This excellent column from Steve Sailer hits on something I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’m not talking about the ethnic stuff. I mean this last bit at the end of his column:

Perhaps it’s time, for the good of your family, for you to study the secrets of successful minorities. Granted, they won’t make America a better country, but maybe it’s a little too late to worry about that anymore.

I had an exchange last week with someone about the future of the country. Specifically the future of the country after the Republicans push through another amnesty. His point, one with which I largely agree, is that amnesty pretty much ends the Right as a force in American politics. The Right has very little influence now, but it is an obstacle that causes problems for the Left and their enablers. Classical Liberalism, the only post-Christian alternative to the Jacobins, will die out in an America with another 30-50 million third world citizens. The political parties will resemble what we see in Europe, international socialism versus national socialism. Any discussion of reducing the role of the state in the lives of the people would be on the fringe.

I fully admit to a degree of sadness at that prospect. For most of my life, I have liked my country. No nation is perfect and a propositional nation like America is always going to be at odds with itself over the defects. That beats the homogenizing and stifling  conformity forced up the citizens of most civilized nations. It certainly beats the barbarism of the uncivilized lands. If you are going to love your country, loving one that loves you back is a good choice. That relationship, however, will soon be a thing of the past. My “countrymen” will have no more in common with me than a guy living in China. My rulers will see me as just another subject, no different than any of the other entries on the spreadsheet. That’s the reason fertility rates in Europe have collapsed. Why would anyone bring someone into a world of strangers?

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I’m continually amazed at how much Huxley got right in Brave New World. People who fret about the future and those unhappy with the people in charge, tend to rely on Orwell for their ammunition. The truth is, Orwell got everything wrong. The future is not going to be a boot stamping on a human face forever. The future is going to be something closer to what Huxley had in mind. Automation will do most of the work required to sustain life and people will spend their free time on drugs or their technological equivalents. The “feelies” were a type of movie experience Huxley described where the viewers experienced raw emotions, rather than watching a story with characters and plot.  According to this story, books will soon deliver emotion to the reader.

Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations” the researchers said.

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I’m surprised by how quickly the traffic on this blog has grown in the short time doing it. I see a regular group of a few hundred popping in daily. A larger group of a few thousand drops in at least every few days. of course, an army of robots and penis pill salesmen swing by daily, but I filter those out of the list. It’s funny how it is easy to spot web traffic from robots, but a major pain in the neck to block them entirely. The penis pill salesmen and fake ugg boots people from Eastern Europe are persistent. I  assume it works for them otherwise they would stop, but you never know. It may be that the real scam is further down stream and has nothing to do with stealing credit cards and selling fake medicine.

What got me thinking about it is a couple of things I recently saw. When I was regular on NRO, I would torment liberal by comparing them to the Seekers, the cult written about in the great book When Prophesy Fails. I know exactly one person familiar with that book and that one person is me. I never see anyone reference it and certainly no one connect it with modern liberals. That’s why I used it. That was the gag. The best way to insult someone is by doing so subtlety. Calling someone, who fashions themselves your intellectual superior, a booger-head just reinforces their sense of superiority. Referencing something they have to look up because it is unknown to them makes them feel inadequate. Childish on my part, but every man has his vices.

The other day, I saw that former National Review contributor Robert Weisberg had picked up on the idea and used it in his latest column. I don’t want to claim he got the idea from me, but I’d say it is highly probable. He may not even recall where he heard it, but he looked it up and decided it was a good bit of gear to stash away for future use. That’s often how ideas get into circulation. Someone with a small audience gets read by someone with a big audience, who then popularizes the idea, often taking credit for it. Rush Limbaugh has become a very rich man popularizing the ideas of others. Ann Coulter is another example of someone from Conservative Inc who got rich repeating the ideas of others while flashing some skin on TV.

There’s nothing wrong with it, but it is a reminder that ideas have a habit of escaping the enclosure. Steve Sailer gets ripped off all the time. I see his stuff recycled by less agile minded people on a regular basis. That’s not a terrible thing as he has many good ideas. It is why HBD’ers should not worry so much about the assault coming from dead enders like Jamie Bartlett and Tim Stanley. These are people with no useful or interesting ideas of their own. Instead they make a living attacking others, but by doing so five those ideas a wider audience. The concern is that people like these two trolls are good at character assassination, while guys like JayMan are not. Reading his post on the subject, I can see how guys like this could be silenced by thugs like Bartlett and Stanley.

Still, I suspect the ideas peculating in the so-called Dark Enlightenment – what a great phrase – will be surfacing in the columns of mainstream chattering skulls soon enough. There may be no Alfred Wegener out there in the Dark Enlightenment, but you never know. Science is the history of error and the best ideas were often met with skepticism and scorn from the running dogs of the status quo.

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The only thing more mysterious than Byzantine politics is maybe Oriental business practices. It is a strange combination of complexity and opacity, sprinkled with a heavy dose of dishonesty, that is forever off-limits to the Western mind. A good example is right here. In the West, a firm struggling to pay its bills and threatening to default will do so in a very public fashion. If the regulators take over, they perform a public audit, liquidate the assets and pay creditors based on an agreed upon framework. If the firm goes into bankruptcy, that is also a public process. If a white knight comes in and puts up a bunch of cash, then we learn who it is and why they are coming to the rescue. It is not perfectly transparent, but the public and interested parties will know enough to judge the results.

In China, the banking system is a mystery to even the people in the Chinese banking system. China Credit Trust Co has no money of its own. It sold a product to investors promising a ten percent return on loans to a firm that has no money to repay the loans. They can dress it up in the popular lingo, but that’s the bottom line. Zhenfu Energy, desperate for cash, went to private firms to borrow money at rates well above market. China Credit Trust Co appears to have created a product to be sold to retail banking customers to funnel money into the struggling energy company. It was a fraud, but most of modern banking is a fraud. Now that the energy company is defaulting on the loan, China Credit Trust Co cannot pay the retail investors their promised return.

This was all supposed to happen at the end of the month. Today a mysterious and undisclosed white knight has arrived to supply the cash. Everyone knows the white knight is the Chinese Communist Party, but no one will dare say it. It is simply a “restructuring” that papers over the problem for now. A month from now some mid-level functionary will kill himself and everyone will know why, but no one will dare say. It is no way to run a modern economy, but that’s another thing everyone knows, but no one dares say. Instead, the West looks the other way and hopes those inscrutable Chinese keep buying up the useless paper the credit machines keep emitting every month.

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I saw this linked on the America Spectator blog. I must confess that I find Sean Hannity to be a boring loud mouth. Michael Savage is a nut, but nuts often lock in on a truth that the rest of us pretend not to notice. Conservative talk radio is often just Republican talk radio. In the Bush years, guys like Hannity and Limbaugh were so far in the tank for Bush they should have been getting a W2 from the GOP. I listen to some talk radio, but the level of discourse is pretty low. Most of it is just cheering for the red team over the blue team, even when the red team is fucking up. Still, I give Hannity credit for using his head in this case. It is too bad his party does not do the same.

The recent uproar over Huckabee’s comments at some Republican meeting is a good example of the stupid party in action. Huckabee pointed out that Democrats think women are unable to control themselves in matters of sex. Dana Bash is either too stupid to understand English or is a liar. The later is the most likely answer. The woman works for NBC which is nothing more than a megaphone for the cult of modern liberalism. MSNBC, their cable arm, is a collection of people who should be institutionalized. Why the Republicans would invite these nuts in and give the media credentials is the great mystery of our time.  The Stupid Party seems incapable of learning what mediocrities like Sean Hannity have apparently mastered.

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My in interested in homosexual marriage lies only in the irrationality of the subject. Marriage is all about reproduction. Without it, you’re left with the equivalent of an intimate handshake agreement on how to divide up the property when one or both parties gets bored. But, as modern insanity goes, it is one of the lesser evils. It does tell us a lot, however, about the people debating it. Arguments for changing public policy, the good ones least ways, contain knowledge of the current policy, its origins, its trade-offs and then the reasons why the new policy is superior. That allows everyone to agree to the facts in advance. Gay marriage advocates dispense with that and instead throw a tantrum, demanding you justify your opposition to their tantrum.

Libertarians suffer from many of the same defects as the Left. My suspicion with them is they are just conservatives with less backbone than the typical conservative. By seeking shelter in the libertarian hut, the lunatics will pass by them on their way to burn some village of normalcy. Libertarians, being useless in the culture war, are not a target of the Left. Say what you will about the Left’s scorched earth polices, they are adept at the  conservation of energy by narrowing their enemies list. They eventually get around to you, but for libertarians, it seems like a safe bet. If libertarianism is on the rise, as some people claim, then this theory will be put to the test. One hundred years of warfare will not be undone by a bunch of pot smoking greed-heads.

Like the Left, libertarians suffer from a peculiar brand of myopia. The Left is at war with the past, even their own past. By that I mean they jam history into their narrative, excluding great swaths of it, even their own words and deeds. Libertarians, in contrast, are so narrow minded, they blunder into a retarded utopianism that borders on the comical. They will yammer on about open borders, for example, and then throw in the fact it worked great when we lacked a giant welfare state transferring a trillion dollars from tax payers every year.They like to design machines that work great if we suspend the laws of physics.

I thought about that when I saw this from Karl Denninger. This is one of the newer hobby horses libertarians enjoy riding in public. Their “solution” to the war over marriage is to do away with marriage.

Marriage is none of the government’s damn business.  It’s sad that it took the gay screamers to wake people up to this, but if it results in Oklahoma actually doing the right thing it will be about damn time.

Tell me this — why is it that you want the State in your bedroom? I don’t give a **** if you’re straight or gay, just give me one good reason why you’d invite the ****ing government behind your bedroom door.  Ever.  For any purpose.

But you do, and what’s worse is that if you actually honor a religious, that is, a sacramental marriage irrespective of what faith you follow you have sworn falsely before your God by having the pastor sign a state marriage license.

As is typical of fanatics everywhere, libertarians have no idea why the rules and institutions were created. They seem to think they were either forced on us by some supernatural entity or sprung from random nothingness. The hallmark of the fanatic is a dedicated lack of curiosity about the origins of contrary opinion. Libertarians seem to think marriage was created in the murky past by the religious or by despotic rulers or maybe the leprechauns. He just assumes that society, through the state, has no interest in marriage and that marriage licenses are something new.

That’s complete nonsense. This excellent post on matting patterns of medieval Franks illustrates that policing marriage predates Christianity and the nation state. Human populations have been keeping an eye on mating habits for a very long time, perhaps from the earliest times of human settlement. Other species have ways of dealing with inbreeding like the Westermarck Effect. The best way mother nature has to handle inbreeding is the defective progeny dies off quickly. Humans having the ability to reason through these results, we soon figured out that mothers and sons should not be mating. Whether a natural repulsion developed, followed by the taboo or the other way around, human societies have been policing the mating choices of its members since the beginning. Again, marriage is about reproduction, not sex.

In the Christian world, the church was enlisted in the war on cousin marriage long after authorities took an interest in it. It is not hard to see what human populations would worry about this problem. Every pinhead is a burden. If you get too many pinheads, you end up like Detroit. If you want to argue that this is no longer necessary in modern times, keep in mind that we are taking in tens of million of people from places where inbreeding is still common. Then there is the urban and rural underclass where inbreeding is always a concern. If you don’t have someone policing the hillbillies in Appalachia, you will get get a Scotts-Irish Pakistan in a few generations. Unfettered liberty works great for smart rich people, but becomes increasingly problematic as you move down the social pyramid.

Contra the libertarians, mating habits are a central concern of all human populations. Try this thought experiment. The world is wiped out by some plague and the remained 100 people are all of child bearing ages, equally divided between boys and girls. What are the first priorities of the group? Obviously, the group has survival needs. Food, fresh water, fire, shelter and defense against nature are the first concerns. Establishing a decision making process and a division of duties amongst the members of the tribe would come naturally, if the group is to make it through the first winter. The next thing they will do is figure out how to handle the inevitable paring off, mating a child birth. Again, if they are to survive, figuring this out is at the top of the list.

That’s why libertarians properly belong on the fringe. They deliberately seek to eliminate themselves from serious debate over public policy. The right thing, it seems, is to leave them alone with the copies of Atlas Shrugged.

[subscribe2]In the 17th century, European settlers in North America saw the native populations as an obstacle to progress. That was not an unreasonable proposition since the natives had no made it far past the stone age. They were using stone arrows and spears, wore animals skins and lived in nomadic tribes. From the perspective of Europeans, these people were barbarians. The locals may not have been very advanced and they were certainly not very bright, but they soon figured out that it was a bad idea to let the white man settle in their lands. A long war of attrition won by the technologically superior (and eventually numerically superior) whites turned North America into Ice People territory. The point being that even primitive nomads could quickly figure out that the tribe that controls the land wins and the tribe that loses, dies out. Love of tribe is a natural part of man.

Everywhere else on plant earth, human populations have been killing one another over land since the dawn of time. So much so we have developed elaborate methods to keep tribes apart from one another. People knew that mixing a bunch of Tribe X into Tribe Y’s turf was going to lead to violence. Either Tribe X would seek to take over or Tribe Y, worried that Tribe X may try to take over, would kill the people of Tribe X first. It may seem totally irrational to the modern alpha male reading this while in his footie pajamas and drinking hot cocoa, but to mother nature it is perfectly rational. I’m fond of saying, just because you don’t understand it does not mean it is irrational. The problem is most likely with you.

Now, against that backdrop consider what the open borders fanatics in the GOP are considering for the end of this summer. It will consist of at least four bills, to be voted on by the end of the summer: 1) an amnesty for illegal aliens that doesn’t lead to citizenship, 2) a Dream Act–like amnesty granting green cards (and eventual citizenship) to illegals who came as teenagers and younger, 3) a bill requiring tracking of foreign nationals (like the eight previous ones passed since 1996), and 4) increased importation of low-skilled workers to compete with unemployed Americans. They’re trying to get the approval of Representative Luis Gutierrez, the firebrand amnesty-pusher from Chicago, who would never — can never — accept any arrangement that would require the full implementation of enforcement systems prior to any legalization.

This little bit of lunacy from the author is the best:

And though none of the bills is likely to offer a path to full citizenship, the fact Republicans are preparing to take on immigration at all is a sign the party is coming to grips with a political reality: if they want to win elections in the long run, they’ll have to face the issue.

After the last amnesty, the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote declined from 37% to 30%. In fact, it has never again risen about 31% and that was with George Bush, who spoke Spanish and was an amnesty fanatic. Bush arguably did more for Mexican peasants than any Mexican leader in the history of the country. Bush expanded resettlement and dropped the English requirement. Further, the lunatic writing the piece just assumes it is the GOP’s problem to fix what his cult has destroyed. Liberal democrats were the champions of the last two amnesty deals and are behind the current amnesty deal. In fairness, the global elites are buying off buffoons like Boehner and Ryan so both parties have their snouts in the trough this time.

Immigration is neither a good thing or a bad thing. The degree and timing is what determines the right course. In boom times, it may make sense to bring in guest workers and ramp up the naturalization of immigrants. The numbers should reflect the needs of the native population. In lean times, like the last five years, foreign workers should be thrown out with exceptions being made in high skill fields. We can safely assume, for example, that we will never have too many mathematicians or brain surgeons. otherwise, the point of government is the protection of the citizens. If the people of Mexico are unhappy with our immigration rules, too bad. They are not our problem. They should make Mexico better so they don’t have to flee their native lands.

Nothing like economic necessity is involved here. The ruling elites of America have concluded that America is too white. They want to remedy that by importing fifty million Mexicans, who they consider non-white. If it were practical, they would bring in fifty million Congolese, but the running of slave ships over the Atlantic is bad form, for now. Paul Ryan, who will be dead soon, most likely is acting out of pure greed, but malice should not be discounted. There’s a reason why companies take away privileges from those about to quit or retire. Short-timers do not take the long view or care much for those who will be left behind. Ryan could very well be nursing bitterness at his fate and it is manifesting itself as a hatred for those he sees as less deserving – his fellow Americans.

That’s what I suspect is driving the mass suicide we see going on throughout the West. When the majority of British school children are not British, it is not hard to see what the future holds for the Brits. Religions are fueled by self-loathing. Christianity, for all it s faults, offered a celebration of life as an antidote to the self-loathing of the faithful. You may be a sinner and hate yourself for the sin, but God loves you nonetheless, as long as you live a Christian life. Liberalism offers no such antidote. Instead, it offers a never ending liturgy on why it would have been better if none of us had ever been born. it is not hard to see why eventually the adherents would want to speed up the process. Surrendering over your tribe’s land to another tribe is one sure way to erase your people and their history.

Many people on the Right think evolutionary psychology is a nonsense field, probably because it has the word psychology in it. On the Left, the opposition comes from feminists who want to believe sex is imaginary. They use the word gender, when they mean sex, as it allows them break free of biological reality. They get to pollute the idea with cultural items like gender roles and homosexual advocacy.

The question though, is whether selection works on the cognitive traits in the same way it works on the physical traits. I’m thinking about that as I type this post, watching snow flurries and temperatures in the single digits. Climate is probably the most brutal of selection mechanism, and humans adapted to climate mentally, not physically. Skin tone and eye color can take many generations. One hard winter and those who failed to plan are wiped out.

For example, if this were five thousand years ago, I would be dead now if I was not prepared for this brutal cold snap. That means I would have collected enough wood for the winter, back in the fall when the weather was nice. I would have prepared my shelter for the cold and wind, back in the summer when the days were long and I had the time. Most important, I would have prepared a supply of fresh water and food that would remain edible through the winter.

In the late summer I could not possibly know what winter would bring or how long it will last so planning for the worst is the key to survival. For that to be learned behavior means the people who failed to learn were wiped out. It also means the folks who somehow survived or thrived had the capacity to pass on these lessons in a way that allows the progeny to survive. It also means every winter the best at this cognitive skill survived while those less skilled perished.

When you start with a simple example like this, it is not hard to see why the personality and culture of Iceland is different from sub-Saharan Africa. When you add in how this would change reproductive strategies, it’s easy to understand how the people in the harsh north evolved a different set of cognitive traits from those in the warm south. In the former, good planning attracts the ladies, while in the south it does not.

How much of difference this makes and how persistent it is in the genes of the human population is another debatable, but the way to be is on biology. Europeans in Africa, for example, don’t acquire African ways after a generation or two. Similarly, African populations in the north remain African in behavior and temperament. Maybe it really is the legacy of colonialism or whatever the Left is into these days, but that is very unlikely.

The other day, the Spectator gave a platform to Stephen Meyer, the intelligent Design guru, so he could make his case. They gave John Derbyshire the chance to reply. Most people shrug off the intelligent design people, assuming they are just the creationists with a different line of attack. Therefore only believers bother to read the arguments put forth by people like Meyer. If you read what this guy has to say, it is not hard to come away thinking these people are worse than creationists.

When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss the many scientific difficulties facing contemporary versions of Darwin’s theory. Yet when scientists take up the public defense of Darwinism—in educational policy statements, textbooks, or public television documentaries—that candor often disappears behind a rhetorical curtain. “There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden,” says theoretical biologist Danny Hillis, adding that “there’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.”

The reticence that Darwin’s present day defenders feel about criticizing evolutionary theory would have likely made Charles Darwin uncomfortable. In the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it.

In the Origin, Darwin expressed a key doubt about the ability of his theory to explain one particular event in the history of life, an event known as the Cambrian explosion. I’ve recently written a book, Darwin’s Doubt, about this in which I argue that the problem Darwin identified not only remains to this day, but that it has grown up to illustrate a more fundamental conceptual difficulty than he could have understood—a problem for all of evolutionary biology that points to the need for an entirely different understanding of the origin of animal life on Earth.

An interesting thing about the intelligent design people is they have an authoritarian mindset that is revealed in their habit of relying on appeals to authority. On the one hand, they rely on the Bible as their ultimate source of authority. That makes sense, as they are believers. They assume, however, that evolutionary biologists also rely on an authority as their god. The ID’er turn Darwin into a shaman or prophet, who they seek to discredit, assuming that will discredit the theory for which is best known.

The trouble is evolutionary biologists do not worship Darwin and are more than willing to point out his shortcomings. It is how science works. It is what makes Darwin a scientist and not a philosopher. He readily acknowledged his own shortcomings and gaps in knowledge. Attacking Darwin to discredit evolution is like attacking Blaise Pascal to disprove probability theory. A whole lot of work and a whole lot of people have built on and modified what Darwin started. Darwin’s shortcomings, real or imagined, are irrelevant.

The real problem with the ID’er is this. Let’s say they are correct and evolutionary biology is a dead end and self-refuting at that dead end. Let’s say the math of genetic mutation is so improbable that it cannot possibly explain the diversity of life. How does that validate Intelligent Design? One has nothing to do with the other. Intelligent design is built on a collection of logical fallacies. To argue that natural selection is invalid proves intelligent design is correct is a version of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Of course, the motivation is the argument from adverse consequences. Their particular brand of Christianity requires a more literal interpretation of creation. God created the heavens and earth just as we see it today. Natural selection says the current natural world is the result of random selection, along with other things like sexual selection. Therefore, if natural selection is true that invalidates their religious beliefs. Since they are not abandoning those beliefs, they can never accept evolution.

That’s really the irritating thing about these people. They are not honest. John is correct to call them liars. On the one hand, they swear they are not starting from a religious angle and are scientists like everyone else. Unlike real scientists, however, they make no attempt to prove their claims or even offer up a shred of data in support of their claim. Instead it is a non-stop assault on “Darwinism” as they imagine it. It really is the opposite of science when you think of it. It’s also fundamentally dishonest.

Most people still think the courts are the defenders of the Constitution. After the ACA ruling, it is impossible to hold that view. Maybe Roberts was pressured into changing his opinion, but the fact that such a thing is a possibility argues against the court being the great defender of the law. On the other hand, if he simply changed his mind, it says that these judges are not bound by an internal logic. They are just as prone to follow the fads as follow the law. Either way, the law is no longer a fixed thing that can be defended.

He could also just be a nut. We like to think it is impossible for crazy people to make it to the top, but history says otherwise. Caligula is the best example. He was obviously a homicidal madman from the start. Ivan the Terrible is another good example. You can be a crazy and ambitious and ambition can overcome just about any defect. Therefore, Roberts could very well be a kook or suffer from some nervous condition. Regardless, it just shows that the Constitution is what the court says, not what is written on the paper.

With that in mind, this gun case looks ominous.

Abramski bought the gun because he could get a discount, and checked a box on the relevant form saying the gun was for him. But he sold it to his uncle.

Abramski was later indicted under federal law for making a false statement material to the lawfulness of a firearm sale — and for making a false statement with respect to information required to be kept in the records of a license firearm dealer.

But Abramski’s lawyers told the high court that since both he and his uncle were legally allowed to own guns, the law shouldn’t have applied to him.

His team argued that Congress never intended for a lawful buyer who transfers a gun to another lawful owner to be prosecuted under this law — and that the intent was all about making sure straw buyers don’t purchase guns for people not allowed to have them, like certain convicted criminals.

But the government argued that he violated the plain language of the law, when he said on the form that the gun was for him. They argued he never gave the seller any idea that he planned to essentially resell the gun to someone else the dealer would have no opportunity to vet.

Much of Wednesday’s arguments centered on the question on the form — prepared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — and whether the agency’s decision to include the question gives it the force of law, enough to make it a crime to answer untruthfully.

In a sane society, a natural right of the citizen enshrined in the founding documents would require the state to meet a very high bar before it could infringe on that right. The acquisition of and possession of arms is a fundamental right of a free citizen. The Founders regularly said this. They put it in the Bill of Rights. They were explicit that this is an inalienable right of the citizen. That’s not a contestable point. Therefore, the state must meet a very high burden before it can regulate the acquisition and possession of arms.

It gets worse. The Federal law against straw purchases was clearly meant to end the practice of people buying guns in bulk and then selling them to blacks in the ghetto. We can pretend otherwise, but that’s what the law is designed to inhibit. It was never intended to stop private sales, which is what the Feds are trying to do here. If owning a gun, in order to defend against tyranny, is an inalienable right, then the state has no role in the private sale and purchase of guns. That should be obvious, but here we are anyway.