Wolves, Foxes, Coyotes, and Dogs

Biological Materialism, which made the case that there are not nearly enough genes to account for most biological inheritance, also showcased a famous lineage of domesticated foxes from Siberia. As a rule, foxes cannot be tamed, but rules can often be broken with enough pressure. In this case, "enough pressure" meant turning the wildest 90% into fur coats at each generation, for many generations. It's extreme Darwinism. (Although not extreme enough to account for the origin of species, which we're supposed to believe is common...but that's another story.)

It's intriguing to realize that, outside of extraordinary circumstances, foxes won't be tamed. They have their own way. Let's consider the evolved traits of foxes and their kin, as they have some analogs to human personalities as well. Wolves, coyotes, and dogs are all closely related, and can even interbreed, while foxes are somewhat more distant, cousins rather than brothers.

Wolves are the consummate pack animal. Fierce, faithful, hierarchal, and emotionally attached to their tribe. (Orcas are similar, in their intense emotional bond to their pod.) Wolves command a territory, over which they provides stewardship. Most people have probably now seen the video of the remarkable improvement of the ecosystems in Yellowstone following the re-introduction of grey wolves. The rivers even run cleaner. Wolves introduce order. While the wolf may be the barbarous enemy of the caribou, the wolf pack is of great benefit to the caribou herd. Wolves cull the weak and diseased, and help attenuate population oscillations.

Foxes are solitary creatures. Like wolves, they live on their own terms, but don't require vast tracks of wilderness on which to roam. Foxes stay hidden from the civilized world, but are happy to poach whatever they can get away with. They're considered clever and cunning because of their ability to steal chickens despite all defenses. Foxes are more adaptable than the wolf, and can thrive even in semi-urban areas.

Coyotes are solitary like the fox, but even more secluded. They aren't as clever as the fox, but are scavengers and opportunists. They skimp by on whatever they happen to come across. Occasionally they group together to hunt large prey, but most often the coyote is a lone wolf. On still nights, the coyote howls in a dignified matter, yet in lean times a coyote is a desperate creature.

Dogs have been domesticated by civilization. They are loved by humans for their friendliness and loyalty by humans, who have also been domesticated. Dogs are diverse. Many dogs are evolved to assist humans in productive tasks, such as hunting and sheepherding, and are admirable. Others have been bred for mere amusement. Chihuahuas are an abomination to nature, and they know it. So dogs run the gamut from useful to useless, although traditionally they were useful and they became increasingly useless in modern times.

Still, a dog is a lowly being, because it is dependent. It is a pack animal without a pack. The dog projects its innate loyalty onto humans who use it for either labor or amusement. The dog is paid, of course, yet seems to have no choice. Dogs grovel before power, and are loyal even when the loyalty is not repaid, even when the master is not loving. Strike a cat and you'll never see him again. Strike a dog and he becomes more obedient. A dog is a creature who will happily accompany his master, tail wagging, out to the field to be put down. And, if the aim is off, would pathetically crawl back for care. [I don't mean to sound too vicious. Dogs are wonderful animals, but poor humans, and we're making a social analogy here.]

Dogs represent the urban / cosmopolitan element of society, and it's wild brethren the rural segments. Wolves provide a clear analogy to the tribe and nation. They are insular, maintain full autonomy of their territory, and oversee a natural order - and are quite threatened by encroaching urban sprawl. Coyotes are similarly threatened, while foxes are capable of carrying on fairly well in a new environment, but they never rule.

Is equating modern cosmopolitans to dogs unfair? Yes, it's rude to the dogs. Consider this story out yesterday from South Africa. I'll take some snippets, but it's worthy reading in its entirety.

The story is about a white farm being violently burglarized by black Africans, right? It's interesting that the article never actually mentions the races of the victims & perpetrators. Everyone knows what happened anyway, even the outlet's totally not-racist white audience, because humans are pattern-matching machines. We know what is happening in South Africa, and we know what the liberal media's motives are in omitting certain facts. The article describes a home invasion by several black men searching for guns and money.

The suspects then started their long night of intimidation and torture. “They started asking us where our guns and cash were. We have never owned guns. We don’t believe in firearms. We told them we not like other farmers. Our family runs an HIV orphanage and is entrenched in helping the community around us.”

This is like the fourth paragraph and already we see they've gone full libtarded. Liberals don't just virtue signal to for approval from other white liberals, but they instinctively cower before those deemed to have status or power. "Have mercy, we aren't like those other white people." And you have to love how liberals are so conscious of anti-racism that they become just as racist as any Klan gathering, equating the black community around them with HIV and orphans. And, of course, they don't believe in self defense, but rely on the goodness of their fellow man and the efficiency of the state. How did the vibrant locals respond to this display of piety by the modern-day saints?

The suspects did not believe the family, so they placed a plastic bag over Peter’s head and started suffocating him. The suspects did this twice while cross-questioning the Bakkers. “They started saying they going to rape my wife and my daughter if I didn’t tell them where the guns were.”

This is the same dynamic starting to play out in the Democrat party. (Seriously, watch the hilarity in the coming years as devout white liberals try to win to win office under the anti-white party.) Luckily, one of the family had taken the time to learn the dialect of the Bantu invaders.

Matt’s eldest managed to subdue the suspects after he spoke to them in fluent siSwati. “I think this helped us, as they seemed to calm down when they heard he could speak the language.”

Remember white people, if you just adopt their languages, customs, and religions, you might save your family from being raped and murdered. Why not give it a chance?

The Bakkers issued a statement after their brush with genocide.

“We, as South Africans, need to learn the concept of ubuntu. We are all human beings who share suffering, pain, joy, happiness. We need to help our brothers and sisters and care about one another. South Africans have so much love to give, yet our news is filled with all the negativity and hatred. Let’s focus more on doing the best we can, individually, to heal this country instead of bemoan our troubles.

This all from the guy who insinuated to the invaders that he wasn't like those other racist, bigoted farmers. The platitudes sound noble, but they aren't. Let's not bemoan that white farmers are constantly being robbed, beaten, and murdered by black immigrants, and native politicians are constantly threatening confiscation of property al la Zimbabwe. The answer is to embrace ubuntu. That is, to become even more African. The liberal response in times of tragedy is always to signal piety. If you want more in that category, read that same outlet's opinion piece on the matter. It has all the same feel as Molly Tibbett's father praising Mexican food after the rape and murder of his daughter. The Boers are in serious trouble.

I would advise you to think of yourself as either a wolf or a fox. They live life on their own terms, by either taking full command of their territory, or finding ways to thrive around the edges. Throwing yourself at the mercy of your tormentors is not dignified. Men were not meant to live like dogs.

The Right Gets it Wrong: Genetics

Many bloggers have taken on genetics in the last week. I'd like to think they all read Biological Materialism and have been inspired to the subject, but the readership numbers of this humble blog would indicate otherwise. (It does seem that at least one of the more prominent alt-right bloggers does read along here, based on some apparent cross-pollination.) But mostly they must not be, or they wouldn't be getting things wrong on genetics so often.

One of the major services we offer here is to clear up some common economic fallacies held by our wrong-thinking brethren. Often they betray a belief that our currency is created out of thin air and remains into perpetuity, driving inevitable hyperinflation. Of course, the rampant inflation is never there, so they frequently engage in concocting theories of dark inflation to account for the discrepancy. The reality is that the created currency is equally offset by debt, and the two annihilate one another at the conclusion of the legally enforced contract.

It's time to help steer the ship right in another domain, which is genetics. The right-wing dissidents dive into the domain to counter claims made by the communists of the mainstream left, which is that disparities of outcome result from racial oppression and systemic bias. Leftists believe in a "blank slate" theory that means all variances in human outcomes must be societally driven. NonCultists observe that outcomes are well correlated to individual IQs and that, if the average IQs of the races are considered, they fall in nicely with the pattern. Ranking races by IQ and ranking them by income returns the exact same list. For all the talk of white privilege, Asians do significantly better on average than whites, and Jews better still.

Where our side goes wrong is to adopt their framework of biological materialism. That is, to assume that human traits are fully inherited through genetics. That leads to engagement of fruitless arguments, like this one recently provided by prominent race realist (and former National Review contributor) John Derbyshire. In response to this take from the Economist

Dr Watson's views about race and intelligence seem to stem from his keen interest in The Bell Curve, a book published in 1994 by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, that, among other things, argued African-Americans were less intelligent than white Americans and genetic differences between ethnicities played a role in the difference. Modern genetic research has largely discredited these ideas.

the Derb responded

Modern genetic research has of course done no such thing. The last 25 years of that research has not dispositively either confirmed or refuted the hypothesis that race differences in intelligence have a genetic component; but on balance I think a fair-minded observer would have to say that it's tilted the probabilities somewhat over towards Watson's side of the argument.

I think it would be fair-minded to say that the probabilities tilt somewhat in our favor. That is not a strong argument in any context. The reason that genetic research doesn't confirm or refute racial influence of genes on intelligence is because genes don't dictate IQ. No doubt intelligence is inherited, so race realists should stick strictly to proofs of inheritance, rather than relying on genetic assumptions that will perpetually confuse everyone on both sides. What they're really afraid of is that the lack of genetic evidence for intelligence (between races or otherwise) will be taken as confirmation of the blank slate theory. So what? Do we counter bad conclusions with bad arguments? It hardly matters, liberals just ignore whatever scientific results are inconvenient anyway. It's not a big deal if they misinterpret another one.

Anatoly Karlin, whose blog is linked on the sidebar, latched onto a recent study to conclude that "racial blank slatism is going to become untenable within the next few years" because "it has now been rigorously shown that Jews have more alleles associated with higher IQs than Caucasoid Gentiles." From the study, found here, it's not clear how they prevented a circular dependency. Jews tend to be correlated to genes correlated to high IQ, which tend to be correlated to Jews. What exactly has been learned? They seem to have ignored a likely parallel result of this research: that big noses and curly hair cause higher IQs.

The results indicated a .30 correlation between genetics and intelligence, which would indicate that 10% of intelligence is genetically determined. But what is being correlated? Certain genes were correlated to intelligence in one study, which correlated back to intelligence in another. So smart people are mildly correlated to smart people. They call it science. It's unfortunate that the paper comes from Western Illinois University, the nearest research university to where I grew up, but then it was always known as a party school.

Steve Sailor shared some recent results from a psychology journal that correlated racial lineage to cognitive ability and showed that the extremes of fully African versus fully European are separated by almost a full standard deviation. Note that, while the term "genetic" is used in the linked paper 167 times, the comparison is actually of lineage to cognition, with "genetic ancestry" used as a proxy for lineage. These results are fine for the arguments Sailor is trying to make. Intelligence is inherited, and there are variations in the various lineages. Perfectly reasonable, and backed by data. It's when we assume the standard model of inheritance - biological materialism - that we run into trouble.

Other authors in our camp have made flawed genetic arguments. Consider the recent post by spandrell, where he makes a historical analogy to today's drug legalization dilemma.

Alcohol is actually a great example. Obviously alcoholism is a big problem in some parts of the worlds, but oddly not everywhere. In many parts of Southern Europe, alcoholism barely exists at all, while in Northern Europe is quite serious. And with peoples like US Amerindians (“Native Americans”) or Australian Aborigenes, alcohol causes severe physical and mental problems to pretty much every single one of them. “Liquid fire” some call it, for how it wastes them.

The only explanation for this fact is that humans in societies with a long history of agriculture have developed genetic adaptations to digest alcohol, while people with shorter histories of agriculture have not. This doesn’t mean that people slowly developed an adaptation while merrily drinking their wine. No, that means that every single alcoholic in France or Italy who couldn’t hold their liquor died, while the few (at the beginning *very* few) who didn’t become addicted were able to survive and leave descendants. I have no idea what percentage of the population of early farmers in Southern Europe had to die in order for widespread adaptation to wine to spread, but given how Amerindians hold their liquor, it may have been in the order of 80%.

I'm sure he's correct that societies with long exposure to alcohol have evolved adaptations to it, but much of the process is speculative. For instance, it is assumed that there was already a small subset of the population with a natural genetic alcohol tolerance. That allows the author to skirt around the thorny issue of how new genes arise. The argument couldn't be applied as a general rule. For instance, to explain giraffes' long necks, he wouldn't say, "well, there was a small percentage of the population that already had genes for long necks, then the environment changed and natural selection weeded out the other genes." Assuming the pre-existence of the gene is meant to reduce the argument to a simple mechanical process, but in either case you have a problem. If the gene already exists, then why? Do we already have all the genes we may ever need, just waiting to be used? There is actually a school of evolutionists that believe just that. They note that there is no conceivable process for evolving new genetics that doesn't fly in the face of reasonable probabilities and the timelines involved, whereas culling genes is easy. They propose that the earliest lifeforms held maximally complex genomes, and all current organisms retain some subset of the original. There is no explanation for maximally complex primitive lifeforms that doesn't invoke the supernatural. On the other hand, perhaps the gene did not pre-exist, and it evolved as needed, in the same way Darwin believed giraffes evolved long necks in response to their continuous reaching for food. How do animal behaviors feed back and influence the genome? There is no know mechanism for this other than magic. So really, the current static of evolutionary theory requires one to pick either God or magic, but most engage in all sorts of logical games to evade the state of the science as it stands today.

Also, spandrell asserts that everyone who didn't have the gene must have died. Well, that's an extreme take on natural selection. No, everyone who had the gene had a reproductive advantage. Over many generations, the gene became the dominant allele in the population. Natural selection doesn't necessarily make bad genes a death sentence, or we'd see population bottlenecks for every evolved trait. It just means that you aren't as good at reproducing as your competitors. Perhaps it just meant that others were spawning large families while you were too drunk to reasonably function. Which brings us to another post by Anatoly Karlin, Breeder's Revenge. In this one, Karlin makes the compelling case that, while modernity makes children optional and has driven down reproduction rates to alarming levels, the environment is actually culling out those without an innate drive to have kids. He notes that white birth rates are finally back on the uptick, and predicts they will continue to rise for many decades to come. This time, Karlin isn't resorting to genetics to make his case, but simply to natural selection and generic inheritance. I'd suggest genes are actually a hindrance to evolution, which is worth considering at another time.

US Elects New Venezuelan President

Venezuela is shaping up to be the next global hotspot. From the Nassau Guardian,

Last Wednesday Juan Guaidó, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, took an informal oath of office and declared himself the country’s interim president. In a choreographed response the United States and a number of other hemispheric countries including Canada, Brazil and Argentina recognized him as such.

The response of other nations was significantly more nuanced, calling instead for a political process that leads to free and credible elections. Russia, China and Turkey however, indicated their support for the Maduro government and objected to external interference in the country’s internal affairs.

In contrast, Caribbean nations, including some of those in the Lima Group who voted recently at the OAS not to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s second term in office as Venezuela’s president, said nothing about Guaidó. Instead they have called for a rapid regional and international dialogue involving all actors to preserve the democratic process.

What happens next is far from certain. Washington’s unprecedented decision to recognize an alternative government to the one that holds de facto power has set in train a hard to predict range of outcomes that may turn a humanitarian disaster into geopolitical conflict.

Washington's decision to officially recognize a usurper is perhaps unprecedented, but it's not that unprecedented. For most of our early history, US policy was to recognize the de facto power of a foreign land, rather than the government we'd prefer. This policy dates all the way back to George Washington himself. For at least the last half century, clandestine (and not-so clandestine) elements of our government have routinely engaged in aiding various rival factions they wished to see in power, particularly in Latin America, the Middle East, and - in the last election - in the United States itself. It's hard to call diplomatic recognition of Guaido unprecedented after, say, Barrack Obama declared loss of confidence in the de facto governments of Libya and Syria, while arming the opposition forces.

Still, the official recognition of a particular faction that is not in power is a clean break from the old tradition. Perhaps they hope it will aid a smooth transition, so that governance is transferred smoothly rather than descending into civil war between numerous factions. Recognizing preferred - rather than de facto - foreign governments robs those nations of self-determination (painful as the process can be) and corners the United States into a risky morality position. What if this guy Guaido ends up butchering a hundred thousand women and children? Blame will fall on Donald Trump and the other foreign leaders who endorsed him.

The Bank of England has refused to release over one billion dollars worth of Venezuelan gold held in its vaults, which was previously used as collateral for international loans. They fear that Maduro intends to embezzle the national assets for himself. It's an interesting dilemma of ownership. If not the government, who in Venezuela can be trusted to take possession of the bullion on behalf of the nation? Perhaps they should divvy it up into small, equal portions for each of the citizens.

If you're a third-world national leader, who do you trust with your assets? The western world is prone to virtue signaling and endless foreign meddling. If I was to set up my own little country (been thinking about it), I'd rather trust my national endowment to the Chinese or Russians than any country that might be pressured by the United States to monetarily enforce the public morality code of the day. Frankly, there's room for caution even as a citizen. Today it's Venezuela, next week domestic wrong-thinkers will find their funds are being retained indefinitely by the bank for national security concerns.

Greenouts

Last week was a blood bath for left-wing digital media outlets. Buzzfeed (recently in the news for another fake-news adventure), Huffington Post, and Yahoo News staff layoffs combined to nearly a thousand. Many took to Twitter to advertise their unemployment, and were met with little sympathy from conservatives who still use the platform. (It seems a lot are there just to troll.) Steven Crowder expressed his heartfelt sympathies but informed them that he has no current openings. Many generally reveled at a dying fake-news industry. Most vicious was the eruption of a "Learn to Code" meme blitz (see Tim Pool, or Black Pigeon Speaks).

During the Obama administration, the response of these same journalists to coal miners laid off by green environmental policies - in areas already hammered by US trade agreements - was to advise them to transition into the technology sector. Reporters were eager to compare the situation to the sharp reduction of farm labor after industrialization. But farmers weren't laid off by edicts from the district.

Learn to code, the miners were told. Whether any given reporter was being genuinely naive, or intentionally condescending, all such reporting dripped with arrogance. To them, all the menial labor is interchangeable. Just go do the jobs those other dirt people do. They betray an ignorance to what coding is. It's a bit like saying, "why don't you miners just all become doctors? There's a shortage of those." (Thanks to the AMA, but they wouldn't understand that either.)

The best part of the meme campaign has been the response of those laid off journalists. Gracefully taking a dose of their own medicine? Of course not. Some have made declarations that telling journalist to learn to code amounts to hate speech, and have demanded Twitter ban all the offenders. As usual, no principle, all righteous indignation. It's fun to watch them go down in flames.

Speaking of coal miners, the Australian state of Victoria laid off its coal miners too. Let's check in and see how they're doing.

Victoria is now an even bigger joke than South Australia, becoming our second blackout state thanks to global warming madness.

Consider: Victoria sits on vast deposits of coal — enough for electricity for hundreds of years.

It also has lots of gas.

Yet last Thursday and Friday it somehow managed to run out of electricity, just like some third-world country. Just like South Australia.

Result: 200,000 homes and businesses had their power cut off without warning. Portland’s smelters and other big electricity users were also paid by government to shut down during the emergency.

Wholesale prices soared as Victoria desperately imported power from Queensland and NSW, which for now still have enough of the coal-fired generators that the Greens and Labor demand we scrap.

Actually third blackout state. Tasmania relies heavily on hydro. During hot summer months, when water levels fall far enough, the rolling blackouts begin. Really we should call them greenouts - power outages directly resulting from green energy policies that mandate volatile energy sources. Luckily, the other countries will see the lessons being learned in South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania, and make sure not to repeat them. Right?

Germany, one of the world’s biggest consumers of coal, will shut down all 84 of its coal-fired power plants over the next 19 years to meet its international commitments in the fight against climate change, a government commission said Saturday.

The announcement marked a significant shift for Europe’s largest country — a nation that had long been a leader on cutting CO2 emissions before turning into a laggard in recent years and badly missing its reduction targets. Coal plants account for 40% of Germany’s electricity, itself a reduction from recent years when coal dominated power production.

“This is an historic accomplishment,” said Ronald Pofalla, chairman of the 28-member government commission, at a news conference in Berlin following a marathon 21-hour negotiating session that concluded at 6 a.m. Saturday. The breakthrough ended seven months of wrangling. “It was anything but a sure thing. But we did it,” Pofalla said. “There won’t be any more coal-burning plants in Germany by 2038.”

The plan includes some $45 billion in spending to mitigate the pain in coal regions. The commission’s recommendations are expected to be adopted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

Germany, which is mothballing all its nuclear plants on a short timeline, will now start dismantling its coal plants on a more leisurely schedule. The future for Germany is a dependency on North Sea wind and Russian gas. Shall we take a pool as to when the greenouts will begin?

A Tyranny By Any Other Name

Man's great power is rooted in his ability to give names to things. With naming, we ascribe a mental order to nature. With that, we can impose an order that we desire. We first manipulate with words, and then with actions. In a sense, we speak our will into existence. No bridge was ever built or field cleared without speaking it first. Genesis was the story of consciousness speaking reality into being, but this is not mere metaphysical musing. Psychologists have shown that the areas of the brain that engage in linguistics and technological functioning overlap greatly.

Man's great flaw, then, is his ability to speak falsehoods. Civilization depends on its ability to convert reality into language, and language back into reality. Corrupt that process and destroy all that is good. Lies are evil. They destroy, murder, and degrade. An advanced society that primarily lies is living on time borrowed from its ancestors. There is much to admire from traditional and ancient wisdom. The Persians built one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world. They might seem brutal today, but were quite liberal by their contemporary standard. Bow to Persian power, and your people would be forced to pay tribute and to allow conscription into the military, but that was largely it. You could keep your languages, traditions, and customs. The Persians were far more tolerant than today's Empire of Columbia, which dictates what the culture should be to every remote corner. The one thing the Persians didn't tolerate was lying, which was a capital offense. They knew that an honest culture is strong.

This blog is primarily concerned with calling out lies. Eventually it will be migrated away from Google Blogger (puke) and rebranded as the Eternal Vigilance blog. [I've held the domain and hosting account for months, but have not yet been able to compel myself to the hours the task would take.] The inspiration for the new name is from the Founding Fathers, who said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. They meant vigilance against tyranny, which really means vigilance against lies. Dishonesty is the substrate on which tyranny grows. This blog may seem to bounce all around the place as far as domain topics goes, but the common thread is the lying. I put significant effort into yesterday's post on Biological Materialism. I don't personally care whether or not genes account for biological inheritance. I care about the scientists who are lying, especially when they comprise a major priestly caste in our secular religious order. I did not care one iota about the New York real estate mogul's long-shot presidential campaign (I thought it was a lark) until I realized how much the media was lying about him. He was the enemy of the liars. Good enough.

A tyranny by any other name is still a tyranny. Call it modern democracy or whatever you want...the reality remains unchanged. Our rulers hold power by speaking false words, which too many confuse with reality. It is hard to make sense of reality. It is much easier to take someone else's word for it. (Literally.) The tyrant holds power by dictating what the words are. Control words, and you control everything.

On Friday morning, Roger Stone was arrested in a pre-dawn ambush by 29 agents in 14 vehicles who aimed fully automatic rifles directly at him and his family, over an alleged process crime. While neither Stone nor his lawyer were given advanced warning, Mr. Mueller made sure to have CNN on site with cameras rolling. This is blatant tyranny, but they call it justice. If Stone was really a dangerous threat requiring 29 fully armed agents to apprehend, he'd never have been released on bail. The point of the raid - and the cameras - should be obvious: it's a show of strength. It's a show of who is really in charge, and what happens when you cross the line. I'm not even terribly concerned about a show of force; not enough to write about it, at least. No, what is remarkable about this blatant intimidation tactic is that it will be spun by the corporate media as proof that Trump is actually the tyrant. "Oh, they wouldn't have arrested him without evidence. More proof that Trump and his allies are criminals." The deep-state tyranny is always used as evidence that Trump is a tyrant, just like Hillary's emails being proof that Trump was a criminal. The dynamic is no different than a study showing little genetic influence on fox domestication making the opposite conclusion. Tyranny thrives in a sea of lies.

The reality - to those of us who reject their sirens' cry - is that the tyrant is probably the one subjecting his political opponents to publicly broadcasted humiliation. Not only does Trump not inflict such abuses on his opponents, but he cannot protect his own people from them. His power is largely limited to his Twitter account. We live under a jack-booted tyranny. Mueller has more power than Trump. It doesn't matter that we elected Trump and gave him political majorities in both houses of Congress. Their major accomplishment in two years was rolling back the corporate tax rate. Oh boy. Our votes carry little power. The real power dynamic is that the approved media sources broadcast lies nonstop, and threats to the establishment are countered by black-clad men with battle rifles. Any more lofty description is just fake words.

Biological Materialism

Let's continue on with what was discussed in Subprime Science. (This post is longer than normal, and takes on some technical arguments at a high level.) A couple takeaways from that piece relating to evolutionary studies were:

1. Like physics, it shares an infatuation with randomness.
2. Many of the fundamental mechanisms are assumed but have never been demonstrated in a lab.

DNA is commonly depicted as an algorithm that fully directs the development, maintenance, and operation of all an organism's biological functions. Most associate the nucleus as the cell's brain. In actuality, DNA has just a single role: it encodes proteins. It is a reference book that is consulted as necessary when a particular protein is needed. Change the gene's allele and you get a different resulting protein. An example of this is the genetic determination of hair color. The generated proteins are functionally similar, but not identical. In that fashion, the genome is assumed to account for the entirety of one's inherited traits. The problem is that there aren't nearly enough genes.

The Human Genome Project was a global scientific collaboration undertaken to fully map the human genome. It was lauded as a monumental human achievement; more significant than landing a man on the moon. But - as often happens - improvements in technology only illustrated how little we know. Early estimates for the number of genes were as high as seven million. Even after the turn of the century, molecular biologists were insisting that the human genome must consist of upwards of 100,000. The results of the Human Genome Project indicate around 19,000 genes. That's not a lot of variables. For comparison, the Toyota Camry electronic throttle control system had 11,000 global variables. Granted, that was some nightmare code, but still a human is vastly more complex than throttle control in a low-end family sedan. Traits are often expressed by multiple genes. If it takes a few genes to determine hair color, and a few to determine eye color, and a few to determine height, and IQ, and susceptibility to heart disease, or alcoholism, or schizophrenia, or each of the 96 sexual orientations, or....well, you can see that 19,000 doesn't go very far. And those are just the traits of human variance. There would need to be genes to describe how to build out the complex brain with its 100 billion or so neurons arranged in the proper manner, with all the intricate structures, as well as all the other organs and tissues. How do 19,000 genes describe a kidney, or where to put it?

Surprisingly, the human genome is smaller than that of a nematode - a microscopic worm. Rice has more than double our gene allotment. From the first article,

The fact that the human genome is so parsimonious raises an interesting question. What exactly is it about the human genome that gives rise to our staggering complexity, in the brain for example, compared to other animals such as monkeys, worms or even water fleas?

A good answer to that question will win prizes!

In modern science, it's all about the prizes. Well, I'll field a good answer to that question: the human genome doesn't give rise to our staggering complexity. Simple enough. (I accept checks and all forms of flattery.)

It is now well established that there is biological inheritance that does not come directly from genes. One scientist showed that if rats are trained to fear a certain chemical odor (by administering electric shocks), then that fear is measurable in two generations of offspring. That is quite a challenge to genetic determinism. The strange ability of organisms to pass specific information to offspring constitutes a field known as epigenetics. Scientists can't explain epigenetics, but assume that somehow regular genetic expression is being modified, and offer some theories to how that may occur. As in astrophysics, the response to results that challenge basic assumptions is to stick with those assumptions and throw in as much complexity as needed to handwave the annoying questions away.

A rejection of biological materialism does not refute the theory of evolution. Darwin himself was not a biological materialist, having written about a hundred years before James Watson - who is currently being de-platformed by the rabid left for insisting that genetics affect human intelligence traits - discovered DNA. Take the example of the giraffe. Under materialism, the long neck is explained by random mutations and gene combinations. One day, a gene randomly mutates to express a slightly longer neck, giving that giraffe a slight survival advantage. Over many generations, this process results in the extremely long necks we see today. Darwin assumed that the longer neck somehow resulted from the animal straining to reach leaves. The natural selection is still the same - animals with the adaptation get a survival advantage.

In 2016, scientists completed a giraffe genome project. They found 70 genes they believed were associated with long neck development. They intend to test the results by modifying mice with the giraffe versions to produce long-necked mice. My prediction: it will never happen. None of the genes are encoding neck length. They are encoding proteins that the giraffe needs to incorporate into its metabolism. There are genes correlated with giraffe necks because giraffes have structural differences which require protein compositions which differ from, say, mice. Geneticists must routinely fall prey to the correlation == causation fallacy. It's sort of like determining that batteries are what make a car go, because all cars that go have batteries, and all cars that don't have batteries, don't go. We understand that batteries don't drive cars, but are still a necessary component. (Teslas excluded.) Similarly, a giraffe without the appropriate proteins cannot support a long neck. That doesn't mean the genes "drive" long necks, only that they are necessary.

Some famous research done in Soviet Russia on Siberian foxes showed that selecting for a single trait - friendliness - caused a whole slew of changes to emerge besides behavior. The shape and color of the animals changed, as well as their vocalizations, and reproductive behaviors. Generally, they became more neotenous (puppy-like), and cuter. These secondary adaptations were noted within the first few generations of the project. The broad effects of selecting for a single trait were surprising to geneticists.

Recently, researchers at the University of Illinois analyzed the fox genome to determine the genetic causes of domestication.

They honed in on a single gene, known as SorCS1, which is involved in synapse formation, functioning, and plasticity, as well as additional functions. Although it had never before been known to contribute to social behavior, SorCS1 was clearly associated with a very specific behavior in foxes.

From an earlier article,

"Our analysis revealed that the differences between tame and aggressive foxes may lie in cells in the anterior pituitary gland, which can change their shapes to communicate with one another about when it's time to release stress hormones," Hekman said. "Their pituitary glands may produce the same amount of stress hormones but be less efficient at getting those hormones into the bloodstream."

The researchers found a strong correlation of the SorCS1 gene with the domesticated population of foxes. However, that does not explain the broad-spectrum changes within that group. They address the matter in their article in Nature.

Changes in physiology, morphology and reproduction have also been observed over the course of fox domestication. These by-products of selection for behavior could be caused by several mechanisms including pleiotropy, hitchhiking, random fixation, trade-offs between different biological systems and targeting of genes that have a broad effect on the genome, for example DNA methylation.

That seems a bit speculative for an article in a premiere journal. (Nature is a politicized entity, so their professionalism should always suspect.) The first possible explanation, pleiotropy - the influence of a gene on multiple traits - could be tested by running a similar experiment, but only selecting for one of the related traits, like fur color, with no human interactions. After a few generations, the experiment population should show increased friendliness if pleiotropy is the cause. (Which it isn't.) Hitchhiking requires the genes for the various traits to reside on the same chromosomes. The researchers should be able to to investigate that with their genome data. Random fixation - the reduction of a population to a single allele of a gene - is possible, but in this case the odds of random fixation for all in the various traits, in ways that show gradual change over many generations, is not plausible.

I'd suspect that the interaction with humans itself has a significant impact on the evolution of the foxes. An experiment that duplicates the fox breeding but adds two new test groups - one that is selected for friendliness but has no interactions with humans, and one that encounters heavy human interaction but selection is random - would likely yield results just as surprising to geneticists as the original research was. Another experiment could be done more easily with mice. Half of the mice must always reach out to grab their food, half the mice do not. Within each population, half should be selected for arm length, and the other randomly. This should allow a quantifiable comparison between Darwin's understanding of evolution and the modern random genetics model.

The researchers found a strong correlation between cells that influence the release of stress hormones from the pituitary gland and the domesticated fox genomes. It seems perfectly natural that it would be so. The selection process should give preference to those with a lower stress responses. The correlation with the single gene may be a matter of the random fixation they referred to. There is no other indication that it affects behavior outside of this one study of a particular lineage of foxes. Of course, a single gene doesn't account for the broad and gradual changes. They admit as much themselves.

"We think this gene makes foxes more tame, but we don't want to overemphasize it—tameness isn't associated with a single gene. The picture is definitely more complex," Kukekova says.

When results don't match expectations, always assume more complexity. What other genes are associated, then? They did the statistical analysis. Only one gene jumped out at them. I'd wager that the one gene is the entirety of the genetic selection that occurred, and all other adaptions occurred outside of genotype changes. The article is titled Sequenced fox genome hints at genetic basis of behavior, but the results actually demonstrate the opposite conclusion. The sequenced fox genome hints at an extremely limited genetic basis of behavior (if any) and none for the associated physiological changes. All conclusions can be twisted into support of the prevailing theory if the theory is considered to be infallible.

While I'm not the only one to make the observation of the gene shortage problem, the skeptic commentary out there is scant. The most prominent voice has been Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist most noted for his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich, observing the ever-decreasing estimated number of genes coming out of the Human Genome Project, opined that there were simply not enough genes to justify evolutionary psychology.

"People don't have enough genes to program all the behaviors some evolutionary psychologists, for example, believe that genes control."
"Evolutionary psychology is dead but doesn't seem to know it yet."

Ehrlich isn't defecting from biological materialism, he's just pointing out that the numbers don't work. He's quite sure that inheritance == genetics, so his conclusion is that evolutionary psychology just doesn't exist. (A ludicrous conclusion.) His detractors are just as bad.

If gene shortage is such a problem, then how can there be so many hundreds of adaptations and features in a body? There are already so many types and locations of bone, hair, sense organ, nerves, hormones, blood vessels etc. If there is no apparent gene shortage for making such variety in a body, then why should there be a problem in making a multitude of mind modules and inherited instincts as well?

There don't seem to be enough genes for evolutionary psychology, but then there don't seem to be enough genes for general biology either...therefore, there must be enough genes for psychology. The basic assumptions can never be questioned. They go on to explain that it's not the genes that determine phenotypes, but the combinations of genes. That's the answer you'd have to give when faced with a glaring gene shortage. Combinatorial explosion will certainly grant you an enormous state space, but that doesn't mean it's correct. What's the evidence? How do different combinations of genes induce complex traits? The majority of animal behaviors are inherited, not learned. What is the combination of proteins that tells a bird how and when to make a nest? Can scientists manipulate those genes to compel the bird to build a bridge instead? If gene combinations drive genetic expression, rather than mere genes, it should have been detected in the statistical analysis of the fox genome. All the genes are still there. What they're dangerously close to outright stating is that the genetic combinations work in mysterious way that can't be measured, and thus can't be disproven. (Making it not a useful theory.) What they are more careful to say is that it's just very complex, and will require many years of heavy funding to suss out all the various details of a theory which is assumed to be true. As in astrophysics, the theories are axiomatic.

This is a field where assumptions are unquestioned and rationale is vague and speculative. I once read a theory that our genes encode fractal patterns that the body follows. This was to account for the proper routing of blood vessels, for one. It's an implicit acceptance of the gene shortage problem, as it's hard to conceive how genes detail the size and locations of the body's countless blood vessels. A fractal pattern would give a concise formula that the body follows - somehow - to get consistent results. In either case, where is the evidence that blood vessels - or any of the body structures - are described by genetics? What genes can be altered to produce three kidneys instead of two? How do I genetically modify my offspring to have flippers instead of hands? (I would do it.)

And that's the first counter anyone would make to my skepticism. "Uh, genetic engineering bro, so you're wrong." But was has been engineered? In the most famous example, engineers swapped a gene in soybeans that encodes an enzyme that is destroyed by Roundup, with an allele from another plant that is resilient. Thus, Roundup Ready soybeans were born. Cool engineering, but not evidence that genes do anything besides encode proteins. Recently, a breed of salmon were engineered that grow to full-size faster. The trick was to inject salmon eggs with genes that encode a growth hormone, compelling the animal to grow faster. The most significant genetic engineering was the transplantation of an entire genome between two similar species of a bacteria. "The entire protein repertoire changed," said the principle investigator. Well, you'd expect that. The cell survived because of the close similarity of the bacteria. It is also conceivable that such a transplant might succeed in closely related animals, like wolves and coyotes, or humans and New Yorkers. (I keed, I keed.) I would predict that there will not be any similar accomplishment between even mildly dissimilar organisms, and I have to note that there seems to be no followup successes now in over a decade. The research was intended towards the goal of creating custom genomes from scratch. Prediction: the venture will fail, dismally, if it hasn't already.

One more aspect I want to quickly mention before we move on to the social impacts is another domain that falls within biological materialism: consciousness. The standard assumption is that it all happens in the noggin. The first troubles began to appears all the way back in the 1950s, when scientists failed to isolate the locations of specific memories in a frog's brain. They did discover that memories were dulled proportionally to the amount of cortex cut away, wherever it was cut. This indicated to them that the memory was distributed over the entirety of the cortex, giving rise to the holonomic brain theory. There has been virtually no progress on the "hard question" of neuroscience, with all theories more or less amounting to speculation. The core questions of human experience - how do we think? why do we sleep? - remain as mysterious as they've ever been.

Impacts

Some consequences if biological materialism is indeed false.

• It is the biggest scientific swindle of all time. The other contenders for the title would probably be global warming and the big bang theory. Global warming is less of a swindle because there is widespread skepticism, and there is a degree of truth to the claims. (Carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas, and there was a warming trend at least up to the turn of the century.) The big bang theory is a bigger swindle because it is generally accepted by everyone, although there is a small skeptic community online. Biological materialism is the biggest ruse because it is almost universally accepted, and it is the assumption used for huge amounts of bad investments and research, mostly of public funds. And, as mentioned in Sherlock's Folly, its prominence means no one is looking for the better answer.
• DNA is not the code of life. It's more like a recipe book. It tells how to make a soup or a cookie, but not how to run the kitchen. Giraffes are tall because giraffes are tall, and the genome instructs how to build the proteins the cells need to function. 
• Parents don't just pass material genes to their offspring, but also behaviors. Want your kids to turn out good? Do good yourself. This would predict that children of older parents should be more capable and successful, and there is supporting evidence. They have more life experience to pass epigentically to their children. (Their assumed theory is that older women just make better mothers.) PTSD and other mental disorders are also passed down.
• GMO food isn't that scary. Copying over alleles of an enzyme from another edible plant is nothing to be concerned about. Jacking up growth hormones in salmon? Might be a problem - because of the growth hormone, not the GMO. 
• Genetically engineered super humans isn't happening. There was a recent buzz that a Chinese scientists had already produced modified humans, stoking all kinds of fears. They are misplaced. Improvements will be minor at best, but probably nil. The best way to create supersmart humans is to breed them, but people tend to get creeped out when you start pining for eugenics.
• IQs are on the rise, globally. (They're sinking in the west because of immigration, but that's another matter.) People like to credit education, but that's not it. Our public education is crap. IQs are going up because we use our brains more. (And thanks to c-section childbirths.) Even people in everyday jobs are cognitively engaged. Mechanics troubleshoot complex systems every day. Cabbies are constantly strategizing routes in a busy cities. (The most mundane jobs do not give the same benefit, such as picking lettuce all day.) Generally, though, automation is making us smarter, because more people are tasked with big-brain duties. Our intellectual endeavors stretch our brains like a giraffe stretches its neck.
• Conscious AI isn't happening. There won't be a Kurzweil singularity, which is based on the assumption that consciousness is a material phenomenon. Which is fine, because superintelligent machines would lead naturally to human extinction. (Only liberal philosophers would be happy with that.)
• The people freezing their severed heads in cryogenic chambers are wasting their money and dignity. The people holding out that technology will one day allow them to upload their consciousness onto a chip and gain immortality are more likely to gain it in a spiritual afterlife.

Conclusion

The natural question to ask is, if genes don't provide a general blueprint or operating instructions, then what does? I have no idea, and that is a perfectly valid answer. I'm only making the case that the gene theory doesn't add up, and hardly anyone seems to be noticing it. Whatever the unknown mechanism is, we'll never find it if the entire scientific community is working under the premise that unknown combinations of genes are a catch-all that can explain away all apparent contradictions.

Sherlock's Folly

There's a quote by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - author of Sherlock Holmes - that I frequently encounter on the internet.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

It describes proof by elimination, which is a valid concept, so long as all possibilities can be enumerated. For instance, if there are three doors, and you've opened both 1 and 2, can you be sure that the prize is behind door number 3? If you're certain that one door must contain a prize, and there are no other doors, then yes. Otherwise, no.

This quote often shows up in science articles. It seems defensive; almost an admission of guilt. "Sure, the theory is based on all sorts of assumptions and ignores the contradictory evidence, but it's the best one we have." Call out a cherished theory as crap and the likely response is, "have you got a better theory?" No, and I don't have to. Is science supposed to be a process for finding the least wrong theory? It is not. The problem with taking the least wrong theory and treating it as a correct theory is that confirmation bias sets in. results find a way to conform to the consensus, or else they are discarded. Science is supposed to be an attempt to disprove theories, but that's not how careers are made. Discordant work is assumed to be shoddy work, particularly if it challenges the conclusions of those highly placed in the ivory tower.

The result is civilizational hubris. We just can't admit we don't have an answer. The people demand an answer. In more primitive times, lightning would have been a fearsome display. What is it? The priest answers, "It is the wrath of an angry god. Give me wealth, power, and perhaps some children to sacrifice, and I'll curry favor with the gods to ensure our safety." How little has changed. In the post-inaugural March for Science, our secular clergymen stated, "Keep funding us in these dark times, or the world will certainly be destroyed." A tad apocalyptic. At least they aren't murdering our children to appease Tlaloc, right? No, but some are calling for them to be thrown into a woodchipper as a show of piety.

"I don't know" is not an answer that gets funded, and if you don't provide an answer, someone else will. Sherlock's Folly is to assume that, because no better theory has been found, no better theory exists. The least-wrong theory ossifies and the correct theory is never sought. They assume everything else has been eliminated, thus the current theory is all the remains. Any new theories that arise can surely be rejected, since the science is settled.

The New Rite of Passage

Most tribal societies marked the transition into adulthood with rites of passage, which often amounted to little more than senseless torture that had to be endured. There is evidently something to the principle of a coming-of-age ritual. In our civilized society, there is no clear transition to adulthood. Delayed adolescence is the norm, with many seeming to never mature. Common phrases like "the 30s are the new 20s", "adulting is hard", and "age is just a number" are all expressions of a desire to remain lost boys into perpetuity. Learn to adopt a healthy disdain for such language.

If American society has an analog to the rite of passage, it is the high school graduation, full of lofty sentiments of new independence and self determination. But high school no longer challenges students (up to 60 percent of college freshmen require remedial education) and half the students show up drunk, high, and rowdy to their day of honor. In addition, graduation ceremonies are now routine at all grade levels, reducing the ceremony from a celebration of a major life transition to more of an inflated reward for not flunking out. Even pre-schools perform graduations now. If my daughter completes college she will have participated in some half dozen graduations. (Although, the pre-school ceremony was so adorable that I almost don't mind participating in the trend.)

Primitive cultures might require a boy to take on a bear to prove his status as a man. Recent events have been inspiring. Perhaps the new ritual should be to take on a left-wing hate squad, and walk away with one's dignity intact. Despite the language adopted even by many on the right, Covington Catholic's Nick Sandmann did not smirk or engage in any sort of condescending behavior. While a still shot has captured the imaginations of millions of rage-addicted facebook junkies, the video shows that he merely stands where he was already standing, and uneasily attempts to keep a smiling face. He didn't instinctively turn to his heels at confrontation. (In fact, the boys have stated they weren't even sure if Nathan Phillips was being friendly or confrontational.) At any rate, they certainly were met by endless confrontation in the aftermath. Prominent mainstream voices were calling for the boys to be exiled from society & the economy, given as slaves to Indian tribes, or tossed into a woodchipper. To my knowledge, the students have not groveled to the media under the shame of hoax hate crimes nor have they apologized, although did express some regret at the whole incident. Very solid, especially for kids. Not all adults do so well. Tim Hunt apologized for his (admittedly foolish) candor before getting his career axed. Matt Taylor pathetically sobbed his way into keeping his job after wearing a provocative shirt. Brett Kavanaugh, of course, put on a display of public crying in response to a whole slew of ridiculous accusations.

On the right, the highest respect should be given to those who poke the bear and live to tell the tale. Trump, of course, does this routinely. During the campaign, he said good words - the best words - but everyone is skeptical of political promises. He demonstrated his valor by driving the left into incredible fits of rage, from which he always survived. We should measure our leaders primarily by the hate they receive from The Cult. If you aren't being called a racist, you aren't even trying. That's actually an understatement. McCain and Romney were both called racists at various times in their presidential campaigns, even as devoted stooges to the mainstream press.

It's understandable why people buckle under the pressure. For one, they are naive. They don't understand that the media is primarily a political weapon for the left. Second, they are unprepared. The media don't just hit the kinds of people experienced in handling attacks, like politicians, and gang up on kids. Normal people assume these things won't happen to them. Third, they see the incidents as unfair attacks that will destroy their reputations. It's time to start framing these as glorious opportunities to prove our mettle to the people we care about. Who cares what the left thinks? They hate us whatever we do. Grovel and apologize, or stand up like a man. (Or woman.) They don't care, but we do. If regular people start to see that their status is enhanced - not destroyed - by leftist rage fits, then the cowardice that grips so many will relax, and many will help us in our mission to destroy the left by fueling their own insanity.

Everything All the Time

The Covington Catholic ordeal demonstrates two aspects of The Cult. (1) They have extraordinary institutional power, and (2) they are extraordinarily reckless. Their power is demonstrated in their ability to take an incident where some high school kids were subjected to unambiguously racist and homophobic slurs, and transform it into a media frenzy where the boys - waiting for their bus - are roving bands of oppressive racial overlords. It's the same phenomenon as with the leaked Hillary emails. They documented actual crimes, and were transformed into a story about Trump committing treason to rig the election by helping - somehow - Russia hack the servers. Perhaps it seemed a bit too abstract or distant for some to get very concerned, but this is a case where the civil libertarians are correct. If our rulers are permitted unlimited power to invert the truth, it is only a matter of time before their tyrannical powers are applied to normal people. It is clear to anyone who is remotely clear-headed that no one is safe.

No one, at least, with a light enough complexion. Everyone now can see that the racists were ignored because they are black and the victims vilified because they are white. We can scream until we're red in the face that this political environment is becoming dangerously racist against whites, but we don't hold a fraction of a fraction of the attention that a social media rage fest generates. They just interrupted the regular broadcasting for a full 3-day weekend to demonstrate to the entire nation that, if white Christians are subjected to racism, they should then be punished by banishing them to a caste of untouchables that can't even attain lowly employment. Think America is becoming a 3rd-world nation? We're already there. Punishing victims is the realm of barbarians. In Arabia, they stone rape victims. In America, they destroy the lives of anyone who draws the ire of the virtual lynch mobs. At the level of national politics, we are post-civilized.

The big question that everyone forgets about, because we're accustomed to the endless drama, is why we are talking about this at all. Whether the story is the fictional one - that the Covington Boys were using racial slurs - or the reality - that the Covington Boys were the recipients of racial slurs - who cares? Who cares what name someone a thousand miles away called someone else on the street? It shouldn't even register on the local news. Perhaps a "facebook-worthy" incident for someone's personal feed, at best. Instead, the incident has fully captured the media cycle. Why? Why are trivial incidents and opinions matters of fierce national debates, constantly? And how can we fix it?

The toxic national-level discourse is a consequence of our form of government, and it can't be fixed. The major flaws are universal suffrage and the death of federalism. The death of federalism means that all issues are national issues. The recent post Why Aristocracy Preserves Real Freedom, and Why Democracy Does Not describes how feudal systems based on balance of real power insulated the people from the central government, whereas modern democracy and its balance of paper power does not. The states have no real power because the federal central government taxes the citizenry directly and uses the funds to bribe the states for obedience. The state capitals are mere field offices of the District, and city hall little more than a service provider. All the real power is in Washington, and accessing that power means farming votes from the general public. Thus, everything is a matter of national referendum, and a swing in public opinion translates into a swing in public policy. The only buttress to all this is the deep state, now a converged institution. Conservatives are caught between a deranged mob on one hand and a managerial class that despises us on the other.

Everything becomes a morality play because half the electorate isn't that bright and votes on emotions, and a sizable chunk of the smart half does so as well. Power goes to whoever can stoke the most outrage. The Covington Catholic event seems like a massive disaster for the left, but I'm not so sure. It succeeded in generating the greatest surge of fury since the Kavanaugh tribunals. When the facts surfaced the cultists got bored and moved on in search of the next rage fix. It's hard to call that a failure. Sure, the outlets lost credibility, but they have none anyway, so who cares? The upshot for us is that the fake-right news got so exposed on this one. Hopefully it clips the wings of Ben Shapiro and drives the last nail into the coffin of the National Review. (Which has not fired Nicholas Frankovich and had the audacity to run this article today.) To his credit, Shapiro's latest piece sounds like it could have been penned here, so hopefully the incident has compelled him to re-examine his loyalties. He is still, at best, leading from the rear.

As long as Washington consolidates all power and all issues require a "national conversation", then it's going to be everything all the time. Constant cacophony is not a graceful existence, and emotional appeals to the lowest-common denominator is no way to steer the ship of state. It will eventually be run onto the rocks. Reform is hopeless. Our fight is to best entrench ourselves to be well positioned for the inevitable. At least this latest episode demonstrated who our friends are. Anyone unconvinced of the secular inquisition after this will likely never be reached through argument or evidence.

Lol, Conservatives

An addendum to yesterday's post, Lol, Buzzfeed.

I said

Meanwhile, the leftists on Twitter are doing everything they can to ruin these kids lives, by revealing their identities which they'll then leverage to try to get them fired from their jobs or have their college admissions denied, in addition to just the normal public shaming with national media support.

Here's Kurt Eichenwald of Newseek, in a tweet that surprisingly hasn't been deleted. I hope you didn't think I was exaggerating about them instigating virtual lynch mobs!

This MAGA thug and his friends from @CovCathColonels in KY, should be identified and denied all work in perpetuity. Their bullying of a Native American veteran matches the taunting of Jesus. But thats not gays and abortion, so the school probably never taught them about that.

I've been hearing that the fake-right news outlets completely took the bait on the Covington Catholic hoax hate crime story. In researching for the first post, I browsed the the tweets and posts of the usual suspects: Ben Shapiro and the National Review. Generally, their commentary seemed to be critical of the media coverage of the event, depicting it as another ridiculous blunder by the liberal media. I did notice that most of the commentary was from late in the story development; specifically, after the full-length video clips had surfaced. There wasn't much in the way of initial reactions. I had to suspect that they had simply deleted their earlier tweets when the story shifted, but I had no evidence and left it alone.

As it turns out, they not only deleted tweets, but entire articles. [I found out thanks to this blog post at VDare, which itself linked Gateway Pundit - the second greatest political blog in all of Missouri.] Most glaring of which was a post from the National Review's official blog, outrageously titled The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross. (Retraction covered by Yahoo News here, with archive link here). This was not a post by an unaffiliated contributor, but a "deputy senior editor." The first paragraph suffices for review.

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.

He compared the left-wing agitator to Jesus, and high school students wearing Trump hats to his crucifiers, and as "evil" children. That is maximum hyperbole. (We'll leave the question as to why the National Review would blame the Crucifixion on Romans and ignore the Jewish mobs who demanded it as an exercise to the reader.) Aren't you glad we have the self-styled leaders of the "modern conservative movement" to counter the biased liberal media? With friends like these...

Bill Kristol - a leading neocon, socialist, feminist, and liberal - took the predicable stance in a now deleted tweet.

If some kid wearing a McCain 2008 hat had been filmed behaving this way, John McCain would have already called Mr. Phillips to express regret. And he would have used the occasion to remind his supporters they should treat others with respect. Will Trump do anything like this?

He's absolutely correct. John McCain could always be depended on to grovel before the liberal establishment and denounce conservatives whenever necessary. Why would Kristol delete a tweet that just oozes truth? Does he hate the truth? He did keep up the tweet where he calls himself a liberal, so he must not be totally opposed to the notion. I've not seen any evidence that Ben Shapiro deleted tweets, but some commenters are insisting he was one of the first on the right to criticize the students and open the floodgates. Shapiro is a guy who gets a lot of followers by saying that the media uses racism as a political weapon, and then piles on to attack any conservative they accuse of racism. His outlet has compiled some tweets deleted by liberal commentators, but spares nominally conservative voices that did the same.

We don't expect anything else from the fake-right news, but what is alarming is the organizations that left these kids to the wolves. As reported from the Catholic News Service,

In response to the escalating fury and disgust on social media against these students, Covington High School and the Diocese of Covington issued a joint statement Jan. 19 saying they condemned the students' actions "toward Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general."

The school officials turned on their own in a heartbeat. From Anchorage Daily News.

"We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic high school students," a statement by the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School read. "This behavior is opposed to the Church's teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. We know this incident also has tainted the entire witness of the March for Life and express our sincere apologies to all those who attended the March and those who support the pro-life movement."

They assumed guilt and were already considering the harshest possible penalty - expulsion. What is the point of them? The primary reason to send your kid to a Catholic school (which I have been planning to do with my own) is to shelter them from the lunacy of our government-run schools. There is no shelter from Catholics. That statement did not just come from the school, but was jointly issued from the diocese. It's not enough that we have a commie pope in Rome, now commie bishops in America? The Catholics are more beholden to the prevailing secular religion than giving shelter to their own flock from the raging forces of spiritual degeneracy.

Even the March for Life itself turned on the child victims. (Catholic News Service)

March for Life president Jeanne Mancini also issued a statement that day saying the encounter did not represent her organization or "the vast majority of the marchers" and that the students' behavior is not welcome at the march and never will be." The next day the March for Life said it in a tweet had deleted its original tweet about the students "given recent developments."

The problem with 80% of these so-called conservatives is that they are liberal by default. They instinctively side with the Cathedral, and usually the best you can hope for when they are embarrassingly contradicted is for them to quietly delete their tweets. As I said of the pseudo-conservatives in Media Rules for Conservatives, "all the left has to do is call someone a bigot or a racist and these cockroaches go scrambling to outdo each other in their virtue signaling."

For more on the subject, Rush Limbaugh has plenty to say, on this and all the fake news of the past week, and on the right's prevalence of "graceful losers." We have an even more significant problem looming, which is that our children aren't even safe from left-wing lynch mobs in Catholic schools or at anti-abortion events.

Lol, Buzzfeed

It's time to upgrade the Fake News shitstorm to a Category 4. That designation would imply we are a single increment in derangement from open calls of insurrection against the elected president, and inciting mob violence against the opposition. Perhaps there's one more step between where we are and the full extreme of partisan propaganda, but I don't know what it would be.

The first item of the week was a report by Buzzfeed that Trump had compelled Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. The left erupted into yet another round of "this is the end of Drumpf" predictions and renewed calls for impeachment. I first saw the headline on Reddit and responded with a simple "lol, Buzzfeed." As you can imagine, I was downvoted deeply into oblivion. Liberals encountering the comment would have been annoyed at its obvious bias and ignorance, and yet it was probably the most sober analysis given by anyone as the story was breaking. The technically correct response to any anti-Trump scoop that's breaking from Buzzfeed is "lol".

To their credit, some major outlets kept a bit of distance from it. Of course, they've been burned endlessly by these kinds of claims, and this one was no exception. In a truly remarkable scene of poetic justice, the story was refuted by none other than the Mueller team. We always love to see liberal fratricide, and watching the fake investigation chop the fake news at the knees was truly a thing to behold. Why they did so is a matter of debate, but I'd wager that Mueller knew that he'd soon be inundated with demands to prosecute the fake crime, so he quickly got in front of it.

The normal process unfolded. Outrageous claims backed by anonymous sources. Full spectrum meta-reporting, where the major outlets loudly trumpet the reported claims, while carefully adding qualifiers to maintain plausible deniability. An absolute avalanche of social media outrage coupled with vows from Democrat officials to pursue the serious allegations. Some examples of the reporting & editorials that came up in a news search:

• CNBC - Trump told his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about Russia Trump Tower deal, BuzzFeed report says
• Bloomberg - BuzzFeed's Trump-Cohen Story Describes Clearly Impeachable Crimes
• Washington Post - Mueller Might Finally Have His Smoking Gun
• National Review - REPORT: Trump Told Cohen to Lie to Congress About Moscow Trump Tower Plans
• Townhall - Dem Rep: This Is 'The Most Serious Threat' to Trump's Presidency
• CNN - Republicans stay mum on bombshell BuzzFeed reporting

It's the usual thing. All outlets which ran sensationalist headlines - or cautiously ran the story but without strongly emphasizing that it was an unvetted claim made by a tabloid - share the blame for the latest fiasco. The problem isn't that Buzzfeed would print fake news. The problem is that all the other fake news outlets would amplify the report until it became the biggest headline of the month. There is no journalistic integrity in running sensationalist horse manure so long as you have a handy cop out for when the story is utterly destroyed the following day. It's a sad showing for even the morally bankrupt field of journalism when the winning argument in response to major breaking news is "lol". The result will be the same lasting disinformation. The majority of liberals on social media now believe that Trump compelled Cohen to lie, and no amount of reason or evidence will convince them otherwise. So, in some regards the operation was a success for the liberal outlets, as it further radicalized their audiences.

In other fake news, the new two-minutes hate has been focused on some Catholic high school kids attending the March for Life. Twitter is in a fury about white kids in MAGA hats who did not properly cower before some Indian protestors. Apparently, the footage has been cut to depict them as oppressing some hapless minorities, when the full footage shows that the smaller Indian group were the ones being confrontational, and they have a history of that kind of behavior. Styx covered it here (with his typical foul language). I normally try to link to Bitchute when I can, but this time it's out of necessity, because YouTube has removed the video as "hate speech." See for yourself. That's the political discourse these days. An analysis that effectively states "those conservative kids did nothing wrong" equates to hate speech. (They also believe family is an offensive term.) Meanwhile, the leftists on Twitter are doing everything they can to ruin these kids lives, by revealing their identities which they'll then leverage to try to get them fired from their jobs or have their college admissions denied, in addition to just the normal public shaming with national media support.

And that's why I say we're at a Category 4 for fake news. Instigating a virtual lynch mob is just one step from instigating a real lynch mob. Running clearly fake news to impeach the president is just one step from calling for open revolt. Remember what they say about how bankruptcies happen: slowly first, and then all at once. Don't fall into the comfort of believing any of this is remotely normal or maintainable, or else when it all quickly unravels we'll find ourselves muttering, "we should have seen it coming." We see clearly what is happening, and any lack of preparedness for the brewing storm will be our own shortcoming.

We Should Give Liberals What They Want

One way I part ways with mainstream conservatism is that I believe liberals should generally get what they want for themselves. The problem with letting liberals have their way is that they're always trying to impose their will on everyone else. It's not enough that 99 bakers in town are more than happy to decorate a gay wedding cake. The one that refuses is an oppressive heretic and must be coerced by the power of the state. My major complaint with liberals is that they operate as a neo-Inquisition. My other complaint is that they are destroying the nation, but increasingly I don't consider them part of my nation. They are defectors, so who cares what they do to themselves?

I believe we should have universal healthcare...for liberals. If you vote Democrat (a fair enough approximation for liberal) you are subject to both the costs and benefits of the healthcare. Otherwise, you can opt out. Anyone opposing such a plan is effectively admitting that liberal programs need conservatives to play the role of tax mules for the schemes to function. This logic applies to all similar programs as well, such as free college.

I believe we should have gun control...for liberals. (An idea originally put forth by Scott Adams.) Liberals believe that more gun control is better. Well, banning liberals from owning guns fits the bill. Moreover, it would specifically apply to the segment of society most inclined to abuse gun rights. Remove firearms from just a handful of the worst Democrat-run cities and America's high gun-crime rate magically becomes a low gun-crime rate. We should really push this idea, as it would force them to complain that such a law would unfairly put them at risk.

I believe we should encourage homosexuality and self-inflicted castration...for liberals. If all liberals became gay tomorrow, and we were able to encourage/enable conservatives to pick up the reproductive slack, most of our major problems would solve themselves in a generation.

In so many ways, the best course of action is to give them what they want, while holding ourselves to a better standard. Here's a contentious one. I believe we should allow cheap and easy abortions...for liberals. Perhaps we could even train the staff to shame them a bit for engaging in heterosexual contact, a relic behavior of the oppressive patriarchy. Really embrace the lefty dogma and run with it. It's not a very pragmatic approach, unfortunately, because abortion is the one social issue that gets many Republican voters energized. Take that away and the Democrats become empowered to impose the full brunt of their agenda upon us.

The March for Life was just held in Washington, and had a stronger turnout than the recent Women's March. The turnout is strong every year, and the media normally tries to ignore it the best they can. Our good friend Ben Shapiro made an appearance, and ended up losing some of his sponsors over it, as reported by Tim Pool. Shapiro decided to spin his speech into an episode of his podcast, which included plugging his podcast sponsors. Hijacking the event to recite commercials for toothbrushes is tacky, and companies withdrew support because they never intended to endorse the anti-abortion event and didn't want to have to deal with the political fallout. Shapiro is the guy you advertise with when you want to reach a conservative audience without risk of controversy. Here is one excerpt from his speech, which Pool plays in his video. Try to read it in his frantic, nasally cadence for full effect.

The argument, I guess here, is that would you kill baby Hitler? And the truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill baby Hitler, alright, because baby Hitler wasn't Hitler. Adult Hitler was Hitler. Baby Hitler was a baby. And what presumably you want to do is take baby Hitler out of his house, and move baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be adult Hitler, alright? That's the idea.

Liberals are obsessed with Hitler, and Shapiro is no exception. What you have here is the densest rate of Hitler references of any political argument in all history. Quite a feat for the boy wonder. Tim Pool, a liberal, agrees with the sentiment but ridicules it as inane. The conservative take should be that the whole argument is flawed, not just because it invokes Hitler ten times in twenty seconds, but because it ignores all social dynamics. (Remember, Shapiro is a hyper-individualist.) The way you stop Nazis is to not have Weimar. Whether you kill baby Hitler or rescue him from his upbringing is immaterial, because someone else will just step into the role that society demands: a heavy-handed reaction to an era of decadence.

A rule of thumb for conservatives: don't invoke Hitler. Especially if you have a national audience. It got Sean Spicer into trouble, and now Shapiro is feeling the pinch. Hitler is the liberal word for Satan. Leave it alone as best you can, otherwise you are adopting their moral framework. Comparing everything to Hitler is giving liberals what they want, but remember, our goal is to give liberals what they want but only for themselves.

Ladies in the Navies

If you knew a bridge was being built by feminists, would it be bigoted to avoid driving under it? If the answer is yes, then the definition of the term bigoted must include common-sense self preservation and protection of one's family. That may seem like hyperbole, but remember we're dealing with the kinds of people who have serious philosophic debates about the benefits of human extinction. The only reason any normal person would drive under a bridge they knew was being built by feminists would be a fear of social shaming. You're expected to ignore all reality - like the increased likelihood of your own pointless demise - to signal proper moral obedience. To me, a bit of social shaming seems almost luxurious compared to the inconvenience of being pulverized under many tons of unsupported steel, concrete, and hubris.

Any time an organization officially declares "diversity is our strength", the ship has been set on a crash course with disaster. Literally.

In 2016, Norway introduced conscription for women. The Navy received the highest number of women after conscription duties were introduced.

The Norwegian publication Armed Forces had in an article heaped praises on the KNM Helge Ingstad crew in which four out of five navigators were women. “It is advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a natural thing and a completely different environment, which I look at as positive,” Lieutenant Iselin Emilie Jakobsen Ophus, a navigation officer at the warship, had said.

Two years of women in the Navy, letting them navigate them an "unsinkable" flagship-class frigate. What could go wrong?

In late November, the Helge Ingstad collided with an oil tanker and sank. Did you hear about it? There wasn't much media coverage of the event, for the likely reason. CNN covered it. Neither they nor the Wikipedia article make mention of the ship's "advantageous" navigational environment. Should they not mention that the ship had, statistically speaking, the strongest contingent of empowered navigators in the entire world? It seems like a relevant fact. Wikipedia's "Investigation" section makes no mention of the cause, but focuses on design flaws of the ship that may have lead to its inundation. The real question seems to be, how do we prevent these warships from sinking when they are inevitably run into merchant traffic by seapersons in the modern military?

India's TheWeek was willing to comment on the uncomfortable circumstances of the incident (the first link). If we want to find out the particulars as to why a NATO ship is sitting on the ocean floor, we apparently must consult media from outside the Anglosphere.

This Navy Times has just reported on a scathing internal review of the 2017 USS Fitzgerald incident - in which 7 sailors died - that has largely been withheld from the public.

The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center — the combat information center, or CIC — while the Fitzgerald tried to cross a shipping superhighway.

[...] The Fitz’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson, and Lt. Natalie Combs, who ran the CIC, are battling similar charges in court but contend unlawful command influence by senior leaders scuttled any chance for fair trials.

It sounds like a cat fight between the two women in charge at the time. The article references a couple other recent collisions in the US Navy. The destroyer Porter collided with a supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz shortly after the female navigator became disoriented and fled the bridge. Shortly after the Fitzgerald, the John S. McCain collided with a tanker, resulting in 10 more dead sailors. The officers reprimanded were both men, and both named Sanchez.

It's conventional wisdom that the wars of late-stage empires are not generally fought by the host nation, but by mercenaries and people of annexed lands. The citizens haven't just become soft, but also wealthy. They have much to lose, so they hire others to go off to battle instead. But also, the empire has become an entity unto itself. An early empire is built by the nation to serve the nation. It provides them with resources, prestige, and security from invasion. Late empires have outgrown the host nation and accrue manpower however they can.

A second historical perspective: no nation that ever won a war sent its women into battle. The main reason is a matter of survival logistics. Women were - and are - needed for childrearing. If a country lost many men in battle to repel invaders, they could return to full manpower within a generation. If they lost many women, the damage would carry through several generations and likely doom them to later defeat. The other reason is simply that men are far stronger and better at fighting. An army of men could rout a similarly equipped female army several time its size. In antiquity, of course. As militaries have modernized, the need for manliness has diminished. There isn't really a reason a chick can't steer a boat as well as a dude. (Unless she just refuses to talk to that bitch Natalie in the CIC.) Supposedly men have better spacial capacity, which seems to be true, but that doesn't make women worse drivers, for instance. Some of the women in my town can even drive to work while on the phone and eating their breakfast. No one will say that doesn't take talent.

The prevalence of women and minorities in the accident reports is inescapable. Normally I'd say there's no reason why a highly trained woman or Hispanic couldn't navigate a vessel as well as anyone else. The Mexican navy hasn't been ramming frigates into tankers, after all. The first problem is that our military, bowing to the pressures of the public religion, is eager to promote women and non-whites to improve "optics". You can't be sure if General Jane earned her way up through valor or vagina. It's the same reason why it isn't racist to demand an Asian doctor at the hospital. They face the harshest admissions scrutinies, so they are, on average, more capable.

The second problem is less acute but even more fundamental. The US Navy doesn't serve America, but the Empire of Columbia. It's not Americans defending the homelands where their children will grow. It's whatever warm body can perform the required task for keeping a heavily deployed force operational. They're defending Kuwait and Syria, enforcing sea lanes that mostly benefit our allies, or bombing Serbians on behalf of Bosniaks. While the homeland is literally being invaded by tens of millions of foreigners, our military is out plowing into merchant ships in far-flung corners of the globe.

Other countries are taking note. Judge them by their actions. Russia, of course, deftly defied American hegemony in Syria. Brazen, risky, and successful. How do you not admire that? China is now becoming very belligerent.

A rare and under-reported tense exchange occurred between US and Chinese military commanders in Beijing on Tuesday. A high level Chinese military official, General Li Zuocheng, told the head of the United States Navy, Admiral John Richardson, in a face to face meeting that Beijing would defend its claim to Taiwan "at any cost". 

The Chinese know strength when they see it, and when they don't. They're not even pretending to be diplomatic. They're ready to reunite their own nation, one way or another. They don't care about Taiwan so much as the Chinese defectors dwelling there. I have to note that the Chinese general spoke down to Admiral John Richardson. A white guy, with English first name and English last name. A bigot, if you will. The specific demographic of heritage America that the dominant social forces here are demanding be improved with diversification. The Chinese - who are racist - are disrespecting a ranking officer of the nation that wields power unrivaled in all human history. Imagine how they'll respond when we send Admiral Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or similar) as our military dignitary. I'll give you a hint - they wouldn't even wheel out a ladder for President Obama. But, we may never find out, as our rate of collapse likely exceeds even our rate of social progress.