Ilyin told Andropov that his motivation to assassinate Brezhnev was to have him replaced with his Second Secretary and Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov

Suslov was a theoretician of orthodox communism, he seems an unlikely candidate for actual head of state. I wonder if this tall tale was an attempt by Andropov’s faction (technocrats who later favored Gorbachev) to weaken Suslov’s.

Witten happened to be working in an era (after the formulation of the standard model) in which no one achieved success with new fundamental predictions. My suggestion is that the future lies with a reorientation of how string theory is applied, towards hints like MOND and the Koide formula, rather than traditional targets like grand unification and low-scale supersymmetry.

As for the tweet about Djokovic: as a young man, Witten worked on the McGovern presidential campaign, so that may be a clue to his politics; and he is said to be a keen amateur tennis player, so that’s why he would notice and comment on this affair.

“this (female led) report”

The lead author is a woman, but the supervisor is a man, and meta-analysis is one of his specialties, and he’s providing some of the soundbites too.

Also just noticed that the report specifically studies variance in personality: “A meta-analysis of sex differences in animal personality”. This is actually the first time I ever heard of interspecies personality psychology.

“The Democratic Party, for example, is an alliance of Eastern and Southern European descended people who are practicing the politics of their nations of origin as of about the time of the 1848 revolutions”

I haven’t heard this one before. The Democratic Party is run by Slavs and Mediterraneans whose politics is what, anti-nationalist Habsburg multiculturalism?

It’s a shame you’re anonymous and may not even see this reply, as I would like to see this viewpoint expanded upon.

Brief comments on Russia, from tsarist era until now, by Chinese political scientist Zheng Yongnian.

Hi – in a search for better information about what’s going on in Ethiopia, I found Mereja discussion forum, which actually has posters supporting TPLF as well as posters supporting the government. Is there anywhere else you can recommend?

I made a very fast search and found no intellectual in Burundi who died because of the vaccine

Vaccines (from China) are only just arriving in Burundi. But perhaps it was an expatriate…

I seem to be in the minority, in that I appreciate Anatoly’s sensible transhumanism. Though I do think we’ve run out of time for human genetics to make a difference, and that the future will be decided by AI.

I fell asleep while reading about this case and dreamed of a movie called “Bandit St High” (that’s “Bandit Street”). I thought it was ominous and outrageous, but my unconscious turned it into a high-school heist-comedy.

I checked reddit to see how people were reacting, but all I saw were true believers – “I hate billionaires”, “let’s pay the damages out of the police pension fund”, and so on.

“the default dog like you see in the Third World today: about 35 pounds, short yellowish fur, and an intelligent-looking pointed face”

Never heard of this before. Is this an iSteve original, or a common observation?

“Based on this study, infants under the age of 2 years are mostly experiencing metabolic disorders and its frequency is up to 38.9%”

I wrote to the corresponding author of this paper (in Kabul), and she says this means that of the 63 genetic disorders mentioned in the literature about Afghanistan, 38.9% of them are disorders occurring in young infants – not that 38.9% of young infants in Afghanistan have a genetic disorder.

Among the many books published after 9/11, I’m sure there was one (possibly “The Cell” by John Miller) which said there had been a rumor that Al Qaeda was going to hijack planes and take hostages.

I can imagine counterterrorism officials being persuaded to let that happen – the idea being, Al Qaeda have been making lots of trouble for us, the embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, but the politicians won’t let us deal with them properly; but if they take hostages here in the homeland, the politicians will have no choice but to go to war against them.

Steve: you might want to check the paper that is (apparently) your source for the 39% figure. They give no explanation for how they arrived at that number, except that they did a literature search. For all we know, the numbers were made up by a bunch of educated Pashtuns against cousin marriage.

Perhaps I missed the derivation, but I don’t see it there.

A thread about Nuristan seems a good place to mention Sam Sloan, the Austin Powers of chess-playing polygamous taxi drivers who represent themselves before the Supreme Court.

“1-2 billion dead”

That death toll (in his scenario) doesn’t come from “medium & long-term vaccine destruction of human bodies”. Note that he refers to “Marek’s”, that’s Marek’s disease in chickens.

For some reason, vaccines against Marek’s disease selected for strains that are extremely lethal to unvaccinated chickens, but vaccinated chickens do survive. So that death toll scenario is for deaths among unvaccinated humans, *if* vaccine-driven selection produced a “Marek strain” of Covid.

I have no idea if the scenario is plausible.

In a tweet, Abrahamian thanked this SFSU professor for sharing his “vast expertise” on the subject of noncitizen voting. He is cited many times in the Wikipedia article “Right of foreigners to vote in the United States”.

Third try, and I think I finally got it right: I think this man was her father, a prominent UN development economist. There are other details that check out. If I’m right this time, her family were products of pre-revolutionary Iran, the shah’s Iran; western-educated modernizers.

OK, second theory: her parents are primarily Iranian Armenians, and might have represented the Islamic Republic in Geneva, and the real riddle is how they obtained an admixture of Russian as well. There was a time in the 19th century when Russia invaded Iran and took some of the Armenian territory, but here we’re trying to explain how some Russian blood ended up on the Iranian side of the border…

I realized something missing from this discussion: her Russian and Armenian parents, based in Geneva and working for the UN, were working in Iran and conceived a child there in the 1980s. The Soviet Union still existed then! They were probably part of a Soviet presence in Iran during the revolutionary period, of Khomeini’s war to unseat Saddam Hussein, a time when Iran’s relations with the entire world were strained. (They may or may not have been in pre-revolutionary Iran too. I wonder how many degrees of separation they were from Valerie Jarratt’s parents.)

It would give a new context to her journalism and opinions – reporting on rich people buying citizenship, while herself believing that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”. If her parents really were Soviet diplomats based in Geneva, it would mean her family’s very profession was to hang out in the rich capitalist west while representing an anti-capitalist ideology.

PS wait I just realized the parents were *born in Iran*… maybe both were diplo-babies? … a complicated lineage

I’m trying to get a sense of who she is. Certain details are scarce. Her parents were UN employees (diplomats? bureaucrats?) who were part of the Iranian diaspora in Canada. She has some Russian blood too. Despite not being an American citizen, she attended Columbia. She’s worked for Reuters and Al Jazeera, and has occasionally written for the New York Times over a decade. She has some relationship to the historian Ervand Abrahamian but I can’t tell if it’s by blood or by marriage.

She’s been writing for years about topics like: small countries that sell citizenship to the wealthy; libertarian seasteading (from an unsympathetic point of view); how billionaires and their money can easily cross borders. In a tweet she says billionaires shouldn’t exist, and she’s written for leftist (?) American publications like “The Nation”, “Dissent”, and “n plus one”. So she seems to be one of those well-off “leftists” who hate the border-crossing super-rich, but who want refugees and other assorted migrants to cross the borders just as freely.

I find myself wondering if she is more like Marie Antoinette or Elena Ceausescu, that is, is this a naive proposal made from a position of privilege, or is she conscious that this is a hostile act directed at class enemies?

This is one topic that makes me truly angry. This kind of thing is class warfare by privileged cosmopolitans against the people who were actually born in a country.

I have tried to imagine what a Taliban restoration would be like. Perhaps it would be an Islamist Turkmenistan – by which I mean, a country as insular as Turkmenistan, but governed by an Islamic ideology.

leaf the hard finking to people like me

Anglo Hardfinker: Good evening, Mr Putler… You are looking at the sun’s rays. They can power a post-fossil-fuel economy; or melt permafrost.

Vlad Putler: Do you expect me to ask for technology transfer?

Hardfinker: No, Mr Putler. I expect you to decline! There is nothing you can contribute to the fourth industrial revolution that I don’t already have.

Putler: You’re forgetting one thing. If I fail to resist, Chairman Xi replaces me. He knows what I know. Operation Rules Based Order, for example. Can you afford to take that chance?

The actual poll can be downloaded here.

But surely it’s only a glimpse of something very complex. America is a genuinely diverse country. The poll may mix answers from campuses with black majority, white majority, Hispanic majority, various mixtures, also from very different class backgrounds.

Perhaps they reasoned…

Iraq and Iran fought to see who would rule the Persian Gulf in the 1980s. The world backed Iraq because Iran was winning. Once there was a ceasefire, it took just a few years and Iraq began asserting itself. In response, US troops were sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 and stayed there until 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq. That’s how Qatar became CENTCOM base instead, I think.

You can speculate about what exact role Al Qaeda and the anthrax letters played in prompting outright invasion of Iraq, but there’s no question that for a long time before 2003, the US was already making military-strategic choices about how to maintain hegemony in the Middle East.

i see Pepe Escobar has for once uttered the truth when he mentions the neo-liberal influence in Iran

What is the significance of calling Rouhani a neoliberal? (It reminds me of how Putin is sometimes dubbed a neoliberal too.)

I’ve just had a look at your comments and it’s a paradigm I haven’t quite seen before. Your model of the future: it will be Brave New World (woke west) versus 1984 (AI China) while the world ecosystem collapses everywhere else, and you’re betting on the Brave New World.

those times when my intersectionality […] makes me “invisible”

If you look her up, you’ll see that she’s actually from the Department of English at an Indian university. (The “Seminar” that all these people are attending is an online event.)

The word ethnomasochism is attributed by Wiktionary to Guillaume Faye of France, 1998, an intellectual leader in the European ethnonationalist New Right.

Derbyshire turned up an isolated academic essay from 1981 talking about “medical ethno-masochism”. This refers to a culture denigrating its own medical achievements, and is considered the opposite of “medical ethno-chauvinism” or “medical ethnocentrism”. The essay contrasts western self-denigration regarding western medicine, with Chinese self-confidence and self-promotion (China as being first and best in everything), that existed even in 1981.

The idea that ethnomasochism is the opposite of ethnocentrism is useful, in that ethnocentrism is a commonplace term.

A search for references to racism at nature.com turned up, alongside contemporary references to the “geoscience racial diversity crisis” and so forth, a book review from 55 years ago. Under the headline “Unbridled Racism”, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky scorns a work called “Racial Contours: the factor of race in human survival” by H.B. Isherwood, asking how such a work “can be published in the Age of Science, and in Great Britain rather than in some underdeveloped country”.

Wikipedia tells me that Dobzhansky had a longrunning debate with the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Montagu considered race a cultural construct that should not be part of science, Dobzhansky wanted a scientific criterion of race divorced from ordinary definitions.

I have been unable to find out anything about H.B. Isherwood, e.g. whether he was related to the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Another one of his books is reviewed in the Unz.com archives (Mankind Quarterly, October 1976).

“openly dedicated to the cultural uprooting of Germans, all in the name of, ‘progress,’ ‘psychoanalysis,’ eroticism,’ ’phenomenology and ‘cultural Marxism.’ ”

How was phenomenology part of this?

This review is fun because its examples of human biodiversity – dense black bones, big Inuit brains – extend beyond the usual, politicized ones.

But I think caution is always advised when big claims are made about human genetics and evolution. Things are often not as they seem, or as they are portrayed.

The mention of North Korea and human gene manipulation together, actually highlights how unfit that country is, for being a biotech power. Massive centralized projects like rocketry and nukes, OK. But biotech, like computing, really requires a people with the freedom to conduct their own experiments… At most, North Korea might hire foreign experts to carry out highly specific projects.

The author identifies as Chinese-Jamaican.

“accused Pepe Le Pew of promoting “rape culture””

This morning I saw a headline saying, is it time to cancel Pepe Le Pew, but didn’t read the article. In the wake of Dr Seuss books being cancelled for containing old-fashioned cartoon-Asian images, I had assumed that this must be about Pepe perpetuating the stereotype of the unwashed Frenchman…

Mostly off-topic: I would like to know who “Gehry brother” is. Some kind of Chinese youth Internet personality? Featured prominently in “People’s Daily” today. Google Translate says he’s a “post-90s B station UP master”, which doesn’t help much.

There are several perspectives one can take on this. One that interests me, is the future of mathematical discovery. It seems there was a time when the greatest geniuses in the field (I am thinking of Gauss or Euler) prospered mainly via royal patronage. Then by the time of, say, Riemann, we’ve entered the university era, but it’s still very elitist. After World War II, we have the era of Big Science and intensive state patronage of the university system. Meanwhile we have the information age, and increasingly large fractions of the population attending university.

Now it’s the age of social media too, and the universities are dumbing down, a kind of village for vocational training that everyone passes through, and where the permanent residents are a lumpenprofessoriat whose scramble for citations, somehow also generates the opinions that steer our overgoverned expertocratic societies… I apologize for the awkward turns of phrase, I’m just trying to put into words the actual role of universities in our university-centric societies.

Given that this is the new structure of society, my question is, where will fundamental discoveries come from in this situation? There could be a return to patronage of the exceptional, but by elements of the rich, e.g. hedge fund managers who came from a STEM background. Perhaps intellectual standards will continue to be maintained at elite institutions (though the Ivy League’s trend doesn’t instil confidence that they will be maintained), or perhaps a new cohort of elite institutions will emerge, e.g. those which resist turning woke while also avoiding scrutiny by the enforcers of woke.

There’s also the possibility that whole new avenues for scholarship and achievement will open via the Internet. Certainly Internet also allows crackpots and mediocrities to self-publish; but I think there will also be a few Internet niches outside the academy, where thought of genuine quality and originality flourishes.

Finally, there’s the role of AI, whether in partnership with humans or eventually on its own. So one might look to all the places in the world where advanced AI is developing – spy agencies, Big Tech, academia focused on AI – as places that might also give rise to advances in math (and other disciplines of high abstraction).

When I want a glimpse of the news as it looks in Russia, I usually check Kommersant. But I guess that’s a business-oriented and somewhat ‘liberal’ publication. Can anyone suggest additional news sites worth browsing?

More on the Australian option

Anatoly Karlin said

“East Asia performed better than well nigh any Western country… Americans and Europeans have done about equally badly…”

How has Russia fared? My impression is that Russia has performed like the best of European countries.

A deeper, perhaps unanswerable question: can we explain Russia’s level of covid performance, in terms of civilizational qualities?

For example, one perspective on Russia is that ours is a world of nations based in historic ethnic and cultural identities (including the “civilization-states” China and India), versus an empire centered in America that seeks to dissolve all rival historic, national, ethnic, etc identities (though we just had four years of revolt against this, in the imperial heartland); and that Russia is basically a European and Christian nation.

One could then try to explain Russia’s performance during the pandemic, in terms of this cultural and demographic identity.

What has the USA to offer my country

The transistor, the personal computer, and the Internet were all invented in the USA.

he went on a T.V show… Regina Fischer told them to give Bobby a math problem. So they gave him a differential equation, and he solved it almost instantly in his head, without having to write it down.

Not only is it unlikely that Fischer knew how to solve differential equations, it’s unlikely that this would be “someone from a TV show’s” idea of a math problem. There’s something wrong with this anecdote.

It sure comes across, as if they held off on this announcement until after the election.

My automatic assumption is that they did so, so that Trump couldn’t take credit.

I would be open to hearing some other theory of motivation, e.g. an authentic desire that the vaccine not be a partisan issue. That sounds outlandish to me, but I don’t know for sure how these executives think.

I would also welcome on information about how closely the Pfizer effort was related to Operation Warp Speed.

This will sound off-topic but I would be very interested if anyone knows a good history of Chinese news and opinion media, and in particular important moments of censorship, leaks, publications or TV channels falling out of favor, and so on. Being able to accurately compare and contrast the Chinese and American systems, in all ways possible, is an empowering thing in today’s world.

This comment led me to look up the etymology of Niger on Wikipedia, where the name (along with the name of Nigeria) is said to come from the Niger River; and regarding the river we are told ‘The name may come from Berber phrase ger-n-ger meaning “river of rivers”‘.

Wiktionary at least acknowledges ‘Commonly linked by folk etymology to Latin niger (“black”)’, and says this ‘likely influenced the modern spelling’, but then reverts to the Berber theory, or an older theory that it comes from ‘Ni-Gir’, ‘Lower Gir’, the Gir being a usually-dry river in Algeria.

Looking for older studies, in an effort to see if these explanations are a modern concoction, I found a 1964 article by anthropologist Mervyn Jeffreys, which calls the belief that Niger is the river of the Negroes an erroneous modern supposition, before setting out on an inconclusive etymological trek via Turkish ‘giaour’ (infidel), to the Nile, and Arab and Jewish morphemes.

I don’t know anything about Jeffreys’s affiliations. But in TIME magazine for 1952, Jeffreys is quoted as proposing the theory that early humans were black, whites are a “bleached” version of the ancient blacks, and modern blacks are a more evolved version. (At least as far as Africa is concerned, this is the reverse of my understanding – that African humans were mostly not black until the Bantu expansion.)

I am only just seeing this essay, a week after it was posted.

I left a response to several of Fred’s points on an earlier version, but comments are currently invisible there, so I have reproduced that response here.

The only things I would add for now:

Computational experiments with “genetic algorithms” and similar exercises in artificial evolution, show that intricate complexity really can arise from blind trial and error.

There is also the anthropic principle: what we observe in the universe around us, has to be consistent with our own existence. In this context, it means that if something unlikely had to happen for us to exist, then we will find unlikely but necessary events in our past.

I wouldn’t push the anthropic option too far. But in a universe of galaxies of stars with planets, it does mean that a certain amount of serendipity can be tolerated or even expected, in the biochemical and evolutionary history of the rare planet on which life and/or intelligence evolves.

However, my main thesis is just to oppose the incredulity that biological complexity could arise from natural selection. Darwinism doesn’t explain consciousness, or the existence of the universe; intelligent design, and nonmaterialist ontology, are both possible; but so is natural selection.

Can someone give me an idea of what IQ 70 and IQ 90 correspond to, in terms of what a person can and can’t do?

I wonder what the key to understanding someone like Kevin Roose is. Fragments of his life that I have gleaned: He grew up in a small liberal university town in Ohio. His family were nominally Quakers but their religion seems to have been more about liberal politics. He encountered rich people when he went to university and it was a shock but he learned to fit in. At 19 he somehow got a grant to attend evangelical “Liberty University” undercover, and was later hired by the New York Times to cover Wall Street. The Times reported his marriage to a Jewish lawyer from the Bay Area. He covered all kinds of tech stories, but his current specialty seems to be, investigating the mechanisms of thoughtcrime on the Internet. He wrote the non-story “Making of a Youtube Radical” which came out just in time to justify one of Youtube’s major purges. That story featured one Caleb Cain, and you can see the two of them appearing together in a PBS interview (I haven’t sat through it, but Cain is introduced with the caption “Radicalized by Alt-Right Videos”).

I guess the reason he interests me, is that what he’s doing, so epitomizes the transformation of journalists into propagandists – and I wonder about his psychology. He’s tracking these “Truth About” responses to mass media stories, but is curiously unmoved by what is actually said in them. It makes me think that, e.g. in China there must be censors who specialize in tracking various forms of forbidden narrative, who face a similar challenge – they must become expert in the logic of the dissidents, without actually acknowledging any truth in what they say. It seems that Roose learned a similar doublethink early, during his infiltration of Liberty University. One wonders, did he just spontaneously have an aptitude for it, or was he encouraged in this direction by a mentor? It would be interesting to know who funded that first book of his.

Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah” reveals him as basically a Lamarckian transhumanist, who thought both Church and Darwin were seeing only part of reality, and that the vital force would produce a higher humanity out of existential and spiritual need. The play has five parts and the middle part is interesting from a racial perspective. It depicts a future imperial Britain (the play dates from 1921) in which the British are in decline, and Chinese and Africans are really running the country. One character does declaim that the next step in evolution must come in order to save the white race; and yet in the next part, when it has happened, the only difference that really matters (to the higher race) is that between short-lived and long-lived, 300-year lifespans being the mark of the higher humanity.

I wonder what Shaw would make of today’s youthful iconoclasts. I think he would be sympathetic, seeing them as a mix of righteous and naive. He would probably also take cynical amusement in the fact that, after 70 years, this is the year in which royalties from his plays will cease to go to RADA, on account of their copyright expiring. RADA have taken every pound they could from his bequest, and then, the moment there shall be no more, they turn around and denounce him.

I like “Back to Methuselah” very much. It’s truly a visionary work, with an optimistic teleology despite the terribleness of life. Like the novels of Olaf Stapledon, it’s a work of British futurism from the interwar period, written in the expectation that there would be further terrible wars of high technology, but that there would be grander tomorrows too.

My post may have had too many links so shall try again… Read about the “Kerala school” at Wikipedia, in particular section on transmission to Europe.

I suspect that the real significance of such “made in India” claims is for the future – they will help integrate modern science and technology into the mass culture of the emerging Hindu superpower. Though the actual technical elite of India will probably be a mix of believers that India is the source of everything, and secularists who look down on that narrative.

This is the text he’s talking about. More on this topic.

I’m not American, and I’m just trying to perceive the power relations here.

I see two scenarios. For now EU is a US satellite and Germany is under American nuclear umbrella. German-Russian entente won’t happen unless US approves, US top concern is China, so it won’t be allowed to happen unless Russia strategically moves closer to America and further from China.

The other scenario is that EU becomes militarily quasi-sovereign – either NATO becomes a duopoly of America and Europe, or America dumps NATO entirely and EU has to fend for itself. In that case, Germany is under French nuclear umbrella, and German-Russian entente will require French approval.

I suppose Turkey shows a third possibility but that would require Germany to marginalize itself within NATO and EU, which seems unlikely.

If there is to be an alliance between Germany and Russia, what of Germany’s NATO membership and EU membership? France has the bomb so in theory it could provide the arsenal of a geopolitically independent EU. I guess I feel that France will have to be part of any new arrangement. And that the American price for allowing EU to have closer relations with Russia, is that Russia should separate itself from China.

we need a war, and the sooner the better

I don’t know if you’re serious when you say this, but assuming you are…

You’re saying that as things stand, China will replace America as the world’s leading power, and that the way to prevent this is an American-Russian-Indian alliance. Okay, that’s a plan. But you don’t explain why anyone should support this. Is the argument pure self-interest, or do you have an argument from values which favors America over China, to the point of justifying war?

Everyone thinks that Lovecraft Country is just another crass attempt to rewrite everything so it’s about race. But actually it’s a brave esoteric defense of humanity from the Elder Gods. The widespread popularity of the Cthulhu Mythos has increased the number of places where the inhuman forces outside the circles of time can try to enter our world. But if the first thing that everyone thinks of, when they hear the name Lovecraft, is “racist”, they will be less likely to be attracted by his work.

I have modeled international trade flows using carefully constructed statistical network models, using fundamental symmetries from Lie Groups.

Is this a “gauge theory” approach, or something else?

the no-capitalization thing is catching on

In their orthography of race, “Black”, “Latino”, “Native American”, “Asian American” are all capitalized, but “white” and “… of color” are not capitalized. I don’t know if they could argue that, like “people of color”, “white” is a number of ethnic groups combined, but I doubt it. So in the end America will probably end up capitalizing “White” as well. And might also have to have a “Mixed” category for people who can’t or won’t fit into a single-race category.

“Introducing: Idealistic Jewish Reporters

A new limited series about keeping a peaceful functioning society, and what gets in the way.”

We all need to make private copies of any information we find particularly valuable, if it is hosted on sites that are at risk of being driven offline.

The Times has been preemptively training its staff on how to avoid being doxxed. We shall see who comes out ahead.

With just 0.1% of that money I could do something very valuable and important, in the cause of actual cultural and intellectual advancement. It’s a hard sell, so I am used to trying to do it just with my own minuscule resources. But perhaps I should put in a few hours trying to think of who or what might help to make it happen. Thanks for the inspiration, Mr Soros!

Well, this does it for me. How much more explicit can they be, that they are trying to heighten racial consciousness in some groups and diminish it in others? And it’s not just the New York Times, it’s the Associated Press.

What did Trotsky say – you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you? It is getting bad enough that white people who have no interest at all in race or racial conflict, are being faced with a choice:

Do I resist this? And if so, how?

Or do I stay low and say nothing, for the safety of myself and my loved ones? But if I do nothing, how bad will it get?

F the new york times

What is the New York Times’s greatest sin? There must be many but I would like to know the most egregious.

By Kevin Roose

Also author of the nonsensical “Making of a Youtube Radical”.

At this point Black Lives Matter reminds me of the gay marriage movement, in the sense that most ‘institutions’ (including large businesses) have endorsed it. So I am trying to imagine what its ‘victory’ would look like. Blacks are only about one-seventh of American population. They are already massively promoted in American popular culture…

Let me accept your premise that the prominence of BLM is due to the choices of Jewish owners of mass media. What are they thinking? It could be an expression of the post-Holocaust Jewish condition. For centuries Jews were treated as a religious outgroup, then they secularized, then they were treated as a racial outgroup. So in the latter era they have an incentive to promote a national identity that isn’t racial, either by diluting racial majorities, or by making the majority racial identity a negative thing.

Apart from Jewish identity, with its racial/religious duality, black identity seems to be the strongest racial identity in modern America. So the overall situation has a demographic and a cultural aspect. Demographically, globalized immigration is changing America from white majority to something more heterogeneous, while culturally, black militance and white guilt work against development of affirmative white identity.

This is a logically coherent picture, but I still only half believe it. What’s missing for me, is evidence that this is how things actually work. It’s often pointed out that white liberals and progressives are eager boosters of BLM. And if I look for the intellectual rationale of BLM (e.g. that there is a continuing ‘white supremacy’), I think of the part of postmodern ‘critical theory’ that’s about race.

Maybe I’d look for a more nuanced explanation that combines critical race theory, Jewish media oligarchs, and post-Christian white liberalism… If I think about it further, I’m sure critical race theory has had a major impetus from the Holocaust, and that the decline of Christianity in the west is correlated with the rise in Jewish cultural power.

So in the end it does make sense to me that the left-liberal embrace of black issues is a side effect of Jewish empowerment in the contemporary west. I hypothesize though, that from a Jewish perspective, it has not been a machiavellian plot to prevent ethnonationalism, driven by anti-white animus; but rather that it’s seen as a campaign for justice, driven by a belief in Jewish moral superiority.

Can anyone identify the heart of the woke revolution – its hub, its most powerful motors, the people or ideas or …, whose defeat would strike the most effective blow against it?

Such a confusing comment.

After wracking my brains, I decided that maybe “partial to Slavs” is not meant to be a flaw – after all, her list of Trump’s traits also includes “impervious to destruction”. But then in what sense is the original Nosferatu “partial to Slavs”? Well, he lives among them and preys upon them. So is she trying to make us see Ivana and Melania as brides of Dracula? In which case it is a Trumpophobic remark, not a Slavophobic one.

However, obviously most people interpreted it as Slavophobic. And I’ve learned enough about American elites by now to expect a Slavophobic journalist to be Jewish, an expectation which turned out to be true in this case. So even if the most coherent reading of the phrase that I can find, is Trumpophobic, is it nonetheless intended to sound Slavophobic?

Faced with all these ambiguities, I retreat to simpler bedrock convictions, such as my belief that the New York Times is a blight on western culture. I wish it would cease to exist. But apparently it is becoming more influential as local newspapers go out of business.

I would like to see the official Chinese assessment of the virus’s origin and history, as presented to the Chinese public – e.g. by their Ministry of Health, Academy of Sciences, or CDC.

Ron said

“how can they have possibly been aware of the outbreak before anyone in China”

The ABC News story also says:

“Following the report’s release, other intelligence community bulletins began circulating through confidential channels across the government around Thanksgiving, the sources said. Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies.”

So the ABC narrative is that the Chinese government knew but was hiding it, at the end of November. The story also says that the original report drew on satellite data. The story is nonsense.

Ron Unz wrote

“It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself.”

Or the story published by ABC News was an invention of its “sources”.

Steve said

“the curious question of why so many things about this virus seem to correlate strongly with age”

Something to do with the condition of the immune system in the upper respiratory tract?

On the question of why we should expect our beliefs to be connected to reality, if everything is deterministic (or even if it is random but with averaged tendencies, as in quantum mechanics): the standard explanation for the relative degree of rationality exhibited by human beings and other living things is, natural selection. It helps you stay alive a little longer, if you’re more right about reality. So evolution caused us to have nervous systems which cause us to have beliefs at least roughly resembling reality.

But the abyss of doubt still looms. Natural selection will only make us as rational and correct as necessary. We could still be helplessly wrong in some or many areas of our thought.

There’s also the gnostic alternative: most beliefs that go beyond surface appearances *are* wrong. The nature of reality is entirely other than science would have it. This is all analogous to a dream, such order as it appears to have is simply the temporary (though perhaps lifelong) order of a dream, and outside it is some other reality entirely.

University of Queensland, my alma mater.

Ironically, just a few weeks before the coronavirus lockdown came to the west, I traveled from Australia to Canada on a shoestring budget, to try to save a young inventor in a difficult situation. The lockdown has made things very difficult – people won’t meet us directly, the public library where we strategized has been closed indefinitely, etc – so now I am trying to focus on the medical part of our invention portfolio, and see if the local startup people can find us a place in Canada’s efforts.

I wonder if the word “famine” occurs anywhere in Yglesias’s book.

Unless she cracks under the pressure, Greta will be around until governments actually do something to change the direction we’re headed (e.g. geoengineering), until some enormous disaster becomes a better reminder of climate change than even she is, or until Deep Mind’s AIs take over. My bet is on the last option.

Since no one else has mentioned it, I would like to recall the disturbing Buzzfeed article in which Katie McHugh first began to testify against her former colleagues at Breitbart. As many people noticed, in the picture she has fake eyebrows on. Her hair was literally falling out due to illness or stress.

The CNN article makes a small nod to this reality at the end: “She has diabetes, alopecia and other medical issues. She has no permanent home right now and only a part-time job…”

So I would suggest that she is now an economic hostage to her media handlers.

I struggle to understand what the contribution of “big data” is here. Big data refers to lots of data, being analyzed by quantitative or computational methods. But here historians are trying to make judgments about the validity of this concept of an Axial Age, axial transition, or axiality. Do they actually employ a quantitative technique like factor analysis, used in psychometrics to show the existence of a “g-factor” in intelligence, to show that there is a statistically palpable difference between axial and non-axial societies? Or are they just looking at a broader range of historical facts than usual, but still in the end using humanistic intuition and human general knowledge to make their classifications?

Afghanistan matters – for the countries around it. In the unipolar world, in which America aspired to determine the political order everywhere, that made it matter for American ambitions in Eurasia.

Then, in the post-9/11 stage of globalization, it mattered for America because it had become a base for the Islamist guerrillas who had now added America to their list of targets.

The Taliban state that hosted Al Qaeda was toppled, the Islamic State that was its more virulent successor was toppled. In the world today, there are still numerous jihadists but they don’t have territorial bases as good as Afghanistan 2000 or Syria 2014.

I suppose the sensible criterion for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, is whether the resulting power vacuum will be filled in a way that will prevent the return of anti-American jihadists.

If only there was, in English, an adjective form of “Latin” with no suffix.

On the other hand, I would also not discount the possibility that Popescu is the one who is catering to an audience here – the Times editors. They love their stories from the border, so she has given them one, and now it’s up to them to put it to use.

As so often happens, I have to wonder about the genesis and true intent of this story.

Is there a clique running the New York Times, with an overt checklist of issues to push, who then spread the word in their circles of progressive Ivy League pals, that they want another piece, let’s say, problematizing the notion of borders? And do they see themselves in a machiavellian, adversarial relationship with any part of their audience, plotting so as to propagandize to them, or are they primarily catering to the existing sensibility of that audience?

In this particular case, I find myself wondering what the logic of the piece is meant to be. In a quick skim I didn’t see many (or any?) overt value judgments. And as the commentariat here shows, one may easily conclude to the problem of transnational dementia is to make the border more controlled.

But there most likely is a larger reason why they would commission a story like this. These periodicals have editorial themes. The Times has its revisionist “1619 project”. The Atlantic’s recent article on the “porch pirate” was part of a series on “ending the age of mass incarceration”. Even if this piece isn’t overtly part of such a series, it must definitely fit some editor’s ideas of “news that is fit to print”.

Also note the background of the author, Roxana Popescu. She lives in San Diego, so she’s writing about events in her own backyard. But her academic background? “Her Ph.D., from Harvard University, examined portrayals of balconies in European literature and painting.” No particular expertise on dementia or borders, then, but probably an expertise in rhetoric and culture. In other words, someone who has the ability to produce propaganda to order…

It used to be that when Hollywood and other big entertainment media kept reviving the dead – “rebooting” “franchises”, producing the nth installment in some clapped-out series, or introducing classic work X to a new generation, often in a form wildly dissimilar to the original – that it was mostly about money. And occasionally the whole process was even redeemed by the appearance of something worthwhile.

Regarding this remake of “Watchmen”… my first question is whether it is, indeed, a primarily ideological production; or whether this is just what audaciously unprincipled rewriting of a classic looks like in the current day, because this is what some people think will sell, in current cultural conditions.

I also have to remark on the peculiar reflexive aptness, of a work which was itself a telling of an alternate history, being rewritten so that it tells a completely different alternate history!

And a final comment. In the history of culture, it is the norm for a particular era to produce far more examples of something – works in a characteristic genre or medium – than the future ever needs or cares to know about. If someone in the mid 21st century comes across a murder mystery from the mid 20th century, it will probably be of more interest simply as a representative of a vanished genre, than for any features which distinguished that particular work from its fellow murder mysteries.

Obviously the vast majority of cinematic and televisual remakes and reboots and recyclings, ought to be viewed in that way. In this case, the general phenomenon is more notable than the instances of the phenomenon… Here, apparently (I skipped most of the description, but think I got the gist), we are dealing with a subgenre of this “cultural recycling” phenomenon, in which the past, or the fictional universe, or in this case the fictional past, is made more Diverse, and also just reconfigured so as to present lessons which fit the zeitgeist.

My final question is whether this kind of on-screen retrodiversity, is actually going to have any substantial effect on culture of the world. One extreme would be that ordinary people literally lost the knowledge that western societies weren’t always as diverse as they are now; another extreme scenario is that, not only does the “retrodiverse reboot” essentially have no effect on cultural evolution, but that in retrospect it is understood as a product of particular cliques with a particular agenda, and as an artefact of its time.

Congratulations on devising a distinctive new technocosmology: that all civilizations throughout the universe are united in keeping a low profile and destroying anyone who attempts to expand, in order to conserve the computational resources of the Simulators, and thereby avoid or delay the shutdown of the simulation.

It seems likely that someone had this thought before you; but you are the guy who made the effort to spell out the details, so now it’s yours: “Anatoly Karlin’s Katechon Hypothesis”.

My main question is this: if we are in a simulation, which is more likely – that all those other stars and galaxies out there, are being simulated in equal detail to our own; or that they are just wallpaper, and that our simulation is intrinsically focused just on some small region, like Earth?

Your comment reminds me that Harold Bloom was an admirer of David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus”, a gnostic allegory with traces of Schopenhauer and many other thinkers. Bloom even wrote a sequel or homage to “Arcturus”, called “The Flight to Lucifer”, which adhered much more closely to gnostic mythology (Lindsay invented his own mythology), but which didn’t have the allegorical clarity of Lindsay.

I will use this comment to pose my own answers to Fred’s questions. I am not a biologist, but I have spent much time with biologists.

(1) “First, from what simpler coding system did the three-nucleotides-per-codon system arise by gradual and beneficial steps?”

A possible explanation: from an “RNA world” of mutually catalytic RNA sequences (Eigen’s “hypercycles”), which started out having only very weak effects on each other’s probability of replication, but which were selected (i.e. the RNA sequences changed) to make the catalytic relations (whether positive or negative) stronger and more targeted.

Now let me explain the explanation… One needs a primordial environment with two things: nucleotide bases that can assemble into RNA, and protocells – perhaps little more than droplets with a lipid membrane, similar to soap bubbles – containing different populations of RNA molecules.

Thanks to the complementarity of nucleotide bases, a single RNA strand can serve as the substrate on which complementary sequences assemble. RNA strands will also form 3d shapes according to self-interaction, and will attract or repel each other similarly. One RNA may hold another one in place, stabilizing it and making it more suitable as a substrate on which assembly can occur. The strength with which it is held in place, etc, may vary if the RNA sequence is changed even at a single point – this is the RNA analogue of the ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’ catalogued at SNPedia.

For evolution to occur, the protocells need only ‘reproduce’, something which might initially be driven by natural turbulence, from storms or eruptions on the prebiotic earth. Anything that will break a soap-bubble-like protocell in two. So we have a population of protocells, each containing a different ‘genome’ of RNAs, some of which are ‘inherited’ by the descendant protocells.

Some genomes provide protocells with extra stability, other genomes are more robustly inherited… So I posit a situation of primordial natural selection, which acts upon the RNA genome, and in particular evolves it to be evolvable. This means that if a network of relationships among RNAs arises, which itself facilitates the processes of inheritance and differential selection, then that entire lineage would be favored. The existing system of codons is to be regarded as the product of any number of such network-level genomic evolutionary events.

This may sound vague and unbelievable to skeptics, but it should seem a lot more believable to anyone with knowledge of genetic algorithms.

(2) “male homosexuality seems evolutionarily mysterious”

I consider it a side effect of the way human sexuality works. As far as I can see, acquiring a sexual preference (and I don’t just mean male versus female, but e.g. a preference for Latinas over Nordics) is a matter of conditioning or imprinting, that occurs at crucial moments, such as first orgasms. It may be similar to the way that we acquire a language: we have a natural “language-shaped hole” in our minds, but the language that fills that hole, is the first language that we encounter.

I believe, therefore, that part of Homo sapiens’ “business model” when it comes to sexual selection, is for sexuality to be something that is partly determined by experience. It is set in a direction by the powerful conditioning provided by first sexual experiences, and is reinforced if the same kind of experiences are repeated. That this sometimes results in human individuals acquiring sexual preferences that remove them from the reproductive cycle, is a “sunk cost” of our sexual business model, which is already premised on some males being far more reproductively successful than others.

(3) “flagellum”

All I have to say about this, is that the flagellum seems to be related to the microtubule, a kind of structural element which has many other uses. Evolution at the cellular level consists in part of reusing structures (often beginning with an accidental duplication of the genes coding for the structure, owing to an irregularity in the process of cellular division), the multiple copies of which can then acquire divergent characteristics and potentially divergent functions. Flopping around, and moving in other ways, is something that molecules naturally do; like the RNA hypercycles that are distilled by selection into a tightly knit genetic code, the functionally specialized flagellum can arise from membrane molecules that originally just have a slight bias to their otherwise random thrashing around, but a bias which if adaptive, will be enhanced by selection.

(4) “the mechanism of abiogenesis”

I already talked about one version of this – the RNA world of protocells.

(5) “neutral or deleterious” traits that haven’t been discarded

Some will be like homosexuality, which according to the model I provided before, is a built-in side effect of our sexual model, which relies on a kind of learning (imprinting) which lets us find new sexual characteristics adaptive. Others will be defects or inefficiencies which evolution hasn’t managed to eliminate yet.

(6) Oh, I see RNA World mentioned here, but I don’t actually see an objection, except “no proof yet”. There may be no nanofossils from RNA World, but it is a fact that the specificity and strength with which one RNA acts upon another, does change as the RNA sequence changes.

A final comment. Like Anatoly Karlin, I don’t mind Fred Reed being an evolution skeptic. Maybe the Raelians are right, and we’re the work of design; maybe there’s some force like Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” which, like Schopenhauer’s life force, just materializes new organisms in one go; maybe we’re living in Neo’s Matrix. But the world as revealed in natural science, and the facts of biology and geology and physics, are all certainly consistent with Darwin’s big idea.

I think I had a comment rejected, for expressing a rather militant view of how the British should respond to the phenomenon of a major political party offering to give millions of non-citizens the vote, just so it can grab power (I do not believe that Labour is adopting this policy because its leadership genuinely want open-borders socialism). That’s fine.

But I would like to reiterate the view that opponents of this policy should regard its promoters, not just as ordinary political opponents, but as enemies akin to foreign invaders. Though upon reflection, a more precise way to put it, is that they are a faction of the native ruling class, who want to win the power struggle by bestowing what should be the rights of a citizen upon foreigners, just so they can win a political numbers game.

Such an act should actually disqualify them from power for all time, and indeed they should also be made to forfeit all scraps of power that they currently possess… I could go on, but I would like this comment to actually get through.

String theorist Lubos Motl blogged about this recently. He argues that new-left progressivism is capable of doing even more to retard human progress than old-left collectivism, because the old left might suppress exceptional individuals, but the new left suppresses the entire demographic from which most such individuals come.

Thank you. So these figures are guesstimates (I had naively thought they might come directly from hard data). There are publicly traded companies where we know more about what’s going on; and then applying some rules of thumb and statistical black magic, we extrapolate from the verifiable facts about the public companies, to the unknown facts concerning private companies in the same sectors.

Comment #33 by @jdubs is complementary to yours, in that it emphasizes what is actually known (relatively little), and something about the trends affecting the valuations of the public companies.

It would be a genuinely altruistic act, if someone who truly knows this subject, were to tell us (even roughly) what kind of assets make up the bulk of Bloomberg’s wealth, how the distribution changes over time, and importantly, what information source they consulted, in order to find out these things.

I am puzzled to see West Papuan separatism being promoted by “New Eastern Outlook – a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences”. I normally expect advocates of multipolarity to respect the sovereignty of developing countries. Does this mean Indonesia is more in the western camp than I thought?

I keep hearing that IQ tests provide some of the most replicable results in psychology; but then we have these unbelievable claims like ‘average Nepalese IQ is 43’. Something must be rotten in the state of psychometry…

You can get away with ‘kritarchy’ being ‘rule by judges’ at any time in history. But the original article by Federale refers to ‘lugenpresse’. Got any reason for not using English there?

This 1619 Project invites the creation of a “1935 Project”, which would reframe 1935 as the “true founding” of America’s intellectual establishment, that being the year in which the Frankfurt School relocated to New York City.

I think the idea is not that the weapon takes advantage of a weakness specific to a particular race, but simply that it only activates on encountering genes peculiar to that race.

For a more exciting take by a “former CBS News exec producer”, you could try this tweet, which begins “Narativ has independently confirmed Jeffrey Epstein works for Israeli Intelligence”. Since the former producer himself has a clearly Israeli name (though his immediate past places him in Canada), the plot thickens…

The pitch is that Epstein invested in an Israeli call-center startup that will actually be a vehicle for spying, and ultimately that (later tweet) “Russia Saudi Arabia China and Bibi’s Israeli government” “attacked America in 2016 and are trying to drag us into another war”.

I’m not sure where this claim lies on the spectrum of spy-backed misdirection, opportunistic factional warfare, and idiosyncratic conspiracist monomania… but you must admit it’s not trying to put you to sleep. (Though how Israeli-Arabia and Sino-Russia could be working together to produce, presumably, a US-Iran war is a bit mysterious.)

By explicitly raising the question of whether elite kompromat is the glue that holds western neoliberalism together, Anatoly Karlin actually helps us put it in perspective. Evidently it is a phenomenon – deployed by a Bush family member against Donald Trump, on the eve of the 2016 election, let us not forget. But if, with The Saker, we designate western ideology as “Anglo-Zionist”, I would tend to think that it is primarily Anglo-Zionist money which maintains elite discipline, with Anglo-Zionist kompromat being a decidedly secondary phenomenon.

In Epstein’s bio at Wikipedia, he is described as advising Bear Stearns’ wealthiest clients on “tax mitigation”, i.e. pay as little tax as possible… (Bear Stearns, a giant investment bank, was a casualty of the 2008 financial crisis.) Edgar Bronfman is specifically mentioned as one such client, a billionaire who was also an extremely influential international lobbyist regarding Jewish issues, above all within the late Soviet Union. Among Bronfman’s children are two daughters who provided financial, legal, and material support to NXIVM, a psychological cult which served as cover for a growing circle of sex slaves. And recall that Epstein was assisted by a daughter of Robert Maxwell, another tycoon who after his death was eulogized for his service to Israel.

Amazing that they would promote this as an example of the Russian influence. Apparently both black Twitter and liberal media are helpless thralls of the Kremlin. “The Russians made me do it” can become the new universal alibi.

Maybe Google really is siding with Xi over Trump; maybe Google’s AI lab in China is meant to give America access to what’s going on in China’s AI revolution, and Thiel is screwing up the plan for his own reasons; who knows. But a few comments:

(1) Personally I feel capable of doing a Godfree Roberts and embracing a Chinese-led world order. The rules change sometimes in history, something is lost and something is found, life goes on but in altered terms. Surveillance, social credit, cultural reeducation, we kind of have all of that in the west already anyway, and it’s hard to see how an advanced digital society won’t have some version of them… But as always, I’m Australian, so maybe it’s a fraction easier for me to countenance “switching sides”.

(2) However, from what I see, the US remains significantly ahead of China in terms of capacity to innovate in AI, largely because its knowledge in pure math is far stronger. So in the short term, there won’t be any AI-powered Chinese world order replacing America’s Pax Internetica, we will instead still have coexistence and competition between two great powers of AI.

(3) For human beings, the endgame of AI is superhuman intelligence, and that means that the natural endpoint of an AI arms race is not a world ruled by Chinese, or Americans, or Israelis, but a world ruled by AI. The key fact here is contingency of values. Humans are born with certain dispositions and imperatives. AIs can be programmed to make any goal or value their top imperative, anything at all.

The key to peaceful coexistence between human beings and superhuman AIs, is for humans, right now, to identify what kind of AI value system can create peaceful coexistence, and work hard to ensure that the first superhuman AIs will follow that human-friendly value system, rather than prioritizing values which become a danger to us when they become the principles that govern all life on Earth.