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the-martianWARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

RATING: 8/10. (Please note my ratings system is harsh and virtually no films get a 10).

In 2011, American sci-fi giant Neal Stephenson bewailed the pessimism prevalent in the genre and called for writers to start thinking more positively about the possibilities of technology in order to inspire new generations to “get big stuff done.”

Of course, he himself hardly set a great example in the next four years with his latest tome.

But the Martian most definitely did. In this hard sci-fi scenario, an astronaut stranded on Mars has to figure out how to survive until a rescue mission could be organized. To do this, he has to, in his own words, “science the shit” of the scarce oxygen and food resources at his disposal, while a NASA that is much better funded than in real life has to solve its own set of problems, which at first glance appear intractable.

Making the story of one solitary man’s struggle to survive is not a enviable task, but the creators pull it off with ample wit and verve. The protagonist Mark Watney is constantly cracking Nerd Lite jokes with himself and mission control in his struggle with the remorseless but indifferent main villain, the Red Planet itself.

nasa-survival-on-the-moon Scientific and technical problems are explained in a way that is neither patronizing nor unintelligible to the average viewer. These problems, though varied, all tend to be in the general spirit of the classic “Survival on the Moon” exercise compiled by NASA, in which different options have to be weighed against each other in a way that in a way that could tip the otherwise dismal odds of survival in your favor.

There are frequent references and homages to NASA themes. The “Rich Purnell manoeuvre” that ultimately enabled Watney’s survival is a direct nod to NASA mathematician Michael Minovitch’s idea of a gravity assist to propel Voyager past all four of the gas giants and into deep space (though the theoretical basis for it had been as early as the 1930s in the Soviet Union).

The film appears to be faithful to NASA culture, down to the contrast between the formal and besuited setting of NASA HQ and the more casual setting of its Jet Propulsion Laboratories. As in real world space exploration, duct tape is the solution to a lot of problems. The “no duct tape on Mars” trope is most decidedly averted.

Most of the challenges faced appear to be technically accurate. This is not surprising, since the book by Andy Weir that the film is based on was rigorously researched and initially published chapter by chapter on his website, where space nerds with encyclopedic knowledge on everything space related continuously corrected him.

There are certainly errors now and then. (I have not read the book and probably will not anytime soon, so these apply exclusively to the film). Gravity on Mars appears a bit too Earth like, with astronauts having to really physically apply themselves to scramble up ladders. Although Mars has the occasional storm, the much thinner atmosphere means that even the most furious tempests will be perceived as a light breeze; certainly nowhere near strong enough to uproot a pole and spear it into Watney. For a novel ostensibly set in 2035, comms systems act as if they are half a century out of date, just to serve a couple of plot points (if otherwise very elegant and clever ones). An astronaut propels himself around the outside of a spacecraft without a tether, while making an appearance in the one case in which a teether would have actually been redundant.

mars-radiation Another criticism of the film is that the astronauts should be all dying of cancer by the end of the film because of all the cosmic radiation (there are no obvious attempts to shield them from it). I am rather skeptical of this. The radiation dose Mars explorers receive will only be 3x as great as that received by astronauts who spend half a year on the International Space Station. But those guys aren’t keeling over dead. Theoretical research shows that the lifetime risk of cancer will only increase by three percentage points over baseline for astronauts who go to Mars, and in real life perhaps outcomes will if anything be even less dire because of the hormetic effects of radiation exposure.

Has anyone actually performed any concrete demographic studies of the death rate from cancer for astronauts (as opposed to theoretical projections)? Let me know in the comments.

But all these are ultimately minor triffles. At its root, it is a highly optimistic, positive, and inspirational story about the victory of technology and human ingenuity over the challenges posed by the last frontier. There should be more of these kinds of cultural products for civilization to continue to flourish.

The Martian is an excellent film, by far the best sci-fi flick this year along with Ex Machina, and incomparably better than the banal Hollywood fare that was Jurassic World, Mad Max: Fury Road, and by all indications, the final Hunger Games movie.

 
• Category: Science • Tags: Film, Review, Sci-Fi, Space Exploration

I made this map based on Razib Khan’s calculated figures of the percentage of Muslims around the world who support the death penalty for apostasy, which he compiled using data from the 2013 PEW global survey of Muslim attitudes.

map-death-for-apostasy-in-islam-poll

Click to enlarge. Warning: Large map!

EDIT: Forgot to include figures for Russian Muslims – it is at ~6%, about same as Tajikistan. See comment.

These figures were derived on the basis of the percentage of Muslims who agreed that sharia should be the law of the land, and in turn on the percentage of sharia supporters who agree with capital punishment for apostates from Islam, as prescribed in tradition. As Razib Khan points out, these figures represent a minimum, because there might be a few Muslims who don’t support sharia law but support the death penalty for apostasy. Nonetheless, such cases will be few and far between, so the figures can probably be taken more or less at face value.

Commentary is largely superfluous, so I will limit myself to just a few remarks:

(1) A solid majority of Muslims in Egypt support the death penalty. Conservatively assuming 80% of the population is Sunni Muslim, that’s 51% of the population that are essentially Islamist extremists and potential Islamic State sympathizes. That also happens to be the exact percentage that voted for Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi in 2012. This probably makes liberal democracy in Egypt all but impossible: Its either the mustachioed soldiers or the bearded preachers. Choose one.

(2) The majority of Muslims in Malaysia and Jordan, both countries widely seen as “moderate,” support the dealth penalty for apostasy.

(3) The only country of the Arab Spring to transition to a more or less functioning democracy is Tunisia. Probably not coincidentally, it is also the most religiously “progressive” of all the Arab states. In those areas where the Islamic State has been taking power – northern Iraq, eastern Syria, the Sinai, the central Libyan coast, chunks of Afghanistan – it appears that the local population supports the death penalty for apostasy and other extremist interpretations of Islam, far more so than even in the rest of the world. Perhaps ~50% is a sort of “tipping point” for the most rabidly chiliastic Islamist cults to take root?

(4) There is very likely a connection between Islamic radicalism (and depressed IQs) with cousin marriage (see my post on the close correlation between the rate of cousin marriage and support for Islamic State in Syria).

(5) It seems almost banal to point it out, but then again, as Gregory Cochran points out, even very obvious things need to be repeated now and then.

Anyone who supports the death penalty for religious apostasy is, by definition, a fundamentalist. In many, perhaps most, Muslim countries, a majority or close to a majority qualifies as such.

There are very, very big and disturbing figures.

That famous "Moderate Muslim" infographic: Not the same thing as a moderate Christian or Buddhist.

That famous “Moderate Muslim” infographic: Not the same thing as a moderate Christian or Buddhist.

It is highly unlikely would find more than 1% of Christians in any country supporting the death penalty for apostasy, and even that 1% would as often as not be merely trolling the pollster. The only surveyed major Muslim countries with a comparable level of insanity are Kazakhstan and possibly Turkey. Regardless of 70 years of secular propaganda, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have three to five times the number of fundamentalists per capita, with 5-6% of their Muslim population supporting death for apostasy; though still an order of magnitude better than neighboring Afpak and the Middle East, these figures can already make themselves felt in events such as the defection of a senior Tajik policeman to the Islamic State.

It only gets worse from there on. Tunisia, with 16% of the population being fundamentalists, gets regularly wracked by terrorist strikes; Bangladesh, with 33%, sees atheist bloggers murdered with impunity. The percentage of Muslims who are fundamentalists in Western Europe is (based on other polls) probably generally around the 25% mark. That is a lot of fundamentalists. And it translates to a permanent, simmering terrorist threat. Which – rather conveniently? – requires an ever expanding security/surveillance state to keep suppressed. Once you go above the 50% mark, as in Jordan, Pakistan, or Egypt, only a dictator or a well-respected monarch prevents the people – the demos – from actualizing their back-to-the-roots fantasies.

This is why apples to apples comparisons of Islamic fundamentalism to extremism in other religions and feel good slogans like #NotAllMuslims are naive and facile at best.

***

Based on these figures from Razib Khan:

Sharia should be law of land Muslims who believe sharia should be law who accept death penalty for apostasy % of Muslims who accept death penalty for apostasy
Afghanistan 99% 79% 78%
Pakistan 84% 76% 64%
Egypt 74% 86% 64%
Palestinian territories 89% 66% “59%
Jordan 71% 82% 58%
Malaysia 86% 62% 53%
Iraq 91% 42% 38%
Bangladesh 82% 44% 36%
Tunisia 56% 29% 16%
Lebanon 29% 46% 13%
Indonesia 72% 18% 13%
Tajikstan 27% 22% 6%
Kyrgyzstan 35% 14% 5%
Bosnia 15% 15% 2%
Kosovo 20% 11% 2%
Turkey 12% 17% 2%
Albania 12% 8% 1%
Kazakhstan 10% 4% 0%
 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Fundamentalists, Islam, Islamism, Map

One of the most memorably vivid characterizations of the USSR was as a communal apartment, in which every ethnicity had its own room. Except the majority Russians, who had to make do with the foyer while paying the bulk of the rent, which didn’t make them too happy.

In some sense, US Whites are not in a dissimilar situation. They were the ethnic group that essentially built the country and produced virtually all its most eminent intellectual figures, but now have to listen to BLM activists claiming “their people” built Princeton. (Just as they were once Kings and Queens of Egypt, which just goes to show that at its root BLM is essentially a “progressive” front for Black Nationalism). They are faced with constant attacks on their “privilege” even as that very privilege not just vanishes by goes into active reverse (see Deaton & Case’s revelations about the the White mortality crisis, and Ron Unz’s finding that the most discriminated against group in university admissions are White Gentiles).

Thus, it is not surprising to see an incipient reaction against this, the latest facet of it being the rash of White Student Unions now being formed in universities across the US.

Although the MSM has attempted to portray them as hickbilly racists and the hacker 4chan, it appears that they are enjoying a surge in support that would have been unimaginable before “the year of shrieking young black women.” Here is the top-voted comment on the USA Today article on this, for instance:

In todays society where people seem more divided by race than any time in recent history, is this even surprising or wrong? Maybe white people feel the need to band together in order to stand up for themselves.

Nor is this even limited to aggrieved Whites. According to a Breitbart investigation:

But this narrative is incorrect. In private interviews conducted with the creators of a number of these groups, Breitbart Tech has found that a number of the new “White Student Unions” are indeed the product of students on campus who are afraid to speak out publicly.

But these students aren’t white supremacists, or even white nationalists. In some cases, they are not even white. One of the anonymous student group founders we spoke to, who did not wish to be identified, was of South Asian descent. Another founder was Mexican-American. They are concerned by what they see as unchecked hostility towards their fellow white students.

Interestingly, these pages themselves appear to be explicitly adopting the language of the diversity commissars, as seen on one of the posts at the UCF White Student Union.

The White Student Union surge is a legitimate one filled with positive intentions. We will continue to be a voice and safe space for people of Whiteness.

Here’s another good one, in response to a Black SJW:

The term “white privilege” is a racist term used by ignorant bigots to further their hateful narratives against peoples of European ancestry. Look in the mirror to see the face of modern racist America.

The commissars are not amused by this trolling, and indeed, a number of the WSU’s have already been shut down at the behest of various universities by Zucky. Nonetheless, this isn’t winning them any favors in the court of public opinion, at least if the comments sections even on MSM sites are anything to go by. Although US Whites might suffer from excessive (even “pathological”) altruism, a dislike for overly blatant hypocrisy happens to be part of the package.

Because at least in many universities Whites already are a literal minority. Here is data on the racial demographics of U.C. Berkeley, one of the universities which was successful in its petition to have Facebook remove its WSU.

US Whites ceased being a plurality there as early as the mid-1990s!

ucb-racial-demographics

The above figures completely align with my own impressions. Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that not only do Asians get in way out of proportion to their share of the population, but they also overwhelmingly take the harder STEM classes. To find White majorities and Latinos you have to make your way to the humanities or even better, the “X Studies” classes.

The detailed ethnic statistics are if anything even more stunning.

U.C. Berkeley Undergrad Population %share
Chinese 18.5%
White 17.8%
International 14.0%
Mexican American/Chicano 10.4%
Jews 9.2%
South Asian 7.2%
Korean 4.9%
Other Hispanic/Latino 3.9%
African American/Black 3.4%
Vietnamese 3.4%
Filipino 3.1%
Japanese 1.7%
Other Asian 1.5%
Native American/Alaskan Native 0.7%
Pacific Islander 0.2%

If you count Jews separately, which might be justified given their specific cognitive profile, US Whites are no longer even the biggest ethnic group there! Even Chinese-Americans (1.2% of the US population although rather more in California) are marginally ahead, while considering the typical international student profile – 32% Chinese – would take that group firmly into the lead. The combined Hispanic categories wouldn’t be far off from the White total, while Jews, South Asians, and Koreans are each at about a third to a half of the White total.

Now U.C. Berkeley might be somewhat of an extreme case, given the cosmopolitan nature of the Bay Area, but still it does very vividly illustrate how White dominance is increasingly becoming history not just as a matter of general demographics but – if anything with even greater speed – at the level of the future elites. And thus so long as the First Amendment and freedom of association remains a thing – which, admittedly, is far from clear – we will probably see a rise in this sort of (decidedly milquetoast) White racial particularism in the futurism. In other words, Whites will pick an unoccupied corner and start working on a partition wall.

 

According to a fable often told by Russians themselves, there once lived two peasants. One of them had one cow, the other had two cows. The poorer peasant found a lamp, rubbed it, and out popped a genie, who proceeded to ask him if he wanted 5 cows. He refused and instead wished for one of his neighbor’s cows to drop dead.

This story is what comes to mind on the news that various Crimean Tatar and far right batallion “activists” blew up the transmission towers carrying electricity to Crimea, plunging the peninsula into a blackout that looks set to last weeks.

In fact, it’s something of a metaphor for today’s Ukraine in general.

(1) “Activists” blockade Crimea, putting an embargo on food products. Belatedly realizing that the whole affair will lose whatever minimal sense it might have possessed in the first place when Russia bans all Ukrainian food imports on January 1, 2016, on Ukraine’s accession to the EU Free Trade Agreement, they decide to up their game, presumably on the belief that if their water blockade failed to win Crimean hearts and minds in favor of Ukraine last summer, then deprivation of electricity as winter approaches surely will. No matter that said electricity blockade will affect not just those evil moskali and Ukrainian zradniki (traitors) who overwhelmingly voted to leave Country 404, but also 90% of the world’s Crimean Tatars whom they are ostensibly fighting for.

heroic-poses(2) Fifty armed National Guardsmen are sent to restore order. The “activists” naturally start to fight them and the efforts of the totalitarian Poroshenko regime to take away their Constitutional rights to blow up infrastructure on Ukrainian soil. In the video above, one of the masked activists, clearly suffering from a terminal case of Maidanism, says the Guardsmen are akin to separatists. Two of the Guardsmen are seriously injured: One gets a brain concussion after getting hit by a stick, while another gets a knife in his stomach.

In any normal functional country, including in any European nation that the Maidanists vaunt so much, they would at this point be getting mowed down by special forces as the terrorists they are. However, in Ukraine, they are “civic activists,” so they are left unharmed to continue to strike heroic Diogenes-in-a-pylon poses. And after a crowd of sympathizing “activists” gathers at the Presidential palace, Poroshenko quickly flip flops and promises that there would be no more attempts to storm them in a hastily arranged meeting with the (self-proclaimed) “Mejlis” leaders of the Crimean Tatars.

You must construct additional pylons!? Not so fast…

(3) Ilya Kiva, the commander of those National Guards supposedly tasked with restoring order so that repairs could be done, immediately afterwards posted the following message on Facebook (the favored communications medium of Maidanist politicians): “The troops are now at their place of permanent dislocation, and the blockade continues! No electricity to Crimea! Slava Ukraine! And now I go to bed…”

slava-ukraine-no-electricity-to-crimea(4) In the meantime, while svidomy Ukrainians digest their great peremoga (victory), the sabotage has forced two nuclear power plants in neighboring Kherson oblast to effect a dangerous emergency shutdown. There is a chance that the blackouts could spread to the neighboring Ukrainian oblasts of Kherson and Nikolaev according to the head of the Ukraine’s energy company Yury Katich.

Russia has ceased supplying coal to Ukraine in retaliation. Considering that Ukraine’s electricity network runs in significant part thanks to Russian and LDNR coal, this is not an unreasonable retaliation for the blockade of Crimea.

At this point, there can only be two explanations for this turn of events, on which in turn will depend any further developments.

a) The first variant is that Ukraine is a Country 404, a failed state powerless to prevent its “activists” from sauntering about and blowing up infrastructure at will in the hope that it kills more Russian cows even if some Ukrainian cows also get caught in the backblast.

b) The more cynical and darker possibility is that this was all planned. As Egor Kholmogorov points out in an article for Izvestia, now is a perfect window for this kind of sabotage, because the center and east of the territories controlled by Kiev have recently been connected to new power lines from the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant to the west, allowing it to minimize any fallout on Ukraine itself, while Russia is less than two months away from launching its energy bridge to Crimea. This implies that the timing of this operation was chosen by people a “great deal more informed than those of the Right Sector and the supporters of the Mejlis.”

If the latter explanation is in fact the correct one – and considering the possible casualties stemming from a sudden and prolonged loss of power, especially now that winter is coming – then this would make this sabotage something more than a tragicomic skit. As Kholmogorov argued, it would make it an an outright act of state terrorism – and if Russia has any sense of honor and consistency left, it would reply with the usual punishment meted out to sponsors of terror, including wide-ranging economic sanctions at the very least.

 

According to a recent n=150,000 global survey by Gallup and S&P, there is an astounding lack of financial literacy in the world.

To gauge financial literacy, they asked a series of four questions on basic financial concepts such as risk diversification, inflation, simple interest, and compound interest. They were very simple and typically only had 2-3 possible answers. Here is the most “difficult” question:

Suppose you had 100 US dollars in a savings account and the bank adds 10 percent per year to the account. How much money would you have in the account after five years if you did not remove any money from the account?

The possible answers were:

[more than 150 dollars; exactly 150 dollars; less than 150 dollars; don’t know;
refused to answer]

Demonstrating understanding in three out of the four areas qualified you as financially literate. Only a third of the world’s population reached that threshold, rising to a modest 53% in the advanced OECD countries.

global-financial-literacy-world-map

One surprising pattern is that there was very little variation in financial literacy between low-income and middle-income countries; there was only a sustained increase once countries began to exceed the $12,000 GDP per capita mark. Presumably, that is approximately the point when people start doing things like getting credit cards and taking out mortgages, so they are forced to come to grips with concepts like compound interest whether they like it or not. But there are plenty of both negative outliers (e.g. Japan, Korea, Italy, Portugal), as well as a few positive ones (e.g. Bhutan, Myanmar, Botswana).

economic-development-and-financial-literacy

Curiously, the correlation between financial literacy and cognitive ability appears to be surprisingly low. In other words, basic financial literacy has a low g loading.

There is a relationship to be sure, but exceptions abound, even in the rich country list. High IQ Japan, Korea, and China do a lot worse than one might expect. Botswana and South Africa do much better than what their national IQ levels might imply; in fact, South Africa is the highest-scoring of the BRICS countries.

g7-vs-brics-financial-literacy

Although conventional coverage of the national differences in financial literacy highlighted in this report by mainstream journalists like Leonid Bershidsky predictably focus on things like education levels and exposure to financial services, the really big explanatatory factor seems to be religious/cultural.

On the global scale, the Protestant world comprise nine of the world’s top 10 most financially literate countries, and an amazing 17 of the world’s top 25 – which is also a convenient threshold representing 50%+ financial literacy. (By which point the stock of both developed world Protestant countries pretty much ends). The world’s offshore bank, Switzerland, is a relatively disappointing 15th.

9 of the top 10 countries are within the Hajnal line of Europe, or are their descendants; and 17 of the top 25.

Predictably, the non-Protestant exception in the top 10 is Israel. The Jews can sure count their shekels.

Another correlation that seems to exist is with time preference. Countries where people displayed a willingness to wait to get a greater sum of money in one month’s time, as opposed to getting a smaller sum right now (inflation-adjusted), also tended to perform much better on financial literacy metrics.

The Catholics and Orthodox Christians tended to do a lot worse, even though as we know IQ differences between them and the Protestant world are fairly minor. Likewise with the Confucian civilization.

This suggests that Protestant populations have tended to culturally evolve (or gene-culturally evolve) an “intuitive” understanding of finance like things, while the rest of the world pretty much has to figure it out from zero. More intelligent populations with financial experience, such as the Japanese, tend to be relatively better at it (43% financially literate); less intelligent populations without much financial experience, such as the Indians and Iranians, do much worse at it (<25% financially literate).

Still, there remain some curious cases nonetheless. How does dirt poor and only 60% literate Bhutan manage to take 20th place, with 54% financial literacy? Myanmar also does surprisingly well for a country of its socio-economic and hisorical profile, taking up the 24th slot. Both are Buddhist, but otherwise, Buddhists do not appear to perform especially well; Cambodia is one of the worst, while Thailand is middling between Myanmar and Cambodia. Nor does it appear to have anything to do with the particular sect of Buddhism: Bhutan follows Vajrayana Buddhism, while Myanmar follows Theravada.

Financial Literacy 2015 via S&P/Gallup

# Country % Financial Literacy
1 Norway 71.3%
2 Denmark 71.3%
3 Sweden 71.2%
4 Israel 68.4%
5 Canada 68.3%
6 United Kingdom 67.1%
7 Netherlands 66.1%
8 Germany 65.7%
9 Australia 63.7%
10 Finland 62.9%
11 New Zealand 61.5%
12 Singapore 59.4%
13 Czech Republic 58.4%
14 United States 57.4%
15 Switzerland 57.1%
16 Belgium 55.3%
17 Ireland 55.1%
18 Estonia 54.4%
19 Hungary 54.2%
20 Bhutan 53.7%
21 Luxembourg 53.2%
22 Austria 53.0%
23 Botswana 52.2%
24 Myanmar 51.8%
25 France 51.7%
26 Spain 49.1%
27 Latvia 48.3%
28 Montenegro 48.2%
29 Slovak Republic 48.1%
30 Greece 45.0%
31 Uruguay 44.8%
32 Tunisia 44.7%
33 Lebanon 44.4%
34 Malta 44.2%
35 Croatia 44.1%
36 Slovenia 44.0%
37 Kuwait 43.5%
38 Japan 43.0%
39 Hong Kong SAR, China 42.7%
40 Poland 42.4%
41 South Africa 41.7%
42 Turkmenistan 41.1%
43 Mongolia 40.7%
44 Chile 40.7%
45 Zimbabwe 40.6%
46 Zambia 40.4%
47 Tanzania 40.3%
48 Ukraine 40.0%
49 Kazakhstan 39.7%
50 Senegal 39.7%
51 Bahrain 39.5%
52 Lithuania 38.7%
53 Mauritius 38.7%
54 United Arab Emirates 38.3%
55 Russian Federation 38.1%
56 Kenya 38.0%
57 Serbia 38.0%
58 Togo 38.0%
59 Madagascar 37.7%
60 Cameroon 37.7%
61 Belarus 37.5%
62 Benin 37.0%
63 Italy 36.9%
64 Taiwan, China 36.9%
65 Azerbaijan 36.3%
66 Malaysia 35.7%
67 Sri Lanka 35.4%
68 Dominican Republic 35.4%
69 Costa Rica 35.1%
70 Malawi 35.1%
71 Gabon 34.8%
72 Bulgaria 34.7%
73 Côte d’Ivoire 34.7%
74 Brazil 34.7%
75 Cyprus 34.6%
76 Uganda 34.2%
77 Korea, Rep. 33.4%
78 Mali 33.4%
79 Mauritania 33.3%
80 Algeria 33.0%
81 Jamaica 32.9%
82 Burkina Faso 32.8%
83 Belize 32.6%
84 Colombia 32.2%
85 Indonesia 32.2%
86 Puerto Rico 32.2%
87 Ethiopia 32.1%
88 Congo, Dem. Rep. 31.9%
89 Mexico 31.6%
90 Ghana 31.5%
91 Niger 31.5%
92 Saudi Arabia 31.3%
93 Congo, Rep. 31.0%
94 Guinea 30.4%
95 Ecuador 30.3%
96 Georgia 29.7%
97 China 28.1%
98 China 28.1%
99 Argentina 28.0%
100 Peru 27.6%
101 Egypt, Arab Rep. 27.5%
102 Thailand 27.4%
103 Moldova 27.4%
104 Bosnia and Herzegovina 27.2%
105 Iraq 27.2%
106 Namibia 26.7%
107 Panama 26.5%
108 Pakistan 26.3%
109 Chad 26.2%
110 Nigeria 26.1%
111 Portugal 26.0%
112 Rwanda 25.8%
113 Guatemala 25.7%
114 Venezuela, RB 25.1%
115 Philippines 25.0%
116 West Bank and Gaza 24.6%
117 Burundi 24.4%
118 Vietnam 24.4%
119 Bolivia 24.4%
120 Turkey 23.6%
121 India 23.6%
122 Jordan 23.6%
123 Honduras 22.9%
124 Romania 21.7%
125 Macedonia, FYR 21.5%
126 Uzbekistan 21.4%
127 El Salvador 21.1%
128 Sierra Leone 21.0%
129 Sudan 20.7%
130 Iran, Islamic Rep. 20.5%
131 Kosovo 19.9%
132 Nicaragua 19.8%
133 Bangladesh 19.2%
134 Kyrgyz Republic 18.9%
135 Cambodia 18.4%
136 Nepal 18.3%
137 Armenia 18.2%
138 Haiti 17.9%
139 Tajikistan 16.9%
140 Angola 15.3%
141 Somalia 15.2%
142 Afghanistan 14.1%
143 Albania 13.8%
144 Yemen, Rep. 13.3%
 
• Category: Economics • Tags: Culture, Finance, Literacy, Protestantism

Here is one of the most popular feel-good #refugeeswelcome cartoons going round the Internets these past few days by the cartoonist John Cole:

john-cole-know-the-enemy

Of course, one not inconsiderable problem is that a disturbingly big percentage of Syrian refugees – some 13% of them, according to a November 2014 poll by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies – say they have a positive view of the Islamic State. Moreover, another 10% are negative towards them but only just to some extent.

So what we have is that almost precisely a quarter of Syrian refugees are either outright positive about ISIS, or have only moderate disagreements with them (they don’t want to get conscripted by them?).

doha-poll-2014-arab-support-for-islamic-state

So, informed by these demographic realities, and taking into account the tendency of second generation Muslim immigrations to radicalize, here is my modest suggestion for improving John Cole’s cartoon:

john-cole-know-the-enemy-fixed

 
• Category: Humor • Tags: Cartoon, Immigration, Islamism, Trolling
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.

The Influence of Air Power upon Syrian History

Here are some recent videos of Russian bombings of Islamic state oil infrastructure (LOL at the guy getting out of Dodge at 0:25).

And a bombing of a nicely arraigned line of oil tankers:

All of which raises a rather obvious question: If this is easy as easy as shooting fish in a barrel – and it sure looks like it – why are there still any such installations and orderly truck columns in the empty desert to bomb in the first place?

The US military claims that such attacks were “minimally effective.” Considering that this was not the case even in 1944, when Allied (primarily US) bombing crippled German mobility despite Germany’s formidable IADS and the much more primitive surveillance and targetting technology of the time, this is implausible. At least the US has since started doing the same thing, after getting named and shamed into doing so at the UN by Putin. (And attempting to attribute Russian strikes on ISIS oil infrastructure to themselves. I wonder if in two generations’ time most Westerners will come to believe the US played the most important role in defeating ISIS, as happened with WW2).

The Daily Beast's coverage of Russia's Syria intervention by neocon Michael Weiss.

The Daily Beast’s coverage of Russia’s Syria intervention by neocon Michael Weiss.

The reason is that the strategy has always been not to decimate Islamic State, but to “funnel” it away from “moderate” rebels towards the SAA. Had that not been the case, ISIS would have never been able to travel across the hundreds of kilometers of open desert to take Palmyra. To add insult to injury, neocon propagandists continually claim (actually: Project) that Assad is in a functional alliance with ISIS, a characterization that was extended to Russia when it waded in.

To be sure there were plenty of Whac-a-Mole type of strikes, but these by themselves are militarily meaningless. Offing individual scumbags such as “Jihadi John” makes for good propaganda, but those guys are a dime a dozen in ISIS. Ultimately, victory lies in regaining ground from the terrorists, and on that front the tide seems to have turned decisively in favor of the SAA.

As I wrote three weeks ago:

This is where the Russian Air Force can hopefully make a big difference. Even the fighters already in place will allow the Syrians to effectively double their number of sorties, and Russian fighter pilots are much more skilled and have more modern armaments than their Syrian counterparts. Effectively, this translates to a tripling or quadrupling of Syrian air power that can be concentrated in support of SAA ground operations. Air power can seriously degrade the combat power of enemy formations that do not have adequate AA counters to it (that describes both the FSA/Al Nusra and ISIS). Whereas a front might have once been in equilibrium, due to roughly matching combat power on either side, a sustained air campaign could begin to systemically swing the advantage over to the SAA and eventually enable the reconquista of Syrian territorities currently under renegade Islamist control.

That is pretty much exactly what seems to have happened at Kweiris Airbase, finally relieved after a 2.5 year siege by an SAA armored thrust supported by Russian air power.

Click to enlarge.

The Aleppo-Raqqa Route. Click to enlarge.

And the doubling of the Russian air contingent in Syria proper – together with the introduction of strategic bombers (the Tu-160 Blackjack has been used in anger for the first time ever) – has now for all intents and purposes amplified the air power available to the SAA relative to before the Russian intervention by an order of magnitude.

The pace of ground operations is likewise only going to pick up from here. With ISIS shattered around Kweiris, a further thrust through Deir Hafir to Jirah Airbase (captured by ISIS last August) would cut off the northern part of the organization from its capital at Raqqa; the last remaining connection, via Tishrin Dam, could be easily plugged with the air power now at the SAA’s disposal.

Palmyra would be the other obvious target, and indeed activity seems to be heating up there as well. That said, it would probably be worthwhile to wait for a few months before starting any assault. With air control, and the vast expanses of open desert between Palmyra and the Islamic State heartlands, it would make sense to starve the Palmyra defenders of supplies first.

In the meantime, ISIS is beginning to bleed dry. Not helped by its flashy policy of mass POW executions, which has predictably resulted in their opponents starting to fight to the death, they wasted a bunch of fighters in a last ditch attempt to capture Kweiris before its relief, and have continued to mount extremely costly frontal assaults against Deir ez-Zor (DEZ).

issam-zahreddineWith ISIS now getting rolled back in both Syria and even more spectacularly in Iraq, it makes sense that it would want to focus on consolidating its internal communications lines, which the heavily fortified DEZ bisects. But that outpost is guarded by some of the SAA’s most elite units and commanded by the legendary Issam Zahreddine (see right). Having held out for years, the chances of it falling now with the arrival of Russian air power are much reduced.

So it will continue serving as a meatgrinder, admittedly largely for the hapless and judging from the rate of executions for desertion not overly enthusiastic conscripts that Islamic State increasingly has to rely upon.

A Geopolitical Coup?

From a geopolitical perspetive, Russia’s involvement is beginning to look like a coup of the first order.

Three weeks ago, in Syria and the Three Wars, I identified a few possible pitfalls as well as advantages that could accrue from this. To date, Russia hasn’t fall into any of the pitfalls, and lapped up all the advantages.

Possible pitfalls

Afghanistan-like quagmire – Nope. Still no ground intervention on the horizon. One suicide, zero direct military casualties. (Though the Saker does identify incipient mission creep).

Will enable “Putinsliv” (abandonment) of Novorossiya – Contra Prosvirnin & Co.’s fears, there is no indication that this is happening either. (At the moment tensions are beginning to heat up again there. Considering the multitude of false war scares we’ve had there, however, chances are it will continue to remain frozen for the foreseeable future).

Advantages

Provide RL training – Is happening.

“Politely” demonstrate Russian military power – This plan was not just fulfilled but overfulfilled, with many second-rate Western analysts apparently shocked – shocked! – that Russia with its decades-old Orc Tech built a functional air base from scratch within a few month from which it maintains extremely high fighter sortie rates that put the USAF to shame, and flings cruise missiles from thousands of miles away with pinpoint precision. Even observers otherwise familiar with Russian military capitabilities were impressed by the magnitude of the improvements since the South Ossetian War. Incidentally, and exactly as I suggested, this also makes a mockery – in the most graphic and explicit terms possible – of the Ukrainian junta’s tall tales that it was “at war” with Russia and beat back Pskov paratrooper brigades and Buryat divisons by the dozen.

Further Advantages

That I hadn’t spelled out in detail, but which are becoming increasingly evident.

Very good PR both for the Russia Stronk! crowd and beyond – To be fair, at least until the Paris Attacks, this was limited to Putin’s usual Western fans – i.e., those not under the spell of neocon “Assad killing his own people” propaganda (i.e. a decided minority). But nice to have nonetheless. The world defender of Christian civilization, and not just in word, as was the case before, but in deed.

And the “only one” such, according to a remarkable recent statement by Assad (this does make one wonder if there is anything to the rumors that Alawites are actually crypto-Christians).

The Russians are now getting called crusaders by Islamists, an honor previously reserved for just the US and its allies (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that). Here is an inspirational video on this “Holy Crusader Order” theme by a Russian “patriotic trolling” group:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4dPBfJrYg0

Western narrative shift after Paris? – It was clear that Russia was going to be at loggerheads with the US and its allies/satraps once it waded into Syria. Indeed, some of the crazier neocons and US Republicans were calling for the US to establish a no fly zone (which would have been a direct act of military aggression against Russia), though I never expected anything to come out of that since it was inevitable that the hotheads would be set straight by the hard realists at the Pentagon if things ever went that far south. Nor was I expecting anything particularly game changing in the wake of the Paris Attacks (in the bleakest version, if anything, the Western elites would merely use them as a cynical ploy to double down on their anti-Assad stance).

But in the event, things appear to be surprising to the upside, and in a very major and unexpected way. Hawkish Hollande, more American than the (post-Bush) Americans in his zeal for intervention, has finally admitted that ISIS is France’s prime enemy, not Assad. Not perfect, but good enough. The Russian military in the Levant has been told to treat the French soldiers incoming on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier as allies. Although speaking of any wider rapprochment in West-Russia relations is very clearly premature, the worst outcomes now appear to be ruled out and things are looking up. Obama has even called Putin a “constructive partner” in the Syria talks, which would have been unimaginable just a year ago when he was the butt of Western opprobrium at the Brisbane G20 summit. Considering that Putin remains constant to his position – the same as that proposed by Kofi Annan at the 2012 Geneva Conference – that Assad must be included in any negotiations between the regime and (truly) moderate factions about political transition, the apparent dropping of the removal of Assad as the West’s Number One priority in Syria basically implies that the Western political elites have been forced come round to the point of view of their worst international bugbear.

These political developments are getting reflected in the Western media. Even the neocon rag The Daily Beast has gone from “Russia’s Giving ISIS an Air Force” to “Russia Pounds ISIS with Biggest Bomber Raid in Decades.”

Irish journalist Danielle Ryan has a very good article on the diplomatic aspects of this development at The BRICS Post:

Before the Paris attacks, some analysts had been worriedly warning that Putin was winning the “PR war” in Syria. In the aftermath, Moscow’s articulation of its position looks less like PR and more like an appeal to common sense.

To risk an understatement, it’s depressing that 132 innocent people had to die in Paris before Obama, Cameron et al realized that Russia could be an indispensable partner in the fight against ISIS, and that disagreements over the fate of Assad should not be “the altar on which the country of Syria is slaughtered”.

If only this realization could have been made in 2010, when the Syrian government offered Western powers a chance to join up and fight ISIS together. Or in 2012, when Russia is rumoured to have offered the West a proposal which would have seen Assad step down as part of a broad peace deal.

is-isis-buying-ukrainian-arms Shady actors hurrying to tidy themselves up – So very conveniently soon after the Paris Attacks, Qatar arrested 6 men who had been supplying arms, including MANPADS, to Islamic State.

Their provider? Ukraine.

Perhaps the Ukrainians took Interior Ministry bigwig Anton Geraschenko’s injunction to “help ISIS take revenge on Russia by the canons of sharia” a bit too literally. So pathological is Maidanist village hatred for Russia that many of them lack the self-awareness to comprehend that ISIS and their own Western sponsors don’t exactly see eye to eye. (Ironically, it is not altogether impossible that this was because they took conspiracy theories from the more unhinged elements of the Russian nationalist scene about how the Americans control ISIS at face value). Certainly the Maidanist types have never had any compunctions about allying with people who ultimately despised them just to spit in Russia’s soup, from the Nazis in WW2 to Islamist fanatics today.

The alternative, less exciting but admittedly far more realistic possibility, is that this is a mere consequence of Ukraine’s failed state status.

 

Soon after calling for ISIS to murder Russian aviators and their families, the Paris Attacks sent them into a confused tizzy, and now the Maidanists are going from proposing an alliance with ISIS to condemning them as pawns of Khuylo, Тhe Darkest One, and The God of Svidomy Ukrainians… who is otherwise known to normal people as Vladimir Putin.

Essentially, Putin cockblocked the ISIS-Maidan alliance!

Yury Sergeyev (“Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations. All tweets reflect my personal vision”): In the Paris tragedy, you should “cherchez la femme” – and her name is – Russia. We await Russia’s invitation to join the struggle against terrorism.

Though for some reason he doesn’t seem to like his “personal vision” getting RTed:

So far as conspiracy theories go, the idea that the Russian intelligence services organized the Paris Attacks down to the snackbaring suicide bombers is one of the most incredible ones out there. But if you were to think this is a fringe theory limited to a rogue diplomat or two you would be wrong.

rferl-russia-behind-paris-attacks Here are some other Ukrainian politicians, journalists, academics, and major bloggers who have advanced this “theory”:

  • Radio Svoboda/RFERL - Ukrainian arm of the US foreign media organ, screenshot right (if you recall, also the department responsible for getting Russian anti-Putin journalist Andrey Babitsky fired from RFERL for being unwilling to cover up Ukrainian far right militia war crimes). Article has since been removed, probably when the more intelligent and less ideologically crazy American bosses saw what their Galician underlings were up to.
  • Andrey Teteruk – Former far right militia commander and now Rada Deputy, recently made famous for hitting a female parliamentatian on the head with a glass bottle and causing her a brain concussion: “In my opinion, behind these terrorist acts stand the cold calculations of the Kremlin creatures, who wanted to take revenge on France for the Mistral on Friday the 13th, a symbolic date for Americans.”
  • Anton Geraschenko – Ministry of the Interior advisor, who compiled a literal hit list (available online) of anti-regime figures such as the murdered journalist Oles Buzina, and who has also started adding the names of Russian aviators for the express purpose of helping ISIS take care of them “by the canons of sharia” (sic): “Not long ago I obtained reliable evidence from good sources that it is RF President Vladimir Putin who is responsible to the flood of migrants to Europe… I recommend the French intelligence services carefully track the entire chain from the perpetrators to the sponsors of these evil acts. Who knows, maybe the Russian intelligence services stand behind it all?”
  • yury-sergeyev-russia-behind-parisYury Sergeyev – See above.
  • Mychailo Wynnyckyj – Canadian-Ukrainian “academic” writing for Euromaidan Press, this author is also a well known budding (if inadvertent) scifi writer famous for having predicted a few dozen of the past zero Russian invasions of Ukraine and nuclear wars with NATO.
  • Vitaly Gaidukevich – Prominent Ukrainian TV journalist
  • Liza Bogutskaya – Prominent Ukrainian journalist.

These are far from the only examples. To the contary, the idea that Putin is behind the Paris Attacks is close to conventional wisdom on Maidanist echo chambers across the Internet – even as Russia steps up attacks on the Islamic state to an unprecedented degree.

Recall that these are the same people who were calling for an alliance with ISIS against Ukraine just a few days beforehand.

What explains such pathological schizophrenia?

Ultimately it is to do with the fact that the Maidanist ideology reduced to its roots consists of nothing but cargo cult like adoration and mechanical imitation of the Western master, coupled with a primitive village hatred of Russia, which is forever oppressin’ and keeping it down. Based as it is on faith in the final peremoga (victory) as opposed to any genuinely attractive cultural or intellectual narrative, the Maidanist project inevitably keeps on failing, time and time again. But since Maidanism is revealed religious truth, this could never happen on account of its own internal failings; some external actor MUST be responsible, and that is where the inevitable zrada (betrayal) comes in.

In this latest iteration, the zrada in question is that of the Islamic State, which, far from coming to their rescue, has turned out to be nothing but another pawn of the Dark Lord Voldemort Putler, who as God of Svidomy Ukrainians stands behind every single act of terrorism, anywhere. And through his mastery of the Dark Arts, it increasingly seems that Putler will be able to hoodwink the Western world – barring a few unusually clearsighted but (it n0w seems) tragically ignored neocons – into ignoring the manifold strands of evidence for a Raqqa-Moscow Axis.

The irony in this theory of a world conspiracy to destroy Ukraine, as promoted by the Maidanists themselves, the Ukraine itself is not an independent agent but a passive and powerless object of zrada after zrada, and the dark designs of Russia. But the paradox largely resolves itself when you start thinking of Ukraine less as a country and more as an ideological project.

 
france-attacks-fever

Summary of the Russian nationalist response to #ParisAttacks.

A Cruel French Lesson, by Egor Kholmogorov appeared in the November 14 issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the leading Russian dailies. It outlines what is pretty much the standard right-wing conservative Russian position on the #ParisAttacks.

Some context: After the terrorist strikes, many outspoken Russian liberals rushed to wrap their digital selves in the French flag; a status signalling action made easy by Facebook’s provision of a French flag avatar coloration app (one could cynically add: To mark the most significant event in the world since the US legalization of gay marrage). This is in stark contrast to the relative silence over the Russian victims of the terrorist downing of the aircraft over the Sinai – and for that matter, the silence in regards to Lebanon, and for that matter, for Syria pretty much nonstop since 2011. (The Egyptians at least were commendably consistent, bathring the Pyramids in the flags of all four of the aforementioned nations).

To be sure, many Russians who adopted the French flag did so on the fly, with no intentions of making any overtly political point. However, some of the more ideologically pro-Western Russians were more to the point in justifying increased attention for French versus Russian victims of jihadi terrorism. For instance, the Russian liberal “hipster” publication GQ was very explicit in defending its decision to feature the Paris Attacks over KGL9268 on the grounds that they idenfied with the City of Lights as a “permanent festival,” whereas for them their own homeland was a permanent “territory of woe” and thus unworthy of any particular attention (this binary characterization might seem rather optimistic to anyone actually familiar with the Parisian banlieues). An English language illustration of this phenomenon is this Foreign Policy piece by Julia Ioffe, which bizarrely justifies the discrepancy in terms of the better performance of French special forces at Bataclan relative to Nord-Ost (no mention being made of the fact that the Chechen terrorists in 2002 were ten times as numerous and far better equipped).

Bearing this in mind, the patriotic and conservative types – seeing such widespread attitudes in the Russian media as an implicit endorsement of the theme that Westerners are first-rate peoples and the center of civilization, as opposed to disposable Russians in peripheral Eurasia – have not been overly concerned with sensitivity right now, which is clearly expressed in Kholmogorov’s article. He is not writing for Westerners, but for Russians on his side of the domestic culture war.

To be sure, translation ≠ endorsement, and there are several points one can take issue with him on. There is too much butthurt over Charlie Hebdo, which – contrary to its high media profile – is in reality a very low circulation publication in France itself. Furthermore, the French state obviously has no obligation to apologize for it. Tying the emergence of ISIS to France’s Levantine policies between the wars is far too radical a causal stretch and besides the point in relations to current French policies anyway. Perhaps most critically of all, the Russian obsession with the West – most prominent amongst the Westernists, of course, but still making itself felt, if in an inverted form, amongst nationalists like Kholmogorov – is perhaps unseemly and even maladaptive, since ironically one could say that this merely reflects and confirms Russia’s status as a peripheral country.

Nonetheless, I believe the vast majority of the points Kholmogorov makes are fair and to the point, and moreover the fact that something so “politically incorrect” can be published in a major Russian daily – can one imagine anything similar in The New York Times? Or even The Daily Mail? – testifies to the fact that Putin’s Russia, ethnically blank slatist as it might formally be, is nonetheless as good ally as any to those Europeans who still support European civilization and self-determination.

***

A Cruel French Lesson

by Egor Kholmogorov

http://www.kp.ru/daily/26458.7/3328330/

The hideous acts of terrorism in France strongly resemble a fast-forward video of the decades long terrorist war that has been waged against Russia. The massacre at the Bataclan theater is basically a French version of Nord-Ost…

So we in Russia understand what is now happening with the French like few others.

But this tragedy occured at a rather inconvenient time in relations between the two countries. It came on the heels of a French magazine’s vulgar lampooning of the victims of the terrorist attack on our aircraft over the Sinai. I have not seen a single public apology from the French. Our officials are the only people who have tried reassuring us that real French people are ashamed about this… Thus, all expressions of sympathy, alas, have to begin with a caveat: “Regardless of your mockery of the terrorist attack against us, we do really feel for you.”

We feel for you because we ourselves have felt such tragedies on our shoulders. We sympathize, and we sympathize sincerely.

But approaching this with a cool head, one can’t deny that this case is also a matter of France paying the bills, and for multiple accounts at once.

The terrorists shouted, “This is for Syria!” And this is, at some level, “For Syria” – not in the sense that French aviation is bombing ISIS, but in that when France after the First World War received a mandate to govern Syria, it first divided that territory into five states along confessional lines: Christian, Alawite, Sunni, Druze, and Armenian. Then it took them and used them to glue together two states – Syria and Lebanon, thus laying the foundations for civil war in both countries. Had they either kept Syria unified, or properly divided, there would have been no ISIS.

Two years ago, President Hollande rattled his sabre harder than anyone else in pushing for an American intervention in Syria [against Assad], and was only narrowly stopped at the last moment by Vladimir Putin.

It was Hollande and his predecessor Sarkozy who supported the overthrow of Gaddafi, who welcomed the Islamic Revolution in Egypt, who seeded the flames of war in Syria and in so doing became directly responsible for the creation of ISIS, Al-Nusra, and similar demons, for the spread of their activities to France and all Europe, and for the overwhelming waves of refugees.

When in January murderers took care of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, instead of a sane adjustment to security and migration policy, Hollande was only interested in preventing Marine Le Pen from getting any political kudos and kickstarted the hysterical tolerance campaign “Je suis Charlie.”

Moreover, the objects of sympathy should not have been a bunch of talentless hacks, but those French citizens who were in danger of becoming victims of terrorism in the future!

Migration policy should have been tightened, and border controls strengthened. A campaign should have begun to fight against terrorist organizations globally and against the Islamist underground in France itself.

Instead of this, the orgy of “tolerance” continued, as Hollande occupied himself with weightier matters, such as saving the Kievan junta and clamping down on Mistral sales. France became a best friend of Qatar – one of the main sponsors of radical terrorism, including ISIS.

And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…

The most horrifying fact of this strategy is that the killers in the Bataclan spoke good French with no accent. This means that they are not recent immigrants, recently arrived from the Middle East. These are French high school graduates, perhaps – French citizens, to whom they tried to teach the lessons of tolerance.

There is a hard-hitting film from 2008 starring Isabelle Adjani called La Journée de la Jupe. A female teacher in an immigrant quadrant of Paris, despairing of the thuggery and unwillingness to learn of her students, and tired of their barbaric morals, finds a gun in the possession of one of them. She grabs the gun and proceeds to take the class hostage, and force the impudent rascals to study the biography of Molière and respect women at gunpoint. The police and bureaucrats dance about in the background, convinced that the “intolerant” teacher is the main threat. Special forces prepare to storm the classroom. But in the end, the gun ends up in the hands of one of the pupils, and there begins a bloody massacre. This is a very enlightenening film that everyone should watch today.

So it is impossible to say that the French themselves are unaware of what is happening with them. And it is no accident that the Front National of Marine Le Pen is France’s leading party. But the political system there has been specially arranged in such a way that even with a plurality of the votes, the National Front still get the smallest amount of seats in Parliament. This means that the situation will only change when the Front National starts getting more than 50% of the total votes.

Dictatorships can always be excused away by the fact that the incompetence of the man in power is paid for by the sufferings of people who never elected him. But France is a democratic country. It has political leaders who were ready to rearrange politics in a way that could avert tragedy. They could have voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 and 2007, and for Marine Le Pen in 2012. They not only could have, but should have, voted for Marine in 2012. But instead, the French elected Hollande and his party of tolerant hypocrites.

Today has revealed the frightful cost of that decision. The streets of Paris have been stained with blood, as mobs of fightened and bewildered people rampaged through the city.

But will even this shock change anything? If, regardless of the newly introduced State of Emergency, the regional elections of December 6th go ahead – will the French finally be ready to put a stop to all this, or will they continue to vote for freedom for terrorists, and equality and brotherhood with bandits?

I am afraid that the answer to this horror will be a continuation of the same old, same old. Western propaganda has already adapted an essentially totalitarian tenor: “We will rally all the more closely around the values of multiculturalism, we will not allow any expressions of extremism, this is all Assad’s fault, if only he had stepped down – none of this would have happened…”

Unfortunately, it has become clear that what we are seeing is a live translation of the fall of the Roman Empire under the onslaught of the barbarians. The same stubborn refusal to understand what is going on, the same unpreparedness to take serious decisions, the same vacillation and buffoonery in the moment of mortal danger. It would be great if wonderful France were to finally find its Jeanne D’Arc.

But that is hard to believe.

Therefore, Russia’s main task is to learn its lesson – and to defend itself. To defend its territory. Its people. Its aircraft.

To support its allies. To remove the contagion of terrorism from the Middle East and everywhere else. To be prepared to settle accounts not just with its perpetrators, but also its sponsors.

And to avoid hoping that either the French state or Europe will learn any lessons from this. That they will change their politics, join us in fighting our common enemy, or stop behaving like an elephant in a china shop in the East. To plan our moves on such hopes would be nothing more than self-deceit.

But with the French, we sympathize. Stay strong!

 

Charlie Hebdo had a hearty response to the terrorist downing of KGL9268: “The dangers of low-cost Russian airlines,” “I should have taken Air Cocaine,” “Daesh: Russian aviation intensifies the bombing.” So drôle!

When challenged on Russian condemnations of their humor:

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Gerard Biard, criticised the Kremlin for “using Charlie Hebdo to create a controversy where none exists, which is the usual manipulation you get from totalitarian regimes”. “This magazine is supposed to be irreverent, and we respect the values of democracy and freedom of expression which the Russian powers that be … do not,” he added.

charlie-hebdo-on-islam-and-its-parody

The French state arrested and charged the creator of the teenaged creator of the parody comic to the right with supporting terrorism. Not a peep about that from Charlie Hebdo.

Of course, as traditional with Western propaganda organs posing as dissident heroes and “pushing the boundaries” types, the concern for free speech is rather strangely limited to just Russia and other bugbears of Western hegemony:

Equal… but some groups were nonetheless plus égaux que d’autres, at least so far as Charlie Hebdo were concerned. In 2009, the cartoonist Siné, a longtime contributor to Charlie Hebdo, joked that Sarkozy’s son, Jean, would “go a long way, that little lad” on rumors that he was planning to convert to Judaism. For any basically normal, non-SJW inclined person, this would be nothing more than a harmless observation on the Jewish talent for economic success (something that is discussed at length by our own Steve Sailer, not to mention by Jews themselves). But for Charlie and the French Establishment, including the “philosopher” Bernard-Henry Lévy, the appropriate response was to fire him and then prosecute him for anti-Semitism (he was acquitted). On another occasion, Charlie started a signature collection campaign to get the Front National banned. Clearly, their own regard for free speech was very far from absolute.

Of course this merely reflects the priorities of the French Republic itself, which proceeded to open dozens of cases on pro-terrorism “hate speech,” including against the comedian Dieudonné for sardonically remarking “Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly” on his Facebook (Coulibaly was one of the CH attackers). All of which Charlie Hebdo evidently did not regard as the “usual manipulation you get from totalitarian regimes.”

Fortunately, Russians don’t take their cues from Charlie Coulibaly, and responded with hilarious cartoons of their own: “Laughter extends life!” “Not in your case Gerard.”

russian-reaction-to-charlie-hebdo

And soon after – and so prophetically – this happened.

Here’s another really amusing cartoon!

hollande-after-paris-attacks

This time, Charlie Hebdo’s reaction was decidedly… disappointingly… lackluster.

charlie-hebdo-on-paris

Terrorism is not the enemy. Terrorism is a mode of operation. Repeating ‘we are at war’ without finding the courage to name our enemies leads nowhere. Our enemies are those that love death. In various guises, they have always existed. History forgets quickly. And Paris tells them to fuck themselves.

That is like so deep man. So courageous. They Who Must Not Be Named are “are those that love death.” It even puts that great Bushism, “they hate us for our freedom” to shame!

 

 

charlie-hebdo-on-paris-2

And thus I finally started to really understand Dieudonné.

 

Ben “Shishkebab” Garrison, the most trolled cartoonist on the Internet, is increasingly making the artistic efforts of his most devoted fans redundant.

suicide-by-political-correctness-ben-garrison

And here he was warning us of Eurabia a few days before the Paris terrorist attacks.

european-vacation-ben-garrison

It is now evident that he never was just the standard, run-of-the-mill libertarian cartoonist that the shills portrayed him as. /pol/ was always right to believe in the potential of Ben “Remove Mohammedan” Garrison.

Assuming you are not too put off by his insane levels of Islamophobia, which might make even the most hardened 14/88 stormfag blanch, his Patreon is here.

 
• Category: Humor • Tags: Cartoon, Islamophobia, Paris Attacks, Trolling

I am too tired right now to compile all this into something more elegant than a point-by-point rant, so here goes: Some preliminary thoughts on the latest terrorist attacks that have claimed 128+ lives in Paris.

(1) The usual cucks have wasted no time in making political hay of this tragedy

So don’t be shamed by traditional social conventions about avoiding making political points out of respect for the dead. Like it or not but the information age and the 24 hour news cycle have made this genteel habit obsolete and indeed, maladaptive.

Spread the anti-”Invite the World” propaganda far and wide (Liveleak version in case YouTube shuts it down).

Note as Whyvert points out that Marine Le Pen, leading the opinion polls and the one politician who might have materially reduced the chances of this happening, is currently on trial for Islamophobia. The globalist elites don’t play fair and neither should you.

(2) It’s probably not even gonna cost you much, if anything.

For instance, here is what Wikileaks – an impressively redpilled organization – Tweeted soon after the attacks.

Contrary to their numerous detractors in the comments, this is an entirely brave and entirely appropriate Tweet. It’s the exact time and place because nobody would pay any attention otherwise.

Moreover, I took note of their follower count when they made this Tweet. It was at 2.81 million. A few hours later, it was still at 2.81 million.

Note that this in spite of the SJWs having attacked Wikileaks for politicizing these terrorist attacks but not the the likes of establishment journalists like Ezra Klein. But apart from confirming SJWs as the mercenary attack dogs of the neocons that they are, this didn’t even have any substantial effect on Wikileaks’ follower numbers, which goes once more to show that the SJWs are more bark than bite.

(3) The globalist elites are pure unadultered evil so do not take anything they say at face value.

assad-on-western-hypocrisy

And now we come to the “Invade Whe world” part.

The Syrian Civil War was a primarily US sponsored project to weaponize their Islamist lackeys to break up Syria for make benefit of Israel. And ever since Sarkozy it should be borne in mind that France has become even more “American” than the Americans, as seen in Libya, and in the ferocity of their demands to oust Assad.

Therefore do not rush to celebrate, like the otherwise astute hbdchick:

Treat everything these reptiles say with the utmost suspicion.

When Hollande declares that this is a “war,” bear in mind that he might just as easily be talking about, say, French nationalists. Indeed, given the trends towards defining Islamic terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity,” terrorist attacks like these could for the elites be a convenient way of getting rid of two birds with one stone i.e. the Islamist problem that they themselves created, plus the Front National and other pro-French and pro-European forces.

Bear in mind also that in Western rhetoric Assad is responsible for the immigrant crisis and for terrorism and everything else that their own perverse policies have created, so do not be overly surprised if in a few days or weeks there arises a renewed clamor for removing Assad – the rock that holds the last bastion of civilization in place in the region.

Note that the “intellectual” foundations for any such developments are already being laid by the neocons:

See also:

At the extreme end of the spectrum of the possible fallout from all this we could see a resuscitation of the Western plans for a no fly zone over Syria which were in place before Russia intervened (Translation: Bombing the legitimate Syrian government, helping exterminate civilized Alawites, Islamic State apemen spreading their reach to the Mediterranean Sea).

This is an idea with plenty of neocon support and Lindsey Graham has been the latest Western politician to endorse it.

As I said before I do not think the Western elites are that crazy – at least the guys in the Pentagon should be realistic and well-informed enough to put the damper on any such adventurist nonsense should it gain further traction in what passes for “debate” in American foreign policy – but then again when it comes to these people nothing can be definitively ruled out…

 

src="http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/us-mortality-compared-1999-2013-279x300.jpg" alt="us-mortality-compared-1999-2013"

width="279" height="300" /> Since the release of the paper by

Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing that mortality rates amongst middle-aged White American males increased from 1999-2013, there has been a

lot of anguished hand-wringing about the sorts of further regression or even collapses that it might portend. Comparisons have been made to the

Soviet Union, which also saw an (alcohol-fuelled) spike in mortality since the 1960s, which reached its apogee in the 1990s.

This self-criticism, seen both on alternative media outlets like the Unz

Review as well as higher profile venues such as The New

York Times (Paul Krugman I see also made a limited Soviet comparison), is a perfectly health reaction to a problem which although quite

severe by developed world standards is nowhere near the scale of that which afflicted the Soviet Union (where until the late 1980s discussion

of adverse demographic trends was silenced by the Communist regime). This is something I stressed in my own post on this:

Nonetheless, regardless of the fact that the US mortality crisis is far less severe in absolute terms, and didn’t undergo the

catastrophic “spike” that post-Soviet Russia experienced, the similarities – a major demographic group experiencing a sustained deterioration

in its mortality prospects over a period of decades in an industrialized country – are otherwise quite remarkable.

Here are a couple of graphs that should prevent Americans falling into unreasonable pessimism. The figures for mortality rates / 100,000 for 50

year olds are drawn from mortality.org, which hosts one of the most detailed databases on mortality

rates for a variety of OECD and ex-USSR countries. (I used it extensively to compile my forecasts of Russia’s 21st century demographics). And the blunt fact of the matter is that relative to what happened in the

late USSR not to even mention the 1990s, when the Russian state lost its monopoly on vodka production, there is simply no comparison in

absolute terms to the limited meth/painkiller epidemic that is currently suppressing life expectancy in some of the poorer US White

communities. (Although this graph shows mortality for all 50 year Americans, do note that that age group is still very much

predominantly White, so the all-American figures will to a very large extent be merely parallel to White American trends. For

Whites specifically, just imagine the very marginal decline from 1990 to today as a flat line instead).

50-year-old-mortality-</p>
<p>usa-vs-eastern-europe

As we can see above, the American trends in the past two decades – characterized by stagnation – are qualitatively different from what

afflicted the USSR and its successor states from 1965 to 1985, let alone the turmoil of the post-Soviet transition – characterized as they were

by very significant outright increases in mortality followed by a sharp mortality spike in the 1990s. Even Poland, a country with some of the

lowest prediclections towards vodka bingeing in Eastern Europe – though that, admittedly, is not exactly the highest of bars – has only

recently just about finished recovering the sort of middle-aged mortality rates that it had half a century ago. In contrast, American

middle-aged men – primarily thanks to medical advances – now enjoy mortality rates less than half of those that prevailed before the advent

of advanced modern medicine in the 1960s.

50-year-old-mortality-</p>
<p>usa-vs-developed-world

The US health profile isn’t anywhere near as good relative to other countries in the developed world, but it should be noted that this has

pretty much always been the case (though of course the burden of that difference has shifted in relative

terms from US Blacks to Whites).

As seen from the graph above, as of the early 2010s, the US had a significantly higher than middle-aged male mortality rate than the European

country with the shortest life expectancy, Denmark, as well as the longest-lived Latin American country, Chile. Moreover, the US were from

being around the highest end of the developed country range in the early 1990s, to something close to an outlier by the early 2010s.

This merits concern. Furthermore, whereas in my Soviet Fishtown post I posited that

the cause of this US mortality lag might have been due to a vicious symbiosis of loose pharma advertising rules and obesity, the example of New

Zealand – which has seen very strong and consistent reductions in mortality – puts a big question mark over that thesis. That is because

href="http://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-fishtown/#comment-1214621">as pointed out by the commentator Chuck, New Zealand was the only

country in the world – alongside the US – to legalize direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs; and New Zealand, too, has a fairly

rotund obesity problem of its own. Nonetheless, it has not experienced the mortality stagnation that the US has.

Note however that New Zealand doesn’t exactly support “Leftist” explanations of the US White exception to First World middle-aged mortality

declines either. That is because New Zealand too had a

distinct “neoliberal” revolution – and one that hasn’t generally been judged to have been successful. Nonetheless, contrary to Leftist

conventional wisdom, New Zealand in fact saw very rapid reductions in mortality – including middle-aged male mortality, as seen in the graph

above – during the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the extent that it basically halved in overall terms.

Three meager conclusions follow:

(1) Don’t rush to assign overly “ideological” explanations to adverse trends, such as the stagnation in middle-aged US White male mortality.

Neither the “Leftist” one of neoliberal reform, nor the “Rightist” one of increasing immigration and White demoralization (which most of Europe

saw as well), nor even quasi-HBD one I posited in my “Soviet Fishtown” post (combination of easily prescriptiond drugs, obesity, and White

melancholy) work very well.

(2) Although there is ample cause of concern, overly direct comparisons with what happened in 1990s Russia – or even the 1970s-1980s

USSR – are as yet overwrought. And in any case, with medical technology continuing to advance, there might be a good chance that the last 25

years of stagnation in US White middle-aged mortality might end up being a temporary affair before the resumption of progress.

 
• Category: Miscellaneous • Tags: Demographics, Mortality, USA
HBD, Hive Minds, and H+
apollos-ascent-front-cover

Today is the publication date of Hive Mind, a book by economist Garett Jones on the intimate relationship between average national IQs and national success, first and foremost in the field of economics.

I do intend to read and review it ASAP, but first some preliminary comments.

This is a topic I have been writing about since I started blogging in 2008 (and indeed well before I came across Steve Sailer or even HBD) and as it so happens, I have long been intending to write a similar sort of book myself – tentatively titled Apollo’s Ascent – but one that focuses more on the historical aspect of the relationship between psychometrics and development:

My basic thesis is that the rate of technological progress, as well as its geographical pattern, is highly dependent on the absolute numbers of literate high IQ people.

To make use of the intense interest that will inevitably flare up around these topics in the next few days – not to mention that rather more self-interested reason of confirming originality on the off chance that any of Garett Jones’ ideas happen to substantively overlap with mine – I have decided to informally lay out the theoretical basis for Apollo’s Ascent right now.

1. Nous

Assume that the intellectual output of an average IQ (=100, S.D.=15) young adult Briton in the year 2000 – as good an encapsulation of the “Greenwich mean” of intelligence as any – is equivalent to one nous (1 ν).

This can be used to calculate the aggregate mindpower (M) in a country.

Since sufficiently differing degrees of intelligence can translate into qualitative differences – for instance, no amount of 55 IQ people will be able to solve a calculus problem – we also need to be able to denote mindpower that is above some threshold of intelligence. So in this post, the aggregate mindpower of a country that is above 130 will be written as M(+2.0), i.e. that aggregate mindpower that is two standard deviations above the Greenwich mean.

2. Intelligence and Industrial Economies

There is a wealth of evidence implying an exponential relationship between average IQ and income and wealth in the United States.

human-capital-and-gdp-per-capita-world

Click to enlarge.

There is likewise a wealth of evidence – from Lynn, Rindermann, La Griffe du Lion, your humble servant, etc. – that shows an exponential relationship between levels of average national IQ and GDP per capita (PPP adjusted). When you throw out countries with a legacy of Communism and the ruinous central planning they practiced (China, the Ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, etc), and countries benefitting disproportionately from a resource windfall (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc), there is an amazing R2=0.84 correlation between performance in the PISA international standardized student tests and GDP (PPP) per capita. (In sociology, anything about R2=0.3 is a good result).

The reasons for this might be the case are quite intuitive. At the most basic level, intelligent people can get things done better and more quickly. In sufficiently dull societies, certain things can’t get done at all. To loosely borrow an example from Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, assume a relatively simple widget that requires ten manufacturing steps that have to be done just right to make it commercially viable. Say an 85 IQ laborer has a failure rate of 5% for any one step, while a 100 IQ laborer has a failure rate of 1%. This does not sound like that big or cardinal of a difference. But repeated ten times, some 40% of the duller worker’s production ends up being a dud, compared to only 10% of the brighter worker’s. Consequently, one is competitive on the global markets, whereas the other is not (if labor costs are equal; hence, of course, they are not).

Now imagine said widget is an automobile, with hundreds of thousands of components. Or an aircraft carrier, or a spaceship. Or a complex surgery operation.

More technical way of looking at this: Consider the GDP equation, Y = A * K^α * L^(1-α), in which K is capital, L is labour, α is a constant that usually equals about 0.3, and A is total factor productivity. It follows that the only way to grow per capita output in the longterm is to raise productivity. Productivity in turn is a function of technology and how effectively it is utilized and that in turn depends critically on things like human capital. Without an adequate IQ base, you cannot accumulate much in the way of human capital.

There are at least two further ways in which brighter societies improve their relative fortunes over and above what might merely be implied by their mere productivity advantage at any technological level.

robot-density

Source: Swiss Miss.

First, capital gets drawn to more productive countries, until the point at which its marginal productivity equalizes with that of less productive countries, with their MUCH LOWER levels of capital intensity. First World economies like Germany, Japan, and the US are extremely capital intensive. It is probably not an accident that Japan, Korea, and Taiwan – some of the very brightest countries on international IQ comparisons – also have by far the world’s highest concentrations of industrial robots per worker (and China is fast catching up). Since economic output is a function not only of pure productivity but also of capital (though subject to diminishing returns) this provides a big further boost to rich countries above the levels implied by their raw productivity. And as the age of automation approaches, these trends will only intensify.

Second, countries with higher IQs also tend to be better governed, and to effectively provide social amenities such as adequate nutrition and education to their populations. Not only does it further raise their national IQs, but it also means that it is easier to make longterm investments there and to use their existing human capital to its full potential.

All this implies that different levels of intelligence have varying economic values on the global market. At this stage I am not so much interested in establishing it with exactitude as illustrating the general pattern, which goes something like this:

  • Average IQ = 70 – Per capita GDP of ~$4,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, such as Ghana (note however that many countries in this class are not yet fully done with their Malthusian transitions, which will depress their per capita output somewhat – see below).
  • Average IQ = 85 – Per capita GDP of ~$16,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, such as Brazil.
  • Average IQ = 100 Per capita GDP of ~45,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, or approximately the level of core EU/US/Japan.
  • Average IQ = 107 – Per capita GDP of potentially $80,000, as in Singapore (and it doesn’t seem to have even finished growing rapidly yet). Similar figures for elite/financial EU cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Milan) and US cities (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Boston).
  • Average IQ = 115 – Largely a theoretical construct, but that might be the sort of average IQ you’d get in, say, Inner London – the center of the global investment banking industry. The GDP per capita there is a cool $152,000.

Countries with bigger than normal “smart fractions” (the US, India, Israel) tend to have a bigger GDP per capita than what could be assumed from just from their average national IQ. This stands to reason because a group of people equally split between 85 IQers and 115 IQers will have higher cognitive potential than a room composed of an equivalent number of 100 IQers. Countries with high average IQs but smaller than normal S.D.’s, such as Finland, have a slightly smaller GDP per capita that what you might expect just from average national IQs.

These numbers add up, so a reasonable relationship equilibrium GDP (assuming no big shocks, good policies, etc) and the structure and size of national IQ would be:

Equilibrium GDP of a country exponent (IQ) * the IQ distribution (usually a bell curve shaped Gaussian) * population size * the technological level

Which can be simplified to:

Y ≈ c*M*T

… where M is aggregate mindpower (see above), T is the technology level, and c is a constant denoting the general regulatory/business climate (close to 1 in many well run capitalist states, <0.5 under central planning, etc).

To what extent if any would this model apply to pre-industrial economies?

3. Intelligence and Malthusian Economies

sfd

Source: A Farewell to Alms

Very little. The problem with Malthusian economies is that, as per the old man himself, population increases geometrically while crop yields increase linearly; before long, the increasing population eats up all the surpluses and reaches a sordid equilibrium in which births equal deaths (since there were a lot of births, that means a lot of deaths).

Under such conditions, even though technology might grow slowly from century to century, it is generally expressed not in increasing per capita consumption, but in rising population densities. And over centennial timescales, the effects of this (meager) technological growth can be easily swamped by changes in social structure, biome productivity, and climatic fluctuations (e.g. 17th C France = pre Black Death France in terms of population, because it was Little Ice Age vs. Medieval Warm Period), or unexpected improvements in agricultural productivity e.g. from the importation of new crops (e.g. the coming of sweet potatoes to China which enabled it to double its population over the previous record even though it was in outright social regress for a substantial fraction of this time).

All this makes tallying the rate of technological advance based on population density highly problematic. Therefore it has to be measured primarily in terms of eminent figures, inventions, and great works.

sdfds

Distribution of significant figures across time and place. Source: Human Accomplishment.

The social scientist Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment has suggested a plausible and objective way of doing it, based on tallying the eminence of historical figures in culture and the sciences as measured by their prevalence in big reference works. Societies that are at any one time intensively pushing the technological frontiers outwards are likely to be generating plenty of “Great People,” to borrow a term from the Civilization strategy games.

To what extent does the model used for economic success apply to technology?

4. Intelligence and Technology Before 1800

A narrow intellectual elite is responsible for 99%+ of new scientific discoveries. This implies that unlike the case with an economy at large, where peasants and truck drivers make real contributions, you need to have a certain (high) threshold level of IQ to materially contribute to technological and scientific progress today.

The Anne Roe study of very eminent scientists in 1952 – almost Nobel worthy, but not quite – found that they averaged a verbal IQ of 166, a spatial IQ of 137, and a math IQ of 154. Adjusted modestly down – because the Flynn Effect has only had a very modest impact on non-rule dependent domains like verbal IQ – and you get an average verbal IQ of maybe 160 (in Greenwich terms). These were the sorts of elite people pushing progress in science 50 years ago.

To really understand 1950s era math and physics, I guesstimate that you would need an IQ of ~130+, i.e. your typical STEM grad student or Ivy League undergrad. This suggests that there is a 2 S.D. difference between the typical intellectual level needed to master something as opposed to making fundamental new discoveries in it.

Moreover, progress becomes steadily harder over time; disciplines splinter (see the disappearance of polymath “Renaissance men”), and eventually, discoveries become increasingly unattainable to sole individuals (see the steady growth in numbers of paper coauthors and shared Nobel Prizes in the 20th century). In other words, these IQ discovery thresholds are themselves a function of the technological level. To make progress up the tech tree, you need to first climb up there.

An extreme example today would be the work 0f Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. At least Grigory Perelman’s proof of the Poincare Conjecture was eventually confirmed by other mathematicians after a lag of several years. But Mochizuki is so far ahead of everyone else in his particular field of Inter-universal Teichmüller theory that nobody any longer quite knows whether he is a universal genius or a lunatic.

In math, I would guesstimate roughly the following set of thresholds:

Mastery Discovery
Intuit Pythagoras Theorem (Ancient Egypt) 90 120
Prove Pythagoras Theorem (Early Ancient Greece) 100 130
Renaissance Math (~1550) 110 140
Differential Calculus (~1650+) 120 150
Mid-20th Century Math (1950s) 130 160
Prove Poincare Conjecture (2003) 140 170
Inter-universal Teichmüller theory (?) 150 180

This all suggests that countries which attain new records in aggregate elite mindpower relative to their predecessors can very quickly generate vast reams of new scientific discoveries and technological achievements.

Moreover, this elite mindpower has to be literate. Because a human brain can only store so much information, societies without literacy are unable to move forwards much beyond Neolithic levels, their IQ levels regardless.

As such, a tentative equation for estimating a historical society’s capacity to generate scientific and technological growth would look something like this:

Technological growth c * M(>threshold IQ for new discovery) * literacy rate

or:

ΔT c * M(>discovery-threshold) * l

in which only that part of the aggregate mindpower that is above the threshold is considered; c is a constant that illustrates a society’s propensity for generating technological growth in the first place and can encompass social and cultural factors, such as no big wars, no totalitarian regimes, creativity, etc. as well as technological increases that can have a (generally marginal) effect on scientific productivity, like reading glasses in Renaissance Italy (well covered by David Landes), and the Internet in recent decades; and the literacy rate l is an estimate of the percentage of the cognitive elites that are literate (it can be expected to generally be a function of the overall literacy rate and to always be much higher).

Is it possible to estimate historical M and literacy with any degree of rigor?

dfgdf

Source: Gregory Clark.

I think so. In regards to literacy, this is an extensive area of research, with some good estimates for Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire (see Ancient Literacy by William Harris) and much better estimates for Europe after 1500 based on techniques like age heaping and book production records.

One critical consideration is that not all writing systems are equally suited for the spread of functional literacy. For instance, China was historically one of the most schooled societies, but its literacy tended to be domain specific, the classic example being “fish literacy” – a fishmonger’s son who knew the characters for different fish, but had no hope of adeptly employing his very limited literacy for making scientific advances, or even reading “self-help” pamphlets on how to be more effective in his profession (such as were becoming prevalent in England as early as the 17th century). The Chinese writing system, whether it arose from QWERTY reasons or even genetic reasons – and which became prevalent throughout East Asia – surely hampered the creative potential of East Asians.

Estimating average national IQs historically – from which M can be derived in conjunction with historical population sizes, of which we now generally have fairly good ideas about – is far more tricky and speculative, but not totally hopeless, because nowadays we know the main factors behind national differences in IQ.

Some of the most important ones include:

  • Cold Winters Theory – Northern peoples developed higher IQs (see Lynn, Rushton).
  • Agriculture – Societies that developed agriculture got a huge boost to their IQs (as well as higher S.D.s).
  • Inbreeding – Can be estimated from rates of consanguineous marriage, runs of homozygosity, and predominant family types (nuclear? communitarian?), which in turn can be established from cultural and literary evidence.
  • Eugenics – In advanced agricultural societies, where social relations come to be dominated by markets. See Greg Clark on England, and Ron Unz on China.
  • Nutrition – Obviously plays a HUGE role in the Flynn Effect. Can be proxied by body measurements, and fortunately there is a whole field of study devoted to precisely this: Auxology. Burials, conscription records, etc. all provide a wealth of evidence.
  • Parasite Load – Most severe in low-lying, swampy areas like West Africa and the Ganges Delta.
byzantine-empire-intellectual-capacity

This old comment of mine to a post by Sailer is a demonstration of the sort of reasoning I tend to employ in Apollo’s Ascent.

All this means that educated guesses at the historic IQs of various societies are now perfectly feasible, if subject to a high degree of uncertainty. In fact, I have already done many such estimates while planning out Apollo’s Ascent. I will not release these figures at this time because they are highly preliminary, and lacking space to further elucidate my methods, I do not want discussions in the comments to latch on to some one figure or another and make a big deal out of it. Let us save this for later.

But in broad terms – and very happily for my thesis – these relations DO tend to hold historically.

Classical Greece was almost certainly the first society to attain something resembling craftsman level literacy rates (~10%). Ancient Greeks were also unusually tall (indicating good nutrition, for a preindustrial society), lived in stem/authoritarian family systems, and actively bred out during their period of greatness. They produced the greatest scientific and cultural explosion up to that date anywhere in the world, but evidently didn’t have quite the demographic weight – there were no more than 10 million Greeks scattered across the Mediterranean at peak – to sustain it.

In 15th century Europe, literacy once again begun soaring in Italy, to beyond Roman levels, and – surely helped by the good nutrition levels following the Black Death – helped usher in the Renaissance. In the 17th century, the center of gravity shifted towards Anglo-Germanic Europe in the wake of the Reformation with its obsession with literacy, and would stay there ever after.

As regards other civilizations…

The Islamic Golden Age was eventually cut short more by the increasing inbreeding than by the severe but ultimately temporary shock from the Mongol invasions. India was too depressed by the caste system and by parasitic load to ever be a first rate intellectual power, although the caste system also ensured a stream of occasional geniuses, especially in the more abstract areas like math and philosophy. China and Japan might have had an innate IQ advantage over Europeans – albeit one that was quite modest in the most critical area, verbal IQ – but they were too severely hampered by labour-heavy agricultural systems and a very ineffective writing system.

In contrast, The Europeans, fed on meat and mead, had some of the best nutrition and lowest parasitic load indicators amongst any advanced civilization, and even as rising population pressure began to impinge on those advantages by the 17th-18th centuries, they had already burst far ahead in literacy, and intellectual predominance was now theirs to lose.

5. Intelligence and Technology under Industrialism

After 1800, the world globalized intellectually. This was totally unprecedented. There had certainly been preludes to it, e.g. in the Jesuit missions to Qing China. But these were very much exceptional cases. Even in the 18th century, for instance, European and Japanese mathematicians worked on (and solved) many of the same problems independently.

sdfsd

Source: Human Accomplishment.

But in the following two centuries, this picture of independent intellectual traditions – shining most brightly in Europe by at least an order of magnitude, to be sure, but still diverse on the global level – was to be homogenized. European science became the only science that mattered, as laggard civilizations throughout the rest of the world were to soon discover to their sorrow in the form of percussion rifles and ironclad warships. And by “Europe,” that mostly meant the “Hajnal” core of the country: France, Germany, the UK, Scandinavia, and Northern Italy.

And what had previously been but a big gap became an awning chasm.

(1) In the 19th century, the populations of European countries grew, and the advanced ones attained universal literacy or as good as made no difference. Aggregate mindpower (M) exploded, and kept well ahead of the advancing threshold IQ needed to make new discoveries.

(2) From 1890-1970, there was a second revolution, in nutrition and epidemiology – average heights increased by 10cm+, and the prevalence of debilitating infectitious diseases was reduced to almost zero – that raised IQ by as much as a standard deviation across the industrialized world. The chasm widened further.

(3) During this period, the straggling civilizations – far from making any novel contributions of their own – devoted most of their meager intellectual resources to merely coming to grips with Western developments.

This was as true – and consequential – in culture and social sciences as it was in science and technology; the Russian philosopher Nikolay Trubetzkoy described this traumatic process very eloquently in The Struggle Between Europe and Mankind. What was true even for “semi-peripheral” Russia was doubly true for China.

In science and technology, once the rest of the world had come to terms with Western dominance and the new era of the nation-state, the focus was on catchup, not innovation.This is because for developing countries, it is much more useful in terms of marginal returns to invest their cognitive energies into copying, stealing, and/or adapting existing technology to catch up to the West than to develop unique technology of their own. Arguments about, say, China’s supposed lack of ability to innovate are completely besides the point. At this stage of its development, even now, copying is much easier than creating!

This means that at this stage of global history, a country’s contribution to technological growth isn’t only a matter of the size of its smart fractions above the technological discovery IQ threshold. (This remains unchanged: E.g., note that a country like Germany remains MUCH more innovative per capita than, say, Greece, even though their aveage national IQs differ by a mere 5 points or so. Why? Because since we’re looking only at the far right tails of the bell curve, even minor differences in averages translate to big differences in innovation-generating smart fractions).

It also relates closely to its level of development. Countries that are far away from the technological frontier today are better served by using their research dollars and cognitive elites to catch up as opposed to inventing new stuff. This is confirmed by real life evidence: A very big percentage of world spending on fundamental research since WW2 has been carried out in the US. It was low in the USSR, and negligible in countries like Japan until recently. Or in China today.

Bearing this in mind, the technological growth equation today (and since 1800, more or less) – now due to its global character better described as innovation potential – would be better approximated by something like this:

Innovation potential ≈ c * M(>threshold IQ for new discovery) * literacy rate * (GDP/GDP[potential])^x

or:

I c * M(>discovery-threshold) * l * (Y/Y[P])^x

in which the first three terms are as before (though literacy = 100% virtually everywhere now), and potential GDP is the GDP this country would obtain were its technological endowment to be increased to the maximum level possible as dictated by its cognitive profile. The “x” is a further constant that is bigger than 1 to reflect the idea that catchup only ceases to be the most useful strategy once a country has come very close to convergence or has completely converged.

Japan has won a third of all its Nobel Prizes before 2000; another third in the 2000s; and the last third in the 2010s. Its scientific achievements, in other words, are finally beginning to catch up with its famously high IQ levels. Why did it take so long?

Somebody like JayMan would say its because the Japanese are clannish or something like that. Other psychometrists like Kenya Kura would notice that perhaps they are far less creative than Westerners (this I think has a measure of truth to it). But the main “purely IQ” reasons are pretty much good enough by themselves:

  • The Nobel Prize is typically recognized with a ~25-30 year lag nowadays.
  • It is taking ever longer amounts of time to work up to a Nobel Prize because ever greater amounts of information and methods have to be mastered before original creative work can begin. (This is one consequence of the rising threshold discovery IQ frontier).
  • Critically, Japan in the 1950s was still something of a Third World country, with the attended insults upon average IQ. It is entirely possible that elderly Japanese are duller than their American counterparts, and perhaps even many Europeans of that age, meaning smaller smart fractions from the Nobel Prize winning age groups.

Japan only became an unambiguously developed country in the 1970s.

And it just so happens that precisely 40 years after this did it begin to see a big and still accelerating increase in the numbers of Nobel Prizes accruing to it!

Extending this to South Korea and Taiwan, both of which lagged around 20 years behind Japan, we can only expect to see an explosion in Nobel Prizes for them from the 2020s, regardless of how wildly their teenagers currently top out the PISA rankings.

Extending this to China, which lags around 20 years behind South Korea, and we can expect to see it start gobbling up Nobel Prizes by 2040, or maybe 2050, considering the ongoing widening of the time gap between discovery and recognition. However, due to its massive population – ten times as large as Japan’s – once China does emerge as a major scientific leader, it will do so in a very big way that will rival or even displace the US from its current position of absolute primacy.

As of 2014, China already publishes almost as many scientific papers per year as does the US, and has an outright lead in major STEM fields such as Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. (Though to be sure, their quality is much lower, and a significant fraction of them are outright “catching up” or “adaption” style papers with no new findings).

If we assume that x=1, and that c is equal for both China and the US, then it implies that both countries currently have broadly equal innovation potential. But of course c is not quite equal between them – it is lower for China, because its system is obviously less conductive to scientific research than the American – and x is higher than 1, so in practice China’s innovation potential is still considerably lower than that of the US (maybe a quarter or a third). Nonetheless, as China continues to convege, c is going to trend towards the US level, and the GDP gap is going to narrow; plus it may also be able to eke out some further increases in its national average IQ from the current ~103 (as proxied by PISA in 2009) to South Korea’s level of ~107 as it becomes a truly First World country.

And by mid-century it will likely translate into a strong challenge to American scientific preeminence.

6. Future Consequences

The entry of China onto the world intellectual stage (if the model above is more or less correct) will be portentuous, but ultimately it will in its effects on aggregate mindpower be nowhere near the magnitude in global terms of the expansion in the numbers of literate, mostly European high IQ people from 1450 to 1900, nor the vast rise in First World IQ levels from 1890-1970 due to the Flynn Effect.

Moreover, even this may be counteracted by the dysgenic effects already making themselves felt in the US and Western Europe due to Idiocracy-resembling breeding patterns and 80 IQ Third World immigration.

And no need for pesky implants!

Radically raise IQ. And no need for pesky neural implants!

A lot of the techno-optimistic rhetoric you encounter around transhumanist circles is founded on the idea that observed exponential trends in technology – most concisely encapsulated by Moore’s Law – are somehow self-sustaining, though the precise reasons why never seem to be clearly explained. But non-IT technological growth peaked in the 1950s-70s, and has declined since; and as a matter of fact, Moore’s Law has also ground to a halt in the past 2 years. Will we be rescued by a new paradigm? Maybe. But new paradigms take mindpower to generate, and the rate of increase in global mindpower has almost certainly peaked. This is not a good omen.

Speaking of the technological singularity, it is entirely possible that the mindpower discovery threshold for constructing a superintelligence is in fact far higher than we currently have or are likely to ever have short of a global eugenics program (and so Nick Bostrom can sleep in peace).

On the other hand, there are two technologies that combined may decisively tip the balance: CRISPR-Cas9, and the discovery of the genes for general intelligence. Their maturation and potential mating may become feasible as early as 2025.

While there are very good reasons – e.g., on the basis of animal breeding experiments – for doubting Steve Hsu’s claims that genetically corrected designer babies will have IQs beyond that of any living human today, increases on the order of 4-5 S.D.’s are entirely possible. If even a small fraction of a major country like China adopts it – say, 10% of the population – then that will in two decades start to produce an explosion in aggregate global elite mindpower that will soon come to rival or even eclipse the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in the size and scope of their effects on the world.

The global balance of power would be shifted beyond recognition, and truly transformational – indeed, transhuman – possibilities will genuinely open up.

 

robert-stark Robert Stark is a journalist who specializes in interviewing various interesting figures from the Alt fringes. So you could I suppose view him as The Unz Review but on radio.

This is my second interview with him. Here is a link to the first.

Robert Stark interviews Anatoly Karlin.

Topics were my standard fare:

Basically, stuff that you’ve probably heard here before.

That said, we did veer into two fairly idiosyncratic tangents.

(1) The Alt Right should embrace Transhumanism

Yes, I know, they are sort of dorky and even SJWish at times. But technology has ideological load, as Michael Anissimov put it (in an article I can’t find), and it just so happens that transhuman techs are perfectly in line with Alt Right, NRx, Identitarian, and even White Nationalist agendas.

  • Raising IQs via genetic editing will arrest the dysgenic trends increasingly affected all peoples on the planet. Degenerating into a global idiocracy serves absolutely no-one’s interest: Not of Europeans, nor Asians, nor Africans.
  • Automation will (hopefully) redistribute resources from the NAM-pandering welfare systems of today to something more fair and equitable. It will also probably help even the gap between indigenous and immigrant fertility rates in Europe and the US.
  • Radical life extension will help preserve White majorities in Europe. The reason that they are declining isn’t just a matter of birth rates, but also of death rates; Europeans are simply much older than your typical immigrant “youth.” Plummeting mortality and morbidity rates – apart from their general desirability – will from an ethnic perspective overwhelmingly benefit Whites and help Europeans maintain majorities in their historic homelands.

Ultimately, this is the future, and ideologies that fail to grapple and engage with it will fall by the wayside.

(2) The Alt Left needs to become a thing

I completely agree with Robert Lindsay on this.

Do you think I should start an Alternative Left movement? People are calling me the Alternative Left. Alternative Left would be something like:

Economically Leftist or liberal (left on economics)
Socially Conservative or at least sane (right on social issues)

It would be something like a leftwing mirror of the Alternative Right.

Do you think it would go over? I am really getting sick of this Left/Right bullshit. Everyone has to decide if they are “conservative” or “liberal.” What bullshit. What if you are a little of both?

Just because I don’t want to engage in SJW faggotry – the sort of ideology that Lenin would have called an infantile disorder, and which Friedrich Engels correctly identified as serving the reaction – doesn’t necessarily mean I want to lick oligarch ass either.

There is no left or right, only nationalists and globalists.” – Marine Le Pen

 

triggered-by-neanderthal-man-1953 Yesterday I was asked by a friend if I planned to write anything about the ongoing saga over Halloween costumes at Yale. I said probably not because what would be the point? The whole affair is so bizarre that parody is redundant. Besides, plenty of other people have ably commented on it, and if you really wanted to indulge in masochism you could always go straight to the source and watch a video of those hysterical freaks haranguing the hapless Master of Silliman College for having the gall and temerity to be “committed to an ideal of free speech.”

How dare he privilege the First Amendment over safe spaces? The irony of these students demanding that adults dictate their Halloween fashion choices – a blatant exercise of authority that would have enraged their activist forebears in the 1960s – was entirely lost on them, in the unlikely event that they even considered it in the first place.

Until the early 2010s, campus leftism seems to have mainly consisted of Obama enthusiasts and a radical fringe of Bob Avakian cultists. I didn’t move in those circles, which is why for a long time I perceived the SJW phenomenon to be a highly fringe phenomenon largely confined to the Internet: Completely insane, to be sure, but amusing, entertaining, and ultimately harmless. WaPo opinion columnist Catherine Rampell agrees:

It just so happens that I left university just as the party was getting started.

Tellingly, my only significant encounter with SJW activism on campus occured during my last term at UCB, in which I was taking a class on hominin evolution to satisfy the biology part of the breadth requirements needed to graduate.

The professor showed the class the following clip from The Neanderthal Man, a bad 1953 scifi movie in which a mad scientist injects himself with a serum that regresses animals to their “primitive” states, which for humans is the Neanderthal. Or rather, the black, hirsute apeman that 1950s folks apparently imagined Neanderthals to be. This Neanderthal man proceeded to terrorize picnicking couples, bashing in the mens’ heads and taking away the women to the accompaniment of campy music.

Overall, this is pretty tame stuff – no blood, no nudity, and an overly slapstick tenor to it all – as was typical of Hollywood movies during the MPPC era. No normal person, I am sure, would take exception to showing this clip to a class of adult students for the purposes of illustrating the popular outlook on Neanderthals in the middle of the 20th century.

However, at least one member of the class did take very strong exception to it.

“Excuse me, professor,” piped up a dark-haired girl in Ben Folds glasses. “Showing rape scenes can be deeply traumatic to survivors of rape and sexual assault. This class is supposed to be a space safe, and you should have either refrained from showing this clip, or at least accompanied it with a trigger warning.”

Wow, just wow, I can’t even! I am not even exaggerating. While I hardly have perfect recollection, and her precise wording would have been different, this is in fact more or less the gist of what she said, down to the stilted speaking style as if she was reading from an SJW glossary.

After a long silence, the class burst out laughing, and the professor, maintaining decorum but obviously struggling to battle down his mirth, told her that her that while he appreciated her concerns, the content he presented was appropriate for mature adult viewers and justified in view of the learning goals of the class. He added that he was not a qualified psychologist, so he lacked the competence to conduct any further discussions on the topic. In the event that she had any lingering concerns, he offered to refer her to a professional psychologist, or to the university department responsible for dealing with student complains (safe in the knowledge that it would chucked out with a chuckle). Her classmates were rather less polite in their responses, telling her to Reddit and Tumblr all about it after class. Very soon she realized just how weird her outburst must have looked from the sidelines, and resolved to work on her social skills and stop being an attention whore.

Of course that last part is a total fiction.

As opposed to what would happen in any normal society, the professor, who didn’t have tenure, apologized to her profusely. He thanked her for pointing out that the clip was problematic and promised that he wouldn’t show it again in his class. He invited her to further discuss her concerns with him after class or during office hours. The other students sat quietly in what I assumed was dumbfounded silence, though I might well have been overly optimistic considering that the latest polls show that an absolute majority of American students are opposed to free speech on campus.

Either way, everyone remained silent as Ben Folds glasses girl denounced prof to his face, and that of course included myself.

The professor had to get his tenure, and I had to satisfy my breadth requirement and quietly get the fuck out of a university system fast becoming a nursery school for coddled and aggressive manchildren. In the meantime, the SJW ideology and its Red Guard methods wracked up yet another Gramscian victory.

Yesterday, the Wikileaks Twitter account posted the following graph showing the growth of SJW terms such as “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions,” and “safe spaces” on the Internet in the past few years. This pretty much confirms the impression that it was limited to a sort of “enclave of extremism” until 2014 or so, but – much like the metaphor traditionally used to explain the concept of exponential growth, that of pondweed spreading almost imperceptibly slowly at the start to filling in the rest of the pond extremely rapidly at the end – has recently come to play a very prominent role in the social discourse; and indeed, much in the manner of pondweed, in a way that stiffles better and more varied alternatives.

Though Nationalist, Alt Right, and even mainstream conservative hostility to SJWism is entirely predictable, it is curious to see that cryptoanarchists and cypherpunks have adopted essentially the same negative stance towards it. Why? Because “generation trauma fad is pro-censorship which impedes our work,” according to a further comment by Wikileaks. The intense SJW hostility to cypherpunks and free information activists, probably on account of the fact that they are overwhelmingly composed of free-spirited intelligent white men – a hostility displayed throughout the Western state-sponsored campaign to persecute Julian Assange, not to mention the entirety of Gamergate – must have also played their roles in significantly “immunizing” this class of people from SJW ideology.

Since indigenous nationalism may well be the greatest challenge to the power of the Atlanticist elites, and cypherpunks provide some of the most potent tools to actualize it, it is surely rather telling that SJWs have so viciously focused on precisely these groups, as opposed to, say, actual American oligarchs and their shitlord tendencies like having sex segregated trophy wives. I wonder to what extent SJWism might even be a creation of the American deep state, to be used as an icebreaker against opponents of the creeping surveillance/security state at home and increasingly, abroad. If this sounds like that’s too much of a conspiracy theory – not that being such makes it necessarily wrong – consider that it’s now common knowledge that the CIA promoted modern art to undermine the Soviet Union. And, incidentally – and so conveniently – to provide a new and convenient method for Western oligarchs to store and increase their wealth.

 

Who would have the temerity to even suggest it? What kind of paid up Kremlin propagandist would even countenance such a possibility?

Leonid Bershidsky is who.

Bershidsky is a Russian journalist who left Moscow for Berlin a year ago on account of his distaste for Russia’s direction under Putin, and where he now agitates for increasing immigration to the EU in Bloomberg’s opinion columns when he isn’t lambasting the World Bank for increasing Russia’s position in its Ease of Business rankings. In short, he is an able and eloquent voice of the Atlanticist-Yuropean Consensus.

That said, Leonid Bershidsky is one of the more objective anti-Putin journalists around, and this level-headedness means that he does have to acknowledge reality on the ground.

Hence his latest article: Ukraine Is in Danger of Becoming a Failed State.

Despite attempts at change by a new generation of bureaucrats, Ukraine’s economy remains unreformed. Taxes are oppressive but widely evaded, the shadow economy is growing and the regulatory climate for business has barely improved. The International Monetary Fund, the country’s biggest source of hard currency after a steep drop in exports, is optimistic about next year’s economic growth prospects, forecasting a 2 percent expansion, but last month it revised this year’s projection to an 11 percent decline…

Equally unreformed is Ukraine’s incredibly corrupt justice system. In September, Christof Heyns, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said after visiting Ukraine that the country lived in an “accountability vacuum.” Heyns bemoaned the failure of the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the deaths of more than 100 people on the streets of Kiev in the final days of the revolution and of 48 pro-Russian protesters in a burning building in Odessa in May, 2014. Those investigations are stalled, and attempts by the victims’ lawyers to speed them up have been stonewalled by authorities as some of the suspects in the Kiev shootings are still employed by the Interior Ministry.

The Maidan has had zero compunctions about purging the old elites, so the allegation that the investigations into the Kiev and Odessa massacres aren’t moving forwards on account of ancien regime protection networks is tendentious in the extreme. People are getting protected alright, but they are the nationalist radicals who set up the Snipergate false flag in the first place. (The evidence for it is so overwhelming – here is a 79 page summary by Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski, not to mention the fact that even big Western media organs such as the BBC have been forced to point out inconsistencies in the official narrative – that it cannot be treated as a mere conspiracy theory).

Heyns also said Ukraine’s Security Service “seems to be above the law.” Apart from raiding a number of tech companies in an apparent scare campaign in recent weeks, last weekend the service arrested Gennady Korban, a top lieutenant of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who has been resisting the consolidation of power by Poroshenko. The arrest gave rise to accusations of selective justice in the Ukrainian press. Other oligarchs, after all, face no reprisals — perhaps because they’ve accepted Poroshenko’s dominance.

Out with the new boss, in with the new.

Elite corruption, though virtually impossible to measure, appears to remain as high as ever going by the anecdotal evidence. We also know from the latest opinion poll surveys that everyday corruption hasn’t decreased either.

Two years after the corrupt team of President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine corruption is still rife and the country’s intrepid investigative journalists have been especially busy again. Setting the tone is Poroshenko — the only of the country’s 10 richest people to see his net worth increase in the past year — who seems to have forgotten his promise to sell off his businesses; his bank has only expanded as many others lost their licenses. Poroshenko’s and Yatsenyuk’s close allies are routinely named in connection with corrupt schemes involving Ukraine’s customs service and state energy companies.

A year ago there were many people seriously arguing that electing someone like Poroshenko is a good thing because he is so rich he wouldn’t feel any need to steal further. And then people wonder why plutocrats find it so easy to hoodwinkle the sheeple.

Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. “Pyatt and the U.S. administration have more influence than ever in the history of independent Ukraine,” Leschenko wrote.

Surprised to see him go thus far and so candidly admit that the Maidan regime is run from Washington D.C.

Europe’s requirements for the visa-free regime center on Ukraine’s seriousness in fighting corruption. The European Union recently refused a request for more funding for the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, because of “concerns raised with regard to some people who participate in the selection” of prosecutors for the office. This is a clear reference to the team of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, a Poroshenko appointee and long-time associate, who has been accused of undermining the anti-corruption efforts.

But evidently they are just about sovereign and independent enough when it comes to their personal financial interests.

Ukrainian civil society is stunted by these powerful vested interests. I doubt it can push the country to a more civilized direction with the usual tools of electoral democracy: The local elections have proven that post-Soviet practices of fraud, bribery and intimidation have not been overcome. There’s little will for further upheavals so soon after the revolution and the war in the east. But unless the current political elite finds it in itself to clean up — a highly unlikely turn of events –Ukraine’s history of violent regime change is probably not over yet.

Here I have to put in a more “upbeat” note.

Although Bershidsky is correct to be pessimistic about Ukraine’s reform prospects, ultimately, the threat of revolt in a place like Kharkov or Odessa that could unravel the rest of the country has been contained. The economy is steadily stabilizing and, although the implementation of the DCFTA from January 2016 may produce a second derailment, frankly the country is already at such rock-bottom – even Moldova is now ahead – that I really don’t see how it could fall much further before resuming growth. The chances of a new Maidan are very small regardless of how unpopular Poroshenko gets or how much corruption increases even further (this is because the Maidans have always been primarily driven by deep ideological and ethnic factors, not the we’re-tired-of-corruption tropes presented to slack-jawed Westerners). Meanwhile, due to the exit of Crimea and the LDNR, not to mention the emigration of the more pro-Russian orientated elements of society, demographics has completely extinguished any change of an electoral challenge to the Maidanist course.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Corruption, Economics, Ukraine

arab-spring-skies

Sima Diab on Twitter makes the observation that the countries most affected by the “Arab Spring” are easy to find on a live air traffic map (because nobody is going there).

Don’t you just hear that crickets chirping sound of freedom ringing?

Incidentally, Russia’s and Britain’s hardline response to what is now universally understood to have been a terrorist bomb attack – evacuating its 70,000 stranded tourists there and barring further flights – is understandable but arguably short-sighted. 12% of Egyptian GDP accrues to tourism, and the rest of the economy is too sluggish to make good the difference. Less tourism equals economic decline equals a decline in good guy Sisi’s ratings and more support for bad guy Islamists.

With about half the country being essentially Islamists – that’s both the percentage of Egyptians who support death for apostasy and who voted for the Muslim brotherhood – a cutoff in tourist dollars (rubles, pounds sterling, etc.) is the last thing Egypt needs.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Arab Spring, Egypt, Revolutions, Terrorism

The Flynn effect has reversed in terms of spatial IQ, according to a big recent meta-study by Jakob Pietschnig and Georg Gittler.

James Thompson has a good summary in Deutschland über alles, dann unter allen?

In the present meta-analysis, we show an inverse u-shaped trajectory of IQ test performance changes in a large number of samples (k = 96; N = 13,172) on a well known test for spatial perception (the three-dimensional cubes test, 3DC) in German-speaking countries over 38 years (1977–2014). Assessment of both item response theory-based measures as well as more standard measures of classical test theory showed initial increases and a subsequent decrease of performance when controlling for age, sample type (general population vs. mixed samples vs. university students) and sex. Our results suggest saturation and diminishing returns of IQ increasing factors (e.g., life history speed) whilst negative associations of IQ changes with psychometric g may have led to the observed IQ score decrease in more recent years.

Below is the version of the graph that has been corrected for age, sex, and sample time. The all time peak seems to have occured around the mid-1990s.

germany-flynn-reversal-iq-pietschnig-gittler

The PISA tests have indicated that (ethnic) Germans might have some of the highest IQs in Europe. This is credible in light of their historical intellectual accomplishments in the 19th century through to the 1930s, even though Germans were typically shorter (i.e. probably less well fed) and certainly poorer per capita than the British. The Finns are brighter on average, but have a small standard deviation, hence much fewer geniuses.

However, I suspect that since the 1920s and certainly since the 1970s German fertility has become strongly dysgenic. This has started outrunning the benefits from better nutrition (essentially maxed out by the 1970s) and more intensive schooling. Furthermore, they have been brought down by immigrants, to the extent that in 2012 Germany as a whole was overtaken by Poland in the PISA tests.

Further from Pietschnig & Gittler:

Results from our linear regression analyses suggest decreases of about 4.8 IQ points per decade when controlling for age, sample type, and sex, thus indicating a substantial negative Flynn effect that is even stronger compared to previously observed positive trends (e.g., Flynn, 1984, 1987; Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015). This trend was observed in linear regression analyses, but our results showed that the present changes over time may be even better described as a curvilinear function, thus indicating initial increases, followed by stagnation (with performance peaking around the mid-1990s), and subsequent decreases of task performance.

Incidentally, this is one of the factors you have to bear in mind when looking at historical “human accomplishment” (in science, literature, art, etc) and the puzzle of why East Asians don’t figure largely in it for all their high IQs. Not only were the key countries – UK, Germany, etc – well ahead of the likes of China and Japan in terms of nutrition (related to IQ) and general development (schooling, funding for science) but they also enjoyed a bonus from not yet having fallen on the dysgenic slope. I suspect this will likely remove any need for Jaymannian “clannishness” as a key explanatory factor.

But I digress; this is for another post.

Back to Germany – if you are in the throes of dysgenic decline, you might want to try to at least do some obvious things to slow it down, like not take in millions of 85 IQ Third World immigrants. Obviously this is not happening but I found it curious that the great scientist Heiner Rindermann has been given column space to call for exactly that in the German magazine Focus.

In it, he makes some of the following points:

  • Unlike the case of the Huguenots, whom the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm welcomed to Prussia in 1685, the wave of immigrants in the past years and months are lacking in human capital.
  • They perform at ~110 points below US and German standards in the PISA tests, or a difference of three years in terms of schooling age. The gap with Africa is more like four and a half years.
  • Even “elite” students like engineering students from the Gulf states are two to four years behind their German counterparts.
  • A recent study in Chemnitz, the city that hosts Rindermann’s university, showed that asylum seekers with university degrees had an average IQ of 93 – that is equivalent to that of Realschule students, i.e. prole children.
  • He mentions that this gap is not closed in the second generation, and even dares to mention cousin marriage as a contributory factor.
  • These groups will have higher unemployment, and their cognitive errors in daily life such as in traffic or professional decisions will negatively impact other people.
  • HE ACTUALLY GOES THERE and mentions the high incidence of violence against dissenters and sexual assaults in places where they congregate, such as immigrant neighborhoods and the refugee camps. He also mentions the statistic that whereas only 12% of the French population are Muslim they constitute 60% of the prison population, and alludes to the Rotherham mass rapes in Britain.
  • Diversity is associated with more crime and inequality, contrary to the positive rhetoric around it.

Furthermore, the comments to his article are generally positive.

Given the current climate, in which Angela Merkel openly demands that Mark Zuckerberg censor “hate” against immigrants on Facebook and the New York Times approving quotes a former East German apparatchik openly commiserating that anti-immigration activists from a village getting swamped by Third World immigrants are not getting arrested, I will admit to some degree of surprise that Rindermann was allowed his not very PC say. I hope he doesn’t get into trouble on account of this.

 
• Category: Race/Ethnicity • Tags: Dysgenic, Flynn Effect, Germany

baltlivesmatter

Muh reparations! Muh slavery!

The justice ministers of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared that it’s time to calculate the losses the three countries suffered as the result of the Soviet occupation and demand that Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR, take responsibility and pay compensation. Yet, other members of the Estonian Government say the declaration, signed on Thursday, was not discussed in cabinet meetings.

This is nothing new. Demands for reparations have been issuing from the Baltics since the 1990s, the most energetic party typically being Latvia. Nothing will ever come of them, not least because Russia could always send them the bill for Soviet-era infrastructure and subsidized gas.

Even so, cringeworthy whining regardless, do the Balts actually “deserve” reparations in a moral sense from Russia for Soviet crimes against them?

Allow me to indulge in some modest russplaining, and present a better question: Does Russia deserve reparations from the Balts?

Contrary to Russophobes who claim the USSR was nothing more than an expression of Russian imperial chauvinism, and anti-Semites who ascribe it all to the Jooz, the fact of the matter is that the Bolsheviks were also greatly aided in their designs by the many the other small nationalities of the former Soviet Union.

Moreover, as a general rule, the more they helped out the Bolsheviks, the more they have been lionized by Western neocons and East European diaspora nations, and the harder they have worked to airbrush their roles out of the Soviet project: From stronk Polish Hussars to True Aryan Ukrainians and “Stalin planned a second Holocaust” Jews to the “plucky” Balts and Georgians of the conventional Western imagination.

The Latvians in particular are the very distillation of this pheonomenon. This nation of less than two million people, thanks to the Red Latvian Riflemen, provided the firepower to disband the Constituent Assembly – the product of the only free elections in Russia until 1990, in which the Bolsheviks got less than 25% of the votes – before being redirected to quell anti-Bolshevik uprisings in the Russian cities of Moscow and Yaroslavl.

No Latvians serving as Varangian Guards to the Bolsheviks, and its feasible that there would not even have been a Soviet Union.

The first leader of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, was Felix Dzerzhinsky, an ethnic Pole (and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s hero back when being pro-Red Terror was politically correct). His key deputies were a couple of Latvians, Yakov Peters and Martin Latsis.

The heavily Jewish nature of the early top Bolshevik ranks, and of the pre-purge NKVD, is now as much a matter of confirmed historical record by the most impeccably academic and indeed Jewish sources, as is the fact that after 1938 control shifted to what was essentially a Georgian-Mingrelian mafia headed by Stalin.

Considering the critical role of Latvians in foisting the Bolsheviks to power and committing atrocities against Russians, it is if anything Russia which should be demanding reparations from Latvia for its crimes against the Russian people, nation, and culture. Further invoices can be sent to Saakashvili and the Beltway “Now We Call Ourselves Neocons” Trotskyists later.

Of course, as a somewhat self-respecting Great Power with a rich history and culture independent of the Soviet experienece, Russia has no particular need or urge to engage in such antics to confirm its status as a European nation. It is if anything pluralist enough for support an entire ecosystem of ideological Atlanticists and Yuropcultists who insist on taking exclusive ownership of the crimes of a long dead Georgian gangster and flaggelating themselves for it. This “pathological altruism” is a quintessentially European trait. To the contrary, even pro-Russian foreigners in as “reformed” and Yuropean a small East European country as Estonia – look, they have e-democracy! – get deported as “Russian agents of influence.”

This, in a nutshell, is the difference between Russia and the small aboriginal cargo cults whose sense of nationhood boils down to the East European equivalent of muh oppressions and gimme gibs.

 
Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.