some land in the third world, slaughter/expel the natives, and form an ethno-state there and then for the next 60 years continue living in a never ending state of war in order to expand in a sea of one billion hostile and aggressive Muslims in search of some all elusive “security,” all the while being financed and protected by foreign taxpayers and soldiers. Western Rightists shouldn’t be comparing themselves to Israelis, but pointing out how reasonable, humane and moderate their goals are compared to those of mainstream Zionists.  

As Steve Burton has already pointed out, Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking the diversity-industrial complex.  It's rare to see such an honest look in a major paper at what "diversity" really means.  Thess parts are worth quoting again.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy....

In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

While the Indian and Chinese numbers are due partly to selective migration, the Jewish stats are incredible.  Even if we give them an average IQ of 110, it means that it's common place for members of the tribe with IQs below 100 to be college graduates.  This shows what a culture focused on education can do and probably explains the Ivy League overrepresentation.  It seems that if Jews with IQs of 100> can graduate in higher numbers than their European counterparts from State U it's not surprising that those with IQs in the 130-145 range are more likely than their gentile counterparts to put in the work to get into an elite college. 

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Pace Burton, this isn't really a "Nixon goes to China" type of event.  I've always been impressed with Webb (at least as far as politicians go).  I remember seeing on TV that even though he'd been a Republican, he decided to run against George Allen in 2006 after he asked the incumbent about his support for the Iraq war and the sitting Senator replied with something along the lines of "What, do you expect me to go against my own president?"  Webb is also pro-gun, tough on illegal immigration and has drawn criticisms from feminists for writing a paper against have girls in the military entitled "Women Can't Fight."

Of course, he's a Democrat for a reason and it's because he believes in class war.  But nobody's perfect and it seems to me that Webb is more of a Buchananite than anyone else in the Senate. 

Webb is also the author of a book called Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, a sypathitic portrayal of his group and its roll in determining American values. 

This article appears around the same time of Ross Douthat's New York Times piece on anti-white discrimination in college admissions. 

What is going on here? I have a theory that in modern America, our niceness tends to makes us think those who complain the loudest have a point.  I think most Americans and the intellectual class in general look at groups like the Black Panthers and say, "Well, they may take things a bit far, but if they're that angry, there must be some objective reasons.  Let's be 'moderate' and adopt programs X, Y, Z."  Before the Obama election, the appointment of the dense black supremacist attorney general and the "Wise Latina" making it on to the Supreme Court, whites believed the propaganda that they were the ones still in charge.  Even though the black bureaucratic class would disappear in a heartbeat without the support of white and Jewish liberals, as things now stand, they do have objective power to implement their racialist agenda. It took the Obama election and these racially tinged stories that have become weekly events to make this clear to the white masses.  They began to organize and make their anxieties clear and voices heard and a trickle up effect is causing the intellectual class to look at ways American Caucasians have been wronged.  The concept of "White Privilege" is starting to look silly and even that of white victimhood is getting a sympathetic hearing in the MSM.  

Some may not like the idea of whites turning into another self-pitying minority, but the truth is that people act when they feel wronged.  As declining white influence becomes more and more obvious, the more backlash we'll continue to see. Needless to say, a McCain/Palin presidency would've encouraged complacancy. 

We are making progress. 

Friday, 23 July 2010

It's Not About Oil

The common themes of Mark Hackard’s informative articles are that the US elites oppose the spirit of the East due to liberal ideology and old school national interests. The former argument I agree with; the latter, on the other hand, seems to imply that those ruling America actually care about its citizens, or at least those which happen to be corporate shareholders. One will search in vain for a “rational”-that is, economic-reason for the Iraq War, which couldn’t be paid for if you stole all the country’s oil for a hundred years.  As for the petroleum companies, The Israel Lobby revealed that they have actually traditionally opposed a bellicose foreign policy in the Middle East, preferring to peacefully conduct business with whoever happens to be in power

Now the website thinkprogress.org puts forth evidence that Big Oil has been lobbying against sanctions on Iran.

The recent revelations about BP’s alleged rolein pressing for the release of convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in order to secure valuable oil concessions in Libya provides a potent reminder of the influence oil companies and other major corporations exert over foreign policy.  New evidence uncovered by ThinkProgress shows that America’s own oil giants are also trying to shape U.S. foreign policy to protect or enhance their own profits, even if it puts American security at risk.

Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate this week show that the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Halliburton lobbied the House, Senate, and various executive branch agencies on the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act during the first half of the year as the bill was being debated in the Senate.

Big Oil’s interest in weakening the law is obvious.  Among other things, the new law, signed by President Obama on July 1, imposes significant new sanctions on individuals and corporations “that directly and significantly contribute to Iran’s ability to develop petroleum resources” and that sell more than $200,000 in fuel or other refined petroleum products to Iran.  The new sanctions are important because “although Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the world, it lacks refining capacity and relies on foreign suppliers for nearly 5 million gallons of gasoline a day.”  In addition, the country’s energy industry is “a huge source of revenue for the Iranian government and a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,” which “oversees Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.”…

  • ExxonMobil, which spent $2.5 million on lobbying last quarter, currently enjoys $4.9 billion in revenues from federal oil and gas leases and sold fuel additives to Iran until 2006.
  • Shell, which spent $4 million on lobbying last quarter, has $11.9 billion in revenues and benefits from the U.S. government, a wide variety of business relationships with Iran, and is alleged to be in violation of the 1996 Iran Sanctions Act—the very law amended by the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act.
  • ConocoPhillips, which spent $5.5 million lobbying last quarter, accrues $1.7 billion in revenue from federal grants and oil and gas leases and still actively profits from selling gasoline to Iranvia Lukoil, in which it holds a minority stake.
  • Halliburton has a whopping $27.1 billion in government contracts and, until 2007, provided oil and gas drilling services to Iran through a foreign subsidiary…

The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act passed the House 412-12 and the Senate 99-0, so it’s not surprising that Big Oil’s activities in Iran are not very popular. 

Think about that for a moment. The bill passed the Senate 99-0, despite only opposition from big business. There goes the myth of plutocracy.

Not that oil companies are angels; as the article reveals they lobby for subsidies just as hard as they fight for the opening up of foreign markets. In both cases they’re looking out for their interests, as is to be expected. Sometimes this is a good thing (trying to remove sanctions) and sometimes bad (looking for taxpayer funding).

Think Progress wants us to believe that we’re just lucky to have such an altruistic government. A full 100% of the Senate and 97% of the House was able to resist oil company lobbying to instead look out for the national interests and protect us from the menace of Iran. How fortunate we are to have such selfless public servants in office! 

Those of us of a more cynical bent may be forgiven for suspecting that it’s far more likely that there’s actually another lobby out there having a countervailing effect, one that in the minds of Congressmen relegates the wishes of Big Oil and their paltry tens of millions spent a year  to a mere afterthought. If our representatives only cared about the wishes of BP and Exxon Mobile it would actually be an improvement-the interests of these corporations at least sometimes accidentally converge with those of the nation as a whole.

I suspect the same factors are behind policy towards Russia, which opposed the Iraq War and is trying to put the breaks on any kind of similar strike on Iran. To the extent that the US government cares about controlling oil and gas reserves it’s only to be in a better position to spread liberalism and defend Israel

Wednesday, 21 July 2010

Where Black Rules White

If you’ve ever taken a class in the social sciences that isn’t economics, you may have noticed that your teachers are so afraid of human biodiversity that they seek to discredit it from the start while patting themselves on the back over how far their field of studies has come.  Oh, around a century ago people explained things by inherent racial differences.  Today, of course, we all know better because you know, Martin Luther King. They rarely explain to you when or how the old theories were proven false and they don’t need to. They’ll sometimes pull out the old canard about human races being 99.9 percent similar if they really want to beat racial egalitarianism into your head or the professor is particularly ideological, though for kids raised on the public school system and television even that isn't necessary.

Due to this scholarly environment some of the most interesting and honest case studies about the Third World are those from a century ago or older.  Recently a YouTube user put together an impressive video based on an old broadcast of William L. Pierce called “The Lesson of Haiti.” It brought to my attention a volume from 1900 entitled Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti.  The author, Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, was thought to be the first white man to cross the interior of the black republic since 1803, the year before Haitian independence was declared.  Where Black Rules White was republished earlier this year.

Prichard arrived first at Jacmel, the main Southern port.  The British Consular Agent gave him a place to stay for the night, which was a lucky thing considering the city had no restaurants or hotels (there were three of the latter in the entire country of 1.75 million).  A few white traders and government representatives inhabited the costal towns, but the population became exclusively dark as one traveled inward.  Haiti has very few mulattos and the ones that did exist were widely disliked at the time.

The NYT on very recent human evolution.

Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

This is funny.  I once knew a Japanese exchange student who told me that she couldn't take a sip of alcohol without turning red.  I had a hard time believing it and tried to convince her that maybe it was in her head.  According to the map connected to the story, the gene for alcohol flushiness is found in about 70% of Japanese (or maybe 60 or 80%, I'm bad at reading charts that try to tell you something with slight gradations of color). 

I wouldn't be shocked if this is part of the reason for Asian overrepresentation at Ivy League schools.  Getting drunk is a gateway into all other kinds of stupid behavior and takes time away from studying and extracurriculars.  And even those Asians who don't have the gene will be influenced.  Let's say you're a Korean who can get drunk but within your social circle of the same race 50% of your friends can't.  You're probably less likely to make drinking a regular habit of the group.      

The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.

Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.

“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.

One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.

About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.

Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.

From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.

A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.

She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold. Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.

One of the most visible human adaptations is that of skin color. Primates have unpigmented skin beneath their fur. But when humans lost their fur, perhaps because they needed bare skin to sweat efficiently, they developed dark skin to protect against ultraviolet light.

Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.

Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.

East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.

Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less, says a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University.

Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.

One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.

Gee, New York Times, you might as well start publishing Lynn and Rushton.  From a strictly scientific perspective, it's a misnomer to say a subspecies is "more evolved" than another as nature doesn't make value judgements.  From another view, if non-Africans are more different than our pre-human ancestors the implications are that they have more traits that are distinctively human. 

Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.

Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.

I get the feeling that the author could've used intelligence instead of height to make the same point. 

The Times has come a long way from the time they were publishing Stephen Jay Gould.  If scientific ideas matter when it comes to policy, and I don't think Gould and the rest of the race deniers would've worked so hard if they didn't, this has to eventually affect educated thinking about issues like affirmative action and third world immigration. 

We've had some back and forths on Glenn Beck, but stories like this give him a soft spot in my heart.

WASHINGTON — A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.

Shirley Sherrod, appointed last July to be the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have.

Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."

The video was posted Monday on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the "tea party" movement of having "racist elements."

But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first black man to occupy the White House practices racism in reverse.

The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments, particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers, was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign.

Both Vilsack and an official at the Obama White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone.

Vilsack said early today that the USDA will reconsider the ousting of Sherrod and will "conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts."

In Sherrod's account, her firing had been driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle — and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

Sherrod added, "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth."

What this story shows is that the Obama Administration is absolutely scared to death of anything that can be perceived as anti-white racism.  It's a battle they don't want to fight anywhere or under any circumstances.  And they're also afraid of Glenn Beck.  If he forces the White House to spend an extra two hours each day watching his show and worrying about its image, giving it less time to think of new "civil rights violators" to go after or work on amnesty, he's doing an invaluable service to this country.

Today, after Glenn Beck told the administration that her comments put her right into the Democratic mainstream, the USDA is considering bringing Sherrod back. 

Tuesday, 20 July 2010

The National Security Monster

Many of us with good reason cheer the decline of the mainstream media.  We shouldn't be too happy if there ever comes a time where there are no major investigative journalistic outlets however, as there's only so much research blogs and specialized magazines can do.  The Washington Post has done a special on the national-security industrial complex that's developed in the aftermath of 9/11.  Here's how it starts.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space...

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

TMZ reports

If this video is any indication, the new reality show "K-Town" -- billed as an Asian version of "Jersey Shore" -- will do for Asians what the original "JS" did for Italians. And that's not a good thing.

TMZ has obtained this cast reel for the new show -- which has only shot its pilot and hasn't been picked up by a network yet. There's definitely a Situation or two, a Snooki, a Pauly D type (who is most likely a club promoter, not a DJ) and their version of Jwoww goes by Jwao (kidding).

GTR for life.

For those who don't get the joke,the Italians on Jersey Shore say GTL, which stands for their daily routine of Gym Tan Laundry.

Hopefully at the clubs the women don't all leave their housemates for white guys.  Can we take that much truth?  From the looks of the video, however, it appears as if the male stars of the show will be masculine enough to hold their own.  Good thing too, as I've always sympathized with Asian men who say they're always portrayed as effeminate nerds.*  Of course, like all stereotypes this one is based truth but other minorities get proactive attempts to fight unflattering images.

Really, is America ready for this?  I suppose willing to have a program based on Asians behaving like degenerates, no media or didactic attempts to refute their negative stereotypes and casual ethnic jokes at their expense is about the best evidence for assimilation you'll ever get.

 

 


*To preemptively respond to a certain commentator, no, expressing sympathy for Asians doesn't mean I want to have them replace NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS .

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