Thanks for this article, Saker. And thanx to Ron Unz, I now see The Saker more accurately than I could before. I now know not to be distracted by any more ‘Sakerism’. By the way, can anyone tell me what is a ‘semite’? What is ‘semitism’, that I could be so often called ‘anti-semite’, but no one can tell me what the word means? If you have accepted the ‘jew lie’ that ‘semite’ is a reference to ‘jew’, you have indeed drunk the cool-aid. Is there any association between the word ‘semite’ and ‘shemite’? Is there a Hebrew word that ‘semite’ is derived from? I think so, and I don’t think any jew wants any non-jew to know that the word ‘semite’ has been defrauded and distorted by the jew mentality to use the word to refer to ‘judaism’ as ‘chosen-ness’. ps: what is a ‘jew’? What constitutes ‘jew’ versus ‘non-jew’? You really don’t think ‘jew’ is bloodline or DNA do you? Is there any such possibility as a ‘Messianic jew’? That contradicts all of scripture, and nature. What fellowship has Christ with belial? Hmmmm.

Correct, Blake. And ‘semite’ doesn’t mean what the jew wants the non-jew to think it means. Very few have any understanding of the root meanings of the Hebrew language; including those that call themselves ‘jew’. Just like few understand that ‘Ashkenaz’ is originally ‘iysh qenaz’, and Qenaz was a grandson of Esau. [Gen. 36:11] Just a little tidbit that the ‘jew’ doens’t want discussed. No such thing as an ‘Ashkenazi jew’. Thanks for your coments.

To me, the movie wasn’t offensive at all. Not like D’jango Unchained or The Hateful Eight. I hated those movies, although they had some classic Tarentino scenes, which by themselves, were awesome.

But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was just simply boring, dull, tedious, and way overlong.

My wife made the observation that this was the first Tarentino film that didn’t have Harvey Weinestein to help with the editing.

Which made sense to me. Because even during this movie, I was thinking to myself stuff like…this scene is too long, this scene is unnecessary, etc.

Honestly, I was prepared to love or hate this film. But I was very surprised to be so bored and indifferent to it.

Given examples are fake. It was American forces who covertly destroyed the USS Maine in order to start a war with Spain for territorial control. The Zimmermann letter was created by British Intelligence as a means of helping America into a war it’s people didn’t want to be a part of. Britain didn’t tilt towards the confederacy it hedged it’s bets with both sides in order to exploit the civil war for it’s own gain. It’s easy to alter history to suit an argument. There is no special relationship, just many touch points for mutual exploitation at the expense of their respective populations.

While I agree with much of your missive, Mike, I contend that the speculation of negatives is more counter-productive than productive. And they are only speculations, based on what you see ‘in part’. Not having access to all of the picture leads one to jump to erroneous conclusions. The vast majority of comments to this article are of the negative, knee-jerk right wing hand-wringing that is characteristic of those that trust what they see with their eyes, while never waiting to see what is going on behind the scenes. Makes me think most of these responses may be jew trolls. You may be correct in your negative assumptions. I hope not. I am a staunch Trump supporter; not because I believe him to be spotless and without sin, like most of the respondents to this missive. I am supportive of Trump because we almost had Hillary. If people don’t believe that the ‘ish-qenaz khazars’ are distraught about losing Hillary, and inheriting Trump, its because they don’t want to have to think deeply enough to see a bigger picture. The jew agenda was devastated by not getting Hillary. The jew agenda has energized every employable resource to displace Trump, and Herr Mueller was only one of many big guns. And they are not through. Every step of diplomacy that Trump has attempted, the jew banking cabal has ‘checked’ and maneuvered. One only has to consider where we would be if the Queen of Death had ascended into the Oval Office. I shudder to think of the devastation she would have allowed by the hands of the zio-satanists. Trump is struggling to stay afloat in the sea of jew corruption. But so did Cyrus (Koresh). We all too quickly forget that every culture in history has, at one time or another, evicted the parasite jew from its midst. We are only remembering anew what vulgarities societies have dealt with for millennia. Welcome to the new millennium.

I find it hard to feel sorry for her.
What was she thinking?
She believed in the USA so much ?

I feel sorry for her parents having such a child, it must be hard to understand what the hell she was doing in the first place.
And she didn’t even have the strength of character to resist and fight back against her treatment.
She Is a disgrace

Israel Shamir, you certainly struck a nerve with this article. Many parts one could comment on, but:

“And so the Church is forced to cleanse Herself, and the Jews are left alone, free to continue their self-destructive denouement.”

As a ‘spotless bride’, believers are in a continuous state of corrections, cleansings, resurrections and ascensions. It is our assignment to continue to “… press toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”. [Philippians 3:14] To this, Yashua (Jesus, if you prefer) prophesied of Judaism: ” Let no fruit grow on you ever again.” Immediately the fig tree withered away. [Matt. 21:19] Judaism has proven the words of Yashua as truly prophetic, for it is a manifestation of “…the father of lies”. It is time to recognize Judaism, and all that call themselves ‘jew’ because of their ‘Judaism’, as the “…synagogue of satan” that scripture declares it to be. By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between ‘semitism’ and ‘Shemitism’. “You keep using that word ‘semitism’. I do not thin it mins what you thin it mins”. Shalom, Y’all. And a Joyous Resurrection to all who will accept it.

Thanx, and Kudos to Andrew Joyce. A reminder, however. Please stop referring to non-jew as ‘gentile’. ‘Gentile’ is a jew word from the Old Testament that has nothing what-so-ever to do with being a descendant, genetically or culturally, from Shem. Don’t know Shem? Well, you should, because there is no such word as ‘anti-semite’; that is made up by the jew to announce ‘discrimination!’ every time a jew is exposed for being a criminal. The ‘jew’ is technically a tribal name, referring to certain tribal descendants of Jacob (Yacov), a grand-son of Abram/Abraham. And Abram was a distant descendant of Shem, son of Noah. What the jew should be screeching when complaining of unfair treatment is “Anti-Shemite”. But, that is not what the jew screeches, is it? No. The jew complains of ‘anti-semitism’, which means that you and I, non-jew in our heart/mind, do not consider the jew to be the supreme life form on the planet. For that is exactly what the word ‘anti-semite’ means to the jew, if you understand Biblical Hebrew. And ‘semite’ is a term from the Old Testament, which means to be especially appointed and placed as a superior entity; at least that is how the jew interprets ‘semite’. And the word ‘goy’, which the jew tells you to pronounce as ‘gentile’? Well, that word is used as well to refer to the descendants of Noah/Shem as much as to refer to those that were not direct descendants of Shem. Abram/Abraham is called ‘goy’ many, many times in the O. T. Think I’m wrong? Check it out. There is no such thing as a jew genealogy. Jew is not a bloodline, or genealogy. Jew is a heart condition of distorted self-aggrandizement; the ultimate manifestation of ‘religion’. Always has been; always will be, until the jew ceases being jew in heart/mind, and accepts Christ as Messiah. The jew wanted to be Messiah. However, the jew failed miserably as a manifestation of God, and was rejected. You are not ‘gentile’ because you reject the superiority of the jew. But you are non-jew if you do, and that is what threatens the jew heart/mind. Please, never call yourself a ‘gentile’ again. You are only agreeing with the jew when you do. And if you have accepted Christ as Messiah, then the jew hates you just as they hate Yashua, the Messiah. ps; There are many over the eons that have been told they are ‘jew’, but are no more jew than you or I. They have only been deceived by the real jew, just as you and I. Awake, Oh Sleeper, and sleep no more! alan

A hearty “Thank You” to the Saker, and to Mr. Hudson for the ‘telling’ interview, and a lusty “Thank You” to The Unz Review for posting. A follow-up comment, if I may, to the closing quote from Mr. Hudson:

“Second, no country should be obliged to pay foreign debt at the price of losing its domestic autonomy as a state: the right to determine its own foreign policy, to tax and to create its own money, and to be free of having to privatize its public assets to pay foreign creditors. Any such debt is a “bad loan” reflecting the creditor’s own irresponsibility or, even worse, pernicious asset grab in a foreclosure that was the whole point of the loan.”

‘Usury’ is the technical expertise of the jew banking cabal; namely, the Fed, IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Wall Street, City of London, etc., etc., etc. ‘Usury’ has no conscience. ‘Usury’ is soul-less. ‘Usury’ is the heart of the jew mentality. All of the above provocateurs are owned by the jew banking cabal. Coincidence? Not hardly. And please, before any of you begin to screech ‘anti-semitism’, the jew has nothing in common with the Tribe of Judah, one of the twelve descendants of Jacob, of whom the current international jew community has perverted the name of by calling themselves ‘Israel’. The supplanting process of Jacob to Israel is a heart condition; period. The international zion jew is nothing more than a satanic impostor to honesty. Can anyone say ‘Palestine’? (Actually, ‘Philistia’) And ‘semitism’ doesn’t mean what the international jew has told you it means. ‘Tis time to awaken, Sleepers, and don your righteous identities.

Ron, I commend your confidence in the ‘facts’ you have posted concerning the ‘immigration across our southern border’ debate. Facts can be stubborn irritants when a serious debate is ongoing. On the other hand, I have never yet read ‘facts’ that weren’t biased in one direction or another. Even the ‘facts’ that I promote are biased towards my agenda. I admit that. What I don’t tolerate, however, is the idea that ‘facts’ supersede Truth, and the real Truth that fuels this ‘border’ debate is not being given serious focus. The dispute over who comes across our border is not quantity, but quality. No one, and I mean “no one”, is allowed to come into my house without first having been recognized, and then invited in. You come in my house uninvited, and if my gun misfires, your were lucky. It won’t misfire a second time. Why does that position seem so egregious to so many? Why does it seems egregious to you? I wouldn’t consider walking into your home uninvited. I suppose you feel the same about barging in, uninvited, into my home. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. At least not to me.
So, why is our president making such an issue of building a wall to determine who comes into our ‘home’ legally? You, and many that seem to agree with you, suggest that myself and my president are just ignorant and brainwashed. I find that silly supposition as repugnant, and small. What I do agree is that we have ample ‘legal immigration’ to continue to swell our population beyond what is probably a healthy growth rate. But with a serious immigration program, and means to enforce that program, that situation can be ameliorated. A wall is a manageable compromise; not perfect, and certainly not a finality. And you believe that Trump is too ignorant to understand that?
Ron! You are much too intelligent to descend to that scoop. I propose another ‘hypothesis’. Our ‘old friend’ FDR said that nothing, in politics, happens by accident. I believe that to be fairly accurate. Could it be that our ‘jew’ nemesis, in pushing and forcing an issue of legal vs illegal immigration has some political value to the jew agenda? Hmmmm? Who is obviously fanning the flames of this illegal immigration charge? Who hired the buses that transported masses of people north into Mexico to approach the U.S. border? Who is economically destroying Venezuela, just to pick up the valuable pieces when the dust settles? Who has most to gain from putting Trump into a very compromising position politically? Who, more than any other entity, wants Trump removed? The answer is, without waver, the jew. The international zion jew stands to lose more than all combined if Trump is successful as an opposition president. And everything on the ‘left’, and most on the ‘right’, is financed and orchestrated by the jew money cabal. You know this. I know this.
‘Tis High Time, Sir, that we stop cannibalizing each other over an immigration policy that is being promulgated and promoted by the international jew banking cabal. For when we fight each other, the jew ends up with more of our productivity, and we end up deeper in debt. Seriously!!!
‘Tis time to end the Fed, and the jew control of an illegal and counterfeit fiat currency. Are there any that have the courage for the fight?!

I wonder if ‘600,000’ is a similar distortion to ‘6,000,000’? And maybe from the same source?
Hmmmmmm!

No argument with you there, “lost American”. And the ‘body public’ in the U.S. has been divided for quite some time; going all the way back to the early 1700s, when the populace consisted of a few colonial settlements, attempting to distance themselves from the manipulative control of the already decadent Britain and France financial squabbles. The jew owners of the City of London have owned Europe for over 300 years, and every where they own and control a central bank cabal they have poisoned and destroyed every vestige of civilization. That is how the ‘jew owned’ parasite banking cabal operates. And just what is the dividing factor that separates the U.S. populace into two distinct camps? The battle lines have always been, and continue to be, between those that are willing to be chattel of a ‘jew owned’ parasite banking cabal (democrats) and those that despise and attempt to repel the parasite invasion of the ‘jew owned’ banking cabal. You see, my friend, the difference between the ‘democrat’ mentality and the ‘republic’ mentality is one of independence from outside manipulation by parasites. A republic demands to be left alone to orchestrate our own pageant, forged and financed by our own creative potentials and successes vs. failures. A ‘democracy’ is one that demands that the ‘guv-mint’ be involved in every facet of our lives, providing every sustenance that the slovenly non-producers desire. A privately owned banking cabal prints worthless fiat currency, and distributes it for votes that allow the parasites to continue to own and operate their fiat currency scam. That is how the ‘jew owned’ parasite banking cabal controls the public; the ‘democrats’. For a ‘democrat’ mentality is one that wants someone else to provide, while a ‘republic’ mentality insists on being personally responsible for success vs. failure. The parasite ‘jew owned banking cabal’ exists solely because of the slovenly mentality of the ‘democrat’ mind. And the owners of the illicit fiat currency cabal know that better than anyone.

The media talking heads in the western ‘democracies’ is not the problem. The problem is the ‘jew owned’ parasite banking cabal that also owns the western media platforms. The ‘Jim Acosta’s and the ‘Wolf Blitzer’s of the western owned media are only reading scripts that are given to spout. The ‘talking heads’ are as ignorant of what they are saying as are the ‘hearers’ of what they are saying. The people who own and operate these ‘talking heads’ are the true demons in this charade. For the ‘talking heads’ are only saying what they are told/paid to say. And who owns the media that these ‘talking heads’ obey and parrot? The same ‘jew owned’ parasite fiat banking cabal also owns the dominant western media; the petroleum industry; the industrial military complex that thrives off of continual warfare; Big Pharma; the insurance cabal; etc., etc., etc. They own the City of London, The Bank of France, Deutshce Bank, Wall Street, The Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. These ‘owners’ are the promoters of ‘democracy’, for they know that by financing the impotence of the ‘democrat’ mind, they insure the continual control of those ‘weak minds’. These ‘owners’ have owned and operated every major political figure since Lincoln; and those that resisted, the ‘owners’ assassinated. Every one. Donald John Trump is the first ‘resistor’ to have provided any real ‘resistance’ to the ‘jew agenda’. And he is most vulnerable. He has no support around him to help with the fight. For the ‘jew parasite financial cabal’ already had all of the ‘guv-mint’ on the payroll. No sane congressman or senator or cabinet officer or ‘supreme court’ judge is going to seriously resist the source of their off-shore bank accounts.

Yes; our body public is divided into two camps. But when we are successful in pulling the curtain back and exposing the ‘wizard behind the curtain’, the ‘synagogue of satan’ that uses deceitful financial manipulation to keep the camps divided and fighting each other, then those divided camps will no longer fight with each other, and will begin to unite in the fight to throw out the ‘parasite jew-owned’ banking cabal, and will begin again to heal our American Experiment. And when that happens, the rest of the world will join in to heal their own lands as well. Resistance in not futile.
Remember; you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong!

Thanks for you response, and your comments. alan

“Sanders is not open borders.” ????? Which Sanders are you referencing? Bernie Sanders is of course ‘open borders’. He proved, without speculation, when he bowed the knee to the commandment to exit the stage in favor of Hillary, that he was what ever his ‘pay master’ tells him to be. And his ‘pay master’ is most certainly ‘open borders’. Why? If there is any filter in place to sift who comes in and out, without scrutiny, then the globalist agenda cannot completely subdue the U.S. of America to the will of the globalist agenda. Why would you have an ‘open border’ policy unless your agenda was to fill the U.S. with an over-burdening load of hungry and hapless invaders, totally at the command of those that control the bread lines. Open borders never was to be understood as free and unfettered access to any that wished to come in, or that were paid and bussed in as we are now seeing. There was no ‘open border’ policy through Ellis Island. Never! Any coming in had to be accounted for. If I am welcome to come to your home, it is expected that I will come to the front door, and knock, and wait to be invited in properly. If I can go to your back door, and let myself in without being acknowledged by the occupant, then the home will not remain a home for long. You may welcome me at your front door, but if I barge into the kitchen uninvited, you are going to take great offense. And rightly so. There is no ‘open border’ mentality in any civilized country on the planet; democracy or republic. You are welcome to come in when you have been recognized and accepted. Bernie doesn’t have an ‘open door’ policy at the nice lake home his Zionist pay master provided for him after he obediently left the stage on command. But he damned sure has an ‘open door’ policy for the further destruction of the constitutional republic of the United States of America. And not because he believes in that policy, but because his ‘pay master’ demands it of him.

Thanx for your response, which confirms my assertion. Whether or not a ‘country’ has a ‘constitution’, or not, is of no significance. A republic is governed solely by the lawful mandates laid forth in the ‘constitution’. A country with a constitution that is not adhered to by the country’s ‘elected’ law enforcement officials is no better off than a ‘democracy’ run by individual dictators; which is how all of Europe’s ‘democracies’ operate. And the U.S. has been no different for the past 100+ years. We have all been raped and pillaged by ‘elected’ thieves that have conspired to no longer be bound by the constraints of a constitution, and have instead bowed their sovereign knees to the ‘shekels of democracy’. However, Donald Trump has become the sole defender of our tattered constitutional republic, or whatever is left of it. And Trump’s efforts to overturn the criminal activity of the past 100+ years has ignited anew the spark of life left in our constitutional republic. And the ‘democracy’ world is apoplectic over his brief success. Even the zio-owned Federal Reserved, privately owned by the criminal cabal in the City of London, is having digestive distress over Trump’s popularity and progress. The ‘republic’ is apparently still alive in many of us, and we are rising from the ashes to once again defend ourselves from the infestation of those that have been purchased by the ‘shekels of democracy’. viva le constitutional republic. Remember, you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong! Thanks, again, for your comments.

Would someone please inform the Macrons of this world that the U.S. of America is not a democracy. UK is a democracy. France, Belgium and Germany, etc. are democracies. The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and that sets us apart from every other manipulated government on the planet. All of the ills we as Americans are attempting to thwart and overcome are because of the intentional ‘democrat’ brainwashing of the non-thinking American public by the Christ hating ownership of the msm and the criminal gangster banking cabal. “Tis a republic, madam, if you are morally strong enough to keep it”. And if not, the parasite shekel lovers will distort it and pervert it, because that is what you do to a ‘democracy’. A ‘democracy’ is owned and operated by those that control the shekels; or gold. A republic is only viable as a governing ordinance for a Christ minded public. All else is too weak and fickle to resist the deception of the ‘money-masters’. Macron, of course, understands this, because he is put into place by those that manufacture and distribute the shekels. And his job is to ridicule those that resist the owners of the ‘democracy’. He serves his masters well.

I pray that there is still some ‘constitutional republic’ that remains in our social and psychological ‘dna’. That is, in Christ, our only hope, and Donald John Trump is our leader out of this morass. Resistance is not futile.

Thank you, Brewer, for your comments on this excellent article, though I believe Shamir’s defense is of a ‘judaism’ that he fantasizes about rather than a ‘judaism’ of which history reveals the reality of. God, not the ‘god’ of foolish religious beliefs but the God of Spiritual Truth, is the most logical arena of thought available to the mind of ‘man’. John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word is God.” The Greek word translated ‘Word’ in this setting is ‘logos’; or more simply, logic. Truth is logical. Always has been, always will be. God is Truth; Logical Truth and Spiritual Truth. Only man’s distorted imagination and fantasy with propaganda can supersede Truth. Fantasy and propaganda cannot over power truth, it can only supersede Truth in the mind of the Illogical Thinker. God is still Truth; Logical and Spiritual. But foolish man prefers fantasy and myth and propaganda. Oh well,….

Touche’ to Mark Green’s observations. Lest we forget, the jew banksters refer to New York as ‘New Jerusalem’. And for good reason. For where their treasure is, there is their focus. An anomaly exists, however; at least in my mind. There is no rational reason for Trump, posing as an ‘isolationist’ who refuses to be sucked into other people’s conflicts, to continue to harass and torment the Iranians. Nothing can be gained from perpetuating middle eastern turmoil. Not even the pseudo-jews will benefit from further conflict. He has already stuck his thumb in the eye of the ‘israelis’, on numerous occasions. He tells the gullible religious crowd that he is a stalwart supporter of ‘israel’. Then he tells the ultra-right that he wants no more Americans soldiers to die on foreign soil. Everyone is getting to hear the song that pleases them. So, why taunt Iran to the point of conflict. Why not prove that he understands the higher ground, and just refuse to do business with those that will not do business with us fairly; and honestly? Our only true enemy is the privately jew-owned Fed, which is the one entity that Trump refuses to harass. But the US is still the most stable and productive economy on the planet, in spite of the Christ hating jews efforts to weaken and neutralize the Christ loving America. All countries need trade with us more than we need trade with them. I cautiously supported and endorsed Trump against the Bush/Obama/Clinton crime syndicate. Hell, what sane person didn’t? However, the more I see of his irrational actions, with no real explanation of why, the less I am comfortable with the current POTUS. Maybe the Helsinki trip will do something to ease my mind. But I remain skeptical…

Ahhh, Ron. You teaser, you. For a few moments there you had me on seats edge, expecting any minute that you were gonna finally blurt out, in an ashamed confession, “The jews did it”! Alas, I will have to wait until you read a few more ‘obscure’ articles, or hidden facts, to finally come to the realization that ‘zionist jew’ is synonymous with Soviet Socialist. Vladimir Putin has admitted that over 85% of the Soviet hierarchy was ‘jew’. The rapacious hegemonic appetite of the global jew is no secret to those of us who are no longer afraid of being labeled ‘anti-semite’. I now know what the word means, and it doesn’t mean a phobia against a people that call themselves ‘jew’. ‘jew’ is not a race, nor a blood line, nor a genetic genealogy, but is simply a perverted heart condition of a group of people that have an elitist superiority complex, and continually tell themselves that they are superior to all other life forms, and all other life forms only exist to serve the perverted whims of the ‘jew’. In that context, Harry Truman proved that the jew was right. And so did Woodrow Wilson, and all of the ‘goy’ that will bow down to the jew for enough shekels. Yeah, the ‘jews’ did it. For there is no difference between ‘jew’ and ‘communist’. They are one and the same. The cat is out of the bag. It’s ok. You can admit it, too.
ps: until we have the courage to remove the privately owned Fed from the hands of international jews, nothing will change. A privately owned central banking cabal is the ultimate manifestation of ‘satan’, and ‘anti-Christ’. And no amount of ‘social behavioral change’ will remedy that disease.

Thank you, Wally, for your comments. However, I urge you, as I do all others, to cease referring to jews as ‘semites’. They are nothing of the sort. The very term ‘semite’, and ‘anti-semite’, cause all of us non-jews to fall into their deceipt and perversion. A jew is not a semite. If a jew is anything, it is a ‘shemite’. Think I’m splitting hairs? jews don’t think so. There is a vast chasm of difference between a ‘semite’ and a ‘shemite’. The jew is not a ‘semite’. And the echelon of the jews knows the difference, but they are trusting that you don’t, and aren’t willing to find out the difference. Even Mark Glenn of The Ugly Truth now understands the difference, and his blogs now refer to the jew as a ‘shemite’. If you wish to know the difference, and aren’t able to discern this on your own, feel free to contact me at [email protected] and I will gladly forward you an article that will clearly reveal why the jew wants you to think of him as a ‘semite’. Thanks, again, for your comments. Alan Newton, Longs, SC

the Israel lobby. big time

Razib writes:

“Though they overwhelmed this region demographically, rather than changing the culture, they simply accentuated its longstanding features, which were established by Yankees (e.g., social progressivism and communitarianism).”

Indeed. Scandinavia and Northern German, or better still, Lutheran protestantism as a whole could be viewed as a template for those values even more so than the Yankee version touted by Hackett Fisher.

Dont worry. Get over the Fear China factor.

China’s rise will mean rise of the world with peace and more trade as to China more trade is the desired direction for global growth not war. China seeks a multipolar world .

War is bad for Business and so if China is to enforce any rule., it would be for peace not war.
Look at today’s US domination… only deaths and wars are news of the day.

Well one thing for sure.

If US domestic planes got hit , we would not even bother to think about it.

You reap what you sow .. westerners (just to overthrow a good Arab leader to replace him with ISIS.)

Don’t cry for me “Argentina”..

Of course the presenter will say that people are surprised at how admixed they are. They’re trying to sell their product and they want people to be intrigued enough to buy it. It’d be poor marketing to say, “your results will show that your ancestry is exactly what you think – 100% British.”

Steve,

Australia never invested in boarding schools for Aboriginal children to help them integrate.

What Australian state governments are accused of was removing part-Aboriginal children from their parents to put them in mostly-church-run orphanages or institutions. Although this assertion has become something of an officially-sponsored ideology: the victims are known as the “stolen generation”; there is an annual “sorry day” for the nation to repent of it; and one State with virtually no Aboriginal people, Tasmania, has handed out money to anybody who claimed to have been “stolen”, in the law courts it’s been extremely difficult for anybody to actually prove they were removed from their parents because of their race. The columnist Andrew Bolt has written many times on the myth of the stolen generation, e.g. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/where_are_the_stolen_children_robert/

Razib writes:

“This is one reason that unscrupulous breeders of animals sometimes utilize very close relatives in programs to change traits.”

I would remove “unscrupulous” from that sentence. ALL animal breeds were created from highly inbred populations to RETAIN traits. By definition a breed is a group of animals sharing a common ancestor/ancestry with a uniform phenotype.

The “blame clock” is in your own imagination and not a “clever trick”, again in your own imagination. The coup that started the events that had to follow have nothing to do with September 11, 2001 and nothing to do with “America’s dealings with the Muslim world”. No need to try to confound what is very simple.

If the Kiev coup had not occurred there would be no war. Crimea would still be part of Ukraine and the Donbass would still be part of Ukraine. Over a million people would not be displaced, many dead would still be living, many wounded and disabled would not be, and flight MH17 would not have been shot down. Those involved in the coup are the ones who are guilty, including the US organizers.

The black cops are actually victims, having inhaled second-hand racism.

Bollocks. You have an axe to grind. Your “Putin fan-gurls” quote gave you away, I guess you couldn’t resist. Anyone who will read the Spiegel article can draw their own conclusions. Here are some other quotes you forgot to mention, where Spiegel goes out of its way to not embarrass old statesmen contradicted by the actual documents unearthed:

1)

“For years former US Secretary of State James Baker, Shevardnadze’s American counterpart in 1990, has denied that there was any agreement between the two sides. But Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, has said in the past that Moscow was given a “clear commitment.” Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister in 1990, says this was precisely not the case.
After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with Shevardnadze. According to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: “We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.” And because the conversion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: “As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general. Shevardnadze replied that he believed “everything the minister (Genscher) said.”

2)

“As Genscher’s chief of staff Frank Elbe later wrote, the German foreign minister had “moved with the caution of a giant insect that uses its many feelers to investigate its surroundings, prepared to recoil when it encounters resistance.”
US Secretary of State James Baker, a pragmatic Texan, apparently “warmed to the proposal immediately,” says Elbe today. On Feb. 2, the two diplomats sat down in front of the fireplace in Baker’s study in Washington, took off their jackets, put their feet up and discussed world events. They quickly agreed that there was to be no NATO expansion to the East. “It was completely clear,” Elbe comments.”

3)

“What the US secretary of state said on Feb. 9, 1990 in the magnificent St. Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin is beyond dispute. There would be, in Baker’s words, “no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” provided the Soviets agreed to the NATO membership of a unified Germany. Moscow would think about it, Gorbachev said, but added: “any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.”
Now, 20 years later, Gorbachev is still outraged when he is asked about this episode. “One cannot depend on American politicians,” he told SPIEGEL. Baker, for his part, now offers a different interpretation of what he said in 1990, arguing that he was merely referring to East Germany, which was to be given a special status in the alliance — nothing more.”

4)

“Genscher says today that he was merely “sounding out” Shevardnadze prior to the actual negotiations to determine Moscow’s position on the alliance issue and to see whether there was any leeway.
This is the official position. But there are also other versions of the events.
A diplomat with the German Foreign Ministry says that there was, of course, a consensus between the two sides. Indeed, the Soviets would hardly have agreed to take part in the two-plus-four talks if they had known that NATO would later accept Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European countries as members.
The negotiations with Gorbachev were already difficult enough, with Western politicians repeatedly insisting that they were not going to derive — in the words of then-US President George H. W. Bush — any “unilateral advantage” from the situation, and that there would be “no shift in the balance of power” between the East and the West, as Genscher put it. Russia today is certainly somewhat justified in citing, at the very least, the spirit of the 1990 agreements.”

***********

People should simply read the article. There is a reason why the intro to the article states: “Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.” But nice try.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html

Really?

“Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has accused the West of breaking promises made after the fall of the Iron Curtain, saying that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification. Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html

The supposed “controversy” on this (as exemplified on the Wikipedia entry on this issue for example) is because of the backpedaling of crucial players of the time from the American side for obvious reasons – they weren’t going to admit that they took advantage of Gorbavhev’s naiveté in trusting them and not ask for those assurances in writing. So the argument they have tried to present was that the agreement was about East Germany but not for any other country of Eastern Europe. In that scenario, Gorbachev would have had concerns for East Germany but wouldn’t care about all the other countries which have since joined NATO and are much closer to Russia’s borders! This argument could only work on people who have never consulted an atlas, are total idiots or would accept any lame excuse to advance an agenda towards NATO expansion.

This is no trivial issue. Russia will never allow NATO first-strike capability which is really NATO’s goal here and Russia still has several thousands of nuclear warheads. It’s total madness.

Every time I consider wanting to drop my phone plan, I soon after have to fill out a form that won’t let me proceed unless I enter a phone number.

"However, the article does not read as tongue in cheek."

He's not joking about calling IQ researchers bullies, but he is clearly being tongue-in-cheek about his intent to ban such research. Seriously, read his definition of "ban": it is over-the-top.

You're not suggesting that correlation is causation, are you? 'Cause dass raciss.

Sometimes it reflects causation (though sometimes the directional arrow of causation is in the opposite direction it is assumed to be). Why do *you* suppose that those with the highest 5 percent of IQs are more likely to be liberal than conservative?

Care to show your work, there?

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4981240.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2953791/

This comment has been removed by the author.

I guess no one is disputing that the highest IQ Americans are more liberal than conservative.

"Of course, he gets paid to write for the same reason that Obama was elected President. "

BS. Obama's race was a drag on his vote totals, not a boost to them. A scandal-free John Edwards would have racked up LBJ type numbers.

"Africans are a race"

If we are going to try to be scientifically rigourous, we need to say that they are a number of races as there is far more genetic diversity within Africa than without.

"If there is really no such thing as race, then we can get rid of all this affirmative action stuff, right, TN? How could you single out certain people for belonging to a certain group if said group doesn't exist in the first place?"

Valid question.

I see a lot of reference to "Marxist" in this thread as a synonym for "inherently, axiomatically wrong". Lazy thinking there. Karl wasn't right about everything, but surplus value explains capitalism and inequality better than Adam Smith ever did. If you disagree, I would challenge you to defend your position rather than using the word as a talisman (or bogeyman).

I don't agree with TNC, and although this discussion can certainly get toxic, I don't agree that the truth should be buried. I like this take:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/jason-richwine-race-immigration-article-1.1344963

But while I don't want us to shy away from looking at correlations between race and IQ, let's not shy away from other correlations as well. If we restricted voting to the top 5% of Americans, which party do you think they would support? My money is on Democrats, with some support for moderate Republicans. There are a few intellectual archconservatives, to be sure; but they are way at the tail end of a different sort of bell curve.

Davos is part of the soap-opera component of bread-and-circuses.

It ===could have been=== your town that discovered this money-making racket. But the Davos city council got there first.

>>> Maybe? They do have a black guy quota. And it's a lot higher than the actual percentage of blacks in America

Of course. Advertisers don't want to waste their time and money making appeals to people who'd rather put money in the bank than buy a newer Cadillac Escalade.

The TV ==shows== only exist to trap consumers into watching the advertisements.

We Jews don't run TV the way we do to hurt white folk. We run it to make money off of black people. Your resultant problems are merely collateral damage. Sorry for that. Try to do a better job of breeeding grit into your children, ok?

You whites are so naive about how money works. No wonder I prefer to hang out with Chinese & Koreans!!!!

The IDF only has 16,000 infantrymen on active conscript service at any given moment.

There is ONE infantry battalion ("Karakal", which is a medium-sized feral cat in which the female and the male are very similarly built) that has significant (80%) female members.

The physical/mental medical profile required to get into Karakal is 15% lower than to get into a normal infantry battalion.

The original thinking of the brass was that they didn't want anything like Karakal. They got over-ruled.

In real life, there has turned out to be enough billets for alert, but not-highly-capable, border guarders, to keep Karakal employed.

In real life, when the border of Egypt started to get nasty (as in real dirty hand-to-hand encounters with Gazan & Jihadi armed-to-the-teeth infiltrators) some months ago, they pulled Karakal out of the front and sent in the Golani brigade. Karakal units are still there a few hundred meters back, as a re-inforcement force.

In Israel, you get better current benefits (eg: free public transportation, easier access to weapons permits [= later job as a armed guard]) and better veteran's preferences if you hold an ID from a combatant's unit. Women want those benefits as much as men do. It is not a freebie: the Karakal girls have to sign on for an additional 1 year of active-obligated-conscript service than their desk-worker ("jobnik") sisters.

the concern for about tax-dollars paying for Hebrew instruction ==would be== legitimate if the same concern was being voiced about tax-dollars being used to teach Latin. Only Roman Catholic priests speak Latin.

Hebrew instruction is not religious instruction. The Hebrew Kingdoms were run by secular Royal Families. The Aaronite Priesthood was only in charge of the Temple rituals.

By the way, (real) Chinese students are recently filling up seats in Israeli colleges and universities. They know a value proposition when they see it.

Gawker is sticking their necks out here because this is clickbait – and they have to make them ad dollars.

I’m so glad you included Fingerbang in this article. That’s the first place my mind went.

It is understandable that their may well be differences with in Cornwall the west having more connection with Europe and the North with Ireland and Wales .a study of Cornish history and in particular names in place names such as saints and the tre ,pol, and pen names which of course means a knowledge of the Cornish Language can give an easy guide to this fact any Cornish student will know very early on where a place name as come from

really kicks out at the established point of view that the Cornish don,t exist it is only a very few years that the Cornish language has been allow in to existence the claim that every thing Cornish is made up does not hold a lot of scientific water how does it.

I disagree with the comment that empathy levels are low in the middle east. In fact, my experience has been that high empathy levels may be part of what allows tyrants to hold sway, as many ordinary people are unwilling to resist violence with appropriate violence.

On the other hand, high impulsivity may be at play in the same societies.

Did you know that Johnson and Johnson recently invested 9M in 23andme. Why did J&J do that? Who has the most power: the FDA, AMA, or the drug industry?

The drug industry is a major funder of the FDA. Maybe if the drug Industry wants DTC to survive then they may survive, despite the FDA or AMA?

The AMA should be more concerned with the fact that the ~fourth leading cause of death in the USA is from prescription drugs (and the number of people permanently damaged is huge). And those package inserts are written in gibberish legalese, without any useful statistics. Shame on the AMA, FDA, pharmacies, and drug Industry.

Amazingly easy. I got 13 out of 15, 95th percentile, and the two I didn’t get were so deeply US-specific that as a non-American I couldn’t reasonably be expected to have a clue (prayer in publich schools and names of some born-again preachers)

Intelligent perhaps, but with a very limited lifespan. Most Cephalopods live only a year or two, some only as long as 6 months, and all of them die after reproduction, so seems like a waste of brains…

This reminds me of a telling line in some chick TV sitcom (Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives?) in which one female protagonist tells another, “Nobody likes their friends! Well, maybe men do.” The implication being that female friendships, while more intense, tend also to be more judgmental and more quick to focus on one another’s flaws in taste, clothes, men, behaviors, etc. while men “like” their friends precisely because they don’t focus on intense analysis of each others flaws.

Would love to see some year-by-year graphs on this data. It would say more than a thousand essays on evolution of modern America.

“Weight, income, and health all showed no association with virginity in men or women.” Umm, aren’t they missing the potentially number 1 correlator – attractiveness? Did they not even mention this in the report?

Why does the top map show the entire UK and the bottom only England?

In answer to David B’s and Eric Johnson’s queries, the sheep industry doesn’t use A.I. to the extent it is used in the cattle industry. In cattle, a superior bull can be used to sire thousands of offspring and his semen is shipped everywhere. In sheep, however, owning to a slightly different cervical structure it is extremely difficult to fertilize trans-cervically (i.e., the turkey baster method). Almost all sheep A.I. is done surgically using a laproscope (a much more invasive and costly procedure), so the potential to use any one superior sire on thousands of ewes is just not practical. I use A.I. regularly since I import semen from the top rams in the UK to the US (I’ve got several guys on ice at UC Davis right now). But it’s not cost-effective by any means. Certainly semen from gay sheep can be collected just as easily as it can from straight ones (perhaps even more easily….given the method used to obtain a specimen ). But the reality is, any top ram that’s gay, probably has about a dozen or so straight brothers hanging around that are just as good, so why bother worrying about it?  
 
Also, more to the point, almost all livestock breeding involves one male with a group of females. If he’s solo, and there’s no other rams around to take out to the local disco, he’s going to do the job – it may not be his sexual ‘preference’ but hey, it’s breeding season, and the testosterone is running high…. In the middle of rut, most ruminants will boink anything (surely you’ve see the you tube clips of sex-crazed moose mounting statutes, etc).  
 
In a range situation (on a Western ranch or an Ozzie or Kiwi sheep station) with multiple males running unsupervised with lots of females, sure, the gay rams will be off on their own listening to the Pet Shop Boys or whatever, but their straight brothers will be only to happy to fill in for them. So, again, there’ no economic need to study homosexuality in livestock. Interesting topic, though, nevertheless.

Ahem. As a gay person AND a sheep farmer, let me set a couple of things ‘straight.’ First off, sheep are not the only animals that show exclusive homosexual behavior. There are well documented life-long homosexual pair bonds in a number of bird species. A number of other wild ruminants related to sheep exhibit same-sex orientations – it’s just harder to study in the wild (Wildebeests X & Y in a herd of 1,000 are gay – how you gonna prove that?). 
 
Second, gay sheep studies may have been cloaked with an ‘economic’ rationale originally – perhaps as a means of justifying the grant to study homo sheep, but to suggest that there is ANY economic impact on the sheep industry at all because a percentage of rams are getting it on with each other rather than the ewes is laughable in the extreme! That’s out-of-touch academics grasping desperately for a real-world impact for their research.  
 
The 2% to 4% of rams that are gay have zero impact on any sheep operation’s bottom line – No one, I repeat, no one, “loses a lot of money on those duds.” It is a non-issue in the industry. There are roughly the same percentage of rams born with only one descended testicle. No one is worried about the economic impact of monorchidism.

Lenovo worked (at least in the West) because people knew it was relabeled IBM.

Razib –
This term used to bother the hell out of me too only because it is a specifically US locution. No other society in the rest of “Christendom,” or the West, or whatever you want to call it, uses it. Well, now I’ve seen it creeping into some British publications recently too. Also, I think it’s of recent origin (last 30 years or so)and it was no doubt conceived of as a politically correct palliative for US Jews to feel as much a part of the system. I think it’s ridiculous for the same reasons you do – let’s be Western and leave it at that. There are plenty of Hindus, Muslims and Atheists who are part of Western society, and have Western values, but are their religions part of the Western tradition? In my mind, while it’s meant to be ‘inclusive’ it becomes ‘exclusive’ and not in a way that makes any sense other than to (falsely) make Judaism a “Western” phenomenon, which it is not.

Um..isn’t our global connectedness allowing for greater assortative mating?

Too bad Bill didn’t bag himself a trophy wife — a hot chick would never talk that kind of nonsense now.

Doubt it – it’s no longer politically correct to “just” be a trophy wife married to rich guy, especially if the guy is in a “serious” field & known for his brains, then it’s just embarrassing – a hot chick married to Gates & thus surrounded by his social circle of aggressively brilliant & credentialed people would feel the need to prove she’s not “just” a pretty face – she’s smart and capable and she’s going to show you all!

Hot women painfully aware of their lack of accomplishments who want to be respected for their brains/talents can be pretty dangerous, given enough money to play with.

Melinda French is an attractive woman. She may not be a super model, but the idea that every wealthy man wants to date and divorce a series of fashion models and actresses isn’t accurate.

Has anyone here ever taken a look at those perennial “wives of the super rich guys” articles? The most startling revelation, for me at least, is that a lot of these dudes are not married to women could pass for models; most hovering around a 7 or just moderately attractive women like Melinda (and I’m talking here about guys who married after the money showed up) The exception was actors, who tended to marry hotter women (i.e. other actors).

There’s an evolutionary angle here. The Inuit, for example, who reside where sunlight exposure is minimal much of the year, consume vitamin D-rich seafood, and their skin contains more melanin than say, the average Scandinavian. Eating the right seafood, such as wild salmon, would appear to be an optimal way to get appropriate levels of vitamin D.

How much of this is just the usual shoddy (slightly sensationalist) British journalism and how much actual fact? Black color morphs are fairly common in grey squirrel populations in North America, but they’re never more than 10% of the population. The Washington, DC area has a higher concentration of black squirrels, and while I don’t have any documentation on it, I estimate it at no more than 10% of the total squirrel population. They’ve been stable at those levels for decades. Olney, ILL has a stable population of a white color morph. Don’t know why the British black color morphs have so much advantage over the greys when their American cousins don’t.

Razib – 
 
As someone of half German / half English extraction with an practically unpronounceable germanic surname, I can tell you that the number of German surnamed Americans anglicizing their family names is incredibly small. Where I live in Virginia there are a few Millers that were once Muellers in the early 1700s, but other than John (Deutchendorfer) Denver and Doris (Kappelhoff) Day, I can’t think of any American with a German surname who would feel the need to anglicize his or her surname in the 20th or 21st century. That may not be the case for Jewish immigrants with Germanic surnames, who more frequently anglicized their names, but gentile German immigrants from the mid 1800s onward pretty much kept their names.  
 
Similarly the opposite. Americans of German extraction outnumber those of Anglo extraction, as they have in every census report from around 1900 onwards(though often, as in my case they overlap). Growing up in the Midwest, I can attest to the regional taste for beer and bratwurst(especially in Wisconsin) and very clumsy and clueless attempts at celebrating German heritage (Oktoberfest and fat American guys running around in Lederhosen), but there’s really no such thing as German-Americans – they all very rapidly became/become deracinated unhyphenated Americans, and it beggars the imagination that some Smith is going to get in touch with his “ethnic” heritage by changing his name to Schmidt.  
 
So I think you’ll have to look for another explanation of the declining Smiths.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=25784

Razib writes:
“Some people just don’t grok nature.”
Too true! And how did this happen? Obviously an urban/suburban lifestyle and 24/7 TV & video games play a part, but there seems to be something else going on here too. There are plenty of people who come from such an artificial environment and still develop an affinity for the natural world around them. But the vast majority of them just don’t have any horse sense – and display such obtuse ignorance of the natural world.
Ocasionally I play host to groups of schoolchildren that visit my farm. Most of these kids are only about 200 year or so removed from their hunter-gatherer ancestors, but only a very few of them ‘grok’ animals. Those that do – definite do – and they have an instinctive feel for critters and what they’re likely to do, but those that don’t are like complete Asperger’s syndrome cases – they can’t read the most obvious signals the animals are sending them. I see the same divide among other kids – including those who have had the advantage of travel and exposure to the wider world. Some just don’t get it – while others immediately intuit what’s going on. When I’m tempted to divide the world into two groups, it’s basically along the lines of, “come the apocalypse, how long would you last?” and the fault line neatly divides between those who ‘get’ the natural world and exhibit some sense of awareness of their surroundings and the majority that don’t.

Razib – 
 
Your African model is a good analogy,and the one where I think Rauch was heading.  
 
I think the US is evolving to something much like in the former Soviet Union – where medical care providers (from nursing staff on up to elite doctors) were overwhelmingly female. Only elite surgeons were male.  
 
My real question is why, in human social groupings (college classes, professions, teams, clubs, genetics blogs, etc), males much prefer their own company? I like to think of myself as enlighted and socially progressive, but I am guilty of the same behavior. I’ve no science to back this up, but in my experience any such group that has a few females will generally find those females patronized or perhaps ostracized or discounted. The greater the female participation in the group however, the less males feel its value. And the tipping point seems to be not a female majority, but roughly 1/3 female participation. At 50% female participation or more, most males start to bail entirely and the group, in male eyes, is less interesting/less valid/less prestigious. Any studies you’re aware of to confirm or deny my casual observation?

Razib said:  
 
alan, don’t you think your analysis is a bit more interesting than what rauch implied about ‘matriarch’ then? 
 
Well, I dunno. Don’t you think it kinda confirms his (somewhat tongue in cheek) assessment that: 
 
Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)

Razib – 
 
Believe it or not, I had lunch with Rauch just this past Saturday and we didn’t discuss this much beyond my mentioning male performance/achievement on either side of the bell curve.  
 
But the point he makes is that in college campuses AND in professional degree programs – females now dominate. That isn’t going to change much in the future. So, yeah, males may outperform females, but males aren’t enrolled in those degree programs. 
 
My own experience illustrates his point all too well. In October I visited the University of Illinois Vet school (where my dad got his DVM in 1955). They have a whole wall of graduation photos of every graduating class from the 1890s. It’s an amazing panorama. All male in every class photo – not a female in sight. Until around 1962 when there are suddenly a few females. By the early 1970s, about 1/3 of the classes are female. By late 1970s 1/2 are female. By late 1990s they’re 90% female. In the 21st century classes they are almost completely female with only about 4-5 token male students. As the profession has become ‘feminized’ it’s also lost earning power. Veterinary salaries have eroded in real terms since the 1980s. Is this the result of society valuing women less than men? Or the result of women willing to work part-time and as ‘staff’ in larger animal hospitals and clinics? I dunno. I do know that my local large animal vet who comes to my farm says that he can’t hire anybody to work with cattle or other livestock (the only exception being horses) as no recently minted female vet wants to do the physical labor involved in restraining large and dangerous animals. Yet there are no male graduates to do this work either – Veterinary medicine has become a ‘female’ occupation that high ability males avoid (due to declining earning power and prestige), and low ability males cannot perform cause they don’t have the smarts to get the degree.

Fair number throughout history, but none other than Qaboos come to mind at the moment. On the other hand, the mayors of Paris and Berlin are both gay, as is a candidate for mayor of London (former top cop). And New York had a gay mayor Ed Koch(not out). And there’s a gay candidate for Senate in NC right now. So, don’t think there’s any difference in political ambition (gay vs. straight), more of just a numbers game and societal acceptance of democratically elected gay leaders.

Why isn’t this under the “Christmas Finn Baiting” category?

Aren’t you all missing a crucial point? Mothers are more ‘invested’ in their daughter’s lives – full stop. Mother-in-laws aren’t as welcomed by daughters-in-law. My mother visits my sister more frequently and spends more time with my sister’s children, even though my sister lives on another continent, than she does with my brothers’ children in this country. And I don’t think my sisters-in-law necessarily mind this. In their view mother = helpful, mother-in-law = meddling. So, obviously, maternal grandmothers are more invested in the matrilinial grandchildren – they’re simply more welcome in those childrens homes.

Hey, come on now, Razib, Canadians don’t suck. They gave us Terrance and Philip after all, right? Besides (pace South Park) “they’re (sic) not even a real country anyway.”
What I really want to know from our Canadian neighbors is – what ever happened to the term “hosers” and how come you don’t use it anymore?

Sorry I’m late. Has anyone mentioned Drew Barrymore’s grandmother the silent screen star Dolores Costello?

Dunno if this is an example of ‘sexual antagonism’ but among animal breeders there are definitely ‘paternal’ and ‘maternal’ breeds which are used in livestock crossbreeding programs to produce commercial offspring destined for the dinner table.  
 
I have a sheep farm and breed one of the quintessential British “maternal” sheep breeds – the Clun Forest Sheep. Farmers have selected for certain ‘maternal’ traits over the past several centuries in this breed. Maternal is in quotes because I’m not necessarily sure that some of these traits are necessarily more feminine than masculine, but the emphasis has been on maternal instincts, wider pelvic carriages, milk production (more milk and higher butterfat), and multiple births. Other breeds were selected for more ‘masculine’ traits such as size, muscling, and body frame. Again, the determination of what is a ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ trait was somewhat subjective on the part of the farmer, but however unscientific, there was a tendency to assign different phenotypes to each sex.  
 
Ewes from my breed of sheep were always crossed with rams of two other breeds of sheep – the Scottish Black-faced or the Border Leicester. Never the other way around.  
 
Maybe because I have an animal breeding background, but I’ve often looked a humans this way too (though I’d never admit it to anyone), but I can generally look at a dainty, small-framed very feminine woman and know that her dad was certainly not a big hulking macho guy. Same goes in reverse, I’ve seen some fairly tough looking dames, where it’s quite clear daddy must have been a bruiser. It’d be pretty easy to breed humans for hyper masculine or hyper feminine phenotypes. You would definitely run into some fecundity issues (women with narrower pelvises, etc), but I know plenty of families (or even ethnic groups) where some, both male and female have more gracile features, and some, both male and female, have coarser features.  
 
Just some very, very unscientific observations. 
 
– Alan

Dear Steve,
This is my first year teaching AP Mod. Euro with Merrimans text. Are you aware of any test banks (CD-Roms, etc) that exist to assist in the generation of questions to prepare for the AP exam? Would it be wise to use test banks from other texts (Palmer, McKay,etc) to suppliment? Thanks. Alan

Razib –
You’re probably way too young, but when I was kid (way back in the 60s). I NEVER heard the term Judeo-Christian heritage or Judeo-Christian values, etc. It was always Christian – full stop. “Our values as Christian nation” “Our Christian heritage” etc, etc. It was almost entirely used as a substitute for “Western” but, I think the subtext was that one used the term “Christian” instead of “Western” to refer not only “Christian” values which implied tolerance, forgiveness, ‘turning other cheek,’ kind of stuff which were implicitly Christian and not Judaic, but also as a subtle dig to remind Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc that although we were a secular nation, certain national touchstones were completely Christian in orientation – take it or leave it.
I really don’t recall the introduction of Judeo-Christian until the late 70s, and I always thought it was a politically correct sop to the Jews, or promoted as a ‘me too!, me too!’ effort on the part of Jewish Americans.
As a secular American (who loathes any religion on principle), I always bridle at the term, but I can see and accept the historical antecedants. No one in the 1920s would have batted an eye at the term “Our Christian heritage.” But today, I think there’d be plenty of people today ready to take the poor soul to task who forgets the “Judeo-” suffix when using the term. Certainly no politician would dare – it would be political suicide.
I think the term should be viewed as an historic artifact. I loathe political correctness almost as much as I loathe religion. So while I see nothing wrong with “Our Christian values” when I’d much prefer “Our Western values” I also hate the contrived “Common Era” and “BCE” instead of AD and BC. Why throw out our historical, dare I say, “Christian heritage” just for touchy-feely political correctness? I’m not a Christian, but I’m not offended by AD and BC. Are any other Atheists, Jews, Hindus, of Muslims offended by those designations?

Hey Razib – 
 
I don’t have anything to add to the hypertension debate, but since TNR won’t let me comment on the articles there (I’m not a subscriber), I thought I’d just leave a general comment on the exchange here – to wit: I’m sure Messers. Chowkwanyn and Shubow are nice young fellows. They certainly seem bright and articulate enoguh, but really, what sort of standing do a law student and a history grad student have to be arguing these points in a national publication? I mean, hell, why not pull some random cab driver and farmer out of the population to debate genetics and race? They’d be just as qualified as those two. I’m not sure I’m getting what TNR is trying to achieve here with this discussion.

……But, the finding that Asian Americans are more secular than other ethnicities is a pretty robust and consistent finding…… 
 
Hmm, could it be that Asian American = higher G? 
 
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of say, Korean-Americans who were raised in a Christian tradtion (the only Asian immigrant group I can think of with a consistently Christian background), and see how many of them are “un-churched” as adults.

Hey Razib –
There’s a little on-line discussion between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris right now that you might find of interest:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/209/story_20904_1.html
– Alan

Large groups of men in uniforms trying to kill other men in uniforms, in service of an abstract concept…

If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are just “abstract” concepts then so be it.

Hey Razib –
Don’t you think it’s time you morphed into a black female for a while?

My question would be, how do we arrive at such breeds as the Irish Wolf Hound – the largest of all dog breeds – from a relatively recent small canid?? Or is this one of the breeds that contain wolf admixture – though this breed is much larger than wolves itself? 
 
One could ask the same in reverse – how were we able to engineer a Chihuahua out of the same ancestral species that gave rise to the St. Bernard? There seems to be an amazing plasticity in both domestic and wild canids (wolves themselves vary considerably in coat colors and thickness). 
 
Irish Wolfhounds and other “over-sized” dogs such as Scottish Deerhounds, Great Danes, etc, are notoriously short-lived. They average around 6 or 7 years before their hearts give out (average dog lifespans seem to be around 13 years). I think the answer to the question is simply, constant selective breeding for size. In a sense we’re pushing the envelope in getting dogs to that size – and I’d argue that selectively breeding humans to achieve giant size would result in the same health problems. 
 
I’m involved in a cat breeding program seeking to produce ‘super-sized’ pet cats. The Maine Coon cat is the largest domestic breed of cat. For whatever reason cats don’t seem to be as ‘plastic’ as dogs when it comes to size, shape, or facial morphology. The Maine Coon seems to be about the largest size we can achieve using selective breeding with domestics. We’ve been using the Jungle or Reed Cat (Felis chaus) to increase the size of cats, but while the F1 and F2 generation hybrids are noticeably larger than domestic cats, by the F4 generation, there’s really no discernable difference in size.  
 
An interesting aside regarding feline hybridization – rare crosses between the Geoffroy Cat (Oncifelis geoffroyi) and the domestic cat result in hybrids which are considerably larger than either parent species. Something to do with differing number of chromosomes.

I think that Darren Naish’s synopsis of the argument of the Pariah Dog as the ancestral ‘species’ of the domestic dog makes the most sense to me. It’s something I’ve always thought “must” be true – despite supposed genetic evidence of wolf ancestry. Glad to see that others are providing more solid evidence for something that I could never justify as anything more than a hunch.

Just a follow up on my original post –
To my eye, the Canaan dog, Carolina dog, Pariah Dog, Dingo, etc, all have certain common characteristics which are more ‘dog-like’ than wolf-like” in appearance. Look at the picture of the Canaan Dog here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan_Dog , and then this picture of Dingo here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo. They look pretty similar in my mind, at least phenotypically. Sort of a proto-dog – or the dog that feral populations revert to after several generations. Indeed the Wikipedia entry more or less claims that the dingo is kind of an ‘ur-dog” which makes sense to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo
To follow upon Razib’s original comment to my query, I think it’s quite plausible that the original cohort of wolves domesticated in East Asia must have been quite small in number – AND – must have displayed some neotonous qualities that not only made them domesticatible, but also considerably altered their appearance (shorter muzzle, more rounded ears, etc). If this group of domesticated wolf descendents were left to breed on their own in the mountains of the Carolinas for several generations or in the Australian outback – might it be that they can only ‘revert back to a semi-neotonous predator? i.e., one that looks more dog-like than wolf-like? http://gator.biol.sc.edu/dogpage/ In other words, unless there’s some sort of mutation to ‘remove’ the neotonous elements, dogs can’t revert back to wolves, because of that genetic shift. It would be much like the Russian neotony foxes – http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/15642 – suddenly turned out in the wild in an area without contact to a wild fox population – would they indeed be ‘able’ to revert back to their ancestral form? Perhaps not. Comments?
To further this line of thought, has there been any research into the genome of northern sled dog breeds (Malmutes, Huskies, etc) might have more ‘wild’ wolf markers? They look a lot more ‘wolf-like’ in appearance and look a lot like various dog-wolf hybrids.
Anyway, this brings up another question – has anyone identified an actual set of genes that result in more juvenile appearance or neotonous characteristics? I think some one should look at the genomes of, say, Gary Bauer http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1022 and Arnold Schwarzenegger http://www.schwarzenegger.se/planethollywood.htm and see if some of those genes couldn’t be isolated??

Given the huge variation in dog sizes, shapes, behaviors, etc., I’ve often wondered if dogs had something in their genome that just allowed for greater ‘plasticity’ or something. You see a lot of variation in color and size of wolves. Some other domestic animals share this astonishing range of shapes, sizes, and colors and but most don’t. Horses and cattle have been domesticated for a long time, yet aside from variations in colors, they’re all shaped pretty much the same as other horses and cattle. Cats also seem not to have the same plasticity in shapes that dogs do. Yet various domestic pigeons and goldfish breeds show such bizarrely different shapes that most casual observers cannot believe they are the same species. Anybody have any thoughts?
Another thing that’s always intrigued me about dogs is that unlike other domesticated animals there doesn’t seem to be a true ‘reversion to wild type’ in feral populations. Feral cats or feral pigeons all very quickly look pretty much like their wild ancestors in relatively few generation removed from man’s selective breeding. Yet most feral dog populations quickly revert to a medium-sized, short-coated, yellowish dog – the so-called “Pariah Dog” that’s found in so many places around the world – why don’t the feral populations look more like their wolf ancestors?

I think Asimov’s “New Guide to Science” (currently out of print and out of date, unfortunately). It’s book akin to Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything” but much thicker, more technical, yet still as amusing and accessible.
It tells the history of science, with anecdotes, many, many references and great flair. It really gets across the wit, energy and sheer luck involved in doing science, as well as the key ability to draw the correct conclusion (or any conclusion) from the “wrong” result.
If there were to be a new issue I think it would be a killer text. It does, however, lack maths (apart from layman’s descriptions).
Otherwise, perhaps what is required is a real “Young Ladies Illustrated Primer” (as in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”).

I’m sorry, typo on the previous message. I meant
I think that intelligence goes beyond what IQ tests can measure, that’s all I have to say

I think the intelligence goes beyond what IQ tests can measure, that’s all the have to say

I totally agree. I actually studied history (to PhD level) before the realities of earning a living dictated a switch to writing software. I always wished I could have something mathematical as a sideline.

David, I’ve been thinking more about this general theme of software industry recruitment – and particularly about an old schoolfriend of mine who is definitely one of the two or three most intelligent people I have ever known. He is the kind of guy who absolutely refuses to put any time or effort into anything he finds too easy or boring. He consequently wouldn’t conform to the programme sufficiently to do “well” at school, and dropped out of a comp.sci. college course after a year. Twenty years and a succession of interesting and technically cutting-edge jobs later, he’s a senior compiler engineer for a major software company (one that doesn’t begin with M).

I seriously doubt whether hyper-intelligent mavericks of that kind will still be in senior positions in major software companies in twenty years time. Is that a loss to the software industry? Maybe, maybe not. It’s part of the natural scheme of things that as industries mature, the sort of people who were attracted to them when they were the frontier start to find them boring. But there will be some other industry where people like that will be making a living in the next generation (and if I knew what it was I’d be investing in the startups now)

I suspect part of the reason for there being more women working in software in the old days is that the software industry in days gone by was much more open to taking people from diverse academic backgrounds than it is now.

I remember a couple of women I worked with when I started out in a “corporate programming position” fifteen years ago (having previously done a PhD in history and decided that academia wasn’t for me) – one had a master’s degree in French Mediaeval literature, another a degree in German from Trinity College Dublin. Thse days, it seems that almost all entry level software development jobs require a degree in Computer “Science” … and that the diversity and interesting-ness of the young programmers one meets is declining as a result (although that last bit could be just me becoming an old, or at least middle-aged, curmudgeon)