Kenya – Beyond Highbrow

Alt Left: Fascist States around the World in the Past Century

I will be leaving World War 2, where many such regimes were created in Europe, out of this discussion because I don’t understand it well.

A discussion of fascism is very important because the Republican Party is already a fascist political party in the sense of a rightwing authoritarian party along Latin American oligarchy lines.

The Type of State the Republicans Are Aiming At

Similar regimes were installed in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Iran, Turkey (a Mussolinist + Nazi extrerminationist model), Greece, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Zaire, Kenya, Liberia, Indonesia (a classic Mussolinist model), Philippines, South Korea, Brunei, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, Gabon, Angola, and South Africa, not to mention the many such regimes installed in Latin America, where the rightwing authoritarian or dictatorship regime has become a classic model. Many of these had a fake democratic facade over what was basically a dictatorship.

Nazi extreminationism with an ethnic component has been installed in Turkey and possibly Azerbaijan. Those models are governing to this day in the fake Croatian and Serbian states inside Bosnia. The present Croatian and Serbian regimes have overtones of WW2 like fascism, as does Hungary under Orban. Nazi-style exterminationist regimes, albeit with Communists and leftwingers substituted for Jews, have been installed in Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan in the past.

One could argue that Israel is now a Mussolinist style fascist government, albeit with a facade of democracy in which various fascist parties compete to rule the fascist state.

Rightwing Authoritarian Models in Latin America in the Last Century

It’s not so much the Nazi, National Socialist or classic fascist models of World War 2, although Trump and Berlusconi do resemble Mussolini, and Berlusconi created a classic Mussolinist fascist state in Brazil along the lines of the previous years of Operation Condor in Pinochet’s Chile, Velasco’s Argentina, the generals’ Brazil, Salazar’s Paraguay, the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Banzer’s Bolivia.

Somewhat different but similar “kill the Communists” regimes were created in Ecuador in the 1980’s, Fujimora and Belaunde’s Peru, Venezuela in the late 80’s, Uribe and many others’ Colombia (where it has become the only form of the state and Uribismo is almost a classic fascist Mussolinist model), Somoza’s Nicaragua, Bautista’s Cuba, Trujillo’s Dominican Republican, Rios Montt’s Guatemala, and ARENA, D’Aubisson, and Duarte’s El Salvador, Haiti under the Duvaliers, where it became a model followed to this day, and the present government of the generals in Honduras.

The model has not yet been installed in much of the Caribbean, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, and the Guyanas, but it’s been generalized as the classic model in Latin America in general for over a century now. There are rumblings now to create another rightwing authoritarian regime in Peru and Mexico.

Counterrevolution is ongoing in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela and has succeeded recently in Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Haiti. There were recent rumblings in Argentina, where the large landowners (who were never broken up as there was no land reform) were making threats of a coup if their riches were touched. There were failed attempts recently in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Another attempt is ongoing in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

“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.

Repost: Alt Left: The Birth of the Caucasian Race

The Birth of the Caucasian Race

An early European, possibly of the M173 line. He may somewhat resemble a Khoisan or Bushman.

A reconstruction of a very early European, based on fragments found in caves in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania from 2002 on, offers a tantalizing glimpse at what early Europeans must have looked like.

He actually looks a bit like Richard Steele, boxing referee and possible throwback.

Previously, the oldest European skull was 30,000 years ago and was said to look like a modern European, with closest affinities to Finns.

As you can see, the White nationalists are furious about this. White nationalism has always opposed the Out of Africa theory, now accepted as the Gold Standard by nearly all of anthropology. It’s just too offensive to imagine that Grandpa may have been a nigger*.

Yet obviously he was.

The “White European” phenotype as we know it today did not come into existence until after 12,000 years ago, or maybe sooner.

Before that, European Caucasians resemble Arabs. For instance, A 24,000 year old Cro-Magnon European shows DNA similarities to Near East (Arabs or the Caucasus). A 23,000 year old Italian Cro-Magnon sample genetically resembles modern Middle Easterners from Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

It’s time for WN’s to quit claiming Cro-Magnon as The Original White Man. Forget it! He was a Middle Easterner – an Arab – Iranian type. As almost all WN’s say that Arabs are not White, and many, even more bizarrely, state that Iranians are not White (genetically, Iranians look like British, Danes and Norwegians), WN’s need to quit claiming Cro-Magnon as some Super White Cave Man.

The original Proto-Asians came out of Africa 65,000 years ago, probably descendants of the M168 line, although NE Asians are probably partly M89.

The original Caucasians did indeed come out of Africa about 40-45,000 years ago, probably descendants of the M89 line. Whites and Caucasians in general are probably a legacy of M89 and not M168.

M89 birthed M45, which are the Proto-Amerindians of 35,000 years ago on the steppes and in the Mongolia-Siberia region. A child of M45, M173, were the first Europeans, and may be represented by this fellow. Later, M343, the real Cro-Magnon, appeared. It is a bit confusing whether Cro-Magnon is M173 or M343 or both.

The early genesis of the Caucasoid race involved a large injection of Asian genes from Mongolia, Siberia and East Turkestan. This occurred about 40-45,000 years and represents about 2/3 of the Proto-Caucasian genetic line (Bowcock 1991). These Proto-East Asians probably looked something like Aborigines or possibly Ainu. Modern NE Asians do not appear until about 9,000 years ago.

Before that, all Asians looked like Aborigines, Melanesians, or Ainus. As noted above, the modern European phenotype also only appears 10,000 years ago. So both modern Whites and modern East Asians only go back 10,000 years, to the Last Glacial Maximum. All humans had dark skin until 10,000 years ago. What birthed light skin? The glaciers.

For an analysis of this early process, which injected a lot of Proto-Asian genes into the Northern European Cro-Magnon line, see this early discussion on my now-banned blog:

Based on y-chromosome lineages, Atlantic and north European men (Cro-Magnon descendants) are related to N.E Asian men.

They all descend from haplogroup Q which arose in the north Himalayas and south Siberia 45,000 years ago, with one group branching off west eventually ending up in the Pyrenees, the Caspian sea and northern Scandinavia. The other group would go across east Asia and even to the Americas.

Indeed, there were movements in the other direction too – from Northern Europe back to Siberia. An ancient line of Europeans called Orcadians (named after barren islands in the north of Scotland) went back to Siberia at some point and contributed significantly to the genetic line of the Yakut, a Siberian grouping that is now only 6% Caucasian. The Yakut as ancient Scotlanders? Incredible.

The other 1/3 of the line was an early African (Bowcock 1991), possibly a Khoisan or Bushman type, but maybe a Proto-Caucasian African out of South Africa (see below). Out of the Proto-African and Proto-Asian mixture was birthed the Proto-Caucasian.

The African phenotype was Bushman or Hottentot or S African Proto-Caucasoid, not Bantuoid, because modern Blacks do not appear in Africa until about 12,000 years ago. Before that, all African look like Pygmies or Bushmen.

I have always wondered what these folks looked like, and this is an interesting part of our heritage.

In the Amren article linked above, commenter JPT is not correct that Whites are on our way to being a different species. Caucasians are closer to Blacks than any other group since we were the last to split from them. Ouch! That’s painful, huh WN’s? Caucasians and NE Asians are also quite close, but not nearly as close as Caucasians and Africans.

The furthest apart are Blacks and Aborigines. If anyone is evolutionarily on their way to becoming a separate species or subspecies, it is the Aborigines and the Papuans of New Guinea. The distance between them and Africans is greater than the distance between any two human groups.

It might be interesting to see what happens if they mate. I am pretty sure that they can mate successfully, but it might be interesting to see if their couples are less fertile than others. As genetic distance increases, infertility does too, because you are moving closer and closer to separate species. I know that Europeans and Aborigines can mate successfully, as there has been a ton of this going on since the first White invaders attacked (I mean landed on) Australia several hundred years ago.

Speaking of Aborigines, yes, they are very different, but they are not Homo Erectus as many say. They are fully human. Homo Erectus lives to this day in large numbers in San Fransisco. Whoa! Sorry, that was a joke!

What follows is reconstruction of the genesis of the early Caucasians.

First of all, a line descended from the original M1 line out of Africa arose in Southwest Asia, frankly in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria). This line had come out of Africa via Somalia to Yemen and Arabia 40-45,000 years ago.

It’s known that they went back to Africa, but it was always thought that they went back the same way that they came, via the Red Sea. Instead, they moved out through the Sinai and into North Africa to become the Proto-Berbers. This same line moved into Europe via the same Mediterranean route, this time along the Northern Mediterranean. These folks indeed may have been related to the fellow pictured above.

The most succinct summary of the Proto-Caucasians is found here. The actual birthplace of the Proto-Caucasians was in the Caucasus, as one may expect. A figurine has been found in the Don River area of southern Russia dating from 45,000 years ago. It is thought that this is a remnant of this earliest Proto-Caucasian culture.

Proto-Caucasian Man came out of the Caucasus 39-52,000 years ago. One went west to Europe (possibly resulting in the fellow above) and N Africa (this is the line out of the Levant described above) and other east to NE Asia (probably the M89 line described above, and this in part explains Caucasian affinities of Koreans, North Chinese, Mongolians, etc.

There were also further returns to North Africa from Caucasus and India 30,000 years ago. It appears that the birthing grounds of the Caucasian Race were in the Caucasus, the Middle East, India and North Africa. The highly modern East Indian and North African Berbers – both diverse groups of Caucasians – may be the remains of the earliest Proto-Caucasians.

It is interesting to postulate on what the Proto-Caucasians who moved out of Africa via the Red Sea 42,000 years ago looked like. No one knows. However, curiously, 36,000 years ago a new line arose in South Africa that did not look like the Khoisan types prevalent at the time. Instead, it looks like a Caucasian, specifically like Cro-Magnon and other Late Pleistocene cave man types in Europe.

No one knows what happened to this line, but this Proto-Caucasian in South Africa 36,000 years ago could have moved up to the Rift Valley area and then to Arabia to give rise to the Caucasians. Keep in mind that by the time that Africans moved out of Africa, only 2 lines left.

At 65,000 YBP (years before present) an incredible 40 different lines had already evolved separately in Africa, and they were all quite different. Only two of these 40 diverse lines left Africa. The rest stayed and birthed the tremendously diverse African race of today.

It’s often said that the Khoisan-Bushmen of Southwest Africa are the most ancient living people. However, recent research shows that this is wrong. The most ancient humans are from East Africa, specifically from around Kenya and Tanzania.

This includes the Masai (thought to be originally from the Sudan), the Sandawe (a Khoisan type in northern Kenya), the Datog (similar to the Masai, and probably also originally from the Sudan), and the Burunge and Gorowaa, both of whom came from Ethiopia recently.

The African Eve, the first human, was probably a Northeast African or East African. Man probably originated in Ethiopia or Sudan, close to the Rift Valley that transformed the first men from apes and watered the fields of the long line of Homo that ended in ourselves.

From a dead link discussing Tishkoff’s findings:

Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and a team of coworkers reported genetic analyses of more than 600 living Tanzanians from 14 different tribes and four linguistic groups. They analyzed mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) the tool of choice for tracing ancestry because it is inherited only through the mother as part of the ovum.

The number of mutations that have accumulated in mtDNA is a rough measure of the time that has passed since that lineage first appeared.

The owner of the first modern human MtDNA (by definition, a woman) is often referred to as “Eve,” although many women of that time are likely to have shared similar mtDNA.

Genetic diversity

Tishkoff and her colleagues chose to investigate East African peoples for specific reasons. The number of linguistic and cultural differences is unusually high in the region, as is the variation in physical appearance – East Africans are tall or short, darker-skinned or lighter-skinned, round-faced or narrow-faced, and so on.

This observation suggested that the genetic composition of the population is highly diverse, and as expected, the team found substantial variation in the mtDNA.

In fact, members of five of the lineages showed an exceptionally high number of mutations compared with other populations, indicating that these East African lineages are of great antiquity.

Identified by tribal affiliation, these are: the Sandawe, who speak a “click” language related to that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert; the Burunge and Gorowaa, who migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last five thousand years; and the Maasai and the Datog, who probably originated in the Sudan.

The efforts of the University of Maryland group reflect a substantially larger database and more certain geographic origins for its subjects than earlier mtDNA studies.

Further, the work by Tishkoff’s team reveals that these five East African populations have even older origins than the !Kung San of southern Africa, who previously had the oldest known mtDNA.

“These samples showed really deep, old lineages with lots of genetic diversity,” Tishkoff says. “They are the oldest lineages identified to date. And that fact makes it highly likely that ‘Eve’ was an East or Northeast African. My guess is that the region of Ethiopia or the Sudan is where modern humans originated.”

For more links between the Tutsi – Masai types and the original Europeans, see the following early discussions (here, here, here) from my previous (now shut down) blog. It’s a bit hard to get your head around, but if you think hard, you can start to understand it.

I spent months trying to figure out exactly what this guy was saying, and I think I have it now. His intriguing comments strongly suggest that the earliest Cro-Magnon ancestors were derived from populations that are now the East African Masai, Tutsi, etc:

Masai and Tutsi are doliocephalic and orthaganus. Tutsi and Masai Central African types are quite low-skulled, like the original Cro-Magnons were. Also MtDNA retrieved from a Cro-Magnon in Europe was found to belong to haplogroup *N, which directly and immediately descends from L3, which originated in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Some of its clades went south and then east onto Australasia, while the northern clade went to the Middle East and gave birth to *N, and other clades went to West Africa and south.

It’s the northern subclades of L3 that gave birth to *N (like l3a1) that are the most closely related L3 members, and Sub Saharan Africans are closest to *N bearing Cro-Magnons, as they are their most immediate and closest ancestors.

It would be interesting to see if the Tutsi and Masai have any of these northern subclades of L3, as they are more closely related to Cro-Magnon *N than any other MtDNA lineage in the world.

What I cant get my head around is the overlap in identical SNP clusters (Caucasoid) between populations of predominantly different patrilineal and matrilineal ancestry. e.g. e3b Ethiopians (also predominantly indigenous African on mtDNA) and r1a/I1a Norwegians.

R1a and Ia descend from K, which arose in the Middle East, and e3b descends from YAP, which arose in Uganda. The nearest ancestor of R* and I* and J* Europeans/Middle Easterners with E3b Ethiopians is the M168 male, which is the ancestor of all other modern humans, so they share as little as possible recent ancestry.

On mtDNA East Africans are predominantly L3, which is the direct ancestor of mtDNA N*, which is the original Middle Eastern Caucasoid mtDNA marker, which has been retrieved from 2 European Cro-Magnon specimens too. I wonder if East Africans have northern subclades of L3, as they would be the most closely related L3 subclades to N*.

See below. They do look like White people, don’t they?

An example of a Dinka, an example of what I call a West Sudan Elongated Desert Adapted African. This man is a negotiator for the SPLA, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.

A Masai man. The more I look at this guy, the more I think he looks like our 36,000 year old Caucasian guy reconstructed at the start of the post. Or am I hallucinating?

More Dinka West Sudan Elongated Desert African phenotypes.

Another West Sudanic type, from an old anthropological textbook, back in the days when race still existed and we could still discuss phenotypes and whatnot. You know, before the Cultural Marxist lunatics took over?

A Tutsi, possible ancestors of the original Proto-Caucasians. Note the Caucasoid appearance.

Another Tutsi. I must say they are handsome folks. Hey WN’s, say hello to Grandpa!

Yet another Tutsi. I can’t get over how much these Africans look like Caucasians or Whites in facial structure.

Eastern Desert Elongated Africans, possible progenitors of the Caucasoids, look like Caucasians. One argument is that this is due to inbreeding with Caucasoids. In fact, they are pure Africans. See the chart.

Another chart showing the African purity of the possible Proto-Caucasoids of Africa. Take home point: Caucasian appearance is not due to Caucasoid interbreeding; it’s de novo.

*Used sardonically.

References

Bowcock, A. M.; Kidd, J. R.; Mountain, J. L.; Hebert, J. M.; Carotenuto, L; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and Kid, K. K. 1991. “Drift, Admixture, and Selection in Human Evolution: A Study With DNA Polymorphisms.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1991 February 1; 88(3): 839–843.

Cabrera, Vicente M, Maca-Meyer, Nicole, González, Ana M, Larruga, José M, Flores, Carlos. 2001. “Major Genomic Mitochondrial Lineages Delineate Early Human Expansions”. BMC Genetics 2:13

Hellenthal G, Auton A, Falush D. 2008. “Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model”. PLoS Genetics 4(5).

Wade, Nicholas. 2006. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. East Rutherford, New Jersey, USA: Penguin Group.

Repost: The Major and Minor Races of Mankind

The Major and Minor Races of Mankind

Repost from the old site that was shut down. This post is very long and complicated – it runs to 83 pages – but I have tried to make it as easy to understand as possible. Please feel free to dip into it at your leisure. Updated January 28, 2013. Regularly updated.

As you can see by the title, this is an awfully ambitious post. Those who believe that race does not exist, or that Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid are outdated terms of no use, might as well bail out right now and save yourself the exasperation.

Recent prior attempts include the usual Mongoloid – Caucasoid – Negroid Three Race Theory, which is discussed below. The main problems with this theory are twofold: that it fails to classify a group called Australoids and that it fails to note the huge split between SE Asians and NE Asians.

From Cavalli-Sforza’s recent work comes an eight-race theory: European Caucasoids, South Asian and North African Caucasoids, Northeast Asian Mongoloids, Southeast Asians extending from Thailand to Indonesia and the Philippines, Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines, Negroids and American Indians.

This is not bad, but I would argue that there is no reason to put both Arabs/Berbers and South Indians in one race (see Cavalli-Sforza’s own map below). Genetically, they are quite distant.

From my World Book Encyclopedia 1990 comes a nine-race theory: Negroids, Caucasians, Asians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Aborigines, South Indians and Amerindians. To this I recently added three more very distinct groups, Khoisan (Bushmen), Pygmies and Negritos, to come up with 12 races.

But we can go further than this. If Polynesians and Melanesians are widely regarded as separate races, we should be able to distinguish races based on any other major grouping at least as genetically distant as Polynesians and Melanesians. When I finally found two hapmaps showing the distance between Polynesians and Melanesians, I got the idea for a new race theory based on genetic distance alone.

This theory in most cases is based only on genetic distance, and not physical appearance of physical anthropology. In a few cases, races were grouped into a major group based on appearance – for instance, genetically, Chukchis are in the Caucasian square below, yet they look anything but Caucasian.

Though many distinguish Melanesians and Papuans, Capelli’s (see below) genetic analysis puts them in one race. But see Figures 1-4 below which clearly put them in separate groups. Also, Melanesian and Papuan teeth are very different from each other.

Some people are likely to be upset by this theory.

Surely the Japanese will not be happy to learn that they are virtually identical to the despised Koreans. White Nationalists will not be happy to learn that Turks, Jews, Kurds and Iranians are included in the European race and that they cannot include South Indians with Australoids.

NE Asians and ignorant amateur anthropologists will be unhappy to learn that there is no reason to lump SE Asians with Australoids and that the hated Filipinos (which some refer to as the “niggers of Asia”) are very close to the high-IQ, high-achieving Southern Chinese and the Filipinos haven’t a trace of Negrito in them.

It is standard of NE Asian racialists and amateur anthropologists on the Net to say that the Filipinos are heavily-Negrito.

There are traces of Australoid (Papuan) genes in the Malay, some Indonesians, the Southern Thai and the Coastal Vietnamese, but these admixtures are not large, and the Filipinos haven’t any observable Australoid traces.

Filipinos are closer to Southern Chinese than any other race below, although they are also close to the Aeta Negritos. This is because the Aeta and Ati Negritos are not Australoids genetically but instead are related to SE Asians. Anthropomorphically, they are Australoids.

There is also a more substantial Melanesian component in many Indonesians (except those in Western Indonesia), but there is little if any Australoid, or even Melanesian influence in existing SE Asian populations. It is common amongst Internet anthropologists to lump Melanesians in with Australoids. This is the case anthropomorphically, but not genetically.

In fact, as Figures 1-3 below indicate, they are Asians and are most closely related to other Pacific Islanders. In fact, the distance between SE Asians and Australoids is greater than the distance between NE Asians and Caucasians.

Afrocentrists will be unhappy to learn that various dark folks like South Asians, Melanesians, Papuans and Negritos cannot be considered to be “Black” by any sane definition of the word.

This theory creates nine major races and 113 minor races. It is a work in progress.

Most of this document comes from Cavalli-Sforza’s haplogroup gene map of the human race below.

Figure 1: Cavalli-Sforza’s Principal Coordinate (PC) autosomal DNA haplogroup gene mappings of major human ethnic and racial groups. There are differences between a PC mapping and the tree mappings below.Much of the racial grouping below is based on this map – on genetic distance between groups, not on superficial resemblances between groups. The upper left square can be called NE Asian. The lower left square can be called SE Asian. The upper right square can be called Caucasian. The lower right square can be called African.Figure 2: Another Cavalli-Sforza map showing general genetic distance, with tremendous overlap with the map above. This map clearly separates out Papuans and Melanesians and also Filipinos and Thais. There is some confusion here regarding the placement of Northern Turkics with Amerindians and whether NW Amerindians should be cleaved off into a separate race.

This map is actually interesting because it implies that there are six major races of humans – not three – NE Asians, SE Asians, Oceanians (Australoids), Pacific Islanders, Caucasians and Africans. As you can see, the distance between NE Asians and SE Asians and between SE Asians and Pacific Islanders is greater than that between NE Asians and Caucasians. SE Asia is clearly an area of profound genetic diversity.

Figure 3: Yet another map, in this case a genetic tree. Once again, Papuans must be cleaved from Melanesians and Thai, and Chinese are clearly separated. This is the first tree that shows the Northern Chinese, and it seems clear it wants to put them with the Koreans and Japanese. This map shows five major races – Caucasians, NE Asians, SE Asians, Africans, Papuans and Aborigines.

Figure 4: More from Cavalli-Sforza showing genetic distance. This was apparently used to map one or both of the maps above. Based on this, I split the Thai off from the Filipinos. This map also shows that Aborigines are most closely related first to Mongolians and Siberians and second to Japanese and Koreans.

I usually wanted about 150 points difference to split off into a separate race, but in some cases I split off closer groups if they were distinguished somewhere else, like in any combination of Figs. 1, 2 or 3. You need to click on it to read it properly.

The initial impulse for this post was this paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics, A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania (Capelli et al 2001). If you look at Table 4 in Capelli, you can see that they carefully delineate out Polynesian and Melanesian groups based on Haplogroup mapping.

Since many scholars of race include both Melanesians and Polynesians as separate races, this table serves to delineate what the proper genetic distance between genetic groups needs to be in order for them to be separate races.

Based on Polynesians and Melanesians as separate races in Table 4 in Capelli, I was able to sort out four more groups in that table, if only to get some idea of the distances between racial groups.

First, an Indonesian Race was separated out, including all but the easternmost island groups such as the Alor that go into Melanesian. Javanese and Sarawak were later included based on Figure 5. Later, based again on Figure 5, the Toraja and Mentawi were separated out, each into their own groups. The Toraja are an ancient farming group in South Sulawesi. The Mentawi are the indigenous peoples of the Mentawi Islands west of Sumatra. They still live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

A Lesser Sunda Race was also split out (see Figure 5), but the Alor were not covered, as they lumped more with Melanesians. The Lesser Sunda Race included the Lembata, the Lamaholot, the Manggarai and the Kambera. These people have mixed Indonesian and Melanesian ancestry. The Lembata and Lamaholot live on Lomblen Island east of Flores Island. The Kembara live on Sumba Island and the Manggarai live in the West of Flores Island.

Second, a Filipino-Ami Race, composed of Filipinos and the Ami, a Taiwanese aborigine group (the Filipinos are almost genetically identical to the Ami and are quite close to the Southern Chinese – see Figure 1 in Capelli) was split off.

Third, a South Chinese Race consisting of unknown groups that was later expanded below was split off.

Based on the distances between these clearly differentiated races in Capelli, I was able to plot plot racial distances in Figure 1 above to infer major and minor races based on distance.

All of the groups created via Capelli were then further chopped up based on Cavalli-Sforza here (p. 234-235). An Indonesian Race consisting of Sulawesi, Borneo and Lesser Sunda survived the cut, while the Alor of Lesser Sunda went into Melanesians. Malays themselves are distinct enough to create a Malay race.

The proto-Malay or Temuan, who have some of the most ancient genes on Earth of all of the Out of African peoples, are an ancient aboriginal group in Malaysia. They have an extremely diverse genetic signature (See Figure 5), enough to split off a category all of their own.

The Bidayuh or Land Dayaks are the indigenous peoples of Sarawak. Their genetics are wildly divergent (Figure 5), as we might expect from such an ancient people, hence, they form their own stock.

Some comments are in order.

Although separate NE Asian and SE Asian Major Races were created in order to account for both the vast differences between NE and SE Asians (the distance between NE and SE Asians is greater than the distance between Caucasians and NE Asians) it should still be noted that at a deep level, this is clearly one race.

The Gilyak and Ainu are leftovers from the original Proto-Northeast Asians. The Proto-Northeast Asian homeland was around Lake Baikal maybe 35,000 years ago. The Ainu themselves may go back 18,000 years to the Jomons, who arrived from Thailand. These people resembled Australoids.

In Figure 1 above, Northern Turkic forms a clear race with various Amerindians, yet in Figure 4, they seem to be quite distant. The Buryat have also been linked to Amerindians, even though anthropologically, they are linked to Mongolians and genetically they are close to Koreans.

The North Turkics are closest to the Northern Chinese and the Nepalese, both of which were split off into separate groups. The Manchu and Qiang were added to the Northern Han based on genetics for the Manchu and the fact that the Qiang have an origin in the north. The Yunnan Han, a southern group, oddly cluster with Northern Chinese, as do the Hui.

The Oroqen, a Siberian Tungusic tribe in northeast China that is genetically very divergent, was split off into its own group.

The Nepalese, consisting of Nepalis and Newaris, are genetically Asians, though they resemble Caucasians. They pretty much straddle the line between Caucasians and Asians. A lot of groups close to them – Turkics, Mongols, Northern Chinese, and Altaics, straddle the line between Caucasian and Asian.

Nepalis are closely related to South Indians. They are also close to Central Asians. The Central Asian Race includes the Kirghiz, Karalkalpaks, Uzbeks, Turkmen and possibly others. Although they are mixed Caucasian-Mongoloid people, genetic analysis shows that they can be included with Asians. However, other analysis (Table 2) shows that they are best placed in with Caucasians, though only barely.

Others, such as Kazakhs, are closer to Tuvans and also Mongolians (Table 2). The Kazakhs were placed into a Mongolian Race, somewhat arbitrarily.

The Sherpas were then further split off and placed in with the Yakut (p. 231). All of these splits were based on this data (p. 229). The Tuva were given a separate race based on data showing them splitting away from the Yakut-Sherpas (p. 229)

Northeastern Indians were put into the Mon-Khmer Race somewhat arbitrarily, since this is who they cluster with. There was some confusion. In one paper, the Naga, Apatani, Nishi and Nemang cluster with the Mon-Khmer, and the Adi go in with Tibetans.

The situation is somewhat contradicted by this Y-DNA graph (Reddy 2007), which puts the Apatani, Nishi and Adi, along with the Tripuri, Jamatia, Mog and Chakma, in a single Indian Tibeto-Burman Race. Because of this cluster, and because this group tends to separate somewhat from General Tibetan, I created an Indian Tibeto-Burman Race.

Note that the Tibeto-Burman Tujia, Yizu and Shan cluster away from Indian Tibeto-Burman to some extent. The Mizo and Yizu, Indian Tibeto-Burman groups, cluster more with General Tibetan. However, the Mizo are far enough away from the rest of General Tibetan to warrant their own stock (chart). The Garo also cluster with General Tibetan on Y-DNA, but on Mt-DNA, they are very different (chart) (Reddy 2007).

A group of the Mundas was split off as a Meghalaya Race on the basis of their differentiation on MtDNA (chart) (Reddy 2007). Some Indian Tibeto-Burman groups such as the Bai and the Pnar were included. This race includes the War Jantia, Bhoi, Maram, War Khasi, Kynriam, Nishi, Pnar and Bai. All of these groups are found in Meghalaya or over the border into China.

A group consisting of the Santhal, Naga, Munda, Kurmi and Sudra were split off from this group due to their dramatic difference on MtDNA (chart). This group also lives in NE India.

There is a group of Indo-European speakers in NE India that can be differentiated from the rest of the groups on Mt-DNA. This NE India Indo-European Race consists of the Mahishya, Bagdi, Gaud, Tanti and Lodha.

The Mon-Khmer are close enough to Thai and Southern Chinese in Fig. 4 to be included with the Tai, but they were split off due to the obvious distance in Fig. 1. The Mon-Khmer, Southern Chinese and Thai groups are clearly all closely related.

The Zhuang were split off from Mon-Khmer into a Munda Race on the basis of this autosomal DNA table (p. 235) (Cavalli-Sforza 1994). The She were included because they are close to the Zhuang. The Santhal and Ho were included on the basis of this Y-DNA chart (Reddy 2007). This group is best thought of as an outlier Austroasiatic group.

The Austroasiatic Race consists of the Mon, Zhuang, She, Santhal, Ho and Lyngngam. Most of these groups are found in NE India, but the Mon are in Burma. Most speak Austroasiatic languages, but a some speak Tibeto-Burman or even Indo-European languages. The Nongtrai group with this race in Y-DNA (chart) but not on MtDNA (chart), where they may well form their own group.

The Zhuang are a group in Southern China. They left Central China for Southern China 5000 yrs ago. This group was originally thought to be part of the proto-Tai group in Southern China that later moved down into SE Asia and gave rise not only to the Thai, but also helped form many other SE Asian groups.

At the time of the split from proto-Tai to Tai, the Zhuang went to Guangxi Province and the Tai went to Yunnan. In 1200, the Tai moved down into Indochina and mixed with local groups, becoming the Thai, Lao and Shan.

The Senoi are an ancient group in Malaysia dating back about 4,000-8,000 years. From the close genetic relationship, it seems that the Senoi may have split off from the proto-Zhuang or an earlier group soon after the group left Northern China for Southern China. The Santhal, Ho and Shompen may also have been early split-offs.

The Shompen at least are thought to be a very old group. Originally it was thought that they were remnants of the early people (Negritos) who settled the area, but further research indicated that they are an Austroasiatic group, albeit an ancient one.

Although there is much controversy about the origins of the Senoi (Are they Negritos?) a variety of points of inquiry converge on the notion that they are related to SE Asians.

The Senoi are Veddoids, an ancient group with possible links to the Negritos and the original settlers of Asia 70,000 years ago. There is fascinating evidence for this as Senoi skulls cluster with skulls from the Andaman Islands, Coastal New Guinea and Tamils. Andaman Islanders are Negritos, the New Guinea population is Melanesian and the Tamils are thought to be Veddoid.

The Senoi speak an Austroasiatic language and are also thought to be related to the Vietnamese and the Khmer. Senoi teeth resemble SE Asian and Polynesian teeth. It is thought that the Senoi came down from Southern China and bred in heavily with the Negrito Semang in Malaysia. The Senoi have wavy hair like most Veddoids, though some have straight hair and a few have woolly hair like Negritos.

I recently split the Greater Andamanese and the Onge into two separate major races each based on new data showing that they are profoundly different from all other humans. Whether or not they get separate major races of their own each is open to debate and is determined by the depth of their differences.

However, the data does show that they are each completely separate branches on the human tree. As the Andaman Islanders were the first people to split off after we left Africa and they have been evolving for ~70,000 years in isolation, it figures that they would be extremely different.

I also decided to split Australoids into a macro race alongside Caucasians, Africans and Asians due to charts showing that they are extremely different from all other humans. This group would include for now Papuans, Aborigines and Andaman Islanders.

The Tungus, a group of mostly reindeer-herding tribes, including the Even and the Evenki, were given a separate group based on this map (p. 227). The Evenki are also close to various Tibetan groups, because these Tibetan groups came from NE Asia also.

Amazingly, the Yenisien (of which Ket is the last surviving member) Language Family has now (in 2004) been conclusively tied to the Amerindian Na-Dene Language Family, the first conclusive linking of a New and Old World language family. Even though the Ket presently reside quite a bit to the north of the Altai region where most Amerindians came from, the Ket used to live down near the Altai thousands of years ago.

Northern Turkics include such groups as the Altai, Hazara, Shor, Tofalar, Uighurs, Chelkan, Soyot, Kumandin, Tuva and Teleut. They are located around the Altai Mountains where China, Mongolia and Russia all come together. This is where most of the Amerindians came from.

Evidence for including the Hazara, who speak a language related to Persian, in the Northern Turkic group is a chart that shows the Hazara clustering with the Uighur.

Malay Negritos (the Semang) were given a separate race based on a recent study finding them highly differentiated from other Asian populations. The Jehai and Kensui are related Negrito groups in Malaysia (Figure 5).

Though Cavalli-Sforza includes Berbers barely into the African square, I include them with Caucasians due to their greater resemblance to Caucasians than African, and also due to genetic analyzes that show that they have little Black in them. However, some Berbers are clearly African. Analyses of the more-Caucasian Berbers find that, across the board, they are on average 12% Black.

Tuaregs were given separate races because they are clearly separate from Berbers and all of the African groups in Fig. 1.

However, Tuaregs do cluster (p. 169) with Algerians and Bejas. Since Algerians are Caucasian and most Tuaregs are Africans (though they vary considerably), I had to separate them into major races based on appearance. This is one of those cases where genes flies in the face of physical anthropology.

Bejas are a mixed-race people living in northeastern Africa and speaking a Cushitic language. They look like Ethiopians. Ethiopians are about 57% African and 43% Caucasian – Amhara are 57%, Cushitic are 56% and Tigreans are 53% Black. Since the Beja are a Cushitic group, on that basis, I put the Beja into Africans.

Similarly, Nubians are grouped (p. 169) in with the Caucasian Berbers, although most people consider them to be Black people. With examples like this, you can see why Fig. 1 has Berbers on the border of African and Caucasian.

Figure 1 also puts the Chukchi in the Caucasian square, though they clearly resemble Asians. I lump them in with Asians due to their obvious resemblance to Asians. I included Aleuts with Chukchis due to a recent paper showing a linkage.

Siberian Eskimos were included for the same reason. The entire group was called the Beringian Race. The Koryaks were split into a separate group due to Cavalli-Sforza’s data. The Itelmen were later added to the Koryaks due to evidence showing that they are related. Both were combined into a Paleosiberian Race. The Reindeer Chukchi, apparently a more Siberian group, was split off due to its great (p. 228) genetic distance from other groups.

The Uralic Race was split into a Siberian Uralic Race including the Samoyed, Ket and Nentsy subgroups (p. 227). The Nganasan are an outlier (p. 229) in this group, and there was barely enough evidence to split them into a separate group.

Northern Na-Dene speakers were split from the North American Eskimos whom they resemble (p. 323), on the basis of this tree (p. 227). Similarly, Ge and Tucanoan (linguistic groups) Amerindians were split off from the rest due to great distance (p. 322) between them and the others.

A Fuegian Amerindian Race was created based on evidence that they exhibit extreme genetic differences with all other Amerindians. They are probably the ancestors of the original peopling of the Americas.

The Nootka, or Nuuchahnulth, were also split off due to the finding of a fifth major haplogroup lineage (p. 1166) in them in addition to the main four lineages – A-D – usually found in Amerindians. This line links back to ancient Amerindian remains and goes back to Mongolia.

I started out with a General Amerindian Race, but I decided to split it into four races – Northwest American, Northern, Central and Southern, based on Figure 2. It is true that I could not make these splits on the basis of Figure 1 or the genetic distance charts, but as most serious splits on Figure 2 went into separate races, I decided to split the Amerinds in the same manner.

Further, the Amerinds have some of the greatest internal genetic distances of any geographical group, far more, for instance, than the Europeans and Iranians, so the splitting seemed valid.

South Indians are included with Caucasians based on a general consensus that these are an ancient group of Caucasians. The reason being their resemblance in facial and body structure to Caucasians. In addition, Figure 1 clearly puts them in the Caucasian square, and the other three figures clearly show that they are most closely related to Caucasians.

Although genetic studies say that South Indians are all one race and there is good reason to believe this, Figure 1 delineates South Indians and North Indians into separate groups, though there is a clear transition from one to the other. Figures 2 and 3 reiterate the distinction between South and North Indians.

There is data linking Vietnamese genetically with Cantonese. Vietnamese genetics are very complex and it is all being worked out. They are clearly an Austronesian-Tai mix with heavy S. Chinese admixture and some undetermined amount of Khmer and Cham mixed in. Vietnamese does not include the Montagnards, who are the indigenous people and seem to be related to Negritos.

There is good evidence also linking the Vietnamese and related groups to the Tai, however, there seems to be better evidence linking to them to a small group of mostly Mon-Khmer speakers. The Deang or Paluang, the Jinuo and the Blang lump together with the Vietnamese (Lĭ 2006). The Mon-Khmer speaking Deang live in Yunnan, Burma and Thailand, the Tibeto-Burman speaking Jinuo live in Yunnan and the Blang also live in Yunnan. So the closest living relatives to the Vietnamese people are in Yunnan, and next in Burma and Thailand.

Since there is quite a bit more distance between Filipinos and Thais than between Filipinos and Southern Chinese, I split off Thais into a separate race. I also kept the Filipino-Ami Race above, but added the Guangdong Han (Guangdonren in Chinese) to the group based on evidence that they are linked to the Ami.

Based on Fig. 5, I further refined the Filipino portion of this group into Tagalog, Visaya and Ilocano speakers, while splitting off the Manobo into a separate group, as they are divergent (Fig. 5). Tagalogs are an ethnic group who live mostly in Luzon and Oriental Mindoro, while Visayan languages are spoken in the Visayas region in the central Philippines, encompassing the islands of Panay, Negros, Cebu, Bohol, Leyte, Samar and Palawan. Ilocano speakers are located in the far north of Luzon.

A race called the Southeast China Race was created based on a tight clustering of the Minnan Nan, Hakka, and overseas Chinese of Singapore and Thailand. Based on Figure 5, the Cantonese Han (outside of Hong Kong) were added to this race.

A separate Taiwanese Aborigine Race was split off, based on Cavalli-Sforza’s work. This group, best seen as the principal Taiwanese Aborigine Race, consists of the Atayal, Bunun and Yami. Another Taiwanese Aborigine group, the Paiwan, was split into an Island SE Asian Race based on Cavalli-Sforza. Interestingly, the Paiwan, Atayal and Yami are also somewhat close to the Tai Race (see below).

The Taiwanese Aborigines have an interesting background, and their prehistory is in need of further research.

In addition to the Thais proper, I also include other Tai groups such as the Tai Lue, Tai Kern, Tai Yong and Tai Yuan on the basis of Figure 5. All are found in Thailand. Many groups are related to the Thais. They are the Lao, Shan, Dai, Lahu, Aini and Naxi. The Lahu, Dai and Aini were included on the basis of this report. All of them are found in Yunnan. This group is found in Southern China (especially Yunnan), Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. The Buyei are also related to the Thai.

Two aboriginal groups of Thailand are so different as to warrant a separate stock each.

The Htin, or Mal, are ancient aborigines of Thailand speaking a Khmuic language. In Figure 5, they are different enough to constitute their own stock.

The Mlabri are a very strange group of hunter-gatherers in Thailand who are very poorly understood. They live very primitive lives. Their genetics is wildly diverse and suggests that they were founded from a small stock only 800 years ago or so. That is, they went through a genetic bottleneck. Some think that they are former farmers who went back to land for some reason. They are one of the most genetically wildly diverse people in Asia (see Figure 5).

Although Fig. 4 suggests that Southern Chinese and the Thai should be grouped together, Figs. 1-3 suggest otherwise. Clearly, the two groups are very close, but I decided to break Southern Chinese off due to the other figures above, especially Figure 1, that suggest they are a separate grouping.

I lumped a number of groups into a Southern Chinese Race, including the Dong, Yi and the Han living in Henan Province, China, based on evidence that they form a group with the Southern Chinese. These groups are found in the Southern Chinese provinces, including Henan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hainan and Fujian.

I created a Hmong-Mien Race for the Hmong and the Mien, since, while they are close to the Southern Chinese Race, they are different enough to merit their own category (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Click to enlarge. A good chart of many of the Asian races, showing how well genes and language line up.

The Li is a genetically divergent Chinese ethnic group that forms it’s own outlier between the Southern and Northern Chinese. However, it trends more towards Southern Chinese. They also link up very closely to the Khmer. The suggestion here is that the ancestors of the Khmer were the Li.

What we are learning about Negritos is that instead of forming a distant group, they are often closest to the people they are living around. So the Philippine Negritos (Aeta) are closest to other Filipinos, and the Veddas are closest to other South Asians.

The Mamanwa, a Negrito group on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, are highly divergent from the rest of the Philippine Negritos. The Mamanwa are thought to be remnants of the original Negrito population in the Philippines.

The Palau, a Micronesian group, curiously cluster with Aeta and Agta Negritos, indicating that they may be the remains of the original settlers of SE Asia. The Agta and Aeta cluster together also (Fig. 5). The Aeta and Agta Negritos both live in mountainous areas of Luzon.

The Iraya Mangyans of the Philippines are also quite different, but they are close to the Ati Negritos, also of the Philippines (Fig. 5). The Ati live on Panay Island, in the Visayas Group. The Iraya are a Mangyan group living on Mindoro Island. The Mangyans are not Negritos, but they are still an indigenous group in the Philippines and are different from most Filipinos.

The Toba Batak, a tribe in northern Sumatra, curiously clusters with the Kanaka and Yap Micronesians. On Figure 5, the Karo Batak line up with the Toba Batak. They may be leftovers of the original Melanesian-Polynesian mix that populated Micronesia. The Kanaka is an old name for a Micronesian tribe that lives primarily in the Carolines and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

The Veddas are clearly related to the Negritos as one of the sole remaining leftovers of the group that left Africa 70,000 years ago and populated all of Asia. There are interesting links between them and the Toala of Southern Sulawesi and the Senoi of Malaysia. Nevertheless, almost all Veddas except the Kerala Kadar cluster with the South Indian Race.

North Indians include the Punjabis, Central Indic, Punjabi Brahmins, Rajputs, Vania Soni, Mumbai Brahmins, Jats, Kerala Brahmins, Pakistanis and Koli.

South Indians include the Munda, Bhil, Maratha, Rajbanshi, Oraon, Parji, Kolami-Naiki, Chenchu-Reddi, Konda, Kolya, West Bengal Brahmins, Parsi and Gonds. Although many of these groups are thought to be related to Veddas or Negritos and part of the original people of India, they now resemble other South Indians.

Kerala Kadar are a highly diverse Vedda group who are probably the ancestors of the original people of India. They live in the forests of Kerala and resemble Australoids.

The Gurkha and Tharu are two highly diverse groups in Nepal. In Figure 5, the Ladakhi are close to them, so a Himalayan Race was created to encompass them.

The Kanet live in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat and probably have some Tibetan mixture. The inclusion of the Uttar Pradesh Brahmin with these people in unexplained.

The Nicobarese and the Senoi cluster with the Munda Race on Y-DNA, but on Mt-DNA, they are extremely different (chart here) (Reddy 2007), which is suggested by their ancient origins. Each got a separate race due to their extreme divergence.

The Khoisan were divided into three groups, the San, Khoi and Hadza. The Khoi are probably a creation of intermarriage between SW Bantus and San. The Hadza are an ancient group in Kenya and Ethiopia. The San form a separate race with the Somalis.

The Sandawe are another Khoisan group that was also divergent, but not enough to form a separate group, on the table here (p. 176), but was split off due to its divergence on the tree here (p. 169) .

The Sara are a a very divergent Nilotic group from Chad, who form a race with Biaka Pygmies from Central African Republic. All of the African splits are from here (p. 169).

The Funji, a Nilo-Saharan group, was both split off due to their diversity (p. 169). The Bedik, a small group of 5,000 in Senegal, are also divergent. Though they are not divergent enough to be a race on the distance chart, they are on the PC and tree charts. The Funji, or Gule, live in Sudan on the Blue Nile near the Ethiopian border (p. 170). The Bedik are a small group in Senegal.

Three groups in Senegal, the Peul, Serer (650,000) and Wolof (2 million), were split off into a separate group although they they do not have enough distance in the distance chart to warrant that, similar to the Southern Chinese, Thai and Khmer. However, like these three groups, the Senegalese groups are quite different on the PC Chart and on the tree chart, so they were split off (p. 181-182).

The Peul (700,000) speak Fulani (Peul is just French for Fulani), but are settled African farmers, unlike the more pastoralist Caucasian – Berber group that roams across the Sahel.

Figure 1 appears to divide humanity into four racial squares – Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, Caucasian and African. Although the difference between SE and NE Asians is deeper than that between Asians and Caucasians, it is clear that this is all one race – the Mongoloids. Inside of that group, all of the Chinese are related.

The homeland of the proto-Asians dates back over 60,000 years and is in northern Vietnam and southern China. We know this because the Vietnamese have the greatest genetic diversity in all of Asia. The split between the NE Asians and the SE Asians is at least 53,000 years deep. There is a Hmong-specific line alone that may date as far back as 26,000 years.

The traditional tripartite system favored today by racial minimalists – Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid – is appealing, but I could not reproduce it. As there is as much difference between Asians and Caucasians as between SE Asians and NE Asians, why should I create a Mongoloid Race?

Instead, I split it into nine separate major races. This enabled me to account for the fact that while Australoids are Asians (genetic analysis of various Australoids has proven this), they are definitely an extremely divergent group.

This analysis also recognizes the deep diversity of Australoids – the Aborigines are more distant to Africans than any other race (once again despite physical appearance), due to genetic drift in Australia for millenia.

At first I put Papuans into an Australoid Race with Aborigines, but later I split them off. The distance between Aborigines and Papuans is as great as between Caucasians and Asians, so why lump the two Oceanians together? At the same time, we should recognize that there is a Mongoloid super-group that does encompass Aborigines, Papuans and both NE and SE Asians.

Figure 1 puts Aborigines barely into the NE Asian square, Papuans on the line between SE and NE Asians and Melanesians further down in the SE Asian square. Figure 4 shows that Aborigines they are mostly closely related first to Mongolians and Siberians and next to Japanese and Koreans. This is due to the Ainu substructure in these groups.

I also reluctantly split off the Kalash into a separate major race, inside of Caucasians, based on a stunning paper that differentiated the Kalash among groups such as Africans, East Asians, Oceanians, etc.

Based on Cavalli-Sforza’s six-race theory above in part, I split off Amerindians into a separate race inside of Asians. I also split off Pacific Islanders into a group called Oceanians, but contra Cavalli-Sforza, I did not include Papuans with the rest of the Pacific Islanders.

My Pacific Islander group includes Melanesians, Micronesians and Polynesians. Note that one group of Indonesians is included in each of the Melanesian and Micronesian subgroups. Therefore, there is no Indonesian race per se, as Indonesians encompass a variety of groups, although most can be put into a few SE Asian minor races.

That is based on genes. If you go by anthropometrics, you can get a group called Australoids that includes Negritos, Melanesians, the Ainu, Papuans, Aborigines, the Senoi, Tamils and Fuegian Amerindians.

The Andaman Islands Negritos are also profoundly different from other groups, and are said to have the “purest” genetic profile of any group, once again due to genetic drift and lack of outside inputs. Papuans, Melanesians and Negritos are also extremely distant from Africans, once again despite physical appearances.

The Khoisan (San and Bushmen) in Africa are the oldest race on Earth based on genetic signatures dating back 53,000 years, and this is what the original humans who came out of Africa 70,000 years ago may have looked like.

The various Negrito groups, the Aborigines and possibly the Papuans are also very ancient.

Mongoloids as we now know them are only 9,000 years old – previous groups in Asia looked more like Australoids – of which the Ainu and Gilyak are the last remaining descendants.

Australoid types and their ancestors are the original peoples of India , Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, and possibly even New Guinea and Australia. For instance, the Semang go back an incredible 50,000 years in Malaysia.

The Bantu (or the Africans that we are familiar with) may go back much further – it has been up to 40,000 years since they split off from the Pygmies. There is a suggestion that they were distinguishable from Khoisan (Bushmen) even 100,000 years ago (p. 160). The ancestors of all Africans seem to have come from West Africa at least 35,000 years ago (p. 160).

Amerindians at the tip of South America are very different in head shape than the rest of the Amerindians – looking more like Australoids – and their genetics is also profoundly different.

The proto-Caucasian homeland may have been in the Caucasus about 45,000 years ago. Another theory says it was in Central Asia.

The most ancient Europeans are the Saami and an ancient, isolated group of Sardinians. Among Caucasians, the Berber and South Indian Races appear to be very ancient, and both are extremely divergent within the Caucasian group. They may be surviving remnants of the most ancient Caucasians.

The South Indians are actually midway between Caucasians and Asians genetically and are only lumped with Caucasians because this is who they most resemble.

Europeans proper only go back 10,000 years or so, but the Saami (best seen as proto-Europeans) seem to go further back than that.

South Indians have been evolving in considerable isolation for about 15-20,000 years in the subcontinent. Prior to that, they appear to have come from the Middle East. The Berbers of today appear to be continuous with Berbers of up to 50,000 years ago, making them the most ancient Caucasian race of all.

The rest of the groupings mostly follow from Figure 1. More tables like Table 4 in Capelli would be very helpful in order to tease out more minor races.

A single asterisk indicates considerable genetic difference from related groups, two asterisks indicates a highly divergent group, and three asterisks is a profoundly divergent group. Major races are in red.

Some groups are not represented. I was not able to classify many groups with Negrito or Veddoid affiliations, such as the Tamils of South Asia and the Montagnards of Vietnam.

Mien and Qiang are Northern Chinese tribes, but the Mien have moved to the South lately. I could not find any good genetic data on the Qiang. The Nu were arbitrarily included in the Tibetan Race because they came from Tibet, but I don’t have good genetic data to prove that this is really a single unit. The chart here does not clarify things much.

The Bhutanese, though most closely related to Tibetans, were given their own race based on data showing that they are nevertheless considerably distant from Tibetans.

The Barya are a mixed-race group in Western Eritrea.

The Gilyak or Nivkhi are an ancient tribe living on the border between Korea, Russia and Japan that has ties to the Ainu. Ryukyuan is another name for Okinawan. They were given a separate race based on studies showing them intermediate between the Ainu and modern Japanese.

The Va (or Wa) are an ethnic group in Yunnan and Burma that seems to be distinct from the Northern, Southern and Tibetan Chinese groups. The Va seem to be about equally related to the Northern and Southern Chinese, indicating some sort of a dual origin. The Jingpo, or Karen, another Yunnan group that also occurs in Burma, were included with them based on this paper. The Lawa of Thailand were added to this group based on Figure 5. Interestingly, the languages of the Lawa and Va are also closely related.

A Southern Japanese Race was split off from the Japanese, Ryukuyans and Ainu. This group is made up of Kyushu Island, the southernmost island, and the Kinki region of Honshu, near the city of Kyoto. The Japanese in this area are highly divergent (p. 232).

The European-Iranian Race includes almost all Europeans except the Saami, Basques and Sardinians. The Saami and the Sardinians are very distant and the Basques much less so from the rest of the Europeans.

Although Cavalli-Sforza classes the Basques, Yugoslavs and Greeks as genetic outliers, there was not enough distance between the Yugoslavs and Greeks and other Europeans to split them into a separate group on the basis of genetic distance. Furthermore, the Greeks are clearly in the European group in Fig. 1 – they are quite close to English and Danes in the PC analysis.

However, I did split the Basques off based on their lying outside the European-Iranian cluster on the PC chart in Fig. 1. Most groups that were distinguished as independent units outside of clusters on Fig. 1 were given separate races.

The Greeks are interesting in that, while they are obviously a part of the Europeans on all charts, they are also the only Europeans that are are also close enough to most Middle Easterners to be included in their group. So the Greeks are a link between the European and Middle Eastern groupings inside the Caucasian Race.

The Iranian branch includes Jordanians, Iraqis, Assyrians, Druse, Lebanese, Kurds, Georgians, Caspians, Turks, Jews, and related groups in the area. It was difficult to decide whether to put the Turks in the Iranian subgroup or in the Central Asian subgroup, as they are close to both.

It was also very difficult to decide whether to put the people of the Caucasus, the Kurds, Turks, Caspians and Jews in the Iranian group or the Central Asian group as they cluster with both. I decided on sheer geographic grounds to put them in the Iranian group. The Russian Saami are closer to the Tungus and were included in that group.

Although some Arabs, West Asians and all South Indians were split off, this was somewhat arbitrary. Although they form separate groups on the Fig. 1, the Arabs are closely enough related to various Europeans, including Greeks, to be included with Europeans (Fig. 4). However, the Arabs were not as close as the Iranians.

Likewise, South Indians are close to Iranians, who are in turn close to Greeks and Italians – note that Iranians are also somewhat close to Danes and English (Fig. 4). As the Greeks link Europeans genetically with Middle Easterners, the Iranians link Europeans genetically with India. Arabs and South Indians were only split off due to the distance observable in Fig. 1.

West Asians were also split off due to their divergence. Based on this chart, they seem to be a compact grouping. This group includes the Pashtuns, Brahuis, Balochis, Makranis and Sindhis.

Further research shows that the Tajiks and Hunza, who at first appear to group with the West Asian group above, actually compose two groups divergent enough to be split into 2 different races. The first group is made of the Hunza of the Karokorams, the Bartangi of the Pamir Range and the Roma or Gypsies of Europe. So the Gypsies have a Himalayan origin.

The second group is made up of Tajiks, the Shugnan of the Pamirs, Bukhara Arabs and three groups in India – the Kallar of Kerala, the Sourashtran of Tamil Nadu and Yadhava of various parts of the region.

The Kalash, a strange, ancient, tiny tribe with Caucasian roots in northwest Pakistan in Chitral Province, are so diverse that they could very well form their own major grouping entirely, on a par with Africans, Europeans – Middle Easterners – West and South Asians, Oceanians, East Asians and Amerindians.

Since making a macro race out of a tiny ethnic group in Pakistan is absurd, I decided to throw them as a major race subsumed under Caucasians, albeit on the grounds that they are an extremely divergent race. They were classed with Caucasians because there is a general consensus that this is what they are (last two links are racist).

Due to their divergence, Kuwaitis and Arabians – consisting of Saudis, Yemenis and Bedouins – were split off into separate groups.

The are numerous groups that are more or less recent combinations of various groups and do not yet deserve their own racial category.

Hispanics are in general a mixture between Caucasians (typically Iberians) and Amerindians. They have been evolving for a short time and have not had time to differentiate into anything suggesting a race yet (despite nonsense from La Raza demagogues).

There are other Hispanics who are heavily mixed with Blacks, Caucasians and Amerindians. This is especially seen in South America in Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia, and even in Central America and Mexico.

There are large Black-White mixed populations in the West Indies. In Singapore and Hawaii, there are rapidly mixing populations that defy categorization.

This paper is basically just a shot in the dark and is more properly termed a pilot or exploratory study. I welcome evidence-based inputs from any knowledgeable persons who wish to add to this preliminary grouping of the human races, major and minor. All suggestions coming from nationalists of various types, ethnic or otherwise, typically lacking evidence, will probably be rejected outright.

There are 4 macro races of man, 11 major races of man and 115 minor human races of man.

* = significant genetic distance from most other groups

** = major genetic distance from most other groups

*** = extreme genetic distance from most other groups

Asian Macro Race

Northeast Asian Major Race*

Japanese-Korean Race (Japanese – Korean)

Southern Japanese Race (Honshu Kinki – Kyushu)

Ryukyuan Race (Okinawans)

Ainu Race*** (Ainu)

Gilyak Race** (Gilyak)

Northern Chinese Race (Northern Han – Qiang – Manchu – Hui – Yunnan Han)

Oroqen Race (Oroqen)

Sherpa-Yakut Race (Sherpa – Yakut)

Nepalese Race (Nepali – Newari)

Mongolian Race (Mongolian – Inner Mongolian – Buryat – Kazakh)

Northern Turkic Race*** (Dolgan – Altai – Shor – Tofalar – Uighur – Chelkan – Soyot – Kumandin Teleut – Hazara)

Central Asian Race (Kirghiz – Karalkalpak – Uzbek – Turkmen)

Tuva Race (Tuva)

Tungus Race (Even – Evenki – Russian Saami)

Siberian Race

Beringian Race** (Chukchi – Aleut – Siberian Eskimo)

Paleosiberian Race (Koryak – Itelmen)

Reindeer Chukchi Race (Reindeer Chukchi)

General Tibetan Race (Tibetan – Lisu – Nu – Tujia – Akha – Burmese – Yizu)

Mizo Race (Mizo)

Bhutanese Race (Bhutanese Buddhist)

Siberian Uralic Race (Nentsy – Samoyed – Ket – Mansi – Khanty)

Nganasan Race (Nganasan)

Uralic Race (Komi – Mari)

North American Eskimo Race (Inuit)

Amerindian Major Race*

Northern Na-Dene Race

Northwestern American Amerindian Race

Northern Amerind Race

Central Amerind Race

Southern Amerind Race

Ge Amerindian Race (Ge Language Group)

Tucanoan Amerindian Race (Tucanoan Language Group)

Nootka Amerindian Race (Nuuchahnulth – Makah)

Fuegian Amerindian Race (Ona – Yaghan – Kaweskar – Aonikenk – Alacaluf)

Southeast Asian Major Race*

Southern Chinese Race (Dong – Henan Han – Yi – She – Punu – Naxi)

Hmong-Mien Race (Chinese Hmong – Thai Hmong – Mien)

Li-Khmer Race (Li – Khmer)

Southeast China Race (Hakka – Min Nan – Singapore Chinese – Thai Chinese – Cantonese Han)

South China Sea Race (Tagalog – Ilocano – Visayan – Ami Taiwanese Aborigine – Guangdong Han)

Manobo Race (Manobo)

Philippines Negrito Race (Aeta – Agta – Palau Micronesian)

Mangyan-Ati Race (Iraya – Ati)

Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race (Mamanwa)

Tai Race (Thai – Tai Lue – Tai Kern – Tai Yong – Tai Yuan – Lao – Lahu – Aini – Shan – Dai – Muong – Buyei)

Vietnamese Race (Vietnamese – Deang – Jinuo – Blang)

Mlabri Race** (Mlabri)

Htin Race (Htin)

Kachin Race (Kachin – Karen – Va – Nung – Lu – Lawa)

General Taiwanese Aborigine Race (Ayatal – Bunun – Yami)

Island SE Asian Race (Paiwan Taiwanese Aborigine – Sea Dayak – Sumatran – Balinese)

Bidayuh Race** (Jagoi)

Indonesian Race (Sulawesi – Borneo – Lesser Sunda – Sarawak – Javanese)

Mentawi Race (Mentawi)

Toraja Race (Toraja)

Lesser Sunda Race (Kambera – Lembata – Lamaholot – Manggarai)

Malay Race (Malaysia Malay – Singapore Malay)

Proto-Malay Race** (Temuan)

Austroasiatic Race (Mon – Zhuang – She – Ho – Lyngngam)

Nongtrai Race (Nongtrai)

Santhal-Naga Race (Santhal – Naga – Munda – Kurmi – Sudra)

Meghalaya Race (War Jantia – Bhoi – Maram – War Khasi – Kynriam – Nishi – Pnar – Bai)

Senoi Race (Senoi)

Shompen Race (Shompen)

Garo Race (Garo)

NE Indian Indo-European Race (Mahishya – Bagdi – Gaud – Tanti – Lodha)

Indian Tibeto-Burman Race (Apatani – Nishi – Adi – Tripuri – Jamatia – Mog – Chakma)

Semang Malay Negrito Race*** (Semang – Jehai – Kensui)

Oceanian Major Race*

Micronesian Race (Yap – Kanaka – Toba Batak Indonesian – Kora Batak Indonesian)

Polynesian Race* (Tonga – Western Samoa – French Polynesia – Cook Islands)

Melanesian Race (Fiji – Vanuatu – New Ireland – Papuan Melanesian – Nasioi – Alor Indonesian)

Australoid Macro Race

Australian Major Race***

General Australian Aborigine Major Race***

Queensland Aborigine Race***

Western Territory Pama-Nguyan Aborigine Race***

Papuan Major Race***

General Papuan Race***

Motu Papuan Race***

Sepik-Ramu Papuan Race***

Greater Andaman Islands Major Race***

Greater Andaman Islands Negrito Race***

Onge Andaman Islands Major Race***

Onge Andaman Islands Negrito Race***

Caucasian Macro Race

General Caucasian Major Race***

European-Iranian Race (Most European – Caucasus – Armenian – Jewish – Turk – Kurd – Iranian – Jordanian – Iraqi – Assyrian – Druze – Lebanese – Georgian – Caspian – Palestinian)

Basque Race (Basque)

Norwegian-Swedish Saami Race*** (Norwegian Saami – Swedish Saami)

Finnish Saami Race** (Finnish Saami)

Sardinian Race** (Sardinian)

Kuwaiti Race* (Kuwaiti)

Arabian Race (Saudi – Yemeni – Bedouin)*

West Asian Race (Pashtun – Brahui – Balochi – Makrani – Sindhi )

Tajik Race (Tajik – Bukhara Arab – Shugnan – Kallar – Sourashtran – Yadhava)

West Himalayan Race (Hunza – Bartangi – Roma)

Berber Race*** (Berber)

Egyptian Race (Egyptian)

North African Race (Moroccan – Libyan – Tunisian – Canarian)

Algerian Race (Algerian)

North Indian Race** (Punjabi – Central Indic – Punjabi Brahmin – Rajput – Vania Soni – Mumbai Brahmin – Jat – Kerala Brahmin – Koli)

Himalayan Race*** (Gurkha – Tharu – Ladakhi)

Karnet-Uttar Pradesh Brahmin Race*** (Karnet – Uttar Pradesh Brahmin)

South Indian Race** (Munda – Bhil – Maratha – Rajbanshi – Oraon – Parji – Kolami Naiki – Chenchu Reddi – Konda – Kolya – West Bengal Brahmin – Parsi – Gond)

Kerala Kadar Race*** (Kerala Kadar)

South Dravidian Race*** (Sinhalese – Lambada – Irula – Izhava – Kurumba – Nayar – Toda – Kota – Malayaraya – Tamil)

Kalash Major Race***

Kalash Race*** (Kalash)

African Macro Race

African Major Race***

Tigrean Race*** (Tigrean)

Amharic Race*** (Amharic)

Sudanese-Barya Race*** (Sudanese – Barya)

General Nilotic Race (Shilluk – Masai – Nuer – Dinka – Luo – Turkana – Karanojo – Mabaan)

Funji Nilotic Race (Funji)

Tuareg-Beja Cushitic Race*** (Tuareg – Beja)

Nubian Race*** (Nubian)

Wolof-Peul-Serer Race (Wolof – Peul – Serer)

General Bantu Race (Most Bantus)

Bedik Bantu Race (Bedik)

West African Race (Most West Africans)

Mbuti Pygmy Race

Sara Nilotic-Biaka Pygmy Race (Sara – Biaka)

San Khoisan-Somali Race*** (San – Somali)

Khoi Khoisan Race*** (Nama – !Ora)

Hadza Khoisan Race*** (Hadza)

Sandawe Khoisan Race (Sandawe)

References

Capelli C., Wilson J. F., Richards M., Stumpf M. P. H., Gratrix F., Oppenheimer S., Underhill P., Pascali V. L., Ko T. M., and Goldstein D. B. 2001. A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432-443.

Cavalli-Sforza L. L., Menozzi P,. Piazza A.. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chu J. Y., Huang W., Kuang S. Q., Wang J. M., Xu J. J., Chu Z. T., Yang Z. Q., Lin K. Q., Li P., Wu M., Geng Z. C., Tan C. C., Du R. F., and Jin L.. 1998. Genetic Relationship of Populations in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). 95:11763-11768.

Harihara S., Saitou N., Hirai M., Gojobori T., Park K. S., Misawa S., Ellepola S. B., Ishida T. and Omoto K. 1988. Mitochondrial DNA Polymorphism Among Five Asian Populations. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 43:134-143

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. 2000. The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

Lĭ H., Pan S., Donnelly M., Tran D., Qin Z., Zhang Y., Cheng X., Yin R., Lin W. and Hoang V. 2006. Dermatoglyph Groups Kinh Vietnamese to Mon-Khmer. International Journal Of Anthropology 21:3-4, pages 295-306.

Lin M, Chu CC, Chang SL, Lee HL, Loo JH, Akaza T, Juji T, Ohashi J, Tokunaga K. March 2001. The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study. Tissue Antigens:57(3):192-9.

Omoto, K. (1984). The Negritos: Genetic Origins and Microevolution. Acta Anthropogenetics 8(1-2):137-47.

Omoto K., Ueda S., Goriki K., Takahashi N., Misawa S., and Pagaran I. G. (1981). Population Genetic Studies of the Philippine Negritos. III. Identification of the Carbonic Anhydrase-1 Variant With CA1 Guam. Am J Hum Genet. 33(1): 105-111.

Reddy BM, Langstieh BT, Kumar V, Nagaraja T, Reddy ANS, et al. 2007. Austro-Asiatic Tribes of Northeast India Provide Hitherto Missing Genetic Link Between South and Southeast Asia. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1141.

Useem, John. 1948. Human Resources of Micronesia. Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 17, No. 1. pp. 1-4.

Alt Left: America’s Salad Days, or When America Ran the World, 1945-60

The UN has been an American province for a long time. Let’s take after World War 2 for example. Sure, there was a UN. But from 1945-1960, the UN and the US were pretty much synonymous. Hence the pussilanimous and disgustingly murderous behavior of the US proxy called the “UN” in the Korean War. After World War 2, we had not only defeated all of our adversaries but most of our allies lay in ruins too. We weren’t running the world before the war – Germany and Pax Brittanica were vying for that honor – but we sure were after the war.

Some people think we allowed our allies to get destroyed on purpose so we could, in our usual slimy way, end up sidelining our allies and running the world, the World Dictatorship Ruled by the US being the main US project since 1945. I don’t know why Americans think it is groovy for the US to be this swaggering, belligerent, out of control outlaw organized crime gang that rules the world.

Do Americans really think that’s cool or something? Because that’s exactly what we are. We aren’t even a country. We’re an Outlaw Empire ruled by an Organized Geopolitical Crime Gang that happens to be the top gang in the world right now?

Anyway from 1945-60, the world was our oyster. Of course, we fucked it up like we fucked up everything. Even the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan reportedly had sleazy Mafia-like subplots going on. After that, we finally started getting some good hard pushback from China and the USSR (Thank God and it was about time!), first in Cuba, next with the Missile Crisis and the Gary Powers affair, and especially in Vietnam.

The cycle of anti-imperialist revolutions followed in Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, India, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Palestine, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, South Africa, Ireland, and Guyana. Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia the Basques followed suit. Arab nationalist revolutions took Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq by storm.

The Shah fell in Iran in what was actually very much an anti-imperialist revolution. A revolution rocked Afghanistan.

But 1945-1960 were the America’s salad days.

Why Is the Average IQ in Africa So Low Compared to Other Continents?

Answered on Quora.
I hate to say it, but I think they have genetically low IQ. This is very sad because it smashes a lot of our hopes for Africa and makes its problems even less salvageable.
Nevertheless, due to something called the Flynn Effect, IQ’s in at least some African countries have risen a lot in only a few decades. I believe Kenya saw a rise of ~30 IQ points. But everyone else’s went up too due to the same effect, so at some point, it’s an arms race. An example would be the question of how fast do I have to be to outrun a tiger? I don’t have to be faster than a tiger to outrun a tiger, I just have to be faster than you!
Nevertheless, assuming that Flynn rises are actual increases in intelligence (I think they are), then Africans are definitely getting smarter. That the rest of the world is too doesn’t matter so much. If Africans get more intelligent, they will be so much better at solving their problems.
There are a lot of tropical diseases, parasites, and malnutrition in Africa which undoubtedly lower scores. Nevertheless, I still feel that there is a genetic lower intelligence that is a huge problem. Personally I think many of the problems of Africa are down to low intelligence.
What I am interested in is the notion of raising IQ. IQ can absolutely be raised in many ways, mostly nutritional. The Flynn rise is partly due to nutrition but also due to better education and also a more complex modern society. The ~30 point rise in Kenya was heavily on vocabulary, mathematics, and general knowledge, and it was thought to be down to better schooling.
Let’s get serious about IQ and do everything we can to raise the IQ’s of Africans in whatever way we can. If we can’t raise it enough by environment, maybe in the future we could monkey with human genes. I am serious. That’s how serious of a problem low IQ is in large populations.
You don’t make a problem go away by saying it doesn’t exist. It just festers, prolongs, and maybe gets worse.

“Problems” and “Solutions”

Discuss Severaid’s quote and my examples given below, agreeing, disagreeing or expanding on the notion.

The chief cause of problems is solutions

– Eric Sevareid

I think this guy is onto something.

Examples:

War on Terror – Solution was all out war on “terrorism” – really just disobedient Muslim states and some international guerrilla/terrorist groups.

The “solution” did not solve the problem at all, and in fact it made it much worse and introduced quite a few new problems.

The “solution” to the “Muslim terrorism problem” did nothing to alleviate the problem, and the problem only expanded massively, in the process destroying much of the secular Muslim world and replacing it with ultra-radical, armed and ultraviolent fundamentalists. Several new failed states were created out of functioning but authoritarian secular regimes.

A wild Sunni-Shia war took off with no end in sight. A new Saudi-Iran conflict expanded to include all of the Sunni world against Iran and some Shia groups.

The policy was incoherent – in places (Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Libya) secular nationalists were overthrown and replaced with radical fundamentalist regimes (Iraq, Palestine) or failed states teeming with armed fundamentalist actors (Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Mali). In other places, fundamentalist regimes were overthrown and secular nationalists were put in (Egypt).

We alternately attacked and supported radical groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. An awful Russia-Turkey conflict took off on the Middle east with the US and NATO siding with Al Qaeda and ISIS supporting Turks. The US attacked and armed fundamentalists to attack Shia Iranian, Hezbollah and Houthi armies waging all out war on Al Qaeda and ISIS. In Yemen we actively attacked the Shia who were fighting Al Qaeda while supporting Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Sunnis with intel and weaponry.

Some Kurds were called terrorists and support was given to those attacking them. Other Kurds were supported in their fight against ISIS. In actuality, all of these Kurd represented the same entity. There really is no difference between the PKK, the YPG and the rulers of the Kurdish region. Meanwhile, Kurds fighting for independence were supported in Iran and Syria and attacked in Turkey though they were all the same entity.

Billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives were wasted for essentially no reason with no results or actually a worsened situation. Russia, one of the most effective actors in the war against Al Qaeda and ISIS, was declared an enemy and attacks on them by our allies were cheered on.

A horrible refugee crisis was created in Europe.

Muslim populations in the West were substantially radicalized.

Instead of ending Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorist, conventional and guerrilla attacks absolutely exploded in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. It also exploded in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Thailand, the Philippines and of course Syria and Iraq. There was considerable fighting and terrorism in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan. The Palestinians ended up much better armed than before and the conflict exploded into all out war on a few occasions.

Terrorism and guerrilla war exploded in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somalia and Kenya with some new attacks in Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Uganda. Somalia took a turn for the worse as a huge Al Qaeda force set up shop there and the country turned into the worst failed state ever with nothing even resembling a state left and the nation furthermore split off into three separate de facto nations.

The “solution” failed completely and simply ended up creating a whole new set of problems that were vastly worse than the original problem for the which the solution was directed.

Technology: Technology itself could be regarded as a lousy fix to many problems.

Early Homo Sapiens Sapiens in Africa

From the study of skulls we can learn what early humans in Africa looked like. By early humans, I mean modern man, not earlier types.

Very early skulls from Africa resemble either Khoisans or no living type. Some Khoisan type skulls (broadly defined) can be found going back as far as 90,000 years. Boskopoid skulls from 35-50,000 YBP seem to look like Khoisan (Mirazón Lahr,p. 282). Early Kenyan skulls look also look Khoisan.

Negroes appear in the fossil record in Congo, Mali, Niger and Chad from 6,000-12,000 YBP. They develop in the course of agriculture as Khoisan and Pygmy types gathered into agricultural villages in the regions above. In hunter-gatherer societies, women need men and marry early, hence there is little competition for females and every man gets a woman. In African agricultural societies, there was plenty of food, and women no longer needed a man to provide for them.

Since women no longer needed men, women got picky. Extreme competition for women developed among men, and one man or a small group of men tended to monopolize the women. This is the “chief” syndrome also seen in primitive agricultural societies in New Guinea.

Extreme competition led to the largest, strongest and most aggressive males dominating the group and preferentially passing on their genes. Hence, Negroes developed into big, strong, good athletes with high testosterone which drove high aggression. This is one theory for high Black crime rates.

In contrast, Pygmies are not aggressive at all, and tend to be rather meek and shy. Khoisan have low testosterone and have low levels of overt aggression.

Nilotics appear in Kenya 8-12,000 YBP. Originally, when these Nilotic skulls were first found, they were mistaken for Europeans. These are the classic “Horner” types of the Horn of Africa. It is amazing that Nilotics would be mistaken for Europeans, but they do have a more Caucasian look to them.

Recent Sub Saharan Africans have skulls that are more gracile than Europeans (ibid. p. 283), so it is a lie to say that Blacks have primitive or robust skulls.

The only really robust or primitive skulls nowadays in the study were found in Australians (65% are robust), Pantagonians, the Ainu and 1 Polynesian. This largely lines up with the Australoid racial group, which developed in a robust fashion for some reason.

The most gracile skulls were 13 E Asians, 13 SS Africans, 11 SE Asians, 7 Europeans, 1 Inuit, 1 S Asian and 1 Australian. So we can see that the most modern and gracile skulls are found in Blacks and Asians. Europeans are also modern and gracile, but not so much as the others. We also see that while Australians generally have the most robust skulls on Earth, some Aborigines have very gracile skulls. Australians are best seen as an extreme mixture.

Why did man leave Africa, and which route did he take? The reason for leaving was apparently a terrible drought in East Africa. For instance, between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago, East African droughts shrunk the water volume of Lake Malawi by at least 95%, causing migration out of Africa.

Which route did they take? Researchers say their study of the tribes of Andaman and Nicobar islands using complete mitochondrial DNA sequences and its comparison those of world populations has led to the theory of a “southern coastal route” of migration from East Africa through India. They took the Indian Ocean coastal route.

References

Mirazón Lahr, Marta. 1996. The Evolution of Modern Human Diversity: A Study of Cranial Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Owen the Hippo and Tortoise Mr. Mom

Repost from the old site.

I bet you did not know that the horrible Tsunami that hit South and Southeast Asia a while back, killing 275,000 humans, also hit Kenya. It did. There are lots of critters still running around in Africa that the increasingly advanced Africans have not yet killed off.

There are hippopotamuses and giant tortoises. These tortoises are really giant, not like our desert tortoises here in California that are about as big as a football.

During the tsunami, the baby hippo, Owen, 350 pounds, and its hippo Mommy (name and weight unknown) got swept down the Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean. Though hippos can swim ok, they don’t like floods and tend to die in them. Owen’s Mom got killed, and Owen landed in the Indian Ocean. Then the tsunami waves swept him ashore with lots of other critters.

Somewhere in all this mess, Owen landed on top of a giant tortoise, male, age 100, name unknown. He probably landed on his shell and they both rode the tsunami waves onto the beach where they both kicked back and caught some rays of exhaustion until they were rescued.

Even though the tortoise is a dude, Owen either could not figure that out or didn’t care. He decided that Tortoise was his new Mom. They bonded well, and Tortoise, though being a guy and all, does not mind being Mr. Mom. They eat, swim and sleep together.

Owen follows Tortoise just like he followed his Mom, and he growls at anyone who tries to approach Tortoise. Hippos stay with Mom for four years, so Owen will probably live at home for another few years before moving out.

I thought it was interesting that Owen showed so many advanced emotions in these photos. He shows tenderness, love and kindness, and appears to be trying to kiss Tortoise, though I can’t see how any animal could kiss a tortoise. Tortoise either also has advanced emotions, or has undecipherable reptilian emotions, or I’m hallucinating. But some tortoises do mate for life, which is awfully advanced behavior for a mere reptile.

Photos at the link.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda Leader, Killed

On Friday, June 10, 2011, 38 year old Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the head of Al Qaeda in East Africa, has been killed at a roadblock in Mogadishu. His car failed to stop for a military roadblock, so soldiers fired on his vehicle, killing him. It was not the West who got him after all.

In 1992, as a very young man, he had participated in the Black Hawk Down firefight in Somalia that killed 18 US Marines. In 1995, he returned to the Comoro Islands, his birthplace. He settled in the capital of Moroni, married a local girl and worked as a fisherman. Formerly of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which he had joined as a very young man, Fazul was already working for Al Qaeda. He immediately set about planning Al Qaeda attacks.

fazul_abdullah_mohammed_1 — One of the most famous photos of Fazul Abdullah Mohammad.

One year later, he hijacked Ethiopian Airways Flight 961 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. The plane was forced down near the Comoros, but before it landed, the Al Qaeda force on board executed Leslie Shed, CIA station chief in Addis Ababa, five heads of Israel’s aviation industries, and a deputy commander of the Ukrainian Air Force. They were headed to a meeting in Jerusalem where they were going to discuss a deal whereby Ukraine would supply jets to Ethiopia which would be provided by Israel and would be paid for by the US.

To this day, all three nations have kept a tight lid on the case because they never figured out Fazul obtained the top secret information about who was traveling on the flight.

Soon after the plane landed, the hijackers took off in speedboats that were waiting for them. They sped off to the Comoros. They were never caught.

Two years later, Fazul masterminded the attack on the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 224 people, the biggest Al Qaeda attack to date.

The FBI figured out that Fazul was involved in the bombing and headed to Moroni. Too late, he was gone, tipped off that the FBI was after him. In 1998, he was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List with a $5 million price tag on his head.

103_236 — Fazul Abdul Mohammad from the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist poster.

In 2002, Fazul pulled off another attack, this time in Kenya. He attacked Israeli targets, first attacking the Paradise Hotel in Mombassa, favored by Israeli tourists, with a suicide truck bomb. Next he chartered a plane and flew it near an Israeli Arkia passenger jet, firing a missile at the jet and just missing it. They flew the plane over the hotel they had just bombed, and dropped bombs on the hotel from their plane. Then they hightailed it to Somalia where they escaped.

In 2010, he attacked again, this time suicide bombing multiple cafes in Uganda that were filled with crowds watching the World Cup Final in South Africa. This attack was in retaliation for Uganda taking part in the peacekeeping mission in Somalia, where Fazul was leading the Al Qaeda allied Shabaab movement that was trying to topple the barely existing Somalian government.

Fazul was a master terrorist, one of Al Qaeda’s finest commanders and organizers. He hid successfully from the finest forces of the West for 15 years. A master of disguise and forgery, he spoke 5 different languages, used 18 different names and had three different birthplaces. At the time of his death, he had plans on him for attacks against targets in the West.

His death leaves Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa and East Africa high and dry, missing their terrorist leader and superb guerrilla fighter.

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 30%, about the same degree to which they reduced the IQ gap. There is even some suggestive evidence that the Blacks who have experienced the most desegregation benefited most of all (Keita 2007). Integration seems to be good for the Black IQ .

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE).
In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960’s-70’s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950’s and 60’s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicaans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 25% married Whites, and in the second generation, the figure is said to be up to 50%. These are just anecdotes, not hard figures. The claim is that all of the rise is due to White genes.

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 25% outmarriage rate in the first generation raises the IQ 3.5 points to 75. Instead, this generation had an IQ of ~85, 10 points higher than genes would have predicted. A 50% outmarriage rate in the 2nd generation should raise IQ by 6.25 points to 81.5. Instead, the figure is 86 for, 5.5 points higher than expected.

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 5-10 points.
In another study by Barbara Tizard (Tizard et al 1972), Jamaican children in the UK who were raised with Whites in an institutional setting had IQ’s of 108, mixed race children had IQ’s of 106, while White children had IQ’s of 103, all at age 4-5. If anything, this study showed a slight advantage for the Black children.

Opponents say that these Jamaicans were selective immigrants – that is, they were the brightest of the bright. James Flynn argues in counterpoint that selective migration could not have raised IQ’s by more than a few points (Nisbett 1998).

Black children in the US score 95 at age 4 and Blacks in Africa score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop).
Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that an initial high score followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), where if they do well on one test, they also tend to do well on all other tests. The

FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.
Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society occupationally, academically, and in other ways.

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 10% of the IQ gain. This shows that increasing incomes in the 3rd World may pay off in increased IQ’s in the children. Interestingly, researchers found no effect on family size, types of food consumed, head size, or height. Mysteriously, researchers were unable to explain much of the IQ rise.

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence, and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic, and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias.” Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West, vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition, and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK, and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-15 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s is wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and in closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 69% of all tests in this series were done on kids.

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake and even increasing obesity in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray, as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following Fuerle’s article are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws.
The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, the FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on-the-spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on-the-spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life.” Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C.; Whaley, S. E.; Sigman, M. D.; Espinosa, M. P.; and Neuman, C. (2003). “IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children.” Psychological Science 14, 215-219.

Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal communication.

Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal communication.

Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal communication.

Nisbett, R. E. (1998). “Race, Genetics, and IQ.” In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (eds.) Black-White Test Score Differences. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution.

Taylor, Jared. (December 2007). Personal communication.

Tizard, B., Cooperman, O., Joseph A., & Tizard, J. (1972). “Environmental Effects on Language Development: A Study of Young Children in Long-stay Residential Nurseries.” Child Development, 43, 337-358.

The Real Reason for the Shining Path

Repost from the old site.
Rightwing anti-Communists (and for that matter, Centrist and liberal US anti-Communists also) have some very peculiar attitudes about Communism, shaped by the Cold War. Communism, it appears, is some strange, evil and insane system, a crazy, idiotic and totally failed economic and social system that brought nothing but misery, hunger, starvation and poverty to the world, while bringing nothing good.
The alternative was capitalism, which would at some point conquer hunger, poverty, starvation and all that. Capitalism is always supposed to conquer these things at some point in the future. Capitalist polemicists usually say, “Just give it some time…”
With the neoliberalism that has been pushed since 1980 and has brought nothing but misery and impoverishment to billions and caused many millions of deaths, we have always been told that it would start working pretty soon now…maybe next year…victory is right around the corner. The truth is that after 25 years of neoliberalism, the verdict is in and a long report has documented it quite well.
Nearly everywhere it has been tried, neoliberalism has benefited the top 20% of the population (often greatly) and screwed the bottom 80%.
Even in the US, from 1980-1992, the top 20% gained income (the top 1% had an incredible gain) while the bottom 80% (everyone with individual income of less than $56,000/yr) of the US population actually lost money. A similar scenario unfolded in Britain.
Neoliberalism, nearly everywhere, resulted in lowered economic growth rates, massive debt, plunging wages and living standards for the majority, reductions in access to health and eduction, and reductions in many health and education metrics like infant mortality, life expectancy and the percentage of children in school at various ages.
This is because neo-liberalism mandated massive cuts in all social services, especially education and health care. The outcome was foretold. The truth about neoliberalism is that it has always been a scam in which the West, especially Western banks, corporations and investors, ripped off the rest of the World blind and the people were always left holding the bag.
Nevertheless, the ripoff artists keep trying to sell their neoliberal snake oil around the world, but more and more nations are no longer buying. Most of the countries of Latin America have tired of the “checks in the mail” neoliberal snipe hunt, and collectively, they are trying, in their own often-limited ways, to dislodge themselves from the grip of the neoliberal plague.
Even mainstream economists admit that Latin America (macroeconomically) did not benefit from the neoliberal fad. Recently, Argentina paid off its foreign debt and said no more. In Venezuela, Chavez is trying to forge a completely new path that is, instead of the Communism his detractors libel him with, in truth nothing more than a reformation of capitalism.
President Lula in Brazil has been hampered by the death grip of both investor capital and the markets; he has not been able to do much at all. Uruguay has elected a strident Leftist, but it is not known what he can do given his restraints.
Chile, after the utter failure of Pinochet’s radical free market economics (something the free market crazies have never owned up to), has elected a socialist and a woman as President, Bachelet. It is not known what she can do in terms of progress, but Chile still has an education and health sector that is in pretty good shape and sports good metrics to show for it.
In Ecuador, Rafael Correa is President, and he has formed an alliance with Chavez. It remains to be seen what he can do in terms of progress, as his options, as usual, are limited.
In Bolivia, Evo Morales, an Indian, has won a very close election in a country where a small White elite has always run roughshod over the majority Indian population. His options are also limited, but Morales’ rhetoric has at least been almost as radical as Chavez’.
A major problem in Bolivia is the mestizos in the East of the country (Santa Cruz Province) who despise the Indians the West as inferior while they sit on top of Bolivia’s rich natural gas deposits. They are making noises about succession, but they will never try it.
In Mexico, AMLO (Lopez-Obrador), a Leftist, actually won the election, but due to the usual fraud, the PAN (a rightwing Catholic party that rose out of the religious hot war in Mexico in the 1920’s that left 70,000 dead) now holds the presidency. Felipe Calderon is the PAN President and he won’t do a damned thing to solve the problems that have caused an incredible 12% of Mexico’s population to move to the US.
As an example of such problems, the family of one man, Carlos Slim, the head of the private Mexican phone monopoly, controls 50% of the wealth in the entire country. That is why America is being overrun by illegal aliens.
There has been some resistance to this semi-feudal order.
A very radical movement has tried to overthrow the corrupt and brutal dictatorial government of Oaxaca state. The Zapatistas* are still alive, and recently a Leftist group, the EPL*, has started to blow stuff up again, after disappearing for three years.
In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was re-elected, but he appears to have softened his rhetoric to the point where he cannot do much. Still, he has formed an alliance with Chavez. Nicaragua, now the second poorest country in Latin America, lies in corrupt ruins.
Support for the considerably neutered Sandinistas is higher than reported in the ruling class media – although Ortega had 35% support, his rival, a Sandinista attacking Ortega from the Left, had another 20% of the vote, so the whole Left vote was a 55% majority, not 35% as the corporate media would have you believe.
Under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua went from one of the worst to one of the best in Central America for literacy and health care figures. In 1990, Violeta Chamorro, adored by the whole US political spectrum, including the Cruise Missile liberals of the US Democratic Party, won the election.
Right away, she ended free education, requiring students to spend $35 a year on uniforms, a fee that immediately threw large numbers of kids out of school. Most have yet to return. She also got rid of free health care, so most of the population is without health care again. The health and education figures for the nation have shown the expected collapse.
It is interesting that Democratic Party liberals are apparently overjoyed about this situation, showing the bankruptcy of their ideology.
Most of the rest of the continent is collapsed in the usual ruins. 1 million people die every year from hunger in Latin America, and this has been going on for decades. How come this stuff never makes it to the “Worst Killers in Recent History” contests?
The anti-Communist line about Communism divorces it from its concrete realities in the sort of totally rotten social and economic systems that have spawned peasant revolutions for centuries before Karl Marx was even born.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the fall of the Warsaw Pact, rightwingers rejoiced. It was the “end of history”, said Francis Fukuyama. The era of peasant revolts was over. Never again would humanity have to worry about any Marxist, Leftist, worker, peasant, or even populist revolution.
Capitalism was here to say, in all of its forms, from most enlightened to most hideous, and no one could do a damn thing about it!
Well, that is nonsense. Anti-Communists say that revolutions happen for no reason at all, other than the insane desire of Communist madmen to seize power and impose their failed system on an unwilling population. They say that revolutions do not arise from horrible social and economic systems – they arise from sick Marxist pathology.
Get rid of Marxism, they say, and capitalism can run wild on humanity again. Perhaps we can even re-instate feudalism and slavery while we are at it. After all, they were both great for business.
Amidst the deafening racket of nonsense, a series of economic figures looms up at us like a ghost from the recent Peruvian past.
In back of those figures, 15 years later in 1980, like an Inca God rising up from the grave to slay the Spanish invaders 450 years after they waded ashore, is the frightening shadow of the Peruvian Shining Path*, another “totally insane” Marxist group that arose “for no reason whatsoever other than sheer evil”.
Yet the figures below show us why a revolution, even one as insane as Sendero Luminoso, was inevitable:
From the Peruvian National Planning Institute in Bejar, Peru, in 1965, we learn that the 24,000 families of the White ruling class in Lima had an income of $62,000/yr*.
The entire rest of the country had an average family income of $157.
The Indians of the Sierra, who even now have a life expectancy of only 45 years, had an average family income of only $10 a year.
*All figures in 1965 US dollars.
Most people agree that things have only gotten worse in Peru since then. Look at those figures above and tell that that is not kindling and kerosene for bloody revolution. The match was called Sendero, and someone was going to toss a match sooner or later.
There were centuries in Peru before 1965, four of them, and they build on our tale. From 1526 (when the Spaniards came to Peru) to 1630, the Indian population declined from 13 million to 600,000 – a loss of 95% of the population. It was a Holocaust, and I don’t care how many crazy Jews scream “anti-Semite” at me for stealing their pet word.
For the next three centuries, the Indians were tied to the land like serfs, bonded in debt peonage in a feudal estate society. This continued until well into the 1970’s. The jungle Indians were enslaved and killed for sport starting in the 1800’s and continuing until 50 years or so ago.
It is 1980. The bump and lurch of the dialectic, from Hegel to Marx to Mariategui to Guzman, has brought us here, to Sendero’s nightmare. The weight of 450 years of oppression, enslavement and genocide buckled the roof of the sick system and created the Sendero virus, which infected much of the country and nearly killed the host.
But given history, it could not have been any other way.

This is an example, from the city of Cherboksary, Russia, of the most failed economic system ever known to mankind – Communism. The fountains you see are inferior and worthless – totally failed fountains, if you will.
The buildings in the background as are complete failures as buildings, since they are dull and boring. Those buildings are called “socialist housing” and everyone in the West agrees that this type of housing does not work. What works much better are the capitalist slums in the pictures to follow.
The river is quite clean and this is another example of complete failure. Much better are the black rivers of capitalist slums, stinking with garbage, animal corpses and raw sewage. Why? Because diseases and smells are exciting! Who wants to be bored, anyway?
Even the bright greenery in the foreground in a total failure – it’s much better to have live amidst the mounds of garbage you see below. Capitalist slums, with their thrill a minute and constant search for food, are the only way to go.

A slum in Brazil. This is the successful system that works. Much better than that failed, dull socialist housing above, no? When are you moving in, reader?

Men pick through a garbage dump, probably in Nairobi. Slums in Nairobi make up 6% of the city yet house 60% of the population. In many parts of the capitalist third world, human beings actually live in these garbage dumps. They often suffer from continuous infections and sores.

Slums of Nairobi. This is the only viable system on Earth, capitalism. All of the alternatives, especially Communism, are failed and don’t work. As you can see, this system works great.

Communist housing fails because it is dull, boring and lifeless. It is much better to live in lively, exciting surroundings like this Nairobi slum, where I assure you there is never a dull movement. How dare those evil Commies try to move these people into “failed” Soviet-style high-rises!

An excellent example of capitalist education from Africa. Capitalism hates education, everywhere and at all times, because the capitalists can’t make any money off of it, and the capitalists all send their kids to fancy private schools, hence they resent paying for a system they do not even use. So capitalism, under neoliberalism, has predictably devastated education systems around the Third World.
Who needs to get educated anyway? The problem of the 3rd World is too many kids! Besides, Black people are so dumb that all attempts to educate them are a waste of time, or so The Bell Curve told me.

Slums of Brazil. The problem is these Brazilians have too damn many kids! Yet the evidence shows that Brazil’s birthrate is actually below replacement level. Never matter, in that case, the poor should quit having babies altogether!
Somehow, Westerners always find a way to blame the victim.
Of course, Brazil having the worst rich-poor gap on Earth could not have anything to do with this situation, now would it? By 2020, 40% of the world will live in these awesome slums. Cool! At least they won’t have to suffer from Communism or any of that failed stuff.

The charming slums of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is home to 12 million people – 4 million of them in 800 different favelas, or slums. All of these slums are run by gangs of drug dealers, who engage in continuous battles with each other and the police, that is, when they are not engaging in armed robberies, kidnappings and homicides. Recent articles in the Western press have hailed the dramatic improvements in these slums. As you can see here, they are so much better than they used to be!

Residents of a slum in Nairobi trudge through the garbage on their way home. Nairobi has an out of control crime rate, but of course that has nothing to do with the fact that these folks live in slums. It is because the criminals are evil and commit crimes for no reason at all. Furthermore, they are Black, and Black people are genetically natural born criminals. They’re just a race of Bad Seeds, and nothing can be done about them at all.

The wonderful slums of Mumbai again! This is the high tech economy that is taking the world by storm, the envy of the planet. Check out that high tech dishwasher this girl is using – I bet it was designed by those IT professionals down in Bangalore! Go, India go!
The truth about India is, of course, more tragic than Tom Friedman (see below) can figure out. By 1985, capitalism was killing between between 2.92 and 4 million every year in India, and 1.76 million were being killed in Bangladesh. That is 5.25 million people being killed by capitalism every year in just those two countries alone. But wait a minute! Capitalism doesn’t kill anyone. Stalin and Mao were the worst killers of the 20th century, dontcha know?

Since Communism doesn’t work, we have to go with the only alternative, the system that works, capitalism. This photo shows you just how great it works in Mumbai, India. Noam Chomsky reports that, comparing China and India, which had similar developmental figures in 1949, there have been 100 million excess deaths in Indian from 1947-1979.
This clearly shows the superiority of Chinese Communism, at least when it comes to saving lives. Note that China’s superior figures even include all of those killed by Maoism, which may number over 20 million people. But Maoism saved far more, and China set a world record with the fastest doubling of life expectancy by any country, going from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1976, surpassing Joseph Stalin’s record set in 1956.
Now in China, gone heavily over to capitalism, millions are dying from lack of health care alone. Getting back to India, recent figures show that there are 4 million excess deaths in India every single year. Gideon Polya calculates that excess infant mortality alone, compared to a model of Sri Lanka, kills 2.7 million Indians per year.

Slums of Mumbai. 6 million people – 60% of the population – live on only 6% of the land. Pundits all across the West, especially Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, rave about India’s booming economy . India’s capitalism is praised all across the West. As you can see here, it really works great!
Working backwards and forwards from Chomsky’s figures above of 4 million deaths per year in India from capitalism, which he got from Indian economist Amratya Sen, we can guess that capitalism may have killed 170 million Indians since 1949 as compared to the Chinese model. But wait, aren’t Communists the worst killers of them all?
Don’t like the way I do figures? Try these instead then. Capitalism kills 14 million people every single year just by starvation, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

*This blog does not support the project of Sendero Luminoso, as they kill people who are completely innocent. It does support the Zapatistas and the EPL in Mexico.

The Place of Horners Among the Major Races

A commenter asks:

…I was wondering, is it true that Ethiopians, Somalis, Eritreans, Djiboutis, and some Kenyans (people from the Horn of Africa) are mixed Caucasoid-Negroid? What is “Hornoid”? I’ve seen it in a map on the origin of races. Are “Hornoids” different from Negroids? Are modern day Horn Africans descended from Hornoids and Caucasoids, and not Negroids or a combination of three?

No one really knows what those Horners are. You can make a good case that they are a separate race entirely from Black Africans, sort of midway between Black Africans and Caucasians.

Ethiopids as a separate race — This excellent chart shows Ethiopids, or Horners, as a completely separate race from African Blacks and Caucasians

They seem to be a mix between some sort of ancient Caucasoid and some interesting form of Black African. On some gene charts, they plot midway between Africans and Caucasians.

Ethiopids and San as separate races — This interesting map shows both Ethiopids and the San as separate races. I agree that the San are also probably a separate race from Black Africans.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

Yes.
In my opinion, conservatism is always bad. Conservatism is always and everywhere at all times elite rule and only elite rule. Some support elite rule. I don’t. I support popular rule. I say elite rule is bad. Since elite rule is always bad, conservatism is always bad. Real simple.
In addition, conservatism is almost always dishonest. As an elite philosophy, you can either be honest about your goals and say you are working to better the elite and harm everyone else – say, the top 20% will benefit and the bottom 80% will be harmed, or you can lie and say you are out for everyone when you are not. It usually doesn’t work for conservatives to tell the truth, but now and then they do. Most people are not so stupid as to vote for an elite party when they are members of the non-elite group who will be harmed by the elite party. So conservatives, always and everywhere at all times, lie. They lie about their project. They have to, because often that’s the only way to get in.
But this continuous lying results in a destruction of Politics. There’s not much of a democracy left when almost the entire media is lying their fool heads off day and night. The population is bewildered at best or brainwashed at worst. This is the sort of “democracy” we have here in America. It’s hardly a democracy at all!
Erranter asks if we should not be bashing conservatives.

Doesn’t a conservative just mean someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo? There are places where the status quo is democracy and none of those above things. I don’t think it’s fair to attach “bad” to the very definition of conservative and “good” to progressive. That’s changing the definitions which people use to communicate and permanently attaching a moral judgment. It’s also unequivocal that conservatives are bad, because a part of this new definition is that they are bad.

Someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo – No, that is not what conservatism means.
Conservatism is elite rule. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Some things never change. Elites hate democracy. The Republican Party hates democracy. Notice how they are always trying to repress voter turnout. Heavy turnout is always bad for the elite Republicans. Given half a chance, sane electorates generally vote for popular rule (the Left) and against elite rule (the Right). Why would any electorate voluntarily vote against popular rule and for elite rule? They would have to be out of their minds (like the US electorate).
It’s hard to vote in elite rule. People don’t like it too much. So conservatives usually need to rule by dictatorship in one form or another. Once Latin America got rid of the dictatorships, the first thing the people did was vote in the Left.
There are only a few places on Earth where US style hard rightwing conservatives are actually voted into power, and those elections are problematic because the popular, anti-elite candidates of the Left are typically murdered.
The US
Guatemala
El Salvador (though the Left is starting to win now)
Colombia
Chile
Turkey
The Philippines
That’s about it.
The conservatives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey and the Philippines all rule by terror. They all run death squads and slaughter the Left.
In the Philippines, conservatives run as populists who will fight and get rid of poverty, so that’s not really US conservatism.
In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, conservatives usually run on a platform of “kill the Communists (the Left).”
Everywhere else on Earth, people generally vote in some sort of a liberal to socialist type government.
All of Africa has generally been run by popular Leftwing parties, with a few exceptions in Zaire and Kenya. They haven’t done a very good job of popular rule, but US style conservatism simply does not exist there.
In North Africa, most of the governments are socialist. Morocco was always the outlier, as it was ruled by a rightwing king, but he’s a dictator.
All of the Arab World is generally run by some type of socialist party or other. US style conservatism never takes power there.
All of the former Soviet Republics are now run by some type of socialist government or other.
All of Europe is being run by some type of socialist government or other, with the possible exception of Great Britain. The UK was always the outlier. US style conservatism ruled under Thatcher, but she was probably the most hated ruler in the 20th Century UK, and she couldn’t get much done.
Russia is run by a socialist regime under Putin.
The Iranian religious government has always been socialist in nature.
It’s hard to characterize the Karzai regime, but it is not US conservatism.
The Pakistani government is very hard to characterize, but it is not US style conservatism. The recently assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, was a socialist. The President, her widower, is also a socialist.
Since Independence, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have generally been run by socialist regimes of one type or another.
Myanmar is run by a regime that calls itself socialist.
Singapore has a social democracy.
SE Asia has been run by socialists since 1975. Thailand typically had rightwing military government. Recently, a progressive, Thaksin, was elected. He was extremely popular, but the conservative elite threw him out in a coup like they often do. At any rate, US style conservatism does not exist in Thailand.
China is run by a socialist party.
Mongolia is run by socialists.
Japan has been a social democracy since 1945.
True, South Korea was always a rightwing regime, but recently they elected a leftwinger.
Taiwan was always ruled by a rightwing dictatorship, but I am not sure who is in power since independence. They have had a social democracy for a while now.
Indonesia was always run by a rightwing dictatorship, but they recently went to democracy. The present leader has begun a number of socialist programs.

More Diverse English Dialects

We have already gone over some strange English dialects on this site in past posts. One tiresome canard that is oft-repeated is that US English speakers have a hard time understanding other US English speakers. This is usually said by Europeans. This is a misunderstanding of the dialectal nature of US English. The most divergent dialects of US English have long ago merged in something called dialect convergence. We already discussed New York English on the site.

As I noted, a young Italian man from Queens came to the Sierra Nevada in California recently and enrolled at a local college. For 3 months, people could hardly understand him. He finally learned to speak California dialect and make himself understood. Really, what he did was drop his outrageous New York English dialect.

What was interesting was that the guy could not seem to accomodate the listeners very well. People would ask him to repeat, speak slower, etc. but nothing seemed to work. And after 3 months of regularly listening to him, most listeners hardly understood him better than on Day One.

To me, these are strong suggestions that we are dealing with a separate language (albeit a very closely related one) and not simply a dialect. Speakers of a separate language have a hard time adjustting their speech to make it understood better, and listeners of a separate language usually don’t understand it much better with time than on the first day. With dialects, things are different. Dialect speakers can modify speech and be understood and listeners of dialects can start to pick it up a lot better in a short period of time.

An example of a dialect of English would be South African English. I recently met a fellow speaking a very thick S.A. English dialect. I could understand him all right, every word in fact, but it was one Hell of a thick accent! To show you how these things go, the woman behind the counter couldn’t really understand the guy, and I had to interpret for him.

AAVE (Ebonics) is quite different, and I think it’s a separate language in its hard form. I recently spent a few hours with two young Black women speaking AAVE. I didn’t understand them any better at the end of 3 hours than at the start. And they may as well have been speaking Greek. They couldn’t really adjust their AAVE to make it better understood (I think they don’t want to be understood, really) but they could drop the AAVE at a moment’s notice and speak perfect English.

There is actually some support among linguists for splitting off AAVE into a separate language. It’s probably not happening for political reasons. Could you imagine the howls from the rightwingers and the gales of laughter from the anti-Black racists if they did? I can see it now: “Niggers speak a foreign language! LOL! I always thought so myself!”

My Mom recently heard a fisherman from the coast of Newfoundland on the radio for several minutes and she said she couldn’t understand a word. There are some Newfoundland English dialects that are quite hard to hear.

There is a Youtube video about continuing slavery in the US. I’m not sure what it’s all about, but it looks like work in return for room and board in the deepest Mississippi Delta. There are Blacks on that video speaking a very deep Mississippi Delta Black dialect that can scarcely be understood.

Mulungeon English (especially Monacan Indians) and West Virginia Appalachian English (hard forms) can be quite hard to understand.

We can understand almost all Australian and New Zealand English. It’s often one Hell of an English accent (especially with the Australians), but they can definitely be understood. However, on the radio I recently heard a speaker of a Tasmanian Australian English dialect. She was from a rural forested area and was protesting logging in her area. I had a hard time understanding that dialect.

I would be all for making West African English (at least the hard forms of it) separate languages. On US TV, African English from Kenya and Liberia gets subtitles.

We’ve already discussed the Scots language on this site before. That Scots is now judged a separate language and not an English dialect drives many English speakers into wild conniptions. You can Google the controversy on the Net and watch the wild, raging debates unfold over many pages. I’m not sure why it pisses speakers of a major language so much when divergent dialects are split off into separate languages. Maybe it’s a primal thing.

There’s only been one scientific study done, but it found 42% intelligibility of Scots by a US English speaker. Sounds about right, but I’m surprised it’s that high. I can often barely make out much of anything of Scots, just words here and there.

At this point it ought to be quite clear that Scots is more than one language. In the heart of Scotland, you go 20 miles in any direction and the other Scots speakers won’t understand you. I wonder if there is some kind of “Standard Scots” that could be spoken that would be understood everywhere?

I would like to start the debate off by proposing that Shetlandic Scots and Orcadian Scots be split off from Scots proper. It’s uncontroversial that these are the most wildly divergent Scots dialect, and they have poor intelligibility to speakers of the rest of Scots. Orcadian Scots is spoken on the Orkney Islands and Shetlandic Scots is spoken on the Shetlandic Islands.

Shetlandic and Orcadian Scots have poor intelligibility with Standard Scots.

As far as the rest of British English, we can understand most of you Limey bastards, believe it or not. However, I have a very hard time with Midlands English. I definitely get less than 90% of it and I don’t get better with time either.

Two of the most infernal English dialects have to be Geordie and Scouse. They are also quite famous.

Geordie is spoken in the far northeast of England near the Scottish border in and around Newcastle. Other dialects around that region like Cumbrian and Northumbrian are similar. Geordie is famous for being one of the hardest English accents to understand. There is actually some support among linguists for splitting it off to a separate language.

Scouse is the notorious, but delightful, dialect of Liverpool. In mild forms, it’s what comes out of the Beatles’ mouths in interviews. In hard form, it’s extremely difficult to understand. There is a report on the Net of a US English speaker who spent 7-8 years in Liverpool and never learned to understand Scouse very well. He said that young working class women were the worst. I’d be in favor of splitting this infernal dialect off into a separate language, but it’ll probably never happen. Can you imagine the shrieks?

The Flynn Effect and "g"

Repost from the old site.
Commenters recently have been bringing up the Flynn Effect (FE) of rising IQ’s in the past 80 years. There are many paradoxes and controversies over this effect that the commenters have been sharp enough to notice and point out. One argument is that the FE is not a real intelligence rise at all, since it is not on real g intelligence. In other words, the FE means nothing, and people are no smarter than before. The FE gains are not gains in intelligence at all, they are zero, nothing, null.
This is not correct, but the argument is very interesting. First we need to understand what the FE is and what it means. Then we need to understand what g is and what it means. The post concludes that there has indeed been an FE rise on g, but only on one component of g. Further, the post critiques the whole notion of seeing intelligence purely through the lens of g as senseless and meaningless, not to mention flat out wrong.
The subject matter is highly complex, but I tried to make it as simple as possible. My readers are a very intelligent bunch, and I think most of you should be able to follow this argument. You really need to read this slowly and take your time to try to understand what is going on here. It took me months of studying the FE before I finally started to get a handle on it.

The Flynn Effect (FE) is a secular rise in IQ over time that has been occurring throughout the West for 80 years now. All ages and ethnic groups are effected. Preliminary evidence indicates that it is also occurring in the Caribbean (Dominica), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya).
An overview of the FE itself goes beyond the scope of this post.
The FE is quite complex, and many people do not seem to understand the concept properly, hence are not able to discuss it, much less debate it. However, most people of reasonable intelligence, if interested, seem to be able to grasp the basic implications of the FE.
Hereditarians, most of whom are White racists, are very upset by the FE (Talk about being opposed to human progress!) because they have a strong emotional investment in White intellectual superiority and the intellectual inferiority of Blacks, Hispanics and other groups. We know that the major hereditarian researchers on intelligence are racists because almost all of them support getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws.
The agenda is clear for both lab coat racists and White nationalists: if we can prove that Blacks, Hispanics and others are intellectually inferior to Whites, we can legalize discrimination, especially job discrimination, against them.
A particularly frightening lab coat racist endeavor is attempting to prove that Blacks are inferior employees to Whites on average. If they prove this scientifically, then they will have a logical reason to support discriminating against Blacks in employment.
Almost all of these folks are White, and most of them call themselves race realists. They spend a good deal of time screaming and yelling about why Blacks and Browns will not accept that they are intellectually inferior (Steve Sailer specializes in this). Why would anyone want to accept, or actually accept, such a thing?
Furthermore, given the nefarious agenda behind those promoting these theories that seeks to legalize discrimination against Blacks and Browns, any Black or Hispanic person who gets behind this would have to be out of their minds.
I have ritually added “Hispanic” after Black above, but in general, Hispanics are being left out of this debate. The real effort here is directed by racist Whites against Blacks, not Hispanics. It is against Blacks that these Whites seek to legalize the right to discriminate.
The Flynn Effect has been hard to argue against, but the hereditarians have tried hard. They have shown that the FE is not on g. G is a hypothesized common correlational factor that supposedly measures pure intelligence. Everything outside of g is “not real intelligence”.
However, according to one paper, the very concept of g is tendentious to say the least, and possibly nonsensical. The paper is titled G, A Statistical Myth, by an admittedly brilliant mathematician named Cosma Shalizi. I read through the whole thing but I couldn’t really make sense of it. Perhaps someone who knows math better than I do can have a go at it.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G represents the totality of the areas where the purple subtests shade into the pink circle, and the degree to which they correlate (line up) with each other. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.
Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

The argument of whether or not the FE gains are on g or not is very complex, about as complex as the FE itself. First of all, the FE gains have not been across the board. In general, they have focused on verbal analysis, visual analysis, visual intelligence and problem-solving. Gains have been few to none in basic things like general knowledge, mathematics, mathematical analysis, spelling and reading comprehension.
G is a hypothesized and problematic construct that is a correlational factor all of the subtests on an intelligence test. It is thought to be highly heritable and physiologically based, and this is why the hereditarians have gone nuts over it.
It measures how someone with a somewhat more neurologically efficient brain will tend to score better across an entire range of subtests than someone who with a less efficient brain.
The reason the FE is not on g is because it is limited to a subset of intelligence subtests, and gains have been small to none across another subset. Therefore, there is no g gain.
However, Raven’s Progressive Matrices has shown larger gains than any other test. Raven’s was designed to measure pure g and nothing else. Raven’s scores are not thought to be effected by environmental factors outside of pregnancy and the first few months of life, and are thought to be purely neurologically, physiologically or genetically based.
Given the pure g basis for Raven’s, the wild secular gains on it on the FE are most puzzling.
However, recently James Flynn has shown that the FE does show a .5 correlation on a factor analyzing fluid g.
There is fluid g and crystallized g.
Fluid g is thought to peak early in life. This is why things that require raw brain processing power tend to peak in young people: creativity – artists, musicians, poets, novelists, filmmakers, mathematicians, physicists – often do their best work as young people (usually as young men). Fluid g is really a measure of how well, fast or efficient your brain works.
Crystallized g is another matter altogether. Crystallized g may be seen as “what you know” as opposed to “how fast of a brain you have.” While fluid g peaks early, crystallized g often goes up throughout life, and people can still score high on crystallized g in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s.
This is what we might call “accumulated knowledge” or “wisdom”. The old person’s brain does not work as fast, but the accumulated knowledge makes up for that in that they can see connections between things easier.
The young person’s brain works very fast, but with the lack of accumulated knowledge and life experience, they are not able to put things together as well to arrive at the correct conclusion. This is why no society has ever put the 18-23 year old’s in power, no matter how zippy their brains are.
Instead, the old men have always been put in power. The accumulation of a life of learning is thought to lead to a wisdom that will manifest itself as the ability to make “wise”, correct and proper decisions.
The concepts of crystallized and fluid g are complicated, but hopefully that explanation helped you understand it better.
The FE is on fluid g, not crystallized g. Visual intelligence and analysis, problem solving, verbal analysis analytical thinking in general, on intelligence tests, is in the realm of fluid g. Those are those little puzzles that ask you to decide which figure goes next in the series.
On intelligence tests, crystallized g measures accumulated knowledge and the degree to which one has learned basic tasks of modern life. The FE gains on mathematics, math analysis, reading comprehension, vocabulary and general knowledge are small to nil, and all of these tests measure crystallized g. To sum, these are the sorts of things you learn in school.
This is why, despite skyrocketing IQ’s, we cannot read a book, add and subtract, or do calculus any faster than our grandparents. We also do not know any more than they did, and we know no more words than they did.
This is obvious in the many reports on “idiocratic” state of high school seniors, college students or college grads. And this is how a puzzle is solved – how IQ’s are surely rising at the same time as idiocracy is.
From Flynn’s chapter summary:

IQ gains over time were calculated for each WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) subtest and the subtests ranked by size of gain. Verbal Similarities led at 20 points per generation – larger than gains on Raven’s Progressive Matrices.
Similarities measures on-the-spot problem-solving (something akin to fluid g); verbal subtests that do not measure this show low rate of gain. WISC subtests were also ranked by their correlations with Raven’s, the latter being used as a marker for fluid g. The r between the two hierarchies was calculated to approximate a correlation between IQ gains and fluid g .
The result of 0.50 contrasts with the negative correlation between IQ gains and the g generated by factor analyzing the WISC battery itself, which is generally viewed as predominately a crystallized g.
In sum, it appears that human groups can make massive fluid g gains in a period too short to accommodate radical change in the speed and efficiency of neural processes. Moreover, once gains in intelligent behavior over historical time are seen to be independent of brain physiology, does g really provide a criterion for assessing their significance?
Finally, not only a measure of fluid g (which is highly heritable) but also inbreeding depression are shown to be correlated with IQ gains – gains overwhelmingly environmental in origin. Therefore, correlations between such genetically influenced factors and the size of the black/white IQ gap do not show that the gap has a genetic component.

The Similarities test has risen faster than any other test. It measures analytical thinking and is thought to be a good measure of raw fluid g. The final paragraph is interesting. The Black-White IQ gap is correlated with something called inbreeding depression score, a purely heritable measure. Hereditarians use this to say that the B-W IQ gap is genetic.
But Flynn shows here that the FE (a purely environmental gain) also correlates with inbreeding depression, a purely hereditarian score. Flynn uses this to say that the B-W IQ gap is not necessarily completely genetic.
Flynn notes above that the FE cannot possibly be caused by brains that actually work better physiologically than the brains of our grandparents. Genetics doesn’t work that fast.
Therefore, what does the FE measure? Flynn says it measures “intelligent behavior.” So our brains don’t work any better than our grandparents’ brains, but we show improved “intelligent behavior” over them.
Therefore, another mystery is solved, how massive IQ gains can occur without concomitant improvement in the physiology of our brains.
Since hereditarians use g as a measure of physiological efficiency of our brains, Flynn calls this into question by noting that g gains can occur too fast to be accommodated for by physiologically improved brains. Therefore, Flynn suggests chucking g as a measure of pure brain physiological efficiency.
Therefore, the White nationalist and hereditarian argument that the FE is not on g has been proven wrong.

References

Flynn, James R. 2000. IQ Gains, WISC Subtests and Fluid g: g Theory and the Relevance of Spearman’s Hypothesis to Race, Chapter 12 in Bock, Gregory R., Goode, Jamie A., Webb, Kate. Novartis Foundation Symposium 233 – The Nature of Intelligence, pp. 202-227. Novartis Foundation. Published online.

What is a "Flying Toilet?"

It’s that question all of you have been waiting to know the answer to, right? I know I have. Ever since I heard the phrase, “flying toilets”, I was mesmerized. Now I love me a toilet now and then, especially if it’s nice and warm, where I can relax on the throne with my loose shoes (apologies to Arthur Butz). Toilets not only come in handy, they are a downright necessity as long as you are breathing.
But “flying toilets” really got me thinking. You mean airplanes? Or is it the flying shit of Mexico Shitty (sic), where so many people shit on the ground that the winds toss the shit up into the air as “shit-air”, sharing the shit-wealth so to speak, so everyone can breathe in that nice tasting air, not only the poor slum denizens, but even the rich who forget to venture outside without a gas mask.
Turns out that flying toilets are just plastic bags. You use them and then you toss ’em. Where? Oh, anywhere you like! Just throw it over your shoulder like a sack lunch on a stick. Throw at the neighbor you never liked. Throw it at no one in particular. Throw it at the evil world that forces you to live in Kibera (possibly the most evil slum on Earth – Kibera is literally Hell on Earth). Throw it and curse the Gods!
Flying toilets are a menace. If you don’t look both ways before crossing the slum-street, you might just get nailed by one. They pile up on the roofs and attract flies. And when it rains, the flying toilets try to become one with you, even in your very own home. They merge with the former streets and now rivers and kids go for a swim in the Flying Toilet Streams. It’s like something out of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, except, depressingly, it’s actually real.
There are actually some measures being undertaken in Kenya to reduce to prevalence of flying toilets, which is a good sign of some progress.
I hate to sound like a racist Afrikaner bastard, but sometimes it seems like these folks were better off in the bush, no?

Geographic Spread and Ethnic Origins of European Haplogroups

Geographic Spread and Ethnic Origins of European Haplogroups, on the very interesting Eupedia page.
From the About:

Eupedia.com was founded in December 2004.Our aim is to create a detailed and informative guide for countries of the European Union for travellers, expats and locals alike, with an emphasis on sightseeing, history, culture, economy, and life in Europe.

I figure that this page tells us something about the origins of the Caucasians, not to mention the origins of the Europeans. One thing that is incontrovertibly clear is that the Caucasian Race did not arise in Europe. Instead, it appears to have arisen in Southern Iran, the Caucasus and the Middle East, as I have speculated. So the Grandaddy of all the great European White Men was some towelheaded wog. Figures. Choke on that, White nationalists.
Going back even further, the Caucasians appear to have origins in Haplogroup N, which, a commenter on this blog has noted, seems to originate in Eastern Africa, especially around the area of the Masai in Kenya. This is also as I suspected, as I assume that the proto-Caucasians may have roots in the Masai, the Tutsi, the Southern Sudanese and other Desert Adopted Elongated African types. The Tutsi even have an uncanny, almost Caucasian appearance about them, despite their African purity (no Caucasian blood).
It also looks like any European clades go back no further than 13,000 years in Europe, and even at that time, I am told that Europeans looked more like Arabs than present day Aryan Supermen. This means that the vaunted White Race, like most exact races on Earth, is a relatively new creation, the latest model, as it were. Attempts to link present day Europeans to Paleolithic Europeans would appear to be absurd on their face.
If anyone other than White nationalist boneheads can make more sense of that page than this, go to it. It’s looks kind of mind-boggling from here.

Black Crime and Intelligence: An Intrepid Investigation

Repost from the old site.
Note: This post has been accused of racism. See here for my position statement on racism.
Black crime is a real thing; let’s not gloss it over, and the Black crime wave is a relatively recent occurrence, mostly since about 1960 or so, which just so happens to coincide with sky-high rates of Black illegitimacy, Black males being raised without fathers, etc. Around this time many Blacks moved from the South to the North. But many more Black females moved north than Black males.
So there were more females than males. In such a situation, many males will tend not to marry and instead will just play the various women, father children, not support them, etc. In the opposite situation, more males than females, males will compete aggressively for females, quickly marry any available females and tend not to leave them.
Since the 1960’s, there has been a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the North. All of this has pretty much wreaked havoc on the Black family. It’s clear that those Black males frequently being raised by poorly socialized Black females, without fathers, have a higher rate of sociopathy. In fact, this formula may produce sociopathy in any race.
Much of the analysis in the preceding three paragraphs comes from The Antisocial Personalities by David Lykken. While heavy on the psychological jargon, I found it a great read. It’s one of the best books ever written on sociopathy.
Robert Hare, one of the world’s top experts on psychopaths, also has a great book on sociopathy, Without Conscience, The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Hare’s book is much easier to read and is a must for anyone interested in the subject.
The recent explosion of Black crime shows that it is not just Black genes that cause Black crime, which itself is real: Blacks have a 9 times higher crime rate than Whites.
I admit that the town I just moved to has a reputation for a fairly low crime rate. The reason given to me in whispers is that, while heavily Hispanic, the town also has few Blacks. Hence less crime.
Demographics trumps all for many Americans when deciding on a place to live, or especially to buy a house. For decades now, Whites have been fleeing areas, particularly inner cities and exurbs, as they turned Black.
Now they are fleeing Hispanics, and in towns in the South San Fransisco Bay Area, namely Cupertino, they are even fleeing Asians! There, White parents complain about heavily Asian schools where the Asians out-compete their kids, where sports, arts and music and either poorly funded or simply not supported at all, where all the emphasis is on math and science.
For their part, Asian parents have decried the over 90% Asian demographic there as not representative of the reality of US society, in that Cupertino does not prepare Asian students for the real world.
The Whites flee and flee and run and run. One gets the impression that at some point there will be nowhere left to run.
Yet we now have something called “Black Flight.”
To understand this, first realize that Black society has become two-tiered with the liberation Blacks experienced since the 1960’s. Increasingly, a Black professional, middle and upper class reaps the fruits of American society, while a Black underclass continues to fester in the worst pathology.
In places like northeastern New Orleans, middle and upper middle class Blacks are fleeing the pathology of the Black Inner City in New Orleans to create a relatively upscale Black neighborhood, which undoubtedly has less pathology than the danger zone they are fleeing. Labeling middle class Blacks with the problems of the Black underclass is immoral, irrational, rude and just stupid.
Yet this is what the Hal Turners do.
Nor should we decry all “flight” from blighted neighborhoods as “racist,” as the Left is wont to do. Since Blacks themselves are engaging in “flight” from blighted Black neighborhoods, it seems silly to regard flight from blight as a racist move.
Even with that reality of high Black crime, why be racist? Any given individual Black person may quite possibly, and often does, possess the moral character and decency that one wants in a friend or acquaintance. Therefore, Blacks in general should be treated respectfully as individuals as long as one feels they are good people and lacks evidence that they are not.
The White racists also say that Blacks are stupid. There is a White-Black variance in IQ that has lasted for some time now. I will not go into the debate around that variance except to say that I think it is real.
But it is not so devastating as one thinks. First of all, we are not taking into account the Flynn Effect, whereby the IQ’s of all people in the Western World have been rising for decades now. A couple of recent studies have also found the Flynn Effect in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and rural Kenya, of all places.
There is much debate about the cause of the rise, but it is real, although there is evidence that it is petering out.
Flynn is also the author a study showing young Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap in the US by about 5-6 points since 1970.
Since IQ is always renormed around an average of 100 for Whites, the rise is not noticeable. That is, a 100 nowadays is a considerably higher score than a 100 a few decades ago, since IQ’s continue to climb while the scale is constantly renormed to mask the changes. So, Blacks have been getting smarter for decades now in America (and in Brazil and Kenya at least, also) along with other races.
At some point, if the trend continues, we can hope for various groups in (at least) the West: brightest, brighter and bright. If different races compare differently along that scale, it should not be a tremendous matter. Further, as Black IQ continues to rise with every decade, it becomes more and more difficult to call Blacks “dumb” in the face of rising Black IQ.
Nutrition is the main reason given for the Flynn Effect; technology, video games and an increasingly intellectually stimulating modern environment are others. Blacks probably still do not eat as good a diet in the West as Whites, so there is probably room for more improvement here. If Blacks follow Whites in enthusiasm for video games and personal computers, there is probably room for further improvement.
As is, video games are probably played by Whites more than Blacks and many poorer Blacks still do not own a PC or have internet access.
Furthermore, as IQ’s have risen for decades now, the rationale for setting mental retardation at 70 IQ becomes harder to sustain. After all, an 85 IQ today is higher than an 85 IQ 30 years ago.
Racists conflate Black IQ with Black crime, and do the same with Hispanics. This argument is interesting and not entirely without merit.
However, there are some problems with the analysis, yet, at the same time, if true, it offers some hope.
First of all, as noted, Black IQ, along with all other IQ’s in the West, has been rising for decades.
The low IQ-crime link is especially seen at the lower end of the IQ range, which is where the Flynn Effect is having its greatest effect. I.e., the average rise noted by Flynn is mainly accounted for by reduced numbers of scores in the lowest range of IQ’s. As the number of persons scoring at the lowest end of the scale becomes fewer and fewer, if there is a good IQ-crime link, then we would expect crime to fall in tandem.
Looking at average crime rates between Blacks, Hispanics and Whites, we can see that more than IQ is accounting for the differences.
Hispanics have a crime rate three times that of Whites, and Blacks, as noted, have a crime rate nine times as high. Average Black IQ is about 89.8, Hispanic IQ is about 92 and White IQ is 103. The IQ-crime link is quite imperfect.
If IQ alone accounted for the differences (going by the White-Black spread), Hispanic crime would be 6-7 times the White rate, not 3 times higher. So Hispanics are committing crimes at a much lower rate than would be expected by IQ – 50% lower. Something about Hispanics, possibly Hispanic culture, is lowering the Hispanic crime rate.
If we take the White-Hispanic IQ spread instead, the Black crime rate would be about 4-5 times the White rate, not 9 times higher. So Blacks are committing crimes at double the rate expected by IQ. Something about Blacks besides IQ, possibly Black culture, is inflating the Black crime rate.
Clearly, while there is some IQ-crime correlation among groups, there is a heck of a lot more going on with crime than merely IQ.
It is here that we probably enter into the wilds of a place called culture.
Racists like to say that Black pathology is due to Black genes, and as such is hopeless. Blacks are stupid and crime-prone, it is in their genes, and nothing can be done about it. It is important to take this on in a logical manner instead of just hurling the racist moniker at those voicing this argument.
Let us look at Cuba for instance. Cuba is a state that is about 63% Black and mulatto – 11% Black and 52% Mulatto. Also there is a significant percentage of Amerindian genes in Cubans along with small portion of Chinese mixture.
A fascinating look at the variety of lineages visible in the Cuban people is here – it seems they have every possible mixture you could think of. Considering the 63% Black and mulatto population, we should expect to see high levels of pathology, since we are told that all Black/mulatto nations produce high levels of crime and pathology.
What do we see instead? In Latin America, Cubans have the second longest life expectancy, are the best educated, have the lowest infant mortality, and have the highest standardized test scores in the region. Cuba, with 2% of the population of the region, has 10% of the region’s scientists. The nation is a world leader in biotechnology and medical research.
They have the highest percentage of agronomists per capita of any country on Earth and the highest doctor-patient ratio (1 doctor for every 169 patients). Cubans, far from starving as capitalist propaganda says, are among the top 5 nations in Latin America in terms of caloric and protein intake. The rate of malnutrition is so low – 2% – that the UN recently declared that Cuba has wiped out malnutrition.
Further, the rate of street crime, especially violent crime, is quite low. Opponents of the regime quickly retort that “there is nothing to steal in Cuba.” Surely there is plenty to steal, and if not, there are always other humans to commit violent crimes against.
Haiti is vastly poorer than Cuba, surely has much less in the way of stuff to steal, and has an out of control crime rate. Racists quickly point out that Haiti is all Black, hence ridden with crime. Yet Cuba is also majority Black and mulatto.
Havana is often regarded as the safest large city in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba is regarded by many travelers as one of the safest countries in Latin America. A majority-black and mulatto country and big city the safest in an entire hemisphere – imagine that!
A typical rejoinder is that Cuba is a dictatorship and therefore there is little crime. Hey, if it takes a cop on every corner to control crime, I say go for it.
Furthermore, the penalties for breaking the law are really far worse in other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, where the prisons are utterly Hellish and where police death squads roam the streets slaughtering petty criminals and street kids at an astonishing rate.
Where there are a lot of Blacks, there is often quite a bit of social pathology, low educational achievement, crime, especially violent crime, etc. Some racists have also implied an association between Blacks and rape. The more Blacks, the more rape. All of these statistics are interesting, but taken to their racist logic, lead to discrimination.
For instance, many Blacks are upstanding folks who play no role in any of this pathology or crime. By associating them with their brethren who do, and discriminating against them, you commit an immoral act.
Further, as the Cuban example shows, majority-Black and mulatto nations are capable of amazing achievements, in the Cuban case beating many majority Mestizo and even some majority White nations on a variety of metrics.
One way of ameliorating of the problems of Black pathology laid out above could involve looking at those nations and locales that seem to have the highest rates of Black achievement and the lowest rates of Black pathology. This could be seen as an environment to “bring out the best in Blacks”. The Cuban example shows that Black genes are not destiny and there is a way forward, out of the cave of genetic determinism.

Bad Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want To Live There

Repost from the old site. This article has produced a tremendous amount of controversy, angry comments, and even, oddly enough, virulent hate mail. I guess I hit some raw nerves. I stand by my comments that these cities are some of the worst in the world, and, in doing further research on the Net, have found only further support for my thesis.
Some of these cities, such as Bogotá, for instance, have large wealthy districts that are apparently quite pleasant. If one is rich, one can make a nice life just about anywhere on the globe. But this is not important – what is important is how the majority live.
The title is a play on the line, “Nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there”, said about many less-than-desirable tourist locales. This post is about the worst places on Earth to visit, and probably to live too. The ratings were based on research done on the Internet in various places, including here and here.
I’m going to focus on the places that are dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, trashy, rip-off havens, unsanitary and dangerous (Third World), and avoid places that are merely depressing, unsightly, rude, etc. (First World). Why? Because I live in the US, and those Third World qualities are going to be the most disturbing to me. I’m also avoiding active war zones because everyone knows they are horrible.
To be fair to the “Third Worldists” out there, I noted that many people slammed various places in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, Ireland Italy, the US, Great Britain and Australia for various reasons, mostly because they are said to be unfriendly, depressing, tacky, cheesy, boring, etc.
Detroit seemed to top the list as worst US city, along with Newark (though it had one fan), East St. Louis and New Haven (though some liked New Haven) were runners-up. Various small towns in the Rockies (especially Idaho) and Texas also were listed. For some reason, a lot of people hate Vancouver, BC in Canada.
To my thinking, many of the horrible cities below point out the catastrophe of Latin American, Indian, Indonesian and Philippine capitalism. In much of Africa, capitalism doesn’t seem to working very well.
For all its faults, impoverished Cuba certainly does not resemble any of these Latin American hellholes in any way, shape or form. I don’t think that capitalism in the First World is failing, but looking at many of the cities below, it’s hard to argue that capitalism is doing anything but failing in those places.
Some of the winners in the Loser Destination Contest:
Colon, Panama: A dirty, crime-ridden disaster of a city. The most dangerous city in Latin America, full of residents who seem like they would just as soon knife you as say hello. Other than the free trade zone, the entire city seems to be sprawling slum. Colon has no redeeming qualities. This city topped many worst lists.
Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador: Guayaquil is horrible. A stinking, steaming, downright dangerous heap of a city with miles of slums. With armies of glowering gang members, this place is dangerous even in mid-day. There are garbage dumps everywhere with corpses laying out in plain sight and guns going off all the time. Quito is similar. Guayaquil topped many worst city lists.
Johannesburg, South Africa: How sad that this country now has one of the worst violent crime rates on Earth. Although popular with tourists, this city is downright dangerous. This city also topped many worst lists. This blog supports the Mandela government, but the problems of this tragic nation seem insurmountable.
*****
Lagos, Nigeria, or the whole country: This city, and even the whole country, seems to top everyone’s list. Garbage is everywhere, the city stinks, the poverty is horrible, animals are slaughtered on the streets, and it seems that at least half the population wakes up every morning thinking, “Who can I rip off today?” Up to 90% of the economy may be “underground”, off the books, or crime-related in some way or another.
Nigeria has what must be the worst government on Earth and the country is rated the second most corrupt on Earth. The national airlines are dangerous and not recommended. The ripoff attempts often start as soon as you land at the airport and won’t let up until you leave.
It’s best to assume that most, if not all, Nigerians you meet in Lagos are out to rip you off in some way or another and then proceed from there. The city is full of impostors, and you really do not know if anyone is really who they say they are. The police and Customs officials are all crooks and so is 99% of the government.
Most bank and post office employees are also crooked. Imagine waiting in line at the post office, and a group of swaggering gangsters with fake ID’s strut in to pick up their stolen goods reshipped from overseas. They go straight to the front of the line ahead of everyone else, pick up their stolen property, and walk away laughing, having paid off the Post Office clerks. Welcome to Nigeria.
There are Internet cafes all over the city, where 150,000 full-time Internet scammers ply their trade in plain view of anyone to see, and the government doesn’t bat an eye or lift one finger to stop them. In many cafes, 80% or more of the patrons are Internet scammers. Nigeria is now world-famous for Internet scams. Even out-of-work TV newscasters scam away in the cafes, trying to steal from Americans.
The scammers started out with the famous 419 email scams but have now branched out into lottery, romance, auction, roommate, orphanage and check-cashing scams. The scams are continuously evolving, and Nigerian con artists are widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the world, as they have been practicing the art for decades now.
On highways outside of Lagos, you can see numerous vehicles wrecked on the side of the road, or even in the middle of the road, some with dead bodies still in them or beside them. Thieves pick through the wreckage and rifle the corpses looking for stuff to steal. All of the roads are dangerous, as armed robbers often set up roadblocks to shake down travelers.
Nigeria is now a world center for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, credit card fraud and drug dealing, and a district of Lagos, Oluwole, is now a world center for top-notch forgery.
The FBI and the US Merchant Risk Council recently came to Nigeria and inspected 40 packages coming into the country from the US to check for stolen goods. 39 of the 40 packages contained stolen property.
When the agents arrived at a Lagos neighborhood and tried to arrest an 18-year-old boy for reshipping scams that targeted US merchants, much of the neighborhood – up to 100 people – rushed out of their homes to defend the local punk from Big Bad Whitey.
Although the country is awash in oil, the power goes out all the time because the government power company is so crooked. The power company has either stolen all of its own budget money or the power comes in, but the crooked company resells it on the side.
As with elsewhere in Africa, Whitey is blamed for all the troubles here. Hatred of Whitey is higher in Nigeria than in much of the rest of Black Africa and the White visitor will definitely feel it.
The degeneration of Nigerian society is complete, and the culture appears near collapse. Mobs lynch thieves in the street and kill them in public for as meager a crime as stealing a cellphone, yet crime rages on anyway. Anyone can just up and say they own your house, put it on the market and sell it and you are out a house. Law enforcement, courts and anything resembling government seem to be nonexistent.
******
******
Lima, Peru: When they tell you to visit Peru, they don’t mean the nightmarish capital. There are teeming slums as far as the eye can see, horrible crime (although not a lot of violent crime), pickpockets everywhere, and on top of all that, the sun never comes out. The fog mixes with the smog and the filthy streets to make a toxic brew. Lima made many worst lists.
But it has its fans, and the upscale Miraflores district is said to be nice. The execrable Shining Path took up their nihilistic, deranged war in this country for a reason – because Peru is a rotten heap of a country.
******
******
Medan (Sumatra), Jakarta, Surabaya, Indonesia: Jakarta is a reeking city with terrible pollution, open sewers and wrenching poverty.
Medan seemed to top many lists for worst city on Earth, though it has a few fans. It’s hot, dirty and polluted, with factories, thieves and leering, menacing men everywhere. There is also nowhere to stay, not that you would want to stay anyway. Besides Medan, the rest of Sumatra is much better.
The river running through Surabaya is so polluted you might vomit walking across the bridge. As you suppress your gag reflex, you will look down and notice that people are actually washing their clothes in this river.
*****
*****
Mumbai, Patna (Bihar), Calcutta, all large Indian cities, India: Indian cities are very dirty and teeming with some of the most miserably poor and wretched people you will ever see, but at least there is not a lot of crime. The Hindu religion keeps crime down because believers fear they will be punished by returning in the next life as something terrible, like one of the huge rats you see scurrying about.
Mumbai has pollution that is so bad that people actually get lung cancer from breathing the air. Mumbai, a stinking and sometimes dangerous city, made many worst city lists.
Patna is the sorry capital of Bihar, the poorest state in India. It’s dirty and miserable, and it’s almost impossible to even get a taxi to get you out of town, which means it’s hard to leave the place.
Calcutta is generally agreed to be one of the worst cities in India.
*****
Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, China: Deadly pollution, mostly from coal.
Bucharest, all of Romania: Stalinist pollution covers the whole country and everyone seems depressed.
Bali (in particular Kuta Beach), Indonesia: Hopes so high, reality so low. It seems everyone is out to rip you off. Surly locals hungry for money. Dangerous roads, nightmarish traffic, rude, leering men. When it rains, the sewers flood into the streets. Very high crime rate, hustlers everywhere. Most of the rest of Indonesia is pretty nice. Kuta is a tourist trap gone to Hell.
****
Manila, Philippines: A crime-ridden hellhole. There are armed guards everywhere, especially in front of banks due to constant bank robberies. Their nemeses, criminal gangs armed to the teeth, roam streets filled with prostitutes and transvestites.
It’s a town where everyone seems like they are out to rip you off in one way or other, and the hotel workers and cab drivers are all crooked. The latest advice is to have your Filipino friend meet you at the airport and head straight to their place, thereby avoiding all the ripoffs and con artists that seem to descend on every tourist. Traffic is horrible, and pollution is so bad it kills people. But some people don’t mind it.
****
Gdansk, Poland: Combine a high crime rate and daylight robberies with totally crooked, thieving officials, and you get this Polish city. However, a number of others said it’s just fine.
****
Mexico City, Villahermosa, Mexico: Mexico City is a dirty, polluted city suffering an insane, surreal epidemic of street crime, especially violent crime. Add 20 million people, stir well, bring to a boil, cover with a lid of otherworldly smog, and simmer.
Reportedly, tons of human waste are blown into the air every day, and much of the population has constant respiratory infections. The sewer system is reportedly above ground and more or less runs through lots of neighborhoods where many people are residing.
Villahermosa is a Mad Max-style, violent, crime-ridden disgrace of a city. There are stabbings and shootings galore here, even with a 10 PM curfew in place.
*****
Tangier, Morocco: This is a dangerous place with lots of street crime. That’s unusual for a North African country, but Tangier is so close to Europe that it is almost a part of Europe.
*****
Cairo, Egypt: Cairo has horrible pollution, smells terrible, there is trash everywhere, nothing works, there are armies of miserably poor people and it boasts some outrageously awful traffic. In the souks there are huge rats and wild, mangy scavenging dogs running about in plain sight. There seems no escape from aggressive, pestering hawkers. On top of all that, all the Customs officials are criminals.
The crime rate is fairly low, though. Thank President Hosni Mubarak. 25 years ago, Cairo was one of the great world cities.
*****
Bangkok, Thailand: This gigantic city has pollution so bad you need to wear a mask over your face. However, some folks like this city and say it has many positive attributes.
*****
Brindisi, Naples, Italy: No one seems to like Brindisi. It’s a sad, dirty, polluted and ugly city, with hostile, brawling, drunken locals, hungry stray dogs, belligerent drivers, horrible traffic, and miles of soul-killing tenements.
You would think that despite all of that, being genuine Italians, they could still manage to make a decent pizza. Forget it: even the pizza is terrible. Brindisi topped many worst lists, although it has a couple of fans.
I had never even heard of Brindisi and had to look it up on a map. It’s located in southern Italy on the East Coast, southeast of Naples. Naples has a great deal of crime, and many think this city is overrated as a tourist destination, although others say that, despite the drawbacks, it has its joys. All of southern Italy has a lot of crime, but it’s mostly property crime.
*****
*****
Athens, Piraeus, or the whole country, Greece: Greece, especially Athens, gets mixed reviews. A lot of people really hate Athens; others don’t. The detractors say the city is dirty, ugly, depressing, polluted, and covered with garbage and traffic. I was surprised that Athens made the list, as I had always thought it was a wonderful city.
The port city of Piraeus is a nasty place. The whole city smells like a giant sewage treatment plant, and the ocean offshore has a sickening color to it.
*****
****
Suburbs of Paris, France: These tragic towns, full of hostile Arab immigrants angrily refusing to assimilate to French culture or join French society, are a sign that the French model is not working well, at least for some folks.
There is a terribly high crime rate here, and cops and firemen often won’t go there because they get attacked as soon as they show up. These mournful towns are packed with angry, unemployed young Arab men who like to seriously riot every year or so, or even more often if the mood strikes them. Lately, they have been staging mini-riots every night. If only 100 cars are burned, that’s a good night.
Otherwise, Paris, of course, is one of the world’s great cities. But that doesn’t mean you might not walk into a subway station reeking of urine and see junkies shooting up in plain sight. But still, Paris is a must on any serious travelers’ list.
******
Brussels, Belgium: As with Paris, the districts with many Arab immigrants are quite dangerous and unpleasant, but the rest of the city is as nice as any big city.
Abidjan, Ivory Coast: With one of the worst crime rates in Africa (although it has plenty of competition), this city topped many worst lists.
*****
Bangui, Central African Republic: One of the worst cities in Africa, as bad as Lagos. The crime rate is totally insane. The locals will try to steal everything you own and even a contingent of armed guards will not be enough to protect you.
Your hotel room will feel like a war zone. This fiendish city made a number of worst city lists. Lonely Planet’s guidebook more or less tells you to avoid this city altogether. Here is a harrowing report of a visit to Bangui.
*****
Bamako, Mali: Mali has one of the worst governments in Africa, admittedly a race with a lot of competition. Bamako is a sick joke of a town, where the tourist surcharge is rigorously enforced, and the ridiculous, potholed streets are undriveable by any vehicle.
Guatemala City, Guatemala: A totally dangerous, dirty, polluted, terminal patient of a city, full of scary, heavily armed teenage soldiers. The soldiers are there to keep the teeming, crime-ridden slums that stretch as far as the eye can see, from overrunning the place. But this city has a few fans.
Belize City, Belize: This sweltering, miserable, impoverished, crime-ridden, very dangerous city is built on a swamp, with a jungle for a backyard. The beggars are aggressive and even menacing, and shady characters shadow you on the streets as you walk about. Cops are nowhere to be seen. This is one of the worst cities in the Americas. But the rest of the country is a great place to vacation.
*****
Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sao Paulo is the industrial engine of Brazil. This major city is full of garbage and very dangerous. There are hustlers as far as the eye can see, chaotic streets that render maps useless, not enough cops and Godawful traffic.
Rio de Janeiro, the popular tourist destination with the killer skyline perfect for any postcard, is a deceptive place. It’s a very dangerous city with lots of violent crime. Street gangs armed to the teeth regularly shoot it out in military-style wars with the cops.
Death squads of off-duty cops funded by local businessmen roam the streets at night, murdering homeless, drug-addicted street kids and petty criminals with impunity in a sickening “social cleanup” campaign.
There are pickpockets and muggers all about, often in menacing, youthful gangs (especially on the famous beach) and they frequently operate in broad daylight. A dystopian horrorshow of a city.
******
Nairobi, Kenya: Unfortunately, this city is seriously crime-ridden. Even locals admit that violent crime has reached catastrophic proportions.
Caracas, Barquisimeto, or the whole country, Venezuela: The crime is very bad here, sadly, and there is garbage everywhere you look. This blog supports Hugo Chavez, but crime in Venezuela is a tragic, long-standing problem with no quick fixes.
Guinea-Bissau: There is no water, no electricity, no place to stay, and the only hotel is half-demolished.
San‘a’, Yemen: In a Dickensenian touch, children are actually chained up here in order to beg!
Moynaq and Nukus, Uzbekistan: These two cities broiling in a merciless desert have been ruined and turned into ecological dead zones by Stalinist pollution.
*****
San Pedro Sulu, Honduras: This sad town has a horrible amount of crime. Swarms of locals will attack you on the bus, trying to steal your luggage. You will have to fight them off if you wish to retain your suitcase.
Like the rest of this wreck of a country, it’s full of US gang members gone home to Honduras. People here are very poor and desperate. If you can make it to the nice part of town and afford to stay there, though, you can be quite safe.
*****
*****
Dakar, Senegal: According to some, this large West African city has horrible street crime – it is very dangerous. They say if you don’t have armed guards with you, don’t even go outside your hotel room.
However, others report that they spent a week there and found it to be safe, in fact safer than many American cities. Violent crime is reportedly rare, and the country is one of the most stable in Africa, and has been that way since independence.
*****
Port Au Prince, Haiti: This filthy, degraded, extremely dangerous and desperately poor mess of a city is best avoided at all costs. It sports open sewers, enslaved children, riots, killings and lots of other fun things. This blog did support President Aristide’s efforts to improve the tragedy of a nation called Haiti.
Lome, Togo: Criminals are as common as mosquitoes here, walking around fearlessly in broad daylight in this terrible city full of miserable people and crooked taxi drivers.
*****
Istanbul, Turkey: The 200% tourist markup is fully in force in this dirty, ugly city full of harassing, hawking, hostile locals and crumbling buildings, and you can scarcely find a merchant who does not enforce it. There is also a lot of crime here, including some violent crime, unusual for a Muslim city. The weather is lousy, but there are some pretty mosques to visit. However, Istanbul does have a fan or two.
The rest of the country is a great place to visit, has many fans and is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Best bet for Turkey is just to head to the tourist spots and blow off Istanbul altogether.
*****
Phnom Penh, Kampuchea: This city has become a very dangerous, crime-ridden place. The gangs of little girl prostitutes add a particularly poignant touch.
*****
Bogotá, Colombia or really the whole country: Bogotá is one of the most dangerous places in the Americas but there seems to be agreement that Colon, Lima and Guayaquil are worse. Really, all of Colombia is dangerous as Hell, to be honest.
This comment about Bogotá was recently rebutted by a Bogotán blogger, with more comments here. His post aggressively taking issue with this entry is in Spanish, but my Spanish is good enough to get the gist of it. Also I am getting a lot of comments coming in from Bogotáns on the Internet aggressively objecting to the content.
The sole issue that these Defenders of Bogotá are taking issue with is my contention that the city is a very dangerous place. To be honest, Bogotá used to have a truly horrible reputation for crime, but in recent years, there has been a huge effort put into cracking down on street crime. For some more agreement that Bogota is dangerous, see here, here, here and here.
I will now attempt to prove that. There are twice as many murders in Colombia as in the US, and the US has seven times as many people. That means that the murder rate in Colombia is an outrageous 14 times that of the US, and the US is considered to have a high murder rate for the developed world.
Colombia has the highest murder rate on Earth, with Washington, DC and Johannesburg not far behind, but in the case of Colombia, we are talking about a whole country, not some festering city. Out of every 100,000 people, 60-70 will be killed every year. Defenders may try to argue that this is due to a simmering civil war, but 75% of the 25,000 homicides are merely of the criminal variety.
On an average day in Colombia, there are 2 bank robberies, 8 highway robberies, 72 murders and 204 assaults or muggings. You have a greater chance of being murdered in Colombia than you do of dying of cancer! Death squads made up of soldiers and off-duty cops roam the streets, murdering drug-addicted, petty criminal street kids, transvestites, homosexuals and prostitutes.
In fact, probably more prostitutes and homosexuals are murdered per capita in Colombia than even in the most barbarian parts of the Muslim World. Want to fly a plane in Colombia? Don’t. There have been 138 plane crashes since World War 2, with 2,745 deaths.
One of the most popular things in Bogotá is scopolamine. This drug is used by crooks to disable their victims so they can rip them off. It is sprayed in the face, dumped in your drink or spiked into a cigarette. Bogotá hospitals receive an incredible 2,000 scopolamine victims every month, or an astounding 66 a day. The drug knocks you out and can cause medical problems.
Colombia has one of the world’s worst road systems. Many roads are not even marked. Drivers are reckless and many cars don’t have headlights at night. Cows have a tendency to wander into the road.
Taxis are totally dangerous and are best avoided, if possible. Women are advised to avoid all taxis at night. Anyone is advised to avoid any taxi that already has someone in it.
In many cases, this is a criminal accomplice of the thuggish driver. In addition to getting scopolamine sprayed in your face, another popular scam is the “jump-start”: you are told that the taxi has stalled and asked to get out and help push. As you do so, the taxi driver leaves with your luggage.
Buses are also best avoided. Thieves haunt the buses, waiting for you to fall asleep, at which point, they rip you off. Certain bus lines are frequented by thieves offering drugged gum, sweets, food and cigarettes. After the drug knocks you out, they rob you blind. In addition to theft and druggings, kidnapping and extortion are also rife on buses.
In view of all of the above, it is nothing short of amazing that all of these Colombians are angrily protesting my characterization of their country as dangerous. Or perhaps they doth protest too much?
*****
Managua, Nicaragua: This dirty, crime-ridden, dangerous disaster of a city has a bombed-out look about it. This blog supports Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista Party and prays that they can ameliorate this mess.
*****
San Salvador, El Salvador: See Managua. Full of dangerous former LA gang members. Death squads roam the streets, slaughtering gangsters by the dozen, but for every one you kill, it seems five more pop up in his place.
This blog supports the FMLN’s efforts to reform this ruined land, but the crime here has become so terrible, one wonders if anything short of an act of God could make things better. In fact, I used to make contributions too the FMLN’s weapons fund via an FMLN agent in Los Angeles during the 1980’s.
*****
*****
Detroit, New Haven, Newark, Gary (Indiana), Hammond (Indiana), USA: Detroit topped all lists as the worst city in the US. An ugly, dangerous, depressing and filthy city with a downtown that looks like a war zone – a despairing district surrounded by miles of crumbling, abandoned industrial buildings, torn-down fences and rusting cars.
Newark is similar, with few to no redeeming qualities. It’s a frightening, polluted city with a postwar look of miles of weedy, trash-strewn vacant lots where crumbling apartment buildings have been torn down. It’s also a dangerous city with a high crime rate.
New Haven, despite the presence of Yale University, is similar. There are legions of homeless, begging drug users clogging the streets, and the crime rate is very high due to hordes of crack-dealing gangs shooting it out on the streets. Congress and Columbus Avenues are notorious for drive-by shootings, drug dealing and muggings.
It is reportedly the HIV capital of the East Coast due to IV drug use. A lot of the more respectable people have been moving out for some time now. Although much of the city is quite ugly, New Haven does have its bright spots, thanks to Yale. There are nice parts of town, parks, trees, etc.
Gary is yet another postindustrial Rust Belt train wreck of a town. A grimy town full of abandoned factories, overgrown lots, rusting fences, graffiti, barred windows and vomit. Go downtown and see tall buildings all boarded up, with no vehicles in sight and unhinged stoplights swaying in the wind – for all practical purposes, a ghost town. This was once a vibrant, working-class city, and now it looks like Road Warrior.
Hammond is similar, a suicidally depressing city lined with shuttered factories on the shores of Lake Michigan. Yet another Rust Belt post-industrial ruin.
*****
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: A collapsing, dirty, crime-ridden hellhole.
Osaka, Japan: I never would have thought that this city would make the list but according to my friend Tumerica, she says it is the worst city she has ever lived in. I tagged her with the title of this story. In blogging, tagging mean you are supposed to write on the topic – kind of like, “Tag, you’re it.” I will let her explain why Osaka is such a crappy place in her post here.

Great New Study of Ancient African Genes

Repost from the old site.
A new study of African genes shines some new light on the Out of Africa Hypothesis, which is now the dominant view. Most of the Multiregionalists are now isolated into racial or ethnic chauvinists, each of whom wants to believe that they came from a different kind of monkey. This includes European, Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese chauvinists. It’s all nonsense, and Out of Africa reigns.
Previously, the oldest human lineages were in the Khoisan or Bushmen, where they go back from 90,000-150,000 years. During this period, six separate extant lineages existed in parallel in the proto-Khoisan.
However, recent data has shown that the oldest human genes of all are in East Africans from Kenya and Tanzania.
When humans left Africa 60-70,000 years before present (YBP) from East Africa via the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, and from there along the Indian Ocean to India, SE Asia and Australia and New Guinea, there were at least 40 separate lineages going in Africa, each of which has continued to this day.
Finally, 40,000 YBP, newer, more modern lineages entered the Khoisan pool. The evolution of humans in Africa involves many lineages that were isolated from one another and were evolving separately.
A very early split in modern humans of two separate lines is suggested. This occurred from 140-210,000 years ago in Africa, and may have occurred near Lake Victoria, but we do not really know for sure. One line went to South Africa and the other line went to East Africa – Ethiopia, etc.
About 144,000 years ago, a South African line entered the gene pool in Ethiopia. This line then creates a joint East-South African line that later traverses westward from Ethiopia to the Sahara, West and North Africa. Although there has long been debate about whether the cradle of human development in Africa was in South or East Africa, as they were both contenders, the debate now appears to be settled. Humans arose about 180,000 years ago from a Southwest African site around Namibia.
Genes in Africa have been found in the Khoisan dating back 132,000 years, and they have not been found in any other groups of humans anywhere else. That proves Out of Africa right there.
However, we should note that the ancient South African humans did not look like either modern day Khoisan or Bantus.
Of the 40 separate lineages going in Africa 40,000 YBP, only two went on to become all modern non-Africans. Pygmies go back to a split with other Africans 70,000 YBP. The earliest male line among humans appears in the Khoisan in large numbers, but hardly exists outside of Africa anymore, as it has probably been drowned out by newer lines. Two great graphics are here.
The modern-day ancestors of the Africans who left Africa to populate the world are found in the Sudanese, Ethiopians and also the Bushmen. Note that the Bushmen once extended all over East Africa, and a few isolated groups like the Sandawe are still extant in Kenya.
In my opinion, it was Blacks in this part of Africa, the ancestors of the Tutsi and Masai, who left Africa 45,000 years ago, probably via the Horn once again, moved into Iran and the Caucasus, and went on to birth the Caucasian race after they received proto-Asian inputs from China.

Category: Kenya

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