“Oranges and Lemons,” by Alpha Unit

Humans are among the few mammal species unable to synthesize Vitamin C from glucose. All of our Vitamin C has to come from our diets. If you were somehow to end up with no Vitamin C in your diet whatsoever for a prolonged time – say, three or four months and counting, indefinitely – it is no exaggeration to say that the repercussions could be dire.

Without Vitamin C we can’t make collagen, and without collagen your body can’t repair your skin, bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, blood vessel walls, and teeth. You need fresh food in your diet, either from plant or animal sources, to get this done.

Wherever you find people going without fresh food for long periods, you’ll find Vitamin C deficiency, or scurvy.

Scurvy has been prevalent throughout much of human history. It likely began to occur in humans during the development of agriculture. According to biologist Thomas Jukes, once people in temperate zones adopted an agrarian lifestyle they were able to store grains for use during winter. They were also able to spread into other temperate regions previously uninhabitable due to the lack of food supply during winters.

But because stored grains are extremely low in Vitamin C, it is likely that these ancient peoples developed scurvy during the long winter months because grain dominated their diets.

During long journeys or overland campaigns, such as the Crusades, scurvy inevitably appeared.

The first written account of a disease likely to be scurvy comes from the Eber Papyrus of ancient Egypt, dated to 1550 BC. The Papyrus not only diagnosed scurvy but prescribed that its victims be given onions, which contain Vitamin C.

Throughout maritime history, people had to figure out not only how to transport themselves across seas and oceans but how to stay healthy along the way. They were clearly relatively successful at both. Millennia ago, Austronesians were the first humans to invent oceangoing vessels; they colonized a large part of the Indo-Pacific region. Early Polynesians were superb seafarers and traveled thousands of miles exploring and settling the region we know as the Polynesian Triangle (drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island).

Somali seafarers developed extensive trade networks, and Somali merchants at one time led commerce between Asia and Africa. Chinese merchants sailed the Indian Ocean and traded throughout Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa.

How did ancient seafaring peoples deal with scurvy?

Stefan Slater writes that Polynesian seafarers relied on freshly caught fish, crustaceans, and octopi, and would sometimes slaughter some of the animals they were transporting for breeding stock. Jin Ding, Chaojan Shi, and Adam Weintrit report that the diet on Chinese sailing ships included green tea, which contains more Vitamin C than black tea. They also say that Chinese ships began to carry gardens with them, growing soybean sprouts, which are high in Vitamin C.

So there is some evidence that ancient seafarers knew the importance of keeping fresh vegetables and meat in their diets on long voyages.

For Europeans, it wasn’t until the Age of Sail that the problem of scurvy truly came into focus. Wealth and national interest were at stake in ways they hadn’t been before.

Advances in naval technology and a rush for exploration and conquest brought Europeans the “plague of the sea.” Scurvy was the main occupational disease of what historians call the European Age of Exploration. More sailors died of scurvy than all other causes combined, including battles, storms, and other diseases.

Jason A. Mayberry makes the case that a unique confluence of conditions made scurvy and seafaring a deadly combination for Europeans. In his essay “Scurvy and Vitamin C,” he draws upon the work of Stephen Bown, author of Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail.

First, countries had difficulty maintaining sufficient crews for their naval vessels, so they relied on impressment: the taking of men into the military by compulsion, with or without notice. It had been legally sanctioned in Britain since the time of Edward I.

It was basically kidnapping. Gangs of men would go into port towns looking for “recruits.” They would club a man and drag him back to the ship. The man’s family might have no idea what happened to him, and many of the men never made it back home.

Some had experience at sea, some didn’t. Some were in poor health to begin with, being homeless, convicts, or elderly. On average a third of a ship’s crew was made up of impressed men.

Even the men who volunteered for naval service were often in poor health. Many would volunteer in order to secure a place to sleep and get regular meals. Sometimes boys who were orphans or runaways would join.

A second reason that Vitamin C deficiency was hastened during this period were the working conditions on ships. Discipline was harsh and included flogging, keelhauling, and starvation. The body needs more Vitamin C when it is under stress, and sailors had heightened stress in the form of physical exertion, exposure to the elements, fear of battle, and sleep deprivation.

The third and main factor in the development of scurvy was clearly the diet onboard ships. What mattered most for food supplies was that the food be storable for long periods without spoiling. The nutritional content of the food was of little concern for those in charge. What was most important to them was to maintain a suitable labor force at the least possible cost.

A typical weekly ration for a sailor, according to Bown:

  • 1 lb. hardtack (biscuit) daily
  • 2 lbs. salted beef twice weekly
  • 1 lb. salted pork twice weekly
  • 2 oz. salted fish 3 times weekly
  • 2 oz. butter 3 times weekly
  • 4 oz. cheese 3 times weekly
  • 8 oz. dried peas 4 times weekly
  • 1 gal. beer daily

Sometimes the rations included dried fruit or barley meal. But the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables left the diet almost completely devoid of Vitamin C.

Compounding this problem was that even the food sailors had access to wasn’t always fit to eat. Spoilage was a huge problem on ships. Ships were a dark, damp, and sometimes waterlogged environment for sailors and their food, and this led to moldy, worm-eaten bread, or other dried foods. Meat would begin spoiling almost as soon as it left port, no matter how salt-laden it was.

European navies did provide surgeons and surgeon’s mates on ships, but most of a surgeon’s time was spent caring for battle wounds instead of focusing on the treatment and prevention of disease.

All of these factors made scurvy the leading cause of death during the Age of Sail.

The onset of scurvy is a slow progression, Bown and others inform us, usually appearing after 60 to 90 days of a Vitamin C-deficient diet. This is when the body’s lingering stores of Vitamin C are depleted. The initial symptoms are fatigue and muscle aches. Upon waking, a scurvy victim’s joints will ache.

During the second stage, his gums begin to swell and will bleed with slight pressure. The teeth become loose at the roots. He also feels pain throughout his joints and muscles.

During the third stage, the gums begin to rot. They also bleed profusely. The victim’s flesh becomes gangrenous and will spontaneously hemorrhage. His skin, especially on the legs and feet, develop ulcers that turn gangrenous. As connective tissue fails, long-healed broken bones begin to refracture, and long-healed wounds begin to reopen. The legs cramp so severely that the person cannot walk.

At this point the person is in excruciating pain.

In the final stage of scurvy, the person gets a high fever. His skin develops black spots and he begins having tremors. He will drift in and out of consciousness for a while, and then he dies.

An estimated two million sailors died of scurvy between the 15th and 18th centuries. The science at the time was of very little use in treating them – even though various people throughout European history had made the connection between citrus fruits and the prevention of scurvy.

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, in search of a passage to India. On January 11, 1498, the fleet anchored off Mozambique. After five weeks at sea, the crew began showing the symptoms of scurvy.

Fortunately, some weeks later, they arrived at Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, where they met local traders who traded them oranges. Within six days of eating them, the crew recovered. Da Gama left Africa and began his voyage across the Indian Ocean to Kozhikode (or Calicut to Westerners).

After staying in India for four months, da Gama left for a three-month journey at sea in which scurvy killed many of his sailors. On January 7, 1499, the ships anchored at Malindi, Kenya, where the sailors, remembering their previous cure in Mombasa, asked for oranges. Still, more sailors died of the disease “which started in the mouth.” Six months later the survivors made it back to Lisbon.

Did Vasco da Gama alert any ship owners or controlling authorities of what he had discovered about treating scurvy? No one knows.

Sir Richard Hawkins had discovered a cure for scurvy in 1593 when it appeared in his crew in southern Brazil. He reported that oranges and lemons had been a remedy for his men. To whom did he report this? What did they do with the information?

The Dutch had known about the value of citrus fruits since at least the late 16th century. According to J. Burnby and A. Bierman, who wrote “The Incidence of Scurvy at Sea and Its Treatment,” the Dutch East India Company bartered for lemons in Africa and also established vegetable gardens and orchards in their colonies to provide fresh citrus to their ships. How did the Dutch manage to keep this knowledge to themselves? Was that their intention?

Burnby and Bierman also write about an Elizabethan merchant, Sir Hugh Plat, who had an interest in botany and gave bottled lemon juice to the commander of the first fleet of the English East India Company. It was only the crew of the flagship, Red Dragon, which received a daily allowance of lemon juice. It was also the only crew that remained relatively free of scurvy. What did the English East India Company do with this information?

In the early 1600s John Woodall, a surgeon for the same East India Company, described the symptoms of scurvy and recommended that ships’ surgeons inform Governors of “all places they touch in the Indies” that the juices of oranges, lemons, limes, and tamarinds be used as medicine for scurvy.

The East India Company actually supplied “lemon water,” as it was called, for its ships until 1625, when the Company chose not to provide it because “the woman supplying it wanted 12d. a gallon above the usual price.” The return voyage of 1626 was badly afflicted with scurvy because they had bought tamarinds in the East Indies which they presumed to be as effective as lemons. All sour fruits and even acids such as vinegar were erroneously thought to be cures for scurvy.

J. F. Bachstrom, a Lutheran theologian and physician, wrote in 1734 that there was only one cause of scurvy – the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables for a long period. No drugs would help, nor would mineral acids. Were any companies or government entities aware of his findings? If so, did they take them seriously?

Europe was slowly making headway against this problem nevertheless. In 1739 James Lind, a former physician’s apprentice, volunteered for the Royal Navy and was designated a surgeon’s mate. After seven years in that position, he was promoted to surgeon on HMS Salisbury. It was on this ship that he performed his famous scurvy experiment.

Lind showed an insight ahead of his time by understanding that, to develop a cure, treatments must be compared simultaneously in similar patients. He had envisioned the concept of clinical trials, as rudimentary as his idea might have been.

After eight weeks at sea, and when scurvy was beginning to take its toll on the crew, Lind decided to test his idea that the putrefaction of the body caused by the disease could be prevented with acids. He divided 12 sick patients into six pairs, and provided each pair with a different supplement to their diet: cider, vitriolic acid (diluted sulfuric acid), vinegar, sea water, two oranges and one lemon, or a purgative mixture.

Only the pair who took the oranges and lemons improved.

You would think that Lind had established a clear connection between citrus and scurvy and that the Navy would have taken immediate action. But neither happened.

Lind continued to believe that there were multiple causes of scurvy. He also advocated a method of preserving the virtues of oranges and lemons that involved boiling the juices. Unbeknownst to Lind, boiling destroyed the active ingredient in citrus juices – Vitamin C. When the boiled juice was tried on ships as a preventative measure and found lacking, people began to dismiss the whole idea that citrus fruits were effective against scurvy!

In 1753 Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, considered a classic of medical science. But it took the Royal Navy over 40 years to adopt Lind’s recommendations. This happened under the direction of Sir Gilbert Blane, who had been appointed Physician to the Fleet.

Blane was familiar with Lind’s work and had the power and initiative to bring about change, Mayberry states. He organized an experiment on HMS Suffolk on a 23-week trip to India. The sailors were given a mixture of rum, water, sugar, and lemon juice. A few sailors developed a slight case of scurvy. They were given additional rations of lemon juice and the scurvy was quickly cured.

With the results from the HMS Suffolk and the power of his position, Blane was able to ensure that fresh citrus juice became a staple in the British Navy. For the British, scurvy had finally been conquered.

The question remains: why did it take so long, when so many had found the cure time and time again?

Burnby and Bierman note that there was the view among ship owners and government authorities that seamen were expendable. They also suggest that seamen themselves might have been reluctant to take part in experiments that might have settled the issue. But they mention other considerations, mainly the problem of “sheer impracticability.”

How does one store many thousands of oranges and lemons on an overcrowded man-of-war laden with guns, gunpowder, and shot? Using the juice of citrus fruits was certainly a space saver but it readily became moldy, especially under poor storage conditions, which were usually the case.

Speaking of practical considerations, how long can it be practical to treat your work force as if they are expendable? There were no sailors’ advocates at the time to make it impractical for businessmen and governments to do so. Nothing stopped or even slowed Europe’s exploration and colonization, so losing sailors to scurvy was just one of the costs of doing business.

Alt Left: The Rind Et Al Study on Long-term Effects of Child Abuse: Its History and Ramifications

A famous study on childhood sexual abuse was done 20 years ago by Rind et al. I think I still have a copy of it on my desktop here.

It provoked wild outrage. Even the idiotic American Psychological Association denounced it, notable as one of the most anti-scientific statements this anti-scientific organization has ever issued. Even the US Congress got in on the act. The Congress passed a resolution condemning the study! Congressmen, mostly Republicans, stood up and denounced it forcefully.

The problem? The study came up with the wrong answer. In other words, the truth was wrong and society preferred to believe pleasant lies over unpleasant truths, so the paper was condemned for discovering the wrong facts.

Usually when theory and facts do not match up, we say that the theory was wrong and go back to the drawing board.

However, in this case and with all ideological arguments by ideologues and politics types, when the theory and the facts don’t match up, the facts are wrong, and the facts are not the facts! Why? Because the theory is said to be automatically a priori true. The theory must be true. It cannot be false. So the facts must be wrong and we need to change the facts, wipe out the truth, and say that reality isn’t real, instead, what is real is some fantasy world that doesn’t  exist.

A number of fake “studies” were undertaken by other behavioral “scientists” taking about the Rind findings and finding fault with this or that conclusion. None of the fake studies denouncing it were worth a hill of beans. That they made it into the journals at all shows that pathetic anti-scientific nature of the social sciences, sadly also including Psychology, which has been trying to become more of a science for a long time now.

But by the very fact that it is a social science means that Psychology will always be a fake science in some ways because its findings have to do with people, and the science of people will always be twisted by politics, ideology, bias, and mostly emotional reaction.

It’s hard to get emotional about a new finding in math or physics. Who cares! But findings in the social sciences are inherently emotional because we are always emotional about ourselves and our fellow humans, and anything people are strongly emotional about will always be tainted by bias, propaganda, politics, and ideology. In other words, lies. This is why the social sciences will always be doomed to the charge of being fake sciences and will always carry the guilty burden of physics envy.

Ritter et al conducted a meta-analysis of a huge number of studies on the effects of childhood sexual abuse on children as adults. Child abuse was mostly defined as sexual abuse below age 13, so sex with teenage girls and boys, a massive minefield, was left out.

The available evidence shows that consensual sex with teenage girls and boys and adults causes little if any damage to teenagers. This behavior is illegal not because it is harmful to the teens, as I doubt that it is. Instead it is outlawed because society’s morals say that members of society do not wish to live in a society where adults are free to have sex with teenagers of various ages.

It’s seen as unsavory, unpleasant, disgusting or revolting, and often morally wrong. But this behavior is not psychologically disordered in any way. This is a moral and legal problem, not a psychological one.

Unfortunately we are now in the midst of a truly insane mass hysteria around the sexuality of teenage girls in which 9

In fact, the people who quote the science and the facts about this question are attacked as pedophiles! Because I guess only pedophiles believe in science and truth when it comes to this sort of thing. If you don’t want to be called a pedophile, just spout the usual lies about this subject. As long as you keep lying and don’t ever resort to facts, you’re in the clear!

Fact: nothing published in an academic journal has ever produced evidence suggesting that teen/adult relationships are harmful or predatory. Literally not even one. Anthropological and historical studies all over the world have found that such relationships are common in many societies and no harm was reported in any society ever studied.

How do I know this? I’ve studied them. A particularly large one was done out of Germany in the 1950’s. You can find this evil science of banned truths on the Net, though I can’t tell you where to look. The pedo advocate sites have links to it, but I don’t want to send you there. I suspect the motives of those who wrote this study, but the science seems good.

Furthermore, historically speaking, I’ve learned from the Psychohistorian sites that teen/adult relations were normal in most of the world including the West up until 1900. Zero harm was reported.

Sadly, mass molestation of children was also reported in the West from Roman and Greek times until 1900. Under the crowded urban conditions that arose with the onset of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, where families were packed together in tiny spaces, a great deal of molestation went on. I’m not happy about this at all, but it’s notable that no ill effects were observed in Greece and Rome until the pre-1900 West.

Perhaps the reason for this was that molestation of children was simply an expected fact of life. If you grow up as a female and get molested and all of your woman friends also got molested, it’s seen as a normal thing. There’s usually nothing inherently wrong with this behavior absent physical damage. Things that are normalized in any society tend to cause little if any damage.

I disagree here with some folks like psychohistorians who argue that all sexual abuse of children under any circumstances, normalized or condemned, results in inevitable terrible lifetime damage to the person. They also believe that many other things experienced in childhood cannot but cause horrible lifelong damage.

I doubt if that is true. If you grow up in a society that normalizes this or that behavior, outside of extreme perversion, aggression, and sadism, it’s probably seen as normalized and shrugged off. In other words, the damage of most of these things is relative and depends on the degree to which your society condemns or pathologizes the behavior.

However, for small children, the true victims of child molestation, it is quite different.

Granted, the victims were interviewed when in college so the abuse was a long ways away. Conceivably if they had interviewed them earlier as minors, they would manifested more damage. The findings were shocking:

Rind et al found that the long-term effects of child sexual abuse were typically neither pervasive nor intense, and men reacted much less negatively than women. Ritter et al also found that less than 1

To explicate that further, the effects were shame about having been abused, blame for themselves for allowing it to happen to them, and confusion about the abuse itself.

The confusion may manifest in various ways. A female friend of mine from 10 years ago was molested. Of course she absolutely hates my guts now, but that’s not an unusual reaction for women who get involved with me in some way or another. I’m used to it.

She told me that she was molested by a pedophile in her church group when she was 8 years old. The molester was a young man and he does appear to have been a pedophilic or preferential molester. She told me, “It’s confusing because it feels good but it’s wrong.” This is part of the thinking behind the confusion that kids experience after being abused.

She also told me that she had completely gotten over it by age 50, but she seemed to have gotten over it much before then. I knew two other women (I actually got involved with these two whereas with the other one it was more email and hot phone conversations) of the same age who were sexually abused as girls, one by a probable pedophile and the other by her opportunistic teenage older brother. They both told me that they had gotten over it by age 50 but implied that they had gotten over it much before then.

The shame, blame, and confusion are apparently short-term effects in most victims, and at the very least have dissipated by college age.

The implication is that children or minors may experience those effects for some time in their youth, but these effects mostly go away by adulthood, and there is no lasting damage in almost all (9

Unfortunately, pedophiles have gotten a hold of the Rind et al study and like to wave it around to try to push for legalization of child/adult sexual relations.

That’s not my intention here. I don’t care if most victims get over it. Good for them. I’m happy that they are not damaged in the long term.

Nevertheless, this behavior still needs to be outlawed because I don’t want to live in a society where adults are allowed to have sex with young children below age 13. I don’t have to have a reason. I just don’t like it. That’s all the reason I need.

Repost: Alt Left: The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Repost from the old site. Great stuff. Theorizes that the birth of the modern Black race only goes back 6-12,000 years and speculates on how it developed in conjunction with primitive agriculture. Also suggests that Black Africans were probably the first agriculturalists on Earth.

The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Hang out long enough on White Nationalist fora, and after a while you will be amazed at how many White racists actually believe that Black Africans were Stone Age people who had no metalworking, no agriculture and no civilization of any sort by the time the Europeans contacted them.

It’s true that Africa is not known for its incredible cultural achievements. But it wasn’t exactly a complete backwater either. The White Nationalist line that Africans were a Paleolithic people with only stone implements and no agriculture is surprisingly widespread. Too bad it is horribly wrong.

First of all, agriculture comes to the Sahel as early as 9000 BC. It comes to West Africa around the same time. Later it goes to Southern and Eastern Africa. The “Niggers are too stupid to grow food” line, appalling in its stupidity, continues to retain a lot of currency. Africans have been growing food for 1000’s of years.

The latest permutation has to do with Zimbabwe. Ruined by US and UK sanctions that have completely shut the nation out of the international trade and banking system, the economy is imploding and people are starving.

Instead of blaming imperialism, White racists blame those dumb niggers for overthrowing White rule and confiscating White farms where 5,000 White farmers had 5

They need Homo Blancas Superiorus to show them how to plant seeds and hoe rows. Without White Johnny Appleseeds to grow the food for them that they are too stupid to grow for themselves, the dumb niggers in Africa will all starve to death.

Incredible.

All over Africa, there are hardly any Whites left. Blacks are growing food all over Africa, in every country, in vast numbers. Black Africans are surely smart enough to figure out how to grow food to eat.

In order to look into this story in greater depth, we need to look at the development of Blacks in Africa from an anthropological point of view. The story of Stone Age Africans with no agriculture until Whitey shows up is nonsense.

White Nationalists counter that African Blacks, even over 10,000 years ago, were too stupid to figure out how to grow stuff on their own, so they had to learn from superior Caucasian North Africans. This theory is humorous because in general, White Nationalists refer to North African Caucasians (Berbers and Egyptians) as non-Whites.

Furthermore, at over 10,000 years ago, I’m not sure it matters how Black Africans got agriculture. Cultural diffusion occurs everywhere, and true innovation is pretty hard to pin down. Finally, there is not a lot of evidence that North African Caucasians innovated agriculture at such an early date themselves. As a result, the whole discussion is rendered academic as just another way for racist Whites to kick the Black man while he’s down.

First of all, the original Africans looked like Pygmies or Khoisan (Bushmen). From 6,000-12,000 years ago, Pygmy-Khoisan types traverse from archaic types to the modern Blacks we know today. Modern Blacks are a young race. Pygmies and Khoisan resemble our oldest human ancestors. They have light brown skin and gracile, child-like bodies.

Modern Blacks mostly speak languages related to a huge family called Niger-Congo. During the transition from archaic to modern Blacks, modern Blacks developed agriculture. Blacks had agriculture or proto-agriculture possibly as early as 10,000 years ago when Proto-Niger-Congo first started breaking up.

This means that Black Africans were actually some of the first agriculturalists on Earth. Sango Region hunter-gatherers were the first Blacks to develop agriculture. At first they protected wild grain fields, and then made clearings for wild yams and oil palms. At 12,000 years before present (YBP) they were already using hoes that they made, and at 8-9,000 YBP, they were tending pili nut trees with agricultural implements.

There are agricultural terms in reconstructed Proto-Niger-Congo from before 10,000 YBP, so they must have had some form of agriculture. Mande  is a branch  of Niger-Congo. Proto-Mande speakers inhabited the Niger’s headwaters at the Mali-Guinea border near the modern city of Bamako, and they were the first group to break off from Proto-Niger-Congo.

The Fouta Djallon Highlands in Southeastern Guinea, source of the Niger River. This is probably where Black African agriculture, cultivated by Proto-Mande speakers, began over 10,000 years ago.

 

Modern Black Africans are associated with the spread of agriculture in Africa at this time, and this agricultural spread is also located at the headwaters of the Niger, because this is the cradle of the Sudanic Food Complex.

Also, agriculture independently evolved in West Africa (African yams, kola nut) and Ethiopia (coffee, tef) during the period of 4,000-9,000 YBP.

Animal husbandry was widely adopted, and by 7,200 YBP, the Sahel had a full array of food production (cultivated crops, animal husbandry) before this full array was developed in Egypt. So the movement of agriculture in its full array from North African Caucasians to Sahelian Blacks is shown to be a lie.

It’s true that Africa south of the Equator lagged behind, and White Nationalists love to go about this, but the truth is that there were no animals to domesticate down there, nor were there any plants to domesticate either.

It’s doubtful that the Sahelian Blacks were any smarter than the ones south of Equator. They were just better positioned to receive animals for husbandry from Southwest Asia, and they had plants that could be domesticated.

Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels along with more robust body types. See the prior post for more on that.

The first real classical Black Negroid skeleton dates to only 6,500 YBP. Before that, at 12,000 YBP, they look more like the San or Pygmies. Within 6,000 years as Africans moved to agriculture, Blacks changed from gracile archaic types to robust Negroid types. At 6,000-7,000 YBP, the agricultural transition was full.

In contrast to Afrocentric hokum about Black Athena and Black Egypt, modern Blacks do not appear in Egyptian paintings before 4,000 YBP. Before that, the Blacks in northeast Africa, Nubia and Ethiopia were more gracile San (Bushmen) types.

Modern Blacks reach the middle Nile by around 4,000 YBP. At 3,000 YBP, the Bantus spread from Cameroon all through East, Central and Southern Africa, of course bringing agriculture, and yes, iron-making, with them.

Nubians do not obtain their modern Black appearance until 2,700 years ago. Before that, the Nubians and presumably the Hamites look like today’s Egyptians.

Black populations in Africa do not bode well for Philippe Rushton’s R-K Theory. The oldest African populations of all, the Pygmies and the San, with presumably some of the lowest IQ’s (the San have IQ’s of about 54), are very highly K-selected.

They have low fecundity (are not very fertile) and very long intervals between births. This is normally what is expected of a super-K-selected group such as NE Asians, and is said to be associated with high IQ. Yet in the San, it is associated with the lowest IQ’s on Earth. Rushton’s theory does not smell right.

References

Rushton, J. P. 1995. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.

Alt Left: A Theory about Race, Personality, and Civilizational Trajectory with Assistance from Spengler, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

A great new and very long comment from someone who is apparently a new commenter. A fascinating theory about race and personality and how they tie in with civilizational trajectories, be they forward, backward, or flat. He utilizes and owes a debt to Spengler first, then Schopenhauer, and last Nietzsche to help flesh out his theory.

I’d really like to see what you all think of this post. Please feel free to comment if you can make it through and figure out what he’s talking about. It’s a bit dense but it’s not really that complicated and a lot of you ought to be able to understand it pretty well.

Brian: This is a theory that’s been turning around in my head for around a decade, and I won’t go over every detail, just the gist of it, since to think out every caveat would take too long, and it’s not like a primary interest of research for me, but suffice it to say there is Spenglerian influence here, and through him, Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian influence. I’ve often called it the “I think we’re turning Japanese” theory.

The idea here is that Whites are in the middle of a spectrum between Blacks and Asians, where Blacks are the most chaotic, as you say, and Asians are the most orderly and staid, personified by the Spock stereotype.

The Germanic peoples, who pretty much seeded all of Europe during the Migration and Viking period, were, 2000 years ago during Rome’s heyday, barbarians, quite wild, living for the day, warring with each other to the point where, aside from the Battle of Teutoborg Forest, they could not unite with each other to fight a common enemy, which made them easy pickings for Rome.

The Celtic culture never took off into a high civilization due mainly to the Roman conquests of Gaul and Iberia and also of much of Britain, which eliminated the source-lands and most of the territory in which the Celtic culture had grown. So the civilization that arose after the collapse of the western portion of the empire was seminally Germanic: even France is heavily Germanic (land of the Franks), though it lies in between the more fully Germanic Northern Europe and the more Mediterranean Southern Europe.

Through the Dark Ages and High Middle Ages, the tribal polities of Northern Europe gradually coalesced into larger nations with, it must be stated, the help of the stabilizing factor of the Catholic Church. And by the Renaissance, Europe was becoming, artistically and intellectually, the most dynamic place in the world so that by Early Modern times, European art and science had eclipsed anything that had previously existed in the world.

Note how Asians beat Europeans in math and science in terms of raw ability, but Europeans have produced more than the Asians, which led to the core Asian lands (mainly China, Japan, and Korea) being not directly colonized by European empires but certainly feeling colonialism’s effects and even, especially for China, its boot heels. From the wild and more primitive European stock of two millennia ago eventually arose a civilization more advanced than what Asia had produced over thousands of years.

I suggest that the reason for this was that, although primitive, the Germanic peoples were also like a ball of energy that, if properly tamed, which of course means diminishing some of their raw energy, could produce an explosion of civilizational progress, and this taming is exactly what happened over the course of the Medieval Period.

The Church was a great factor, with its universalist vision of all reality being centered on a single thing, i.e. God (basically it’s a rational vision of the cosmos as opposed to a fragmentary and irrational understanding of it).

But another factor in this shift is likely social selection.

Over that 1,500 years of interaction with Rome and then of forging their own kingdoms after the constant interference from Rome had ended with the collapse of the western part of the Empire, European societies were able to grow into nations, become more complex and therefore more demanding about the intellectual demands on their own people and, whether through sexual selection initiated by women or through some other factor, began “weeding out” those who were too dumb or wild from the gene pool.

So by around 1500-1600, there existed a civilization with much of the raw energy of a primitive people but now harnessed and directed to intellectual and artistic ends, ready to make a gigantic mark on the world.

The point is that primitive peoples are like stores of raw energy or pools of potential that can, in the right circumstances, be transformed into a flourishing of civilization that even outdoes what groups with higher (or previously higher) IQ’s have accomplished. The white IQ might have increased during that transition from tribal chieftainships to modern states, with the selection pressures that such a transition brings.

Spengler believed that Western civilization was becoming old and sclerotic, ready either to dissipate or, like East Asia, ossify for a very long time, its main ideas having already mostly been expressed. He saw Russia as the next civilization to rise, since it was in that nether phase of being quite brutal compared to Western Europe and its descendant nations overseas, but nevertheless already being quite tamed.

Perhaps this explains why Europe, for centuries, has had a visceral fear of Russia, from the Great Game in the 19th century to the Nazi invasion and destruction of the country down to the present-day Establishment fear of Russia and Putin. Perhaps there is a sense that if Russia can break free of the West and get its act together, its potential is great, and in time – centuries perhaps – Russia could eclipse the ever-more sclerotic West.

But even more long-term, if this theory is correct, I can see Latin America rising as a major civilization. It would have to go through centuries of real nationbuilding first as Europe did in the Dark Ages and High Medieval Period into the Renaissance, but there is certainly great natural vigor among Latin American peoples, already somewhat tempered by the widespread infusion of Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention some German and other European) genes in those populations.

Perhaps in a millennium, when the raw potential has been converted into actionable works through a combination of genetic selection and cultural controls, Latin America will be a great civilization offering new artistic and scientific insights to the world and perhaps being expansionist, as civilizations born of wild people getting their act together tend to be. There seems to be a golden mean when a people is no longer too primitive but not yet too domesticated when that people makes its mark.

Which brings me to Africa. Africa today is comparable to Germania in Roman times: getting the first inklings of advanced civilization from the West, which had often mistreated it, and struggling to form real nations in the face of their own enormous divisions and external interference. Africans are chaotic but also wildly creative, especially musically – and music is the closest thing to the human Will or Engine of Life, as Schopenhauer teaches.

Africa in the coming centuries and millennia could go through a filtering that eliminates from the gene pool many of the wildest elements, for example through frequent warfare and sexual selection by women who demand more intelligent mates, as it becomes obvious that the trajectory of society is toward greater complexity.

The continued presence of Christianity and Islam are likely also beneficial for taming the most wild spirit of Africa, whose people are truly at present the most primal version of mankind. But in the intervening centuries or millennia some new religion might come along in Africa as shape the minds of the people as Christianity did to the Europeans during Roman times.

I would think that the Africans, in maybe a millennium or two, after the Slavic nations and the Latin American peoples have “come online” so to speak in the procession of great civilizations, could become the culmination of human civilization, since they are starting with the most raw energy that, were it tamed, would entail the greatest outpouring of intellectual and artistic – i.e. civilizational – creativity that humans could produce.

But a great deal of selection pressure and cultural maturation would be required before this could happen.

Later this century, Africans are expected to comprise ~4

But this fits not only my thesis but also the Spenglerian model to which it is mostly in debt. The ensuing collapse of the West could be the opening that Slavic nations need in order to truly rise and express themselves fully. The development of Africa into a high civilization is a process I expect to take many centuries amid the vicissitudes of other civilizations rising and falling.

As for current White civilization which is headed by “The West” or those nations descended from or heavily influenced by the Germanic peoples, I think we are turning Japanese. We are past the Golden Middle Period and into a period where much of our primal nature remains but is channeled by genetic and cultural discipline and we are in effect slowly evolving into more staid, quiet, competitive – i.e. more Asian-like – peoples.

You can see it with the younger generations who are subject to far more social controls than even I was when younger, and I am not that old. The younger generations seem socially skittish, often autistic, and very different from kids even thirty years ago. Of course much of this is due to technology, but much is also due to our societies becoming increasingly rule-based and micromanaged.

And it is our culture itself that is insisting on this bureaucratization and rationalization of social life, with technology being merely a tool to push this cultural tendency forward.

As one final note, my theory might not work if indeed the different personality types and intelligence levels of the major races cannot change over a millennium or two in such a way that a wilder and less intelligent race can be pared down through social selection to a more disciplined and intelligent race.

If this is not a long enough span of time for such a transition to unfold, then the rise of the Northern and Western European peoples from tribal barbarians 2,000 years ago to the epitome of civilization just a few centuries ago was not due to a lack of enough intelligence to produce such a civilization.

Instead it occurred because this spark already existed during the Roman Empire, except that its expression was limited by a lack of social development until those cultural constraints needed to mold it into an advanced civilization had taken shape.

If this was true, then difference between the primitive culture and the high civilization it became was sociocultural, not genetic.

But even if this were true, it could mean that Africa could still rise as a high civilization, only that it will take longer, since a lot of not sexual but social selection would have to occur in order for this to happen.

“Bid Calling,” by Alpha Unit

You name it and it’s been sold at auction.

As long as humans have traded with one another, they have staged auctions. About 500 B.C. in Babylon, women were being auctioned off as wives. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome held auctions not just to sell people but to sell all kinds of assets, including war plunder and family estates. In seventh-century China, the personal items of deceased Buddhist monks were being sold at auction.

Auctions in the United States date all the way back to colonial times. Crops, livestock, tools, slaves, and sometimes entire farms were sold at auction. The National Auctioneers Association informs us that during the American Civil War only colonels could auction war plunder, which is why in honor of this history many auctioneers in America today carry the title “Colonel.”

In the early 1900s the first auctioneering schools opened in the United States. The Great Depression created great opportunity for auctioneers, whose services were needed to liquidate assets. Collectibles, antiques, used cars, heavy equipment, livestock, real estate, and all kinds of commodities are sold at auction in the US either by private parties or by government agencies.

No one knows exactly when rapid-paced “bid calling” became a feature of auctions in the US, but it is now the norm. Many of you are familiar with American-style auction calls, where an auctioneer delivers a rapid, almost hypnotic repetition of numbers and words to present items up for bid. Newcomers to auctions might find it indecipherable, but nothing could be farther from the truth!

An auctioneer’s entire job is to communicate clearly and effectively, and if you can’t understand him (or her), then he isn’t doing his job.

An auctioneer uses his chant to hold the audience’s attention and keep the auction moving along at a steady clip while he’s soliciting bids. He’s going fast because he’s responsible for selling all of the items within a relatively short time, and he’s got to create a sense of urgency among bidders. He must at the same time be very clear and specific with his language.

What the auctioneer is really doing is reciting numbers.

An auction chant consists basically of two numbers – the have (the current bid price) and the want (the higher bid being requested by the auctioneer). Between these two numbers are a variety of sounds and filler words to add rhythm to the chant and make the bidding more entertaining. To make it seem that he’s talking faster than he really is, the auctioneer will slur his words to shorten them.

An auctioneering student starts out learning a very basic auction chant, something like this:

One dollar bid, now 2, now 2, will ya give me 2?

2 dollar bid, now 3, now 3, will ya give me 3?

3 dollar bid, now 4, now 4, will ya give me 4?

This hypothetical bidding would proceed in this fashion until the crowd stops bidding and the item is sold to the high bidder.

Filler words are rhythmic but they serve an important purpose: they provide a natural pause between the have and the want, giving the bidders a fraction of a second to make a decision.

Once the auctioneer’s want becomes the have, a new want is created. This number is called the next. A bid caller always has three numbers in mind – the have, the want, and the next.

Suppose you’re at an auction where a vehicle is up for bid. The auction chant might be something like this:

All right, folks, I have up for auction a 1994 Ford Mustang, cherry, lots of new parts, who’ll give me four large?

Four thousand, four, now who gimme four fiddy? Got four fiddy, got four fiddy from the man in the back, now who gonna go five?

Fi fiddy, fi fiddy bid, man in the back, now who gimme six? Fi fiddy bid, who gimme six?

Six thousand! Now who gimme seven? Seven on the board now, who gimme seven fiddy?

And on it goes.

Each auctioneer has his own style – his own favorite filler words, his own preferred speed, and his own cadence. Some auction chants are positively musical. The filler words are just carriers for the most important part of the chant: the numbers.

Keep in mind, though, that the auctioneer can only chant as fast as the bidders bid. So he designs his chant to create excitement and keep the auction moving along at a good pace. It truly is an art form.

There’s no telling where you might hear an auction call. Listen to Congressman Billy Long (R-MO) breaking into an auction chant to foil a protester during a hearing in Congress.

Magic in the Celtic World from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

New from Francis Miville.

Francis Miville: There was a reason why the Celtic cultural world crumbled and was ready to assimilate into the nearest conquering empire passing nearby. Gauls literally begged the Greeks to conquer them, and as they proved too self-interested as merchants, they turned to the Romans as to the second best choice long before Cesar came. The Celtic world was more and more definitely with the centuries passing a culture based upon the preeminence of magic and of magic of a very malevolent kind. Druidic civilization was no fun at all. Celtic civilization was quite like the Brahmanical one in its worst aspects but without any encompassing universalistic cosmogony. It was a universe without any power above that of the elite of all-powerful manipulators having been selected through proof of their psychopathic mind before being taught any bit of initiation knowledge. Above the stage of a mere brute, you spent your own life dodging evil spells and casting ones in return. The only late exceptions which explain their further survival were Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany on both sides of the Channel. This is because it was rather the invention of something radically new by a certain kind of Christians together with a new kind of Celtic languages that bore very little relationship to the original. But Celtic Christianity as it was called came to be later on considered as heretical from the point of view of more classical theology, as it was based on much magic too, though of a more seductive than warlike kind. In the case of Ireland and Brittany, the magicians proved to be oligarchically-minded to the worst degree as all magicians are. These magicians offered their services to the best payers, that is to say the Norman and French invaders. In exchange, the oligarchs were given as a natural resource the whole populace that the magicians controlled as a  passive herd. In Scotland the whole people succeeded as magicians to enter the British Empire as mafia-minded dominants of a worse kind than Anglo-Saxons proper, while playing a key role in the setting up of Masonry. Magical cultures are all social horrors.

Dysgenic Breeding Has Been around Since Antiquity

Greg Rambo: “The current dysgenic behavior of the African-American community is a complete and absolute result of the government subsidizing pregnancy and desertion.* * Professor Thomas Sowell. Agree or disagree?

Sowell is a conservative, so I don’t like him as I am a Leftist. However, he is right on it regarding a number of issues. I don’t mind his theories. I just dislike his politics. You see here he makes an argument about dysgenic breeding and high illegitimacy rates, he turns into a damned anti-welfare argument because he’s a conservative ideologue first and a sociologist second. Breeding is dysgenic anyway. It’s dysgenic among Whites and Hispanics too. For Chrissake, even the Romans wrung their hands and wrote about dysgenic breeding in Ancient Rome. So dysgenic breeding has gone on forever. I doubt if it seriously harms the gene pool since it’s been around since Antiquity. Scumbags, especially psychopaths, have lots of kids. Which is probably why sociopathy stayed in the gene pool. The women keep breeding with the bad boys, and they either became tribal leaders, or they managed to make a few babies before the other tribal members murdered them or cast them out, which was actually the fate of many psychopaths in primitive society.

Male Homosexuality Is Compatible with Conservatism and Religious Fundamentalism

Male homosexuality is certainly compatible with fundamentalism. There is a lot of male homosexuality in Pakistan, but it’s all undercover and hidden. This is especially true in the very fundamentalist western part where the Al Qaeda / fundamentalist types exist. Of course Afghanistan is one of the gayest countries on Earth in addition to being one of the most reactionary, so homosexuality is compatible with Reaction. Nazism was full of gay men, and Sparta was essentially a reactionary fascist state, while being one of the gayest societies known to man.

Setting the Record Straight About Pre-Contact Africa

John Engelman: Agriculture and civilization select a race for intelligence. Caucasians began agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. We began civilization about five thousand years ago. Negroes only adopted agriculture about four thousand years ago. They never developed their own civilizations. They have only recently been exposed to White civilization.

Agriculture was probably developed by Africans before it was developed by anyone else. There is evidence for agriculture or pre-agriculture in Africa (West African Guinea Highlands) as early as 12,000 YBP. You must realize that Africans originated many things that we as humans do.

The next to develop agriculture were the Mayans (corn), the Chinese (rice), and the Papuans (yams), all at 9,000 YBP. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were not far behind. Africans even had plantation agriculture as early as 900 CE in Tanzania. I doubt if Caucasians developed agriculture 11,000 YBP. Are we referring to Mesopotamia, the Levant, or Egypt here?

Animal husbandry was also developed very early on in Africa. It may have been developed in the Western Sahara before anywhere else on Earth. A figure of 9,000 YBP is suggested for animal husbandry in the Sahara. However, pigs may have been domesticated in Papua around this time also. Animal husbandry was widespread in Africa, particularly in the Sahara, the Sahel and Ethiopia, on contact. I don’t know much about animal husbandry further south, but I have heard there was a shortage of animals to domesticate.

At any rate, the invention of the hoe and subsequent hoe agriculture along with the spear played a major role in the history of Africa. Both derived from the early development of metallurgy in the form or iron. Indeed, the Iron Age came to Africa before it came to Europe. The development of iron metallurgy and the subsequent creation of those two iron tools allowed the Bantus to expand massively all over Central and South Africa in only the last 2-3,000 years.

Africans definitely had civilizations, that’s for sure. Mostly in West Africa but quite a few in the Sahel too. There was even a civilization in Rhodesia. Early European explorers drew drawings of large African cities. Looks like civilization to me. Civilizations were especially common in Nigeria. They had manufacture, trade, agriculture for export, all sorts of things.

"From the Mississippi Delta to South Australia," by Alpha Unit

Don Morrison salvages old galvanized sheet metal from sheds and farms throughout Australia. The older the metal, the better, he says; some of this reclaimed metal is over 100 years old. He takes it to his workshop in Summertown, South Australia, where he fashions it into metal-bodied acoustic guitars. Of his material he says:

Galvanised iron, or Galvo, is now an integral part of the Australian landscape and it seemed natural (to me at least!) to try it in a resonator guitar. The result is a truly awesome sound, very loud but with a surprisingly rounded tone. I should call it the Transcontinental guitar – genuine Aussie material, genuine Delta sound!

That “Delta sound” refers to Delta blues, one of the early forms of blues. This music arose in the Mississippi Delta, which, despite its name, is not a part of the actual delta of the Mississippi River. Rather, it is located in the northwestern part of Mississippi, bounded by the Mississippi River on the west and the Yazoo River on the east.

This alluvial floodplain is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world. It was here that Black field hands created the music we call blues, using chants, “field hollers,” and songs to make their work go faster. Ed Kopp writes:

While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity. The blues is also about overcoming hard luck, saying what you feel, ridding yourself of frustration, letting your hair down, and simply having fun. The best blues is visceral, cathartic, and starkly emotional. From unbridled joy to deep sadness, no form of music communicates more genuine emotion.

Although the sound of a resonator guitar is iconic to blues, blues musicians didn’t start out playing the resonator. The earliest bluesmen played an instrument called the diddley bow. The diddley bow has been called “the godfather of American roots instruments.” It is the simplest form of the guitar and is the first type of slide guitar used in America. It was very easy to make, consisting of a string of wire tensioned between two nails on a board. A bottle or can wedged under the wire would create tension for pitch. The player would pluck the string while sliding a piece of metal or glass on it to produce notes.

One-stringed bow instruments date back to antiquity and developed in various parts of East Asia and in the west coast and Congo regions of Africa. Rural Black Southerners crafted these instruments and taught their children to play them. They would sometimes build one-stringed zithers on a wall, “with a strand of baling wire, two thread spools for bridges, and a half-pint whiskey bottle for a slider,” as slide guitar player Big Joe Williams recalled to one researcher.

Boys who showed promise on the diddley bow could graduate to a guitar if they were lucky enough to get a hold of one. Musicians such as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elmore James, and B. B. King all first learned to play on the diddley bow.

Once musicians could afford guitars they quickly abandoned the diddley bow. And when the resonator guitar came along, they had a way to present their music to even larger audiences. The resonator, with its crisp metallic ring, created the signature sound of Delta blues. When you listen to Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, or Bukka White – among many others – you’re listening to Delta blues. Others, such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, started out playing Delta blues.

This Delta sound is what craftsmen like Don Morrison aim to re-create. His resonators, like the very first of their kind, have built-in amplification – a feature that came about by demand.

Back in the early 1920s guitar players performing with dance orchestras couldn’t really stand out from the other players. Since there were no amplifiers, guitars were considered a part of the rhythm section instead of lead instruments. A vaudeville performer and promoter named George Beauchamp wanted an acoustic guitar that could play melodies over the orchestral instruments. He turned to John Dopyera, a violin repairman and luthier whose workshop was close to Beauchamp’s Los Angeles home.

John Dopyera and his brother Rudy experimented with various designs to achieve a smooth and balanced amplified sound and decided to mount cone-like aluminum resonators, similar to speaker cones, inside a metal guitar body. Dopyera found that using three smaller cones instead of one big cone gave the guitar the sound he’d been looking for. The tri-cone resonator guitar was born.

Beauchamp was impressed with the new design and proposed a business venture to Dopyera, who agreed. They created the National String Instrument Corporation in 1927. National guitars quickly became best sellers. The company soon created a wood-bodied model.

There were differences, though, between Beauchamp and Dopyera. Beauchamp preferred a single-cone resonator, not only because it was louder but because it was cheaper to make. For Dopyera, excellent sound and quality were top priorities. The two men finally went their separate ways when Dopyera found out that Beauchamp had claimed the patent for the single-cone resonator. In 1928 Dopyera quit National, with the intention of manufacturing his own single-cone resonator. John and his brother Emil formed the Dobro Manufacturing Company (named for the Dopyera Brothers).

Because National held the patent for his single-cone resonator, John Dopyera had to develop a new style of single-cone resonator. The single biggest change that he made was to the bridge of the guitar.

On a standard acoustic guitar, the bridge is glued directly to the top of the guitar. It has several functions: it holds the strings securely, sets the spacing of the strings, and acts as an external brace to the guitar body. Its other important job is transferring vibrations from the strings to the soundboard of the guitar. On a resonator guitar, the bridge is a part of the resonator cone. For single-cone resonators, the cone has either a “biscuit” bridge or a “spider” bridge. The National resonator used a biscuit cone, which is convex (pointing outward). Inside the tip of the cone sits a round wooden bridge (the biscuit), and set into the bridge is a small piece typically found on a guitar bridge – the saddle. The saddle keeps the strings elevated at the preferred height above the fretboard. The saddle transfers the string vibrations to the bridge and the bridge transfers them to the cone. The cone in turn vibrates, moving the air volume inside the guitar out through the sound holes.

For his Dobro resonator, John Dopyera decided to make his cone concave (pointing inward) and used an eight-legged “spider” bridge which straddled the cone. The vibrations from the strings travel from the saddle and down the spider “legs,” providing the cone with eight contact rods for vibration. The result is a loud, full-bodied tone.

Resonator guitars became popular in both blues and bluegrass. Dobro-style guitars, especially wood-bodied ones, were preferred by many bluegrass players. Blues players tended toward National-style tri-cone resonators. But plenty of guitarists break with tradition and use resonators in their own preferred ways.

Players liked resonators because, being louder than regular acoustic guitars, they could play for larger crowds in rural areas that didn’t have electricity for amplifiers. Street musicians, who had to set up without amplifiers, liked resonator guitars for the same reason.

Don Morrison makes both single-cone and tri-cone resonators. For his popular Rustbucket model, he says he flattens the corrugated steel sheets by walking on them so he can fit them through his ancient set of sheet metal rollers. Some of this old metal will still bear the makers’ stamps: Trademark Redcliffe, for example, or Lysaght Queen’s Head Australia or Emu Best. You’ll see these stamps on the backs of his guitars.

On some Rustbuckets he takes naturally weathered Galvo and adds an artificially rusted cone and sound holes, giving the guitar a distinctive, vintage look.

When he isn’t building resonators, Don Morrison is performing music, often Delta blues. During the ’90s his band, The Elmores, played blues classics by Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. He and his band Prawnhead are also a part of a “roots revolution” in popular music.

We honed our style on the streets and markets of Adelaide. We found the faster we played, the more money we made. We don’t play blues or folk, we don’t play country, we don’t play bluegrass, nor do we play rockabilly. But we play a mixture of all of those. We call it bluebilly.

Image courtesy of Slide Guitar for Beginners

Is It True That the Number of LGBT People Is Growing More and More by the Year?

Answered on Quora. Studies in the US show that 3- However in the most recent poll in the UK, the rate of homosexuality and bisexuality has increased dramatically among the youngest generation (18–30). In all other age cohorts, the rate was flat or near-flat. Now whether the rate is really going up or not will be the subject of an endless circular argument because no matter how high the rate goes, the PC people will always insist that these are just more and more people who would have been counted gay in prior years except they were closeted. All increases will be hand-waved away as “people coming out of the closet.” Because of this tautological argument the PC types always trot out of all increases being explained by people leaving the closet, we may never be able to determine if the rate of this sort of thing is increasing or not. I have had also had PC people explain increases in the rate of homosexuality as “those people were already gay anyway.” Hence the rate never goes up or down. Once again we see an argument circling around itself. In fact, an argument like this fails falsifiability and hence it is not only inherently false, but it’s not even wrong! In parts of Ancient Greece, 9 The rate of bisexuality among young women in the West is skyrocketing in recent years, from 1. It is absolutely certain that the rate of transgenderism is skyrocketing in recent decades. In the 1960’s-1980’s, the rate was 1/90,000. It was quite rare all through the 1970’s. In recent years the rate has exploded to the point where in Generation Z, an incredible Therefore the rate of transgenderism has gone up 1,800 times (!) in recent years. It’s pretty obvious that there that that 180,00 If it is a choice, it doesn’t seem like a good one to me, as the rates of psychiatric morbidity and mortality among trans people are extremely high. Transsexuals commit suicide at fully 18–57 times the rate of the rest of the population. Their overall death rate is 2.5 X higher than the rest of the population. Rates of heart disease and cancer are double to triple that of the rest of us. 4 The usual PC argument here once again is that no matter what the transgender rate is, the rate was the same in prior years, except these transsexuals were all closeted. I am sorry, but I find it very hard to believe that

Anti-Germanism in a Nutshell

Anti-Germanism is a Left philosophy started by, you guessed it, Germans! They hold that Germany has been rotten from the start, that German culture is evil and irredeemably poisoned, and that Germany needs a complete Cultural Revolution to destroy German culture and replace it with something humane. There are only a few Jews in Germany right now, but there are quite a few Jews in the anti-German movement. The percentage of Jews in the anti-German movement is much higher than in the population. However, most anti-Germans are not Jewish. For the life of me, I cannot see why the Jews want to pick a fight with the Germans. Haven’t Germans and Jews fought enough and wreaked enough destruction on the world? I came across this on Facebook and I think it sums up anti-Germanism quite well. I removed some crap about Communism, Frankfurt School, and postmodernism because this is some weird Alt Right crap that got tacked onto what is otherwise a Leftist discourse. It is interesting to see Leftist anti-German theory adopted, modified, and warped by some weird sort of Alt Right types.

The country that I despise the most is Germany. Germany has had only a history of destroying what is right and civilized, not to mention their Germanic love of totalitarianism. During the days of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, the Romans were spreading civilization throughout Europe, bringing technology and civilization to wherever they conquered. However, the greatest enemy of the Romans were the barbaric and savage Germanic tribes, who later spread all over the Roman world, plundering, destroying, and raiding wherever they went. They eventually managed to destroy the Roman world, annihilating its advancements, and pushing Europe into a Dark Age for nearly 1,000 years. During this period of the Dark Ages, a new power, Prussia, emerged on the European theater. Born from Germanic knights slaughtering an entire ethnic group and enslaving Poles, they brought nothing of merit into the world, bringing only tyranny, militarism, and terror. Once Europe fully recovered from the first large scale attack on civilization, a new Germanic Empire took hold, even surpassing the Roman world, with the spread of new ideas such as Protestantism. This empire was the Holy Roman Empire – which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire; but in fact a Germanic tool to fight civilization and anti-totalitarianism. The empire waged brutal wars of religion in an attempt to reinstate corrupt Catholic rule all over Europe. This finally culminated in the 30 Years War, the bloodiest European War until the next European-wide war, also commenced by Germany. However, the German plot was stopped. Finally, a bit later, in a book called Von Krieg (On War in English), the Germanic elite of Prussia revealed their plans, which are still being implemented to this day. Here are a couple of quotes from the book: Just as Prussia has been fated to be the core of Germany, so Germany will be the core of the future German Empire of the West..Conquered people shall be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with. The Germanic states then clamped down further upon liberalism and liberty, maintaining an absolute monarchy until unification. Otto von Bismarck was their leader – an absolute monarchist/militarist. He then started three aggressive wars: against Denmark, against Austria, and against France. He created Germany as a brutal, totalitarian monarchy, hell bent on conquering the world. Prussia had become the core of Germany, and a new leader now needed to make it the future German Empire of the West. That new leader came – Kaiser Wilhelm II. Plotting to destroy all other nations and achieve a worldwide German Reich, he took the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, as his opportunity. Knowing full well that the Habsburgs, his fellow Germans, would use the assassination carried out by one man, who just so happened to be a Serb, to carry out an aggressive war against Serbia, despite knowing full well it would lead to war with Russia and the rest of the world, Wilhelm promised to unconditionally support Austria-Hungary. The Kaiser of Germany singlehandedly began the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen in an attempt to annihilate all non-Germans. He invaded neutral Belgium, raping and massacring innocent civilians; began using poison gas, which was banned by the rules of war; and sunk without warning merchant shipping. However, liberty and civilization won, and totalitarianism and barbarism lost.   After the war, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Ferdinand Foch had the correct analysis, “This is not a treaty, this is a 20 year armistice.” The way that quote is taken in our pro-German history books is that those evil Allies were so cruel, and those evil Allies forced the evil Treaty of Versailles upon those poor Germans. However, the quote meant what the real case was: this treaty was no hard enough, and why is Germany still allowed to exist? Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that it was not harsh enough. Worst of all, we didn’t even enforce the treaty and allowed Germany to expand and attempt to conquer the world again. During the Weimar Republic, there was another Germanic ideology that was created in attempt to utterly annihilate the West – Nazism. As we all know, the Nazis won at first, and with the power they had, they created one of the most totalitarian regimes ever been created in the world, and the Germans marched across Europe and spread genocide, tyranny, terror, and barbarism. However, the world finally managed to destroy the 3rd German Reich and discredit Nazism forever. We thought we destroyed Germanism, however, once again, we were wrong. We made the fatal mistake of feeling sorry for the Germans, and allow the continual existence of the German state.

Gedalia Braun's Piece on Africans

Sam: A possible explanation for Black behavior. “…common understanding among blacks of what morality is: not something internalized but something others enforce from the outside…” https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/ Tulio: Interesting article. But I’d like to examine multiple perspectives on this topic before I draw any conclusions. I’ve never been to Africa to observe her findings first hand, and given that the author writes for Amren, this individual has an obvious predisposition. For example she speaks of cruelty and torture in Africa, but that has existed among whites as well. I’ve seen some of the torture devices used during Europe’s middle period. Even looking at them was unbearable. Even in this country witches were burned at the stake. Blacks were hung from trees on false accusations while whites stood around and cheered. I don’t like her conclusion that blacks have some inherent flaw that makes them incapable of being moral or having any abstract thoughts. Google a list of African proverbs and they contradict everything she just said.

First of all, Gedalia Braun is a man, not a woman. No idea what that first name is all about. I actually think he is onto something, especially as he lived in various African countries for many years. That was always one of my favorite articles on Amren. The odd thing about that article is that while is not real flattering towards Africans, the author doesn’t seem to hate Africans at all. In fact, it seems that he is rather fond of them despite it all. I don’t think just writing for Amren should disqualify you as biased. One of the truly disturbing things about Amren that I learned from hanging out there a very long time is that so much of what those articles say is flat out true. That is hard to swallow. However, the site is dishonest and biased as it only reports the downside to Blacks and never says anything good about them, while I know some of you will be amazed, but there are actually quite a few good things you can say about US Blacks if you are looking to write good things about them. The Black love of cruelty and sadism does seem to be a part of the race. Yes any culture can become extremely cruel and sadistic, even the “highest” races of all which can become downright genocidal under the right conditions of Organized Violence.  Not long ago, two of the “highest” races of all, the Germans and Japanese, engaged in some spectacular cruelty, sadism, out and out evil and even horrific genocide. And yes, European White did use to be quite sadistic and cruel as the torture devices indicate. However, under normal peacetime conditions, most European Whites in Europe and the West demonstrate remarkably little sadism and cruelty, while with Blacks, even US Blacks, it just seems to go on unabated. I should note that cruelty and sadism are not Black traits. They are human traits! Humans are naturally cruel, sadistic and downright evil, at least at times. Most human societies and most humans have it in them to be sadistic and cruel. I was a pretty vicious little boy, but all my friends were too, so I just figure that boys are just naturally rather evil. But you grow out of it. I still have cruelty and sadism in me of course, but I try to keep it locked up in a cage inside of me and hope it never comes out. My argument is going to be that Blacks are more susceptible to the normal human tendencies than say Whites or Northeast Asians are, not that Blacks are evil and sadistic and White people are real nice. Screw that. Some of those things may not be race-dependent. For instance, even if Blacks are bad at abstract thinking as a race, if you push their IQ up, their capacity for abstract thinking ought to grow quite a bit. African Americans appear to be dramatically more intelligent that Africans for whatever reason. One standard deviation is nothing to shake your finger at. Hence, even if US Blacks are have some inherent issue with abstract thinking, pushing that IQ up to one SD is going to make US Blacks a Hell of a lot more abstract than Africans. I should also note that a number of the other downsides to Africans that he writes about – childlikeness, love of cruelty and sadism, needing morality imposed from the outside rather than from within A lot of that has been said before. Albert Schweitzer wrote much the same things after working for years as a do-gooder in Africa. The fact that he was such a do-gooder makes his remarks particularly potent, as I do not see how a man with that much of a kind heart would deliberately make up a bunch of evil things about Blacks. In fact, if you study so called racist literature down through the years, you will find many of these things that Braun talks about repeated many times. Much early anthropological writings on Blacks are now called racist because they were pretty blunt about the race, whereas now the field is very PC. For instance, the thing about Blacks being “childlike.” Childlike is not the same thing as childish. Childlike is not a bad thing really. I would love to be childlike in some ways and I hope I am, actually. Early American writings including I think Thomas Jefferson noted the same thing: they also said that Blacks were childlike. The morality thing sort of makes sense. In situations where brute force enforces morality, Blacks do pretty well. I heard they do pretty well under Communism. Supposedly you could walk from one end to the other of Maputo in the middle of the night and no one would bother you. Maputo is the capital of Mozambique. That was under the Communist like government of Samora Machel, who is actually one of my heroes. Havana is the safest large city in the Americas and it is very Black. Blacks also do well under Islam. Reporters have gone to the parts of West Africa that are under Islam and they say that things are a lot smoother, less chaotic and far less crime ridden than in the non-Muslim countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. I hear there are also many Blacks in Yemen, maybe up to 4 Under both Islam and Communism, morality is for sure imposed from the outside in a pretty heavy handed way. It was similar in the typical African village or villages that was ruled by a king. I have heard that pre-1960, Nigeria was mostly a country of small rural villages. There was almost no crime in these villages. Not only was law enforcement pretty brutal, there was also a heavy shame factor involved similar to what we see with the Northeast Asians, who do not want to commit crimes or even do bad things in general because it will bring shame unto their families. Amazingly rural Africa was able to operate under the same shame-based morality as the Northeast Asians, yet the NE Asians are usually thought to be a “higher” race than Africans. So it looks like some of those things that make these “higher” races higher can actually be imported and be used by the “lower” races, which seems counterintuitive but is also hopeful. The notion that Black genes make societies inherently unstable is belied by the fact that North Africa (1 Also Ancient Egypt was 1

The Basque-Caucasian Hypothesis

I have gotten a lot of crap from my enemies for being on the Academia.edu site in the first place, but really anyone can join. The following was posted by one of the reviewers in an Academia session by one of the leading lights of the Basque-Caucasian theory. As you can see, the mythological and multiple lines of genetic evidence are starting to pile up pretty nicely too. This is neat stuff if you are interested in the Basque-Caucasian link in addition to work going on into the remains of the Neolithic Farmers who were subsumed in the Indo-European waves. It turns out there is quite a bit left in different parts of Europe, especially in terms of Neolithic Farmer mythology. From a discussion among academics and independent scholars on a paper on the Basque-Caucasian Theory in Historical Linguistics during a session in on Academia:

I am not a linguist but interested in the topic as it proposes a linguistic correlation between Caucasic languages and Basque, as it parallels my own current research on reconstructing European Paleolithic mythologies using ethnographic analogies constrained by on archaeogenetics and language macrofamily correlations. Tuite (2006, 2004, 1998, 1997) has pointed out the hunter-gatherer beliefs and myth motifs shared across a ‘macro-Caucasic’ area to the Hindu Kush and into Western Europe. Basque deities Mari, Sugaar, and Ama Lurra and their associated mythologems have striking similarities to the macro-Caucasic hunter mythologies (not found in Finno-Ugric or Middle Eastern ancient mythologies.) I am currently writing a paper identifying many examples of Southern/Western Gravettian art in Italy, Spain, southern France that appear to depict imagery only explicable by analogy to Macro-Caucasic religious myth and ritual. With respect to mtDNA fossil genetics, three skeleton samples are from Paglicci Cave, Italy, ~25 cal BP: one is macro-N-mtDNA (homeland Caucasus/Caspian/Iran; currently highest frequencies Caucasus, Arabia), and two skeletons, RO/HV-mtDNA (homeland northern Middle East; currently highest frequencies, Basque, Syria, Gilaki, Daghestan). During the later Magdalenian another diffusion occurs apparently by a similar route: HV4-mtDNA emerges in Belarus-Ukraine (~14±2 ka) and under Late Glacial Maximum HV4a (~13.5 ka) moves south and splits in the three refugia: southern Italy, southern Russia (HV4a1, ~10 ka), the Middle East (HV4a2, ~9 ka), and Basque area (HV4a1a, ~5 ka, suggesting full emergence of distinct Basque culture and language), (Gómez-Carballa, Olivieri et al 2012). These studies further support the existence of a Macro-Basque-Caucasic mythological stratum as well as shared language substrate.

The cutting-edge liberal theory is that Basque (and some other odd far-flung languages) is part of the Caucasian language family. In other words, at one time, the Basques and the peoples of the Caucasus like Chechens were all one people. What this probably represents is the ancient Neolithic farmers who covered Europe before the Indo-European invasion replaced almost all of the languages of Europe. All that is left is Basque and the peoples of the Caucasus. Everything in between got taken by IE except for some late movements by Uralic and Turkic speakers. Up in the north, the Lapp Uralic speakers are, like Basques, the last remains of the Neolithic farmers. The Sardinians also an ancient remaining group of these people, but their language has been surmounted recently by a Latinate tongue. As it turns out, the Basques and Caucasians also share a number of cultural similarities. There are also some similar placenames. And there is some good genetic evidence connecting the Basques with the Caucasian speakers. It’s all there, but the conservatives are balking, to put it mildly, about linking Basque with the Caucasian languages. I have long believed in this theory. I read a book over 20 years ago comparing Basque to the Caucasian languages and a few other distant tongues and thought the case was proved even via overkill by the book. And recent work is so super that one wonders why the conservatives are still winning. I feel that the link between Basque and the Caucasus languages is now proven to an obvious and detailed degree.

Guess the Quote

Let’s play guess the quote!

Opposition there was none: the boldest spirits had succumbed on stricken fields or by proscription-lists; while the rest of the nobility found a cheerful acceptance of slavery the smoothest road to wealth and office, and, as they had thriven on revolution, stood now for the new order and safety in preference to the old order and adventure. Nor was the state of affairs unpopular in the provinces, where administration by the Senate and People had been discredited by the feuds of the magnates and the greed of the officials, against which there was but frail protection in a legal system forever deranged by force, by favoritism, or (in the last resort) by gold.

1. Who wrote this? If you are close, that’s ok. He was a very famous writer, I will give you that much. 2. What is the name of the work that this is written in? Any of the author’s works would be ok. 3. Where in the book can this quote be found? Approximate pages ok. 2. Where was this written? 3. When was this written? Approximate times are ok. 4. What language was this originally written in? This is an English translation from another language. 5. What is the writer discussing in this paragraph?

Last Word on Phoenicians, Phonetics, Etc.

It looks like we finally got the answer to whether Phoenician and phonetic, phonology, phone, phoneme, etc. are related – they are not, but both are from Greek words. Phonetic, phone, phonology, phoneme, etc. are derived from Greek Phonein, which means quite logically “to sound.” Phoenician, on the other hand, derives from a Greek word Phoenikoi for the people and region, derived from the word Phoenix which originally meant a particular conch shell that yielded a nice purple dye and later acquired the meaning via legend of a bird that rises from the ashes after it dies. I am not sure what the Phoenikoi were named after – perhaps the conch shell?

Anyway, the roots have no relationship to each other, but it was a nice hypothesis anyway. “Scientists” always like to chortle with ridicule at the notion of a “bad hypothesis” but I think in many cases, most hypotheses that seem prima facie reasonable are not bad hypotheses. Furthermore, I dislike the very notion of bad hypotheses as it smacks of the horrific arrogance all of the sciences engage in these days, even the ridiculous fake social “sciences” like my own pitiful specialty, Linguistics.

Miville writes:

Phonein (to sound) should first be sounded as the ancient Athenians did: not phoney-in, but pf-hone-een (or pf-honey-an as the Spartans did): the important thing is to try to sound out an f not with the teeth against the upper lip but with both lips as gently as to let off a beautiful soap bubble instead of ordinary spittle.

The Romans despite being the new lords on the block felt they were no match for Greece however decadent and derelict so they made that effort to sound the Greek ph the Greek way rather than like their own f, at least so as to spit gracefully down upon their own people, hence the spelling we inherited from them despite the fact no longer any Roman nor Greek knows any other sound than our own vulgar present f.

Phonein in Greek is written with an Omega, which was sounded Oh like in OMG in Athens and like Awe or (Golden) Dawn in Sparta. Phoenicia is derived, as regards the Greek language, from Phoenix, which was written with the false diphthong (original simple sound lacking a proper letter in the alphabet and therefore written two ones) oi which bore but little relationship whatever with either simple o or Omega and was rather sounded œ as in German Goethe or u as in turn depending on the city. Phonein meant to sound, phoenix rather derives from a word meaning a conch, the particular one whence came a very precious dark red dye, purpur or purple.

It also meant a legendary bird capable of rebirth after having passed through burnt offering. The legend was common (and still is in works such as the One and Thousand Nights) to all Near and Middle Eastern countries and the red color also pictured the Rising Sun, the Orient, hence the name given to the mariners stemming from the land of the rising sun also most renowned for its production of purple dye from the conch and for having given to Greece the alphabet.

The Phoenicians themselves called their own language and nationality Cana’an, so the name we use is a pure Greek creation, like the name Greek which is a Roman appellation for a people who call themselves Hellenes. The letters, of Phoenician origin, meant sounds, or phonemata.

The conch could also be used as a sounding horn, as is the symbol of the primeval creating divine vibration in many cultures, apart from the fact that in many languages a telephone receiver can be called a conch (Muschel in German). The proximate sounds, however, prove no common etymology, even though they are marvelous for poetry.

The early Roman soldiers when it came to name the same people that had settled Carthage did not make the effort their betters made when trying to pronounce Greek names and sounded Phoenikoi like Punici, simplifying the very peculiar Greek ph into p rather than into f. By regressive derivation they likened the word to their own poena, a punishment, and to the verb punire, but there is no common etymology.

Phoenician Phonetics

As a linguist I should probably not even be asking this question, but as all Western alphabets are probably ultimately derived from the ancient Phoenician alphabet from the Levant, have you ever considered that the term “phonetic alphabet” may also be rooted in “Phoenician alphabet?” I am also wondering if such words as phonetics, phones, phonology, etc. are also derived from the word “Phoenician.” I suppose I could look it up, but I’m too lazy at the moment, so I will fob it off on one of you.

The Roots of the Alphabet(s)

Probably most of you do not know that we are all using a variant of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. Actually I am not sure if that is precisely true, as I think the Phoenician alphabet was preceded by an Assyrian one. But at any rate, our classic Western alphabets all came out of the Levant and Mesopotamia in some way or other. Indeed, it is even theorized that many of the syllabaries in use in Central, South and Southeast Asia are also rooted in this original alphabet from the Levant.

Of course, Chinese and consequently Korean and Japanese alphabets have another origin.

One might wish to throw the odd SE Asian orthographies such as Thai, Lao, Burmese, Vietnamese, Javanese, Sundanese and Khmer there, but my understanding is that all of those SE Asian orthographies were actually derived from syllabaries originally designed in India.

A few writing systems such as Georgian, Armenian and Cree may have been created de novo, but I might have to look that up. The only non-Middle Eastern derived orthography that immediately comes to my mind is the Chinese ideographs.

The origins of the Assyrian/Phoenician alphabet appear to have been ultimately in Egyptian hieroglyphics. So the ancient Egyptians really started it all when it comes to writing down words, at least for the West.

Chinese ideographs may date from even earlier. Chinese bone writing goes way back.

Very early European writing such as runic systems and similar systems in Asia such as the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions may not be related to the Phoenician system at all. The Yukaghir in Siberia and the Yi in South China may also have designed de novo systems.

"Rodbusters," by Alpha Unit

For millenia humans have created structures out of concrete. The Romans preferred concrete to all other construction materials, and their unique formula is the reason so many of ancient Rome’s monuments are still standing. The concrete we use today, while different from Roman concrete, is an excellent building material but as strong as it is, it has almost no tensile strength: it can’t withstand much pulling or stretching. For that reason builders reinforce it with rebar.

These metal rods, which have spaced patterns of bumps or swirls to help the concrete grip them, allow concrete to bend and flex without cracking or breaking. Rodbusters, the ironworkers who install rebar, have one of the most physically demanding jobs in construction.

Rodbusters will tell you that their shoulders especially take a pounding. They do a lot of lifting, and routinely carry heavy rebar on their shoulders. During hot weather, shoulder burns from hoisting hot steel rods are common. Here’s how one rodbuster describes his work:

Your back is shot, shoulders are raped, you can’t walk from being in the SLDL position all day long, and you literally have no free time aside from our [mandated] breaks.

Another rodbuster has pretty much the same view:

It’s good clean work…but it’s hell on the body. Carrying 150-180 pounds of 30′ rods all day gives your lower back, shoulders, and legs a beating. Not to mention tying [rebar] all day long as well. Picture being in the SLDL start position for five minutes at a time.

SLDL stands for Stiff Legged Deadlift.

Once a rodbuster positions the rebar, he ties it together with wire. He has to wrap wire securely around any area with two or more rebar sections that intersect or overlap. Tied corners are weak, so he installs bent rebar at corners. A job might involve cutting or welding.

Tying rebar requires fast, repetitive hand and arm movements while applying a lot of force. When a rodbuster ties rebar at ground level, he typically works in a stooped position, with his body bent deeply forward. A rodbuster informs us:

For a career as a rodbuster, you’re always bunched forward. You can always tell a rodbuster by how he looks.

Ironworkers in the United States have been represented since 1896 by the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers. But throughout the country there are rodbusters working without a union contract.

Some non-union rodbusters have walked off the job to protest working conditions. They report making significantly less than the national average for reinforcing ironworkers. They say they can work 18-hour days sometimes, without warning. There are no health benefits, and if there is an accident, it might not get reported to OSHA. Such protests have taken place in Vancouver, Washington; in Houston, Texas; and in Manchester, Tennessee.

Union or non-union, if you can set and tie rebar, you have a skill that’s in demand. Some ironworkers say that in their line of work, the sooner you get in and get out, the better off you are. As one of them put it:

I was a rodbuster for over 30 years, and if you go that route you will find out GOD fucking hates you. The first two weeks every muscle in your body will fucking hate you. But remember this, you are not the only one that will do it or has been through it, and you will survive.

Let Us Look at Some "Black" Ancient Egyptians

She look Black to you? If anything, she looks like someone from India! Or possibly an Arab, an Armenian, an Assyrian or a Kurd.
She look Black to you? If anything, she looks like someone from India! Or possibly an Arab, an Armenian, an Assyrian or a Kurd.
Here is another famous “Black” person from ancient Egypt.
Check out this hot Black chick! What's with the paleface? Is she using skin lighteners again?
Check out this hot Black chick! What’s with the paleface? Is she using skin lighteners again? Check out that straight hair! Were Black girls using hair straighteners even way back then? This is a race of people who no longer exist, but you can see some modern Egyptians who look something like this. I also think that Assyrians look a bit like this.

Alexander of Macedon

Ah yes, Alexander the Great. Perhaps the greatest military strategist that even lived, no? But what did he want? What were his goals? William Woodthorpe Thorn, the great classicist, birthed the Napoleonic notion that Alexander was after nothing more than “the Brotherhood of Man” or uniter of nations. This view was later popularized by Mary Renault in a series of popular novels. I disagree. Alexander wanted merely the same thing that all other conquerors (and all colonists for that matter) want:

  1. Land
  2. Money

In other words, the booty. Let’s not romanticize these militarists too much.

More Out of India Idiocy

Here. This is the latest nonsense out of India purporting to undo the Aryan Migration Theory. It is written by high caste Hindu idiots for political reasons, namely to swipe back at South Indians and Dalits who claim that Aryans imposed caste Hinduism on them at the point of a sword. The fact is that South Indians misrepresent the case. The Aryans did not sweep into Northwest India, conquer the Dravidians, and push them south. The Aryans conquered in the north, and they bred in with and mixed with the locals. In time, caste Hinduism spread to the south of India. Michael Witzel is probably the pre-eminent scholar of Sanskrit and the Aryan Migration question. Here is his response to this irresponsible study, which unfortunately was published in a peer reviewed journal. Briefly, the India Today piece completely misrepresents the study and the authors of the study also make many other misrepresentations of the data. I am afraid that this is the way Indians do science, just like they do everything else – with massive corruption and political overtones. As more and more Indians get into science, we can count on science becoming more and more corrupt and less and less scientific. I asked Prof. M. Witzel about a popular news item in Indian English press. Here is his reply. Happy Holidays! N. Ganesan From Michael Witzel answering my question. ————————————– Well, Ganesan, I have answered that, based on my genetic etc. background info and info from my geneticist friends [who include Thangaraj, Pitchappan 🙂 ] — but this msg. has not appeared on IDDOLOGY@yahooo yet, where this “news” was broadcast a few days earlier… Here a copy: =========== The INDIA TODAY article (below) bristles with misrepresentations and outright misinformation, in part by the authors of the genetic study mentioned here: On Dec 11, 2011, at 7:19 PM, Sri Venkat wrote: > Dinesh C. Sharma New Delhi, December 10, 2011 | UPDATED 10:22 IST > > Indians are not descendants of Aryans, says new study. > <> Briefly, it is well known that “The origin of genetic diversity found in South Asia is much older than 3,500 years when the Indo-Aryans were supposed to have migrated to India”. Geneticists point to the Out of Africa movement around 65-75,000 years ago. As a result, Reich et al. have shown that two ancient population segments evolved in South Asia around 40 kya, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), (genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans) and the ‘Ancestral South Indians’. Add another, Neolithic migration from the Greater Near East some 10,000 y.a. Then, it is usually said that “migration of Indo-European speakers from Central Asia … was responsible for the introduction of the Indo-European language family.” Indeed. Indo-Aryan language, religion, etc. have been imported from the Ural steppes/Central Asia. Note the many *early*, pre-Vedic loan-words into *early* Uralic language, and now also loans from the Bactria-Margiana culture (2400-1600 BCE) into Indo-Aryan. By people with one or another genetic set-up (see below on R1a). The rest of the so-called “Aryan Invasion” is an outdated 19th century theory, just as the early 19th c. one that imagined Indo-Europeans migrated out of India (as some Hindutvavadins now reassert!). There was indeed a movement northward out of South Asia/Greater Near East during the warm period around c.40,000 y.a., but that is some 38,000 years BEFORE Indo-Aryans even came into existence. (Same mistake made in the 2005 CA schoolbook fiasco!) > > “Our study clearly shows that there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago,” said Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj. Absolute genetic dates (just as in linguistic reconstructions) need to be supported by outside evidence, such as finds of skeletons. For the period around 1500 BCE, we still have error bars of 3000 years in genetic reconstructions, which makes pronouncements about a non-existent “Aryan” move into South Asia very moot indeed. We will have to await the further, so far very uncertain resolution of the early Y chromosome R1a haplogroup (c. some 20-34,000 years old), to form an opinion. Ra1 has been attributed to speakers of Indo-European (as it is prominent in Eastern Europe), but it also occurs throughout South Asia, tribal populations included. We need to know which one of its unresolved sub-strains moved, when and where. We do not know that…yet. When L. Singh says, “It is high time we re-write India’s prehistory based on scientific evidence,” we can only agree. However, not when he says, “There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India or even something such as Aryans existed”. Dr Singh does not understand that Indo-Aryan language (and religion) simply could not exist in thin air. You need a population. Obviously they had Ural area ancestors, whatever their genetic set-up upon entering from Afghanistan. Even his assertion, “If any migration from Central Asia to South Asia took place, it should have introduced apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India” is patently wrong as Eastern elements entered Central Asia only much later. For further details see my recent message to the IER list. Cheers, Michael Sequel to my last, general comment: 1. First of all, it is rather unfortunate that the authors of the paper have highlighted the “Aryan Invasion Theory” in their summary and later on as well. That is 19th century talk! Since at least the 1950s (FBJ Kuiper 1955, Przyluski even in 1920s, etc.), Indologists have stressed the complex interactions between Indo-Aryan speakers and local speakers both in the Greater Panjab and beyond, from the oldest text (Rgveda, c. 1200-1000 BCE) onward, which has some clear non-IA poets and kings. The great, late Kuiper’s last paper (2000) has the title a “bilingual poet”. Since 1995, I too have written about acculturation, and that maybe “not one gene” of the Ural steppes people had survived by the time the pastoral Indo-Aryan speakers arrived in the Greater Panjab (via the Central Asian river pastures/Tienshan/Pamir meadows, the BMAC, Hindukush, etc., with many chances for gene flow from all these areas). That Indo-Aryan language, religion, ritual etc. have been imported from the Urals/Central Asia (note the *early* loan-words into Uralic, and now also BMAC loans words into Indo-Aryan!) is beyond any reasonable doubt. By people with one or another genetic set up, — which one that is the question. I will await the further resolution of the Y chromosome haplogroup Ra1* –note the “western” affinities in the paper of Brahmins and Ksatriyas even in U.P. — as to see exactly which genetic strain may have entered South Asia around 1500 BCE, — if any. 2. Co-author Lalji Singh says as per the article in DNA : “We have conclusively proved that there never existed any Aryans or Dravidians in the Indian sub continent. The Aryan-Dravidian classification was nothing but a misinformation campaign carried out by people with vested interests,” Prof Lalji Singh, vice-chancellor, Banaras Hindu University, told DNA.” Again harking back to *supposed* British interests in the 19th century. But, the two language groups definitely are as separate as they are from Bantu, Chinese or Papua. Indo-Aryan is definitely not = Dravidian language or its original culture, just as little as Basque, Uralic are not Indo-European. Confusion of language, genes, ethnicity, etc. Well, Lalji has stayed at Hyderabad for a long time. Did he ever try to speak Hindi/Urdu to native, mono-lingual Kannada speakers? He would had have as little luck as I would have with any Indo-European language in Estonia, Finland or Hungary. Why does he have to comment about things (language, culture) that he does not understand? ““The study effectively puts to rest the argument that south Indians are Dravidians and were driven to the peninsula by Aryans who invaded North India,” said Prof Singh, a molecular biologist and former chief of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.” Same mistake. Of course, South Indians are Dravidian speaking. And they even are genetically (ASI) different from North Indians (ANI), which this co-author should know from his own (and D. Reich’s) paper. Same confusion of genetics, language, ethnicity (“race”)… The idea of Aryans “driving Dravidians’ South”, too, is 19th century talk. See above. The reality is much more complex. For example, Frank Southworth has shown that Maharashtra was Dravidian speaking well into the Middle Ages, and Gujarat too has Drav. place names. There was a lot of give and take between the two language families, as is seen in the many Dravidian loans in Sanskrit, etc. and the many Indo-Aryan loans in Drav. languages. 3. Unfortunately, as some years earlier before, Gyaneshwer Chaubey chimes in: “According to Dr Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia, who was another Indian member of the team, the leaders of Dravidian political parties may have to find another answer for their raison d’être.” A clear, political statement based on wrong science: see immediately below. By Dravidian parties he means those restricted to Tamil Nadu. Well, Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra too speak Dravidian, as do many tribes in Central India (Gonds, etc.) “We have proved that people all over India have common genetic traits and origin. All Indians have the same DNA structure. No foreign genes or DNA has entered the Indian mainstream in the last 60,000 years,” Dr Chaubey said.” Sorry, *all Indians* with the same DNA structure? Their own paper says differently. He could also say that all ex-Africa populations have the same genetic origin… And no “foreign” genes? What about all these Persians, Greek/Macedonians, Saka, Kushana, Huns, Arabs 711 CE+, Muslim Turks (1000+, 1200 CE+), Mughals, Afghans 1700 CE, Portuguese, etc., British….? Sure, they all never had Indian wives… “Dr Chaubey had proved in 2009 itself that the Aryan invasion theory is bunkum. “That was based on low resolution genetic markers. This time we have used autosomes, which means all major 23 chromosomes, for our studies. The decoding of human genome and other advances in this area help us in unraveling the ancestry in 60,000 years,” he explained.” I hope he will learn to distinguish between the Out Of Africa migration, the Neolithic one from western Asia around 10,000 y.a. (detailed in this very paper!), and the trickling in of Indo-Aryan pastoral speakers c.1500 BCE?? 4. Said geneticists *still* cannot distinguish between speakers of a particular language and their genes. Writing in English — are Lalji Singh and Gyaneshwer both Anglo-Saxons? Or me, for that matter? It is one thing to explain genetic results to the gullible public, but to confuse them with wrong data from linguistics, archaeology etc. is despicable. 5. “According to Prof Singh, Dr Chaubey, and Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj, another member of the team, the findings disprove the caste theory prevailing in India.” ??? “Interestingly, the team found that instead of Aryan invasion, it was Indians who moved from the subcontinent to Europe. “That’s the reason behind the findings of the same genetic traits in Eurasiain regions,” said Dr Thangaraj, senior scientist, CCMB. Well, as detailed in my last note, the well-known northward movement into N. Eurasia from South Asia during the warm period around 40,000 years ago, has NOTHING to do with the 19th century’s “Aryan Invasion,” dated around 1500 BCE! I suppose they can count and calculate? 6. Finally, the unavoidable dot on the i, from the ubiquitous Dr K., — who has nothing to do with this genetic paper or topic. Bad choice by the DNA newspaper! “Africans came to India through Central Asia during 80,000 to 60,000 BCE and they moved to Europe sometime around 30,000 BCE. The Indian Vedic literature and the epics are all silent about the Aryan-Dravidian conflict,” said Dr S Kalyanaraman, a proponent of the Saraswathi civilization which developed along the banks of the now defunct River Saraswathi.” Through Central Asia?? There is no evidence at all for this, neither archaeologically or otherwise. Central Asia — deserts and all — was settled, pace Wells, only much later. Dr K. is not up to date: Rumania was reached already by 42 kya… As for “Vedic literature and the epics are all silent about the Aryan-Dravidian conflict”, he should re-read the Rgveda (in Sanskrit), not the outdated 100 year old English translation of Griffith. The non-Indo-Aryan speaking populations there (Dasyu, Daasa) clearly are in conflict with Indo-Aryan speakers… Finally, having studied *administration* (PhD Manila), he is not up to date on archaeology either. The Harappan civilization developed in the Piedmont west of the subcontinent (see books by the late G. Possehl) and it spread eastward, also to the Ghagghar-Hakra river, which Dr K anachronistically calls, in Hindutva fashion, Sarasvati — well before the river got its Vedic name, c.1200 BCE. In sum: for all discussants: as the old proverb has it, “shoemaker, stick to your own tools”! ‘nough said. Michael On Dec 11, 2011, at 11:50 AM, Michael Witzel wrote: > This paper  has been out for a few days, and I got a copy from a co-author, one of my Estonian friends. > > I have immediately protested to them and have also critiqued the comments published by DNA. Note that the latter comments are attributed just to three (not all!) Indian co-authors, but do not come from the slew of other authors. The reason, as usual, seems to be politics and notoriety (to attract more finances?) > > To set the record straight, a few general remarks first: > > 1. There is nothing new in the result about an early Out of Africa movement (to South Asia) of *anatomically modern humans* (not Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus) at c. 65-75 kya. There are some hints about earlier dates but they are based on debatable stone artifacts, not skeletons. > > 2. And we also knew well about the movements from there to northern Eurasian areas during the warm period around c. 40,000 BCE: archaeologically attested by skeletons, both in the Beijing area (Zhoukoudian c.40 kya, via S.E. Asia), and in Europa (Rumania, c. 42 kya). > > See my friend Peter Underhill (Stanford) et al. 2010 paper: > > 3. Obviously this early movement has nothing to do with the current Hindutvavadin theory of an “Out Of India” move of the Indo-Europeans, who would have settled Europe: that would be tens of thousands of years later. (The same mistake was made during the CA schoolbook affair … by a CA biologist! They never learn…) > > For a popular overview with maps see St. Oppenheimer’s website  or that of the National Geographic. > > Around 40,000 BCE there were neither “Aryans” nor Indo-Europeans around, not even speakers of the giant Nostratic language family, at best of the still earlier hypothetical Borean super-language family, proposed by my friend, the Africanist Harold Fleming (see WIKI). Likewise, no Dravidian language family yet, which may in fact be part of Nostratic anyhow. > > This northward move is a general phenomenon, as is the subsequent severe contraction southward during the last Ice age around 20 kya, when the four or five major human types (not “races”) developed in isolation: Europe, S.Asia, (Sunda Land: S.E. Asia), E. Asia, Sahul Land (New Guinea-Australia), — for example with two separate, independent mutations producing white skin color in Europe and in East Asia. > > 3. The paper by my Boston geneticist friend David Reich et al. has shown that South Asia has two ancient population segments evolving from the early Out of Africa people around 40 kya, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), (genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans) and the ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI), so named after I had cautioned him and Nick Patterson about the political danger involving the naming of these groups. As you can see, even this nomenclature did not help to dispel preconceived Hindutva bias about “Aryans” and Dravidians. > > At 40 kya there were no “Aryans” and no “Dravidians” around yet. > > 4. If we then want to speak about “Aryans” (more correctly: speakers of Indo-Aryan language) and speakers of the early Dravidian language at all, we first of all have to disconnect language from ethnicity or “race”. I am not an Anglo-Saxon, just because I speak and write in English here, nor are Chaubey, Singh and Thangaraj. > > Language can change within 2 generations, as all Americans know and as Indians *should* know: not just in large cities, but also in tribal areas where people take over the dominant regional language, for obvious social reasons. > > The 3 Indian geneticists quote by DNA confuse language use with genetic setup, ethnicity, culture, religion etc. All of them easily (and *mutually*) transgress genetic boundaries. > > 5. If when then speak about Indo-Aryans or Dravidians at c. 3500 years ago, and want to link them with genetic data, we must take into account that all these studies are based on modern DNA, and depend on *assumed* mutation rates (going back to the Chimpazee-Human split of 5-7 million years ago); the genetic results thus provide good *relative* dates, but not absolute dates. > > Absolute dates (just as in linguistic reconstructions) need to be supported by outside evidence, such as finds of skeletons of anatomically modern humans, as mentioned above. (By the way these are earlier at Lake Mungo in Australia at c. 50 kya and Europe/China than in South Asia, where they only appear in Sri Lanka at c.30 kya. Facetiously: an Out of Australia migration to Eurasia?) > > 6. Worse, there are huge error bars in all these models. It may not matter very much if we have error bars of some 10,000 years for the Out of Africa move, but for the period around 1500 BCE, we still have error bars of 3000 years, which makes all pronouncements about a non-existent “Aryan” move into South Asia, based on current genetic data, very moot indeed. > > The “Western Asian/Central Asian” strain in northern India/Pakistan (as per this paper by Metspalu et al.) may well be due to Persian, Greek/Makedonian, Saka, Kushana, Hun, Arab (711 CE+), Islamic Turks 1000 CE/1200 CE, Portuguese etc. (1500 CE+) or British gene influx. > > I will await the further, so far very uncertain resolution of the Y chromosome R1a haplogroup to form an opinion. Ra1a has been attributed to speakers of Indo-European (as it is prominent in Eastern Europe) but it also occurs throughout South Asia, tribal populations included. We need to know which sub-strain moved: when and where. > > 7. All of which leaves most of the comments by Singh, Thangaraj and Chaubey high and dry. More about them in my next message. > > An interesting weekend, apparently. Luckily, the semester is over… > Cheers, > > Michael > If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

White Nationalist Lies About Portugal and the Dangers of Mulattoization

Here is a typical lie that the White nationalist scum tell about Portugal and the dangers of Whites interbreeding with Blacks:

Portugal – Once a 16th century world power with colonies around the world – moor/negro slave interbreeding after 400 years has left it with a 4

Well, guess what? It’s just not true. The Portuguese are not a mongrelized or mulatto people by any stretch of the imagination. Overall, the Portuguese are about 3. Look, there is no way on Earth that 3.5- Another one of their lies talks about the greatness of “White Egypt.” Except there never was any White Egypt, scumbags. There was an Arab Egypt. You know, Arabs, those inferiors? And even the great Arab Egypt had ~12-1 You know how these scumbags like to talk about the glories of great White South Africa? Guess what, fucktards? Those great White South Africans you love so much are 1 Let us look at the Arab World. The Arab World has gotten a lot Blacker over time with the introduction of Black slaves via Islam, but there was no corresponding degeneration of society. In fact, at the moment, the Blackest parts of the Arab World are the wealthiest of all. Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait have quite a bit of Black genes in their populations. Percentages generally range from ~13-1 So moral and economic degeneration of your population via low levels of mulattoization (~1 In fact, in recent times, we have few to no cases of mass mulattoization of any population anywhere on Earth. Show me one great, prosperous White society anywhere on Earth that degenerated into a moral and economic basket case in modern times due to mulattoization. Show me one, one, one, one. Show me one in the Caribbean. One in South America. One in Central America. One in the Arab World. One in Africa. One anywhere. Not that I think that mass introgression of Black genes into a White society is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Instead I think it is nothing much to worry about, since it doesn’t seem to be happening anywhere on Earth, which is probably a good idea.

Alt Left: Of Vikings and Nubians, or Who Were the Real Mediterraneans?

Anonymous: Anyone who thinks Nordics were the original “Greeks,” “Romans,” “Persians,” or “Egyptians” is an uneducated, inferiority-complexed moron in denial of the truth because of their emotions and obvious ignorant bias. Seriously.

First off, Nordics with light features in hair and eyes and pale white skin only BURN in the sun if they’re not mixed with “darker peoples'” genes. Nordics are up north in Europe because the sun is way less strong up there, duh!

Mediterranean people (of true origin, not migrants now there today) can easily tan and have dark hair, eyes, etc. to easily take the stronger sun rays on their skin and eyes. It’s so obvious only a moron (yep, many out there) would be able to actually deny this with confidence. Anyone can look up ancient art and pottery of Greeks and clearly see the very curly, swarthy BLACK hair, brown eyes, etc. And also in many pictures they show men with BLACK hair and brown skin.

This is also seen in many Minoan paintings, who were of similar or same genetic stock as the Greeks. Look up ancient Persian pictures and you see men with BLACK hair and very Semitic facial features, well, what a shock, just like today’s Middle Eastern population as well!

Look up Cyrus the Great (Persian). Nordicists are simply in absolute denial because deep inside they actually have inferiority complexes. They know most ancient history of amazing civilizations have NOTHING to do with them.

When did Nordic people “come on the scene”? Only when they invaded Roman lands when Rome was in decline. Nordics/Germanics stole all the wealth and technology and also mixed with Roman peoples over hundreds of years. This is why you see people with light features in Italy, Spain, France, etc. today.

The ancient Romans even said the GERMANIC tribes to the north lived like uncivilized animals, didn’t clean themselves, did not have public baths, ran around barefoot, etc. Germanic/Nordics never built anything like Rome or Greece until they had to come down, invade and steal everything like a bunch of animals because they could not do it on their own without outside help.

This is actual fact. Go Google image search the Germanic invasions of Rome, and see for yourself. It started at around 300 A.D., and of course many Nordic migrants came over the last 1,500 years. So much history they ignore (thus, they’re ignorant) because it destroys their superiority complex. That superiority complex is really a mask to cover their…yep, again: inferiority complex.

Sorry guys, but you’re not as “superior” as you always claim. YOU burn in the sun, which many would say is a sign of inferiority. You know damn well if you tanned nicely but most others did not, you would call them genetic defects and albino inferiors. But since you are the ones that burn, you ignore this and try to point at other things. The emotional denial and ignorance of your kind is so high.

All your quotes of people supposedly saying Greeks had “gold hair” are BS lies. More likely implanted quotes by inferiority-complexed Nordics who want to steal history. And also, even if light hair was seen, guess what? Hair dye was used all throughout the ancient times, whether Egypt, Persia, Rome, Greece, etc. Look it up, they dyed their hair different colors, even blue and orange in Egypt.

This is most interesting post, and I agree with it in general. The Nordic-Med history is similar to the Egyptian-Nubian history. Meds produced a superior civilization, and Nordics produced an inferior civilization. When the superior civilization, the Meds, began to die, the inferiors, the Nordic barbarians, charged down from the North and conquered the ruins. And proceeded to not do a thing with it either, as the Dark Ages ensued.

Similarly, the mixed-race Egyptians (8

Vikings are seafaring blond and red niggas from the fjords. Nubian Blacks are are dark desert Vikings gone berserker.

We can probably also theorize something about powerful civilizations here – that as they start to decline, they grow fat, lazy or decadent and soon are overrun by inferior but violent and charged civilizations, who lord it over the ruins for a bit until it all collapses.

I See Race-Denying Idiots

Repost from the old site. I see idiots. I see race-denying idiots. I see them everywhere. I see them on the Egyptology Forum, in particular, linking to one of my posts, The Major and Minor Races of Mankind. That post is a massive work undergoing continuous revision that is based largely on Cavalli-Sforza’s groundbreaking work in genetics. It divides humanity into 3 macro races, 8 major races and 90 minor races. Hey! There is a race for everyone! Don’t despair, folks, there is probably a race out there waiting just for you, lonesome you. It seems that post is upsetting everyone. White Nationalists hate it, and now, over on the Egyptology Forum, Black Nationalists or Afrocentrists or whatever those morons are called hate it too. If White Nationalism is dumb, Black Nationalism is dumber still. Many of the things supposedly invented by Blacks have turned out on analysis to not to have been invented by Blacks. I don’t blame Blacks for reacting this way in the face of incessant propaganda from White Supremacists and various other racists, backed up by “science”, that repeats with hammer-like insistence that Blacks are idiots, evil sociopaths and losers who have never amounted to a thing and never will, as is the destiny of their genes. Hence the pitiful migration of Blacks into Egyptology, in a sad and sorry effort to claim the heritage of ancient Egypt for themselves. It’s bizarre that Black Nationalists, while promoting the Black race, also love to claim that race does not exist. They somehow hold both of these opinions simultaneously. Don’t ask me how. In that forum, I am described as a racialist (!) misrepresenting Cavalli-Sforza’s findings. But I did no such thing. I just used his data (and others) to divide humanity into races, based, almost exclusively, on genetic distance. In a few cases, I had to go outside genetics. In North Africa, there were two cases where mostly-White folks were clustering with mostly-Black folks into single races. Instead of lumping Whites and Blacks together into single subraces, which seemed too weird, I had to (arbitrarily) send Whiter folks to Caucasian and darker ones to Black. The cases involved Algerians and the Beja in one case and Nubians and Berbers in the other. Curiously, these cases do add weight to the race-denier’s arguments that race is a slippery concept. When you have Blacks and Whites lumping with each other genetically into singular small groups, what does it all mean? For the record, Berbers are about 1 Photos of Berbers of various types, North African Arabs and dark-skinned Egyptians from the Aswan Dam area (possibly Nubians) are found on this blog in a recent post here. Later on on the Egyptology thread I get called a racist (!) and White Supremacist (!). But my post makes no such claims at all to White Supremacy. It merely chops up humanity into groups based on genetic distance – nothing more, nothing less. These guys are serious idiots. The reason I am called a White Supremacist racist is because I am supposedly saying that their precious Black Nubians were actually White Berbers. But I said no such thing. I merely noted that two disparate groups, one mostly-White (Berbers – though Black Berbers exist) and another 50-50 Black-White (Nubians) cannot be distinguished racially, on even a minor level, in terms of genetics. Berbers are actually somewhat variable – the Moroccan Berbers are That’s it. The reason Black Egyptology idiots hate the notion of race in Egypt so much is because the ancient Egyptians were about On an anarchist blog recently, I was thrown off and banned for making a simple proposal: that Whites should be free to feel pride. I hedged that White pride is ok, as long as you can feel that way without becoming a racist asshole. I base this on my experience with people from various different races, ethnic groups and nations all over the world. Virtually all of them were ethnocentric about their ethnic group or race, and that clearly went beyond mere patriotism for their state and flag in almost all cases. It is only Whites in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand who are ordered to take no pride in themselves whatsoever, and worse, who are ordered to abase themselves as some sort of racial criminals for all of our nefarious acts down through the ages. At the same time, White countries only are ordered to open their borders to anyone and everyone from the rest of the world (in particular, the non-White world) who wishes to flood in here. It interesting that China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are not also ordered to open their borders. Nor are the Gulf Arabs. In fact, many, or even all, of these states have ferociously racist immigration policies, but the Western Cultural Left has nothing to say about this. It is almost as if only Whites can be racist. I realize that unfortunately this sounds like a White Nationalist rant, but it is sad that only the WN’s are making this perfectly reasonable argument, and on this argument, the WN’s at least are right on the mark. There are some negative effects from this. I had a light-skinned Black girlfriend once for about a year. Once I told her I was not attracted to darker Black women, and she got all upset. I was racist! A White guy dating a Black woman, of all things, and he still can’t escape the racism charge . White men have told me that they told people, when asked, that they were not interested in dating Black women because they were not attracted to them, and they were immediately denounced as racists. As might be expected, hyperaggressive young Black males are mass-targeting White females for sex in mixed-race high schools across our land. I don’t really mind, but it is a bit sickening, let’s face it. Are Black women really so horrible or ugly that these guys must mass-pester White girls? In many cases, the White girls say no, and when they do, they are immediately hammered with the racism charge, which typically leads to White guilt, which I guess in some cases leads to the Black kid getting some White pussy. I really need to say something here. Your house, your state, your attractions and your sex life are yours and yours alone. You don’t have to let anyone into your home. You don’t have to make friends with anyone. You don’t have to let any immigrants into your country, or you can let any immigrants in that you want to. You can be attracted to anyone you want to. And certainly, you can have sex with anyone you want to. You may be racist about who you let into your home, who you make friends with, and who you let immigrate into your land. After all, your borders are like the locked door on your home – you’re not really obligated to let a soul in. You can be attracted to anyone you want to – your own race or any combination of others. You can obviously date, have sex with, and marry anyone you want to and you can limit your partners to your own race or any others. There’s nothing racist about these intensely personal decisions, and the implicit demand that Whites are racist unless they are turned on Black booty or big Black guys, invite whole blocks of Black folks into their homes, invite 2 billion mostly Third World people to flood into their lands, or, most offensive of all, have sex with non-Whites, is utterly outrageous. The demand that Whites self-abnegate all positive feelings about themselves and their heritage has had some nasty side effects. 12-20 million illegal Hispanic immigrants have flooded into the US, many into my home state. Immigration are like seasoning on a dish. A little bit of it is nice, but in California it feels like someone dumped the salt shaker and some spice jars into the pan and ruined the casserole. There is a very real and creepy feeling of living in a foreign land here, or of having been invaded, even invaded by a foreign army. Parts of California have reverted, in all intents and purposes, to provinces of Mexico. This is jarring to Native Californians. Our cities and streets have Mexican names. I was taking Spanish lessons at age six, as my mother, in 1963, had already seen the writing on the wall. Growing up, our friends, best friends and girlfriends were Mexican-Americans. We didn’t hate Mexican-Americans then and we don’t hate them now. We went on wild trips to Mexico to fish, chase women or just rampage around blasted out of minds on alcohol, marijuana and LSD. We always returned stunned at the horrible and cruel poverty we saw, and were always glad to drive through the border back to the US. The illegal alien millions are essentially re-creating Mexico here in the US. If you have ever been to Mexico, you won’t think that is a good idea. My point is that the destruction of White ethnic identity in even its most mild form is what allowed this lunatic invasion and de facto annexation of my state to a foreign Third World country to take place. Whites were neutered, so they sat by passively while this outrage occurred, or, even more perversely, cheered it on.

Aztlan and Zionism: Dueling Idiocies

Repost from the old site. In this post, we will take a look at two nationalisms, Zionism, the movement to (re)create the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Aztlan, the Mexican and Chicano movement that says that part of the Western US is actually part of Mexico, and more importantly, was the homeland of the Aztec people. As with most forms of ultra-nationalism, both movements are exercises in lying and nonsense. And both are similar in other ways, too. Both propose that, because the area in question (Western US, Palestine) was the ancient homeland of the people some 2,000-5,000 years ago, that they have a right to move en mass into the region and even to annex it or possibly make their state there (the Aztlan movement is divided on whether Aztlan should be annexed to Mexico or whether it should be its own state). Both are based on some highly questionable claims of ownership. There is serious question whether or not Aztlan (an area covering part of the Western US – map here) is actually the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, as this article claims, supposedly with authoritative sources. Let us examine the article, by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez, a writing team that somehow got UPI to syndicate their ultra-radical Chicano nationalist nonsense for many years. The authors found a map in the National Archives in Washington from 1847 with a notation near the Four Corners Area in the US referring to The Ancient Homeland of the Aztecs. This scribbling on a map somewhere by God knows who purportedly “proves incontrovertibly” that all Mexicans and all Central Americans have a right to move to the USA tomorrow, because the US Four Corners is their “ancient homeland”. The authors also note a tradition of the US Pueblo, Hopi, and Lakota (!?) Indian tribes that Nahuatl speakers were their former relatives. There are major problems with this. How would these tribes describe these “Nahuatl” speaking people, since back then, there is no way that they called their language or themselves by that name? Since they called themselves and their language something else, how did these tribes know that they were “Nahuatl”-speakers? And why the Lakota? They are located far from this fake homeland, way up in South Dakota. Further, as one who worked with an Indian tribe on a government grant doing linguistic and anthropological field work, I assure you that Indian legends and oral history need to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, to say the least! The authors quote Cecelio Orozco, an education professor at my alma mater, California State University Fresno as saying this lines up with his research also putting the Aztec homeland in southern Utah. Professor Orozco has published two books of apparent pseudoarcheology on this subject. Here is how Orozco discovered this homeland (try not to laugh when reading this):

Orozco said he came upon the site through a process called “archeo-astronomy.” He saw a photograph of four rivers in Utah in 1980, and based on previous research, recognized a mathematical formula in the photo that led him to believe that this was the place of origin of the Mexicas’ ancestors. Subsequent trips and research has confirmed his thesis… 

After reading this fascinating article on archaeoastronomy, I still do not see how that science relates to a photograph of four rivers in Utah. Does anyone have any idea how a photograph of four rivers anywhere on Earth contains some hidden mathematical formula? He also found a painting on a wall in Utah from 500 BC that he says he claims corresponds to the the codec containing the Aztec calendar. Those of us familiar with the field realize that finds all over the world look like other finds, or resemble other peoples, or bear this or that passing resemblance to whatever. None of that usually proves anything; much more work needs to be done. According to the article, because Aztecs have a homeland in Utah dating back 2500 BC, Mexicans and Central Americans are no longer foreigners or aliens or even immigrants in the US, but they are simply in their homeland. By that lunatic thinking, all White Americans get emigrate back to Europe and live there, since that was our homeland at some point in the past. The Europeans have no right to stop us, and we can even call it Euroamland or whatever and carve out our own damn country out of several European countries, make English the official language and even sideline the several non-English European tongues spoken there. Then we can demand to be united with the US across the sea or just up and make our own country, dissolving several European countries in the process. It is this sort of nonsense that makes me wonder just how smart your average Mexican Reconquista type really is. On reflection, they are obviously bright people, it is just that ultranationalism, or even often just nationalism, damages people’s brains and makes them incapable of rational thought. It does this across the board to any ethnic group – there is no reason to single out Mexicans or Chicanos. Let us examine some of the other insane suppositions of the Aztlan crowd. We have already delved into this a bit on this on an earlier post. First of all, the Aztecs (Mexicas) had only taken over the Mexico City area about 200 years previous to the Spanish Conquest. The empire reached its peak only about 40 years before Cortes landed. Further, the Mexicas only lived in the area around Mexico City! That’s it. All of the rest of Mexico was not Mexica territory and the tribes (even those colonized by Mexicas) who lived there cannot be said to be Mexicas! As an analogy, let us consider the Roman Empire. Its headquarters were in Rome. The rest of the empire were just colonies, conquered areas paying tribute to Rome. Can we say that everyone in the Roman Empire was a “Roman” or an “Italian”? By the same logic, do those residing in Rome today have a right to claim all of the former Roman Empire as their land? This is what would happen if we applied “Aztlan”-logic to that situation. Do you see how stupid this Aztlan nonsense-lie is? The Aztecs did conquer quite a bit of land in the center of Mexico (map here), killing lots of folks and enslaving others. As noted below, the homeland of the Nahua, according to prominent Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was probably somewhere around Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán* . From this area, 2,000 years ago, various waves of Nahua speakers radiated out through Mexico and even Central America. This is why we have 28 living Aztec (or Nahuatl) languages today. By the way, Wikipedia is wrong that these languages are almost dead. Most are quite vigorously used, and there are 1.5 million speakers of all Nahuatl languages. 27 of these 28 tribes are not, and were not, Mexicas, anymore than everyone speaking a Romance language today is a “Roman”. Follow? A somewhat more rational take on the Aztlan lie can be found on the Reconquista site here. Apparently real anthropologists put the Aztec homeland somewhere around Nayarit on the west coast of Mexico. That’s a lot more reasonable, but it’s probably not true either. This comes from Mexican anthropologist Alfredo Chavero’s theory in 1887. Moctezuma’s locale is probably better. The piece also argues that since Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language and many Uto-Aztecans either lived in or traveled through “Aztlan”, that there is something to the Aztlan notion in that sense. Fair enough. In fact, the homeland of the Uto-Aztecans in my opinion is in southern Arizona or northern Mexico. But all Native Americans traveled through Siberia on their way to the Americas. Does everyone with Indian blood in the Americas get to go back to Russia and take over the place because their ancestors strolled through it sometime in the past 20,000 years? Looking at the linguistic contacts of pre-Nahuatl would be a good way of trying to find an Aztec homeland. We can see that they had contacts with languages spoken around Veracruz, on the east coast of Mexico. As you can see, the situation is complicated. The authors in the first article make an even more ludicrous point. First, as usual, they conflate the “Aztecs” a single tribe called the Mexica, amongst Mexico’s over 200 tribes, that only lived around Mexico City, with all Mexicans. According to idiot Chicano nationalists, all Mexicans with Indian blood are Mexica or part Mexica! That’s nuts. As noted, there were tribes all over the land, and the Mexica were only one of 200 or so. It’s as if one said that every Italian comes from Rome. Next, they say that all of the tribes related to the Mexicas were “Mexicas” because they spoke Nahuatl languages. They certainly were not! It’s nonsense. Are all speakers of Indo-European languages the one and same group because they all came out the Indo-European homeland in Southern Ukraine 8,000 years ago? Even worse, these fools claim that all Central Americans were Aztecs and get to go invade the USA because it’s home sweet home. Ridiculous. There is only one tribe, the Pipil in El Salvador, that still speaks a Nahuatl language, and there are only 20 speakers left. There were a few other Nahuatl languages in Honduras, Panama and Guatemala, but these are long since extinct. They were not “Aztecs” anymore than English-speakers in the US are “Germans”. However, the Pipil did come from the area around Mexico City around 1000 years ago; they were related to Olmecs, but also to the Nahuatl. In general, they were an Olmec grouping. Anyway, at that time, there were no such thing as Mexicas or Aztecs – that group came later. Another group of Pipil had come to Central America 5000 years ago and came under the influence of the Maya. This is around the time when Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself was born in the southwest US. Both of these groups, by 1000 AD, became the Pipil, who came under even more Maya influence. The Pipil are almost extinct culturally and linguistically today, an end result of the Matanza, when 10,000-30,000 Indians were slaughtered in only a few weeks in El Salvador in 1932, while US warships patrolled off the coast in case the victims of the genocide tried to fight back. After that, most Salvadoran Indians took off their Indian clothes and quit speaking Indian languages, especially since Pipil was outlawed. They also intermarried heavily with non-Indians, so that to this day, only The leader of the rebellion that set off the Matanza was Farabundo Marti, head of the Salvadoran Communist Party. The rebels that fought in the Civil War later on took their name, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, from him. The cult surrounding Zionism is much the same as the Aztlan nonsense. True, Jews ruled the area long ago, but only for a brief time, similar to the Aztecs. Further, similar conflations are made about the Judean Empire and the Aztlan Empire, Judean language and religion and actual Jews and Jewish religion and the relevance of ancient Judean religion to the Jewish religion today. Also similar is the outrageous notion that some group has a right to go back to its ancient homeland of 2000-5000 years ago, settle there at will, and even make a state there. Some of the radical Atzlanistas, similar to Zionists, also suggest throwing out the natives (in the case of the Aztlanistas the Whites, who came starting 400 years ago) since they are “invaders squatting on the true homeland”. In this same nonsensical way, Zionists project their own invasion of Palestine and squatting on Palestinian land off onto the victim. The Arabs, who came 1450 years ago, are the “invaders”, who have been squatting on “Jewish land” since then. Never mind that the Jews left 2000 years ago. They owned Palestine in their hearts in the intervening 1900 years, and Zionism claims that that trumps a property deed! Zionism’s proponents are Jews, the smartest folks on Earth, who ought to know better. But ultra-nationalism can easily make a fool of the finest man. See Joachim Martillo’s site, Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, for more. In particular, his superb Issues and Questions In the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism (90 pp.!), is a piece which deserves much wider reading. Martillo has some tendency towards fanaticism (but this also drives him to produce), can be an ideologue, and is sometimes guilty of trying to make facts fit theory as opposed to otherwise. However, these (especially making the facts fit theory) are chronic problems with most all social scientists, as Kevin MacDonald has observed. At the least, the brilliant Martillo should be more widely read, if only to subject his interesting theories to the critical light of peer review to separate wheat from chaff. And the 90 page link above is just sublime, in particular in the way that it takes apart the primordial nonsense of Zionism in the same way we attacked the similar primordialism of the Atzlanistas in this post. *Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988) 38.

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

Related to “There was no Aryan Invasion” folks, mostly Hindu nationalists and Indian nationalists. Out of India Model. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page makes it seem somewhat plausible. It’s not. Not plausible, that is. It’s nonsense. Indo-European speakers did not come out of India. India is not the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The true homeland is in far southern Russia north of the Caucasus, or, even better, in Anatolia. This is what really happened: an Indo-Aryan migration. Read through that piece and it becomes quite clear that this is what really happened. Part of the problem is with the word invasion. There was no invasion. They just moved in. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist, has been in the forefront of attacking the Out of India model. Here is a good page savaging most of their arguments. He takes apart one of their leader proponents, N. Kazanas of Greece, a guy who is little more than a dilettante. It takes a little while to get through this stuff as it’s a bit heavy going, but I was able to do it. Once you do it, the Out of India Theory lies in ruins. One of the OOI arguments is that Indo-Aryan peoples have no memory of a migration. But who does anyway? Most IE peoples do not remember their obvious migrations either. Romans said they came from Troy. This is a lie. Gypsies say they came from Egypt. Fiction. Here is an argument against an Indo-Aryan incursion:

we have an archaeologically attested culture of many centuries if not millennia with undoubted literacy but without any traces of religious texts, legal codes, scientific works and even simple secular fables (except most laconic legends on indecipherable seals), and, in quick succession, even as the older culture declines, an intrusive illiterate people with no archaeological attestation at all who yet produce within a few centuries (according to the AIT) all the literature that was missing from the previous culture. This is a unique situation that makes little sense.

However, this very thing happened in Greece. First, a Minoan cult, a Helladic civilization, but no literary texts, then, in a few centuries, then, within a few centuries, an explosion of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, the Homeric texts, etc. Further, it does not produce “all the literature that was missing from the previous civilization. It produces new literature at a very rapid pace – see the Yayoi invasion of Japan from Korea and the rapid replacement of the Jomon culture for something similar. Another argument is that archeologically, the record of civilization in India is continuous – that is, there is no obvious disruption dating from an Aryan invasion. However, as a general rule, culture, archeologically, is continuous in all parts of the world. Culture is continuous in Europe too, and we know full well that Indo-Europeans took over and supplanted earlier groups. Is there a record of this takeover culturally? Well no, but it happened. However, keep in mind that horses and chariots showed up with the Indo-Aryans and were not found in India previously. OOI folks say silly things like, “Egyptians had chariots too” (Point being?). Anyway, horses and chariots did not develop in India. They came down from the steppes with the I-A speakers. Surely if OOI is true than Sanskrit would be the most ancient IE language. It’s not at all. It only goes back 3,500 years too. The Anatolian branch may well date back 8,000 years. If OOI is true than borrowings from other Indian languages such as Dravidian and Munda would be found in all branches of IE, no? But of course they are only found in Indic, which we would expect if Indic speakers migrated into India and not out of it. Going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times, paleontologists find differences between bones even between Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Also, there are no I-A bones found here. Of course not. Aryans will not show up for 1000’s of years. Yes, Harappans built wheels, but they built no spoke-wheeled chariot. This came only with the Aryans. OOI folks have no explanation for this. Indeed, Aryan chariots are built from woods from the Punjab plain, not wood from say the steppes. But this is not a valid OOI argument. Invaders always use whatever is available. Aryan immigrants brought chariot technology with them from the steppes. To make chariots in their new homeland, they used local wood. This is surprising?

A Critique of Islam

This comes from the comments section of a conservative White racist publication, American Renaissance. The comment quotes several websites, apparently all rightwing. At least one is run by anti-Muslim Jews. Let us put aside for a moment that this critique is written by our enemies, Zionists and the Right. The painful question is how much truth is there in this critique? When it comes to identity among Muslims, nationality does not count at all in comparison with culture and religion. The consequence is a powerful and growing opposition to Western culture and values in Muslim ghettos throughout Copenhagen and other major European cities. To a Muslim (as to the regional precursor peoples going back to Alexander) tribe is nation And failure to make that correct interpretation is a direct result of our legacy inheritance from a millenia of manorial feudalism because Nascere means by birth, not by land. We come from peasant serfs. Not them. Myself before my brother, we brothers before our cousins, our cousins before the tribe, the tribe before state. And all before Islam. Islam did not change these peoples exploited, exploitative, natures, it harnessed them by explicitly forbidding them any other lifestyle choice and rewarding them with breeding rights and loot for becoming part of a robber gang. Said gang takes tribute from one area, denuding it of females on a 4:1 basis of reward to warrior males. Then it recruits on the basis of pillage as genetic persistence rights in the next area over and so on and so forth. Growing as it expands. Because if you want anything from Islam, you must convert. Before the Renaissance, Islam was the most successful, expansive culture on the planet. Finding those they cannot convert or kill outright, Islamically trained young toughs today are at a complete loss for how to interact on a cop:boss:landlord level of graduated hierarchies above them because respect and dominance is their whole (rote) acquired culture. A system of warrior privilege that cannot live but that it grows through conquest. And what’s most despicable about this is that the Muslims know it quite well themselves, choosing to conceal it behind a facade of ‘Taqqiya’ or tactical disinformation. Indeed, back in 2005, shortly after the Beslan tragedy, the brother in law of the owner of Al Jazeera, himself the owner of a very influential newspaper in Kuwait, wrote a personal editorial that basically said: “Look you idiots, the whole world thinks Islam is a terrorist religion because 9 out of 10 terrorist acts in the last 10 years have been by or included Islamic indoctrinated youth. You had better get your young men under control or we will be the pariahs of the planet.” And nobody listened to him. Because he wasn’t telling a shocking unknown. What The West refuses to acknowledge is that Islam is a majority fundamentalist religion (which is to say natively extremist), of which the high-IQ, college bound, ‘Ivy League sweater wearers’ of the upper class moderates (that Islamic and particularly Iranian TV occasionally parades before the camera) are entirely non-representative. Anymore than the Kennedys are accurate reflections of our culture. Jizya (legal extortion from non-believers) payments only reinvigorate the belief that strength deserves to dominate weakness as the system or ‘racket’ by which Islam functions as a warrior cult built upon conquest. For two years I’ve been researching a book about Alexander the Great’s counter-guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan, 330-327 B.C. What struck me most powerfully is that that war is a dead ringer for the ones we’re fighting today – even though Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic. The heart of every tribal male is that of a warrior. Even the most wretched youth in a Palestinian refugee camp sees himself as a knight of Islam. The Pathan code of nangwali prescribes three virtues: nang – pride; badal – revenge; melmastia – hospitality. These guys are Apaches. What the warrior craves before all else is respect. Respect from his own people, and, even more, from his enemy. When we of the West understand this, as Alexander did, we’ll have taken the first step toward solving the unsolvable. Islam is a revealed religion with a distinct set of unchanging rules and guidelines to follow. It is not a religion that is supposed to “come from within” like some new age religion. It seems quite incongruous to claim that one believes that Muhammad was Allah’s prophet and therefore profess to be a Muslim and then reject clear Islamic doctrine as established by Muhammad when the Qur’an demands that Muslims obey Muhammad and follow his “perfect” example. The religion is named Islam, meaning submission, because its founder, Muhammad, claimed that is the word Allah said to him in several alleged revelations. Otherwise, the religion would surely have been known as Muhammadanism or something similar.

What Went Right Set The Stage For Decline

Understanding what went wrong in the Islamic world is, perhaps, best addressed by first recognizing what went right because the initial success of Islam and its early rise to economic, political, and military power is also a primary cause of what ultimately went wrong. When Muhammad and his early followers arrived in Medina, it is clear that they were in a less than secure economic state. They had cut themselves off from the protection and support of their tribe – an act that was considered tantamount to a death sentence at the time. Moreover, this severance from their tribe’s support and protection occurred in a hostile environment. The Arabian Peninsula consists mainly of desert that, under normal circumstances, can only support a low-density population. Whether Muhammad felt that he had no other alternatives or whether he felt he had other options is something we will probably never know with certainty, but there is no question that Muhammad chose to create a society that sustained itself and advanced its interests by preying upon non-Muslims. Mohammed said: “I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, None has the right to be worshiped but Allah, and whoever says, None has the right to be worshiped but Allah, his life and property will be saved by me…Allah made the Jews leave their homes by terrorizing them so that you killed some and made many captives. And He made you inherit their lands, their homes, and their wealth…Clearly, Muhammad viewed non-Muslims’ land and property as fair game, and his conduct established that he practiced what he preached. Instead, we see Ahmadiyya Muslims, many Sufi Muslims, and Bahai Muslims all believing they are “Muslims” when they have deviated so far from the religion Muhammad preached and practiced that Muhammad would hardly consider them Muslims. Muhammad once ordered a mosque, whose members were practicing a heretical form of Islam, burned, and his followers burned it to the ground with the heretical Muslims inside, thereby establishing in Islamic doctrine that schisms were not only not to be tolerated, but should be violently suppressed. One important answer to the question lies in an ingenious social invention arising among the early Muslims. This was a breeding system that motivated successful warriors with a great incentive to spread their faith and their culture. Bloom puts this motivation in stark terms as “the restless effort of human males to find more wombs to carry their seed.” Islam has the remarkable advantage of being highly patriarchal and polygamous with great sexual benefits for those warriors able to conquer in its name; Islam was and remains a great male racket. Furthermore, these advantages are not the temporary kind that have always been associated with warfare, but continue to exist within the peacetime new order. Warriors were not the only Muslim males sexually rewarded for advancing Islam. As seen above, Islam was also spread by trade and mercantile activity. The wealth accumulated by a successful merchant could be considerable. Thus, those responsible for promoting Islam beyond the borders of the Dar-al-Islam could also obtain the means of purchasing concubines and of affording multiple wives.

In Praise of Julius Caesar

But, for Caesar, the all-accomplished statesman, the splendid orator, the man of elegant habits and polished taste, the patron of the fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person–to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus.

The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, who rejoice in avowing themselves the scourges of God, and the special instruments of his wrath, have no one feature of affinity to the polished and humane Caesar, and would as little have comprehended his character as he could have respected theirs.

Even Cato, the unworthy hero of Lucan, might have suggested to him a little more truth in this instance, by a celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, said he, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation…

Thomas De Quincey, De Bello Gallico, and Other Commentaries of Julius Caesar

The English author De Quincey, who wrote from is not very well know, which is too bad. Most who know of him at all are familiar with Confessions of an Opium Eater, but just about anything he ever wrote is worth reading. Look at that majestic prose above. Sure it’s languid and loping in getting to the point, but so what? So is Henry James. If you can’t hack it, go back to your bodice-ripper or thriller.

As a pure stylist, De Quincey has to be one of the finest writers of the past 200 years. I can’t get enough of this prose. Check out those 50-100 word sentences! Damn. You have to catch your breath while you read them.

Nice comments about Caesar too. Sure he was a conquering imperialist bastard, but he was one of the classiest, most refined and educated ones that ever lived. After him, who else?

Peter Tobin “Clarifying the Primitive Communism Question”

The previous post on primitive communism was attacked by rightwing capitalist ideologues who insisted that primitive man did not live under primitive communism at all.

Peter Tobin responds:

These folks are profoundly wrong and apparently have read nothing, never mind bothering to find out what Marx and Engels actually said. Their knowledge appears to be derived from the first twenty minutes of Kubrick’s 2001.

Engels, rather than Marx, is pre-dominant in this area as the term arises in his seminal work Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. The key work that inspired them work was the American Morgan’s groundbreaking Ancient Society.

What Morgan does, in a serious materialist way, is to trace human progress from, what he terms, savagery to civilization. What Engels takes from this is that there are identifiable stages in human social evolution. So the primitive stage is sub-divided into lower, middle and upper stages. In the lower stage there were no classes, and state and economic relationships were broadly egalitarian. Hence there was a collective right to basic resources, and the question of a superior authority (kings, priests or elders) did not arise.

Morgan himself speculated on the “liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.” He even finds contemporary evidence in the layout of the Native American village, which he calls “communism in living.”

At this time family groups were consanguine, and Engels refers to these family groups as the “original communistic common household” which lasted to the late middle stage of barbarism. There was even group marriage and incest, which existed in Polynesia and lasted until quite recently (to the horror of Christian missionaries). He does not hold this that stage up for emulation, instead, “communism” is used a technical terms to denote the “sharing” of sex with a related group.

This stage gave way to new household communities (Hausgemeinden), which Morgan calls the punaluan family, which prohibits sex between brothers and sisters and children and parents, but allows it between cousins. But this is not the bourgeois form of the family where one man possesses and dominates one women, as women were common wives and men were common husbands.

Far from extolling the former, Engels make the point that as it withered, the human stock grew stronger and better by outbreeding as opposed to inbreeding.

The other important factor that must be considered is the emergence of man as a hunter of animals and hence an omnivore. His brain grew bigger and his teeth smaller. What is salient here is the behavioral changes took place, especially in the process of socialization. In order to hunt effectively man had to organize communally and develop stratagems for success.

Consider, by contrast, the earlier hominids, such as the australopithecines, who were herbivores and consequently had larger teeth and smaller brains – a trait shared by many vegetarian animals today.

You can all these forms, “communist,” “socialist,” “communal” or whatever nomenclature denotes shared activity, because this phenomena is self-evident.

These stages gave way as man settled down and took up agriculture. Private property and the growth of surplus and authority became prevalent, although residual forms of the earlier stages continued.

For example, Grote, in his History of Greece, defining the characteristics of the emerging Greek tribes, found evidence of: common religious ceremonies, common burial, common rights of inheritance, common obligation to help the tribe in times of struggle, and the common ownership of property, while at the same time he noted the growth of authority figures, kings, priests, lawgivers and even treasurers.

References

Engels, Frederick. 2001 (1884). Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. Honolulu, HA: University Press of the Pacific.

Grote, George. 2000 (1846-1856). The History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 B. C. London: Routledge.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1887. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. London: MacMillan & Company.

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