Category Archives: Science & Tech

Doctor Robot

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One of the popular topics among the curious minded is the coming robot revolution where, presumably, all work will be done by robots. A regular feature of the news is the story of how some function previously done by people is now being done by smart machines. The prevailing assumption is that the sort of manual labor jobs done by the working class will disappear over the next generations. That may be true, but it will not be the working man losing out initially. It is going to be the office people who feel the pinch first.

One of the things everyone sort of knows is that a whole lot of what passes for office work is not particularly important. Government is the most obvious example. Everyone is familiar with the image of the road crew standing around watching one guy work, but that pales in comparison to the government agency. Thousands hiding cubicles watching porn or gambling. The paleocons used to make the point that the expansion of government at all levels is primarily a jobs program. It keeps the troublesome busy.

Anyone who has worked in big corporations or large law firms knows there is plenty of busy work going on in those cubicles too. Some of it is defensive, like human resource departments and safety managers, but a lot of it just sort of happens. Make-work jobs grow on an organization like a fungus. The hospitality industry has always suffered from this more than most. In good times, they hire up, even though the need is not there, but then come the lean times, the extra is cut loose and no one really notices.

The robot came to mind when booking my last physical. I have been saying for years that a good chunk of health care could be automated today. Yet, the only growing segment of the labor market, outside of government, is health care. At my doctor’s office, I interact with probably a dozen people during a physical. I know what two of them do and one of them could be replaced by a kiosk. The rest are just women in purple scrubs milling around doing nothing I can identify as medical work or even clerical work.

What has always been puzzling to me is that I never actually see a doctor. In fact, I have yet to meet my doctor in person. We have communicated by e-mail once or twice. Instead, I deal with a nurse practitioner. Once a year, she asks me the same questions and then types my answers into a laptop. She then gives me a physical examination, sticks her finger in my arse and that is the end of it. If I were allowed to answer the questions in advance, the whole thing could be done as a drive-thru service.

I noticed when booking the last visit, on-line of course, that the time slot was now 30 minutes. In the past, I was told to be there for an hour. Some of that time was waiting for my turn, but most of the face time with the nurse was the question and answer stuff. The new on-line appointment process had me answering the questions during the booking, rather than in person. I even did the insurance work in advance. I just show up, get naked, get violated, give a blood sample and go on my way.

The truth of it is most people could get along simply fine with Doctor Google and a routing service to guide people in need of services to the correct providers. When I hurt my knee a while back, I met with a dozen people I had no reason to meet, just to get to the correct person. Frustratingly, I knew the service I needed because I knew the injury. I even looked up the possible ways to address the injury. But I was forced by humans to see a dozen of them first. The robot doctor would never do this to me.

This is just one example of the millions of daily tasks now done by humans in offices that can easily be eliminated with current automation. The fact that it is happening so slowly speaks to how resistant work life is to change. Medical service providers are now being squeezed by insurance companies so the medical providers are looking for savings via automation. One day, reality will come crushing in on the insurance firms and most of those jobs will be automated in the blink of an eye.

The medical services business is a massive racket, which exists as it does primarily due to government. I have made the point for years that it would look something like veterinary medicine if not for government. As such, it should be more resistant to the robots than other fields. The fact that it is showing signs of disruption due to automation suggests we will get our first glimpse of the robot revolution in a white collar field, rather than a blue collar one. The robots are coming for the office workers first.

That will be bring some interesting socio-political ramifications that our rulers seem incapable of pondering. Just look at how they struggle to make sense of the public reaction to wholesale migration. Democrats abandoned working class whites in favor or cheap foreign labor and they remained poleaxed over why these voters abandoned Team Clinton for Team Trump. Imagine what happens when suburban unemployment doubles due to automation. Signaling over trannies is probably not going to work too well.

In case anyone is wondering, Doctor Robot gave me a clean bill of health.

Total Information War

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The wars that ended the feudal period in Europe started as feudal wars but ended as national wars. Taking the 14th century as the start of the Late Middle Ages, The Hundred Years’ War would be the start of that period. It began as a war between kings, leading armies of conscripts and mercenaries of various ethnicities. By the end, it was a war between two nations, fought by the people of those two nations. It is why most historians point to this as the beginning of the nation-state in Europe.

Similarly, the Thirty Years’ War started as a war of religion, among the smaller states that comprised the Holy Roman Empire. By the end, it was a war fought by nations, carving up central Europe. More important, the defining characteristic of people would not be their king or their religion, but their nation. By the time of Napoleonic, nations were mobilizing their people around love of country, not loyalty to a king. War had evolved to match the new social arrangements.

The point here is that wars eventually reflect the age. At the start of the Great War, the French were still using the cavalry charge. They had their line officers wearing brightly colored uniforms so they were easy to spot. The Maxim gun put an end to those old tactics and by the end of the war, both sides were fully employing the weapons and tactics of the industrial age. The Second World War was the perfection of the lessons learned in the first industrial age war.

It is not a perfect framing, but a useful one, when thinking about the current crisis and the inevitable wars that will come. Ours is the information age, so the wars will be information wars, especially the civil wars. The corruption of the internet by global corporations on behalf of the emerging global elite is an obvious example. The corruption of the registrars by companies like Google is a new type of weapon in the social war in the information age.

That is an important aspect here. Up until recently, the Left had a monopoly on our cultural morality. Labeling someone or something as racist or fascist, was enough to sideline that person or idea. The general public was willing to take their word for it and play along. Now, our rulers find themselves facing a skeptical public. Merely calling someone racist or fascist is not enough. That’s why they are moving on to using the blunt force of raw power against threats to their authority.

It is entirely possible that Anglin reported himself to the registrar of Gab, in order to generate attention for himself.  Anglin is a provocateur, which makes him a useful example to understand what is happening. We have an extra-judicial set of entities that can now regulate political speech on-line. The mere fact that these companies can censor speech on-line, based on their whim or in response to pressure brought by the state, is a serious problem for civilized society.

Morally, this is no different than the decision by the Germans to use poison gas in the Great War. Once it was clear that their conventional weapons were not enough, they made the choice to throw off any moral limits to waging war. That is what is going on with the new ruling elite. In America, speech is considered sacred. Everyone alive has grown up hearing the line about giving your life to defend the right of someone to say offensive things in public. The First Amendment is sacred.

Our rulers have decided they must abandon that principle.

The response from the dissidents to the attack on speech by Big Tech, has been an effort to create separate platforms. Gab is an alternative social media platform and others are now in the works. A parallel internet is slowly starting to sprout up with people looking into creating new registrars, new search engines and new funding mechanisms. It is a slow process, and as the attack on Gab shows, one that will be met with escalating attacks from Silicon Valley. We are into a total information war now.

Alt-tech is a defensive response, like the trench was in the Great War. The good guys need weapons to damage the other side’s lines. That will come in time. The old order no longer makes a lot of sense, so it can only be held together by force. The people in charge feel they need to use any means necessary, even if it means squandering what little moral authority they have left. They no longer care if we respect them, just as long as we fear them. They will choose tyranny if that is what it takes.

That is why it is important to not follow guys like Andrew Anglin or Chris Cantwell down the rabbit hole. Anglin is a performer and provocateur. Cantwell is just a sad sack looking for attention and he should never be encouraged. He makes resistance look bad. This is an information war so things like optics, narratives and imagery are the weapons. Defending reckless lunatics and provocateurs just hands the other side ammo if not handled perfectly.

When the Germans moved to the use of gas, it was a sign of weakness. When they unleashed unlimited submarine warfare, it was a sign they were scared. Desperate people reach for any weapon that is handy, regardless of the results. That is our ruling class. They are losing the information war so they seek to reshape the battlefield by shutting off the dissidents from having access to the battlefield. It is a sign of weakness that they are willing to squander their moral authority.

The Fakening

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A universal rule of life is that anything that has value will be faked or stolen. This happens everywhere on earth. You can go to some place on the fringe of civilization to see ruins of an ancient people and you will find some guy selling fake souvenirs. That’s because the locals figured out that authentic crap from their past had value to those funny looking white tourists, so they started faking the authentic relics from their past. Hobbyists in the collectible business will tell you that fakes are their primary concern.

Most likely, the reason that Facebook beat MySpace was that it was easier for Facebook users to keep score of the number of friends they had and see how that stacked up to others. Humans are social animals and one way to determine status is by the size of one’s social network. High status people have lots of friends and acquaintances. People know who they are by reputation. Therefore, someone on Facebook with 500 friends must be a bigger deal than someone with 5 friends. South Park made sport of this.

Inevitably, people found a way to fake their numbers so it would look like their status was high. Everyone knows about click farms that artificially inflate likes on social media or inflate follower counts. It’s fairly obvious that Facebook has been faking their ad numbers for years. This is mostly to defraud advertisers. Fringe celebrities will use services to inflate their follower counts. I’ve always suspected, for example, that Bill Mitchell is more “social media strategy” than actual listeners. Everything about him looks fake.

This story does a great job walking us through just how easy it is to be Bill Mitchell. Here are the juicy bits:

Instagram influencer marketing is now a $1 billion dollar industry, and you don’t need a cute dog or a book-worthy lifestyle to get into the game. According to an investigation by marketing agency Mediakix, anyone can fake their way into signing profitable contracts with brands.

The agency created two fictitious Instagram accounts: 1) ‘a lifestyle and fashion-centric Instagram model’ and 2) ‘a travel and adventure photographer.’ For the first account, Mediakix hired a model and generated the entire channel content through a one-day photo shoot. Introducing Alexa Rae (calibeachgirl310). The second account was dedicated to Amanda Smith (wanderingggirl), and this time Mediakix went even further. The entire feed was composed of free stock photos of random places across the world and blonde girls, always posing facing away from the camera.

After setting up fake personalities and generating their content, the agency started purchasing followers. “We started with buying 1,000 followers per day because we were concerned that purchasing too many followers at the onset would result in Instagram flagging the account,” Mediakix stated. “However, we quickly found that we were able to buy up to 15,000 followers at a time without encountering any issues.” And how much does this army cost? Between $3-$8 per 1,000.

Essentially, if the followers don’t like or comment on posts, they’re kind of worthless. So the next step was to purchase fake engagement. “Once we had accumulated a few thousand followers for each account, we started buying likes and comments.” Mediakix paid about 12 cents per comment, and between $4-9 per 1,000 likes. For each photo, they purchased 500 to 2,500 likes and 10 to 50 comments. The entire experiment ended up costing Mediakix about $1,000 (around $700 for setting up calibeachgirl310 and around $300 for wanderingggirl). After calibeachgirl310 and wanderingggirl reached 10,000 followers (the threshold amount for signing up on most influencer marketing platforms), Mediakix started applying them for sponsorship deals. “We secured four paid brand deals total, two for each account. The fashion account secured one deal with a swimsuit company and one with a national food and beverage company.” “The travel account secured brand deals with an alcohol brand and the same national food and beverage company. For each campaign, the “influencers” were offered monetary compensation, free product, or both.”

The whole thing is worth a read. Not a lot of it is new to those with a suspicious mind, but when you put it all together in one article like that, it is revelatory. If they could so easily create a fake celebrity on social media, then the people who control social media certainly know this. More important, they know this and use it to their advantage. For example, when a TV person signs up for Twitter, maybe their follower count is artificially inflated by Team Twitter, so that the celeb talks about it to their audience.

Of course, we have the extreme examples of the ruling class de-platforming anyone who challenges the one true faith on Facebook and Twitter. I had the Facebook account associated with this blog deleted due to a mysterious terms of service violation. Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, had his Twitter feed deleted because he made barren spinsters sad on YouTube. There are hundreds of examples of the scolds slamming the door on dissent. That’s what we can easily see.

You can be sure that the vinegar drinking scolds at Facebook and Twitter are using their robot armies to promote the cat ladies and demote the hate thinkers. People have noticed for a long time that they are mysteriously dropped from follower lists of people placed on the Left’s proscribed list. To do the opposite and promote Lefty crackpots is so obvious that even the most hysterical social justice warrior would think of it. How much of it goes on is hard to know, but the sky is the limit, as was made clear in that piece.

What is not so obvious is that other side of it, the fakery. The ease with which mass media is used to promote fake ideas, fake events and fake people. That’s not so obvious as no one complains about their follower count being inflated. No one is going to look too closely at Bill Mitchell’s twitter followers, because he is a harmless old man keeping himself busy in his retirement. The cumulative effect, however, of so much fakery in the mass media is not without its consequences. The fake new phenomenon is just one obvious example.

What happens when people start to think that Twitter and Facebook are mostly robots interacting with one another? Social trust has a value. Take it away and it can only be replaced by coercion. Otherwise, society begins to dis-aggregate. We know that diversity increases intra-ethnic trust and decreases inter-ethnic trust. In a diverse society, people trust their kin and distrust those not like them. Take that diverse society and immerse it in fake news and fake social media and the result will be a Balkanized, low-trust society.

Of course, one could argue that the strong arm tactics we’re seeing is the the inevitable result of diversity. The reason Google has to fire their smart men is their mere presence calls into the question the diversity project. The reason for the heavy handed social media policing is that diversity requires it. Fake news and fake social media are just modern incarnations of the old propaganda films from the previous era, just updated to make people think distrusting foreigners and rooting for your own team is weird and unnatural.

Regardless of cause and effect, this will not end well.

Extra Crispr

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Every few months we get a blazing headline about a breakthrough in genetics that will allegedly lead to super babies. This one from a few months ago is a good example of the genre. It makes for a catchy headline. Of course, the story is never as claimed, as we are not close to creating a race of mutant super babies. Instead, science is creeping up on the ability to do some very narrow gene editing to eliminate well known genetic defects. In fact, a lab has just successfully edited a viable embryo for the first time.

This is a huge step in science, but we are nowhere near close to creating the master race or even making small changes in real humans. The most recent research on human intelligence, for example, identifies 50 genes that correlate to IQ. That is a lot of combination to sort, assuming that is the whole set of genes related to IQ. There is also the possibility that other traits are indirectly related to those genes. Even something as simple as hair color can get wildly complex, so we will not be decanting babies anytime soon.

While we are nowhere near close to making super babies, this is one step down the road toward altering the foundations of human existence. The ability to inexpensively alter DNA, even in quite simple ways, will lead to better food and better medicine. Imagine a treatment that alters a pathogen such that it attacks cancer cells in the human body. It sounds outlandish, but that is essentially what your immune system does with disease. Of course, the ability to “correct” genetic defects will have an enormous impact on human health.

It is easy to fall into the science fiction fantasy stuff when thinking about these topics, but small things can have a huge impact on human behavior. Improvements in sanitation, food production and basic medicine greatly altered the human condition. Just look at the impact of life expectancy. If lifespans were still as they were a century ago, things like pension costs and health care would not be topics in politics. It is because we can live, and live vigorously, into our 70’s that these issues are now major topics.

That is why this gene editing technology is so important. Up until very recent, the consensus in science was that we were generations away from having the ability to edit human DNA. All of a sudden, the future is now and the rush is on to be the first to alter an actual human embryo and bring it to term. It also means that science will suddenly shift from the purely theoretical to the practical. The first guy to figure out how to fix defects in something as frivolous as purebred dogs will become rich and famous.

There is another aspect to this that is probably more important than the potential impact on human biology. What this technology is doing is bringing to center stage a truth about humanity that our betters have been trying to suppress for generations. That is, what we are is what we inherit from our parents. What they are is what they inherited from their parents. Each of us is the result of thousands of generations of breeding. Our physical and cognitive traits are the result of that long ad hoc experiment.

At a basic level, people know this. Anyone who is familiar with human children knows that they look and act like their parents from an early age. People do not think to hard about this stuff and our rulers work to keep us from thinking about how this scales up. If a white man is the result of thousands of generations of white people, that means the African is the result of his ancestors evolving in Africa. It is not a long walk from there to accepting that race is real. That is why this thinking is a mortal sin on our age.

This becomes increasingly difficult when it becomes more common for a doctor to use ideas and techniques from genetics to better serve his patients. The old gag about race is that race is a social construct until you need a bone marrow transplant. Not a lot of people have that talk with their doctor but imagine a world where everyone has a genetic realism talk with their dog breeder. When you know Rover had a known defect in his breed fixed by a vet at the canine gene clinic, talking about biological reality gets a lot easier.

As people come to accept the reality of gene editing, even if it is just to make better dog breeds, it is much more difficult to maintain the mythologies of the blank slate. Once people come to accept that things like IQ and personality traits are determined by our genes, the blank slate is finished. Even if people do not accept genetic determinism, they will accept testing for IQ and personality traits to fill engineering positions. In other words, strides in genetics will restore a more sober understanding of the human condition.

This is the negation of the core belief of our ruling elite, but it is telling that our rulers seem to be going in the opposite direction. As science makes clear the realities of human biology, our rulers scream ever louder to the contrary. Instead of simply ignoring the new information, they are waging pogroms too root out anyone not fully committed to their biological denialism. Every week were treated to some new scandal where a heretic is brought forth and punished for acknowledging reality.

It is common to compare our current age to the scientific revolution. Galileo is a compelling figure. That does work at some level, but what we are really experiencing is something like what happened in the Roman Empire, prior to Constantine. As the people began to embrace the new religion, the rulers tried to crack down on it. This only made the new religion more popular. The great insight of Constantine was to recognize the strategic advantage that was available to the first ruler who embraced the new religion.

That is probably what awaits us. Science is moving along faster than the current throne and altar cabal can follow. Some clever politician is going to embrace biological realism and ride it to victory over the prevailing orthodoxy. The first politician to say, “Of course men and women are different” and not get run out of town will be the snowflake that sets off the avalanche. Regardless, breakthroughs like CRISPR are about to shake the foundation of our culture. The blank slate’s days are numbered.

The Torquemadas

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Long ago, it became clear that genetics was going to upend all of the Progressive assertions about human nature. In fact, it was going to challenge the core of Western Liberalism. It’s a little hard to hold onto the idea that “All men are created equal” when you no longer believe in God and science says some men are more equal than others. It’s impossible to maintain the universalism that is the foundation stone of the prevailing orthodoxy, when group differences are clearly rooted in genetics and evolution.

This is, of course, the end of the world. All of the laws and political institutions of the West have been modified to comport with the belief that all humans are the same, regardless of location. Race, ethnicity, even sex, are now considered outmoded notions from a less enlightened era. The reason American Progressives endlessly talk about institutional racism, for example, is it is the only acceptable answer for why blacks perform so poorly compared to other groups. To consider anything else runs counter to accepted dogma.

It’s not just Prog dogma that is under pressure from science. Most of what people in the West believe about human nature is rooted in the idea of free will. It is assumed that people can choose to be good or evil. A drunkard, with help and training, can choose not to drink. Everything about the self-help industry is based on free will. If you work at it and buy his materials, you can be just as successful as Tony Robbins. If you take his class, you can be like Mike Cernovich. The assumption is you can make yourself into anything.

Again, the universal belief in free will and the blank slate is the bedrock of the modern West. You see it in this Joe Rogan podcast with Sargon of Arkkad. Both guys are right-libertarians, or at least that is how Rogan would describe himself. Arkkad calls himself a liberal, but he most likely means it in the British sense, which corresponds to our conservatives. In their back and forth, they both start from the premise that people are free to make of themselves what they will, regardless of their biology.

Whether we like it or not, science is punching big holes in this underlying belief. At the individual level, it is becoming increasingly clear that your general intelligence is a result of your genes. Personality traits are clearly biological. Even without genetics, people had understood this to be true up until fairly recent. Then there are group differences, which have always been out in the open, but made taboo. It is only a matter of time before science  begins to confirm what people have always known about human diversity.

We are on the cusp of an age, not all that dissimilar to the end of the Renaissance when science and philosophy began to challenge the age old assumptions of the West. The Church gets a bad rap for Galileo, but they were not acting without reason. From the perspective of the people in charge, challenges to the prevailing assumptions about the natural world felt like a leap into the void. Maintaining public order is the first duty of an elite. In that age, it felt as if the ground was shifting under their feet.

The difference, and it is a big difference, is we are not experiencing science for the first time and the public is better informed than 400 years ago. In fact, much of what is coming from genetics and the cognitive sciences confirms what our grandparents took for granted about humanity. The expression “the apple does not fall far from the tree” did not become a hearty chestnut by accident. Long before anyone could conceive of the human genome, humans knew that you inherited your physical and mental traits from your parents.

Another big difference is the modern keepers of morality are far less reasonable and more prone to hysteria than the leaders of the Church in the Renaissance. You see it in stories like this one the other day and in efforts like this one. Race mongering is a sacrament of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Academics are forced to play along with the morality of the one true faith,. Those who refuse are accused of heresy and threatened with internal banishment, which is exactly the point of promulgating the term “scientific racism.”

The point of a movie called “A Dangerous Idea” is to serve as a warning. The term “scientific racism” is a nonsense phrase. It has no meaning in the literal sense, but it carries with it the implication that science is subject to moral scrutiny. It does not matter if the conclusions of your research are accurate, you could still be found guilty of the mortal sin of racism. Accuracy is no defense against the charge of heresy. The PC enforcers may not have an Inquisition, but they have an unlimited supply of Torquemadas.

They also will have a lot of sympathetic minds in the general public. In the current age, racism and antisemitism are at the top of the hierarchy of evil. White people stumble all over themselves to prove they have nothing but love in their heart for all mankind. At least three generations have been programmed to think that the ultimate goal of society is to achieve perfect racial parity, where everyone is equal and in perfect harmony. Demonizing anyone who speaks out against the prevailing moral hierarchy is not going to be difficult.

It is easy to be pessimistic about these things, but history says that reality does eventually carry the day. There’s also the fact that science has greater moral authority with the public than the PC enforcers. Then there is the reality on the ground. The migrant invasion of Europe is teaching the West that it is a good idea to have separate countries for different people. Even so, the people in charge are not going to yield without a fight. We are on the cusp of a long ugly period in the West, as the old beliefs give way to the new.

It will not end well.

Free Speech and Other Stuff

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I was one of the early users of Gab, the open alternative to Twitter, started by a renegade programmer named Andrew Torba. Whether or not Torba is alt-right or simply a normal male sick of the ritualized nonsense that dominates social media is debatable. He’s a Trump supporter, but that does not make him alt-right. He was part of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley “seed accelerator” that helps young startup professionals. He was evicted from the club for being an unabashed Trump supporter and not playing nice with others.

That last bit was his mortal sin. In the managerial class, “being nice” has been weaponized, so that anything that contradicts the tenets of the faith is classified as threatening and harassment.  This allows the most sensitive, almost always women, to function as a canaries in the coal mine. When they begin to cry, it means someone is saying unapproved things and it is all hands on deck to root out the heretic. It’s not an accident that most of the speech enforcers on social media are women.

Anyway, Torba started Gab as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. I put that in quotes because there is no such thing as free speech. There are always some rules. It’s like censorship. The state will always suppress subversive or revolutionary speech. The public will demand limits on speech that violates taboos. Similarly, Gab bans certain speech like child porn and criminal conspiracies. Otherwise, the goal of the enterprise is to provide an open platform for users to speak freely about their stuff.

Gab is an important experiment for a couple of reasons. One is that it is subtly demonstrating a truth about so-called free speech. That is, you cannot have free speech without freedom of association. Twitter, as the only short chat platform, could justify their crackdowns on users by claiming that other users were upset. In other words, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, so they started policing what people posted on their platform. Coincidentally, the crackdown broke along predictable ideological lines.

The mere existence of an alternative means that users now have a choice. They can pick the ideological conformity of Twitter and its legion of SJW hall monitors or they can go out to the wild west of Gab. It’s easy to see where this is going. The sort of people who write blogs like this one are on Gab, while the people who fear being ostracized by the good thinkers will stay on Twitter and obey the rules. The result is a perfect example of how free association solves the problem of free speech and removes the need to police it.

The other important thing to watch is how the great blob that is the mass media responds to what it can only view as a threat. The evolution of social media was pitched as an organic, ground up communication medium free from corporate control. That was also the promise of the internet in the early days. Whether it was by design or by serendipity, Facebook and Twitter came to dominate the internet and become megaphones for the managerial state. Now they are trying to be enforcers for the managerial state.

It is not an accident that Facebook is heavy into being the comment platform for establishment media companies. Disqus, which is more open, resulted in a lot of negative commentary, so the big media companies partnered with Facebook to clamp down on dissent. It’s also not an accident that Facebook roots around in your e-mail and browser cache to spy on you. Facebook imagines a day when it is your permanent record, like the one school principles used to swear they had in their desks for each student.

Obviously, the great plans of the social media giants and their managerial class partners are not going to work very well if there are a bunch of alternatives sprouting up. Gab is off to a surprisingly strong start so far, but they are a long way from challenging Twitter, at least in terms of users and social impact. Taking on a Facebook or YouTube is orders of magnitude more difficult. Still, avalanches start with one snowflake so the early success of Gab has to be worrisome to the big social media companies.

Taken together, it could mean the managerial state is vulnerable to its own success. By that I mean the system that makes for rapid technological progress in the business of controlling and disseminating information, may make it very easy for rivals to spring up from within its ranks. The technology at the root of Facebook and Twitter is not exactly ground breaking. In fact, it is fairly crude. The edge for both companies is that they had the resources to scale up. If scale gets cheap, then anyone can scale up too.

Alternatively, what we could be seeing is the evolution of a way to resolve the conflict between the rise of tribalism and the spread of the supra-national custodial state. Big social media platforms will be the safe space that most people crave, while the tribalists will have their smaller silos out on the fringe. The folks who like their news and information with a healthy dose of instruction will get what they need, while the people convinced they are taking the red pill will have alternatives to indulge their needs.

It’s impossible to know how this unfolds. Gab could be a flash in the pan and not last more than a year. Or, it could be the butterfly flapping its wings that sets off a chain of events resulting in a great social hurricane. At the minimum, it is an excellent proof of the basic concept that has eluded us since the 1960’s. That is, free association is the key to maintaining civil liberties like free speech and maintaining social harmony. Once free association is removed, you have a prison and there are no peaceful harmonious prisons.

The Hobbesian Net

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I clicked on a link from Drudge and I was taken to a website called CBS Money Watch, which is obviously a CBS property. The first thing I see is a video trying to load. I see the pause button and stop it before it starts. It then starts itself in a few seconds and I stop it again. I hate baked-in video. If I want to watch videos, I’ll go to a video site or turn on the television. The trend of jamming video into sites borders on the sadistic. No one likes this. No one can possible think it is a good idea. Yet, they keep doing it.

Like everyone, I use a combination of blockers and filters on my browser. It’s not that I begrudge the content makers their money. I get that they need to sell ads. I’m OK with it and prefer it over the paywall model. Having 85 pop-ups and hidden audio play automatically, on the other hand, is a dick move that should carry the death penalty. This does nothing but piss people off, which is why ad-blocking software proliferates, along with tools to block plugins. How did this happen? Why would anyone do this?

The standard answer to these questions is that there is a war between web content makers and the anti-capitalist developers behind the ad blockers. It’s the sort of thing that’s believable if you are new to the internet. The truth is the proliferation of pop-ups got so bad in the 90’s, the web was becoming unusable. I recall some sites having as many as a dozen pop-ups. You would close one and two more would open. Then there was the malware problem. Legitimate web sites would load malicious code onto your PC.

It’s another example of people applying the front lash and then complaining about the backlash. Ad-blockers, flash-block, script blockers, etc., would not exist if the web sites had been slightly responsible for their content. Instead, they got caught up in the hype of the “new economy” and tried to turn their customers into content. Even that could have been done with some care, but they carried on like they were doing you a favor and thereby created a market for these defensive browser add-ons.

This is a curious thing. We’re told that the normal relationship in business is for the seller to curry favor with the buyer. “The customer is always right” is something everyone learns at a young age. TV and radio companies put a lot of effort into making their product attractive by using pleasant personalities and inviting topics. Radio, which lives off ad dollars, is especially ruthless with their talent. Low ratings means you get fired, no matter how much the management likes and supports you. It’s all about the customers.

Even television, which is mostly a cable fee racket now, keeps up appearances by paying some attention to ratings. Even Cult outposts like ESPN pull back a little from their daily proselytizing in order to maintain the facade of respecting their customers. They may still be in the business of chanting the gospel, but they are not quite ready to have their on-air talent giving the viewers the middle finger. It’s still important to be well regarded by the audience, even when you’re a tax farmer.

Internet business, particularly the content side, is the exact opposite. The business model seems to be based on assaulting the customers in ever more creative ways. Twitter, which should be like radio in terms of a business model, is at war with its customers. The web designers appear to be sitting around, wondering how they can make the experience less pleasant for the user. In order to use your mobile devise to consume web content, you need a script blocker. Otherwise, your browser will lock up and force a restart.

It’s tempting to think that it is just incompetence and that may be a big part of it. For some reason, web development attracts a lot of hack coders. It also appears that web development relies on foreign labor. I regularly get solicitations from Indian coding shops and their specialty is almost always web development. There’s also the loosey-goosey standards on the web, which means everyone can be Steve Jobs, reinventing old ideas and calling them new. Much of what ails the web is simply not sticking with what works.

Even if that is all true, why would the business people sign off on the slow-loading crap that passes for web content? Why would the business side say, “Yes, let’s have our hidden and very loud audio ads re-spawn three times after the user figured out how to turn them off. Great idea team!” It strongly suggests the people making these decisions don’t actually spend a lot of time consuming their company content. At the Washington Times, I know this is true as their pages simply will not load on a mobile devise.

As is often the case, there may be things at work about which I’m unaware. The economics of most websites remain a mystery to me. Running ads strikes me as a compete waste of money, especially in the current environment where ad-blocking is the norm. I also suspect most people are trained to just filter out ads as they scan their gab feed or favorite web sites. I don’t recall the last time an ad caught my attention and I stopped to notice it. But, billions are spent on ads so maybe I’m an outlier.

Even so, the web content business model says something about modern society. The hostile relationship between the customer and seller is weird, but maybe it reflects the sterile transactionalism that is modern life. Not only are we strangers to one another, we feel free to treat one another like highwaymen. The sites try to jam us with ads and spyware and we try to break their business model by stealing their content. The internet economy is the war of all against all that Thomas Hobbes described as the state of nature.

Monkey Shines

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For a very long time, science has thought that humans first evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then spread throughout the world. The main reason for this is that the oldest human-like fossils have been found in Africa. Everywhere else, the oldest fossils are Neanderthal or modern humans. There are exceptions, like homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia. This is the one they called the “hobbit” because it was so small. This is believed to be an archaic human that migrated out of Africa 2 million years ago.

That’s the dominant narrative for how humans came to populate just about every nook and cranny of the earth. Recent genetic studies go a long way toward confirming the flow of humans around the world. It’s not “settled science”, if such a thing could exist, but it is the foundation from which scientists works when examining the fossil record. When a new find turns up, the first instinct is to figure out how it fits into the current model, but that’s not always an easy task.

The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.

Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield.

But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco’ by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.

An international team of researchers say the findings entirely change the beginning of human history and place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans – the so-called Missing Link – in the Mediterranean region.

In science, this is what is called a  “big deal.” At the very minimum, it could force a re-evaluation of the timeline for human migration out of Africa. It could also mean that humans moved out of Africa, evolved into what we think of as modern humans and then migrated back to Africa. Later, these early humans then made the trip back out to the rest of the world. At the very minimum, it could lead to a rethinking of the basic narrative, which will set off huge fights within the scientific community for many reasons.

The main reason is the oldest – ego. Many careers have been built around the assumption that modern humans first evolved in Africa and then migrated out to the rest of the world fairly recently. Naturally, when the work of a lifetime is challenged by new evidence, the instinct is to dispute it. Scientists have all the same vices as the rest of us. In fact, smart people tend to be even more petty and envious than most. The most likely result will be an attempt to dismiss these new finds or discredit them in some way.

While all of that is very preliminary, this find does introduce, or re-introduce, an idea that modern science would like to exclude. That is, human evolution not only continued after humans left Africa, but that it accelerated. As humans migrated into new areas, they quickly adapted to those areas, both physically and cognitively. This process continued on just as it does with all species. Put another way, human evolution was copious, local and recent and the result is measurable differences between groups of humans.

That, of course, brings us back to the bogeyman that haunts the dreams of modern intellectuals, which is the bogeyman of race. Just as anthropologists will seek to dismiss data that contradicts the standard model of human migration, modern intellectuals are always on the lookout for anything that contradicts the egalitarian narrative. Most of Western public policy is built on the premise that all people are the same and that any measurable differences are the result of white racism. Nature plays no role.

It is mistakenly assumed that the viciousness with which the Progs attack anyone questioning multiculturalism is purely about power. There’s some of that, but the real driver is belief. How they define the world, and how they define themselves, is based on the bedrock assumptions of the blank slate. If those assumptions are invalidated, not only is their worldview invalid, but they are invalid. Human bio-diversity is the same as telling a devout Muslim that Mohamed was a Jewish comedian and Islam is an elaborate gag.

This discovery will most likely be memory-holed or recast in some way as to not threaten the narrative. The most likely result is everyone just ignores it. But, genetics is making a long march through the human sciences and that’s not something that can be ignored for too much longer. Soon, we reach a Galileo moment when the orthodoxy either shuts down the human sciences or the orthodoxy begins to crumble. That’s ultimately what happened in Christendom. The Church gave way to science in public affairs.

Before anyone gets too excited by the prospect of scientific racism smashing the prevailing orthodoxy, it is important to remember that the Church gave ground to science slowly and violently. The Thirty Years War, for example, left much of central Europe devastated. Towns were depopulated, villages were wiped off the map and people were reduced to cannibalism. The so-called Age of Reason was a bloody mess featuring one more violent war after another. Things tend to end poorly and this will not end well.

Bring Back Smoking

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Are we getting stupider?

This is hard to know as we don’t have IQ exams from further back than last century. We have some ways to approximate IQ going back into the mists of time, but those will always get bogged down by debates over methods.Then you have the flat earth types who argue that IQ is not a real thing or that there are multiple forms of intelligence. Just sticking with the good data we have for the last 100 years or so, it does appear that the West is getting dumber. By how much and and how fast is the debate.

Why this could be happening is not much of a debate. There are three reasons related to biology. One is the Idiocracy example. The stupid are breeding like bunnies while the smart are reproducing at less than replacement levels. The high achieving man marries late and marries a high achieving women with a head full of feminist nonsense. They put off childbearing until she can only produce one child. Meanwhile, the guys that cut their grass are knocking up their girlfriends in high school and producing five kids.

Another reason is that stupid people are migrating into Western countries. This is an easy one as we just have to look at the news. The migrants flowing in from south of the equator into Western countries are bringing a mean IQ in the 80’s and sometimes, in the case of Somalis, the 70’s. They also breed like rabbits. A country full of 95-IQ white people that becomes 90% white and 10% Somali will lose almost ten IQ points. This is just an accelerated version of the above answer. It turns out that Magic Dirt is not real.

Finally, the hardest one to grasp is that something has happened to change the evolutionary pressure on the population that is now changing the rewards and punishments. Traits that in the past were punished, thus resulting in fewer children by those with those traits, are now neutral or maybe even slightly favored. We know smart people tend to live longer, so reducing the risk of death by misadventure or even death from common maladies could be lowering the over all IQ of Western populations.

If you want to read a bunch of smart people debating this, this post by Greg Cochran has a lively comment section. What you’ll note is that people focused on genetics tend not to consider environmental factors. In fact, they often veer into a form of genetic determinism that sounds a lot like astrology. The fault dear mortal is not in our stars, but in our genes, that we are just moist robots. People who tend to this sort of thinking are usually unfamiliar with 4GL programming languages or write JavaScript for a living.

That’s not to say free will is a real thing. Humans are not free to rewrite their personalities anymore than they can make themselves taller. We are the result of our wiring, plus some environmental factors like the community in which we were born, climate and serendipity. Someone born to the Amish will be raised to develop pro-Amish traits and ignore traits that are no useful to the Amish way. Environmental factors may play a small role over all, but they do play some role in what we are as people.

In specific cases, it could have an enormous role. Greg Cochran’s Gay Germ idea is a great example. Homosexuality is most certainly not genetic. Nature works against low-fitness. Males with a trait that sharply reduces their ability (or willingness) to mate will have far fewer offspring and therefore pass on this trait in low numbers. In just a few generations, the trait would die out. In the case of homosexuality, we know there were gay Roman emperors and Elton John is still with us, so this trait cannot be genetic.

Alternatively, homosexuality is either taught or the result of psychological damage done at a young by something like molestation. This is a popular idea on the Right, but it does not explain most cases. Lots of homosexuals grew up fairly normal lives and were simply attracted to the same sex once they hit sexual maturity. That’s where Cochran’s gay germ comes in. Instead of a trauma, it is a virus or parasite that triggers changes in brain chemistry, resulting homosexual behavior. That would provide an answer that fits the data.

Bringing this back to IQ, what if something like this is at work with Western IQ? Maybe not a germ, but environmental factors that are having a cascading effect on mean IQ. For example, such an idea has been posited to explain the spike in black crime. Many on the Left think the Tragic Dirt is contaminated with lead, leading to low-IQ and increased violence for the people living on the Tragic Dirt. It’s not a crazy idea, but like the Gay Germ, it is not proven idea. It’s more of a thought experiment at this stage.

Here’s soemthing else. Smoking rates began to decline in the middle of the last century, with the Baby Boomer interest in health. Nicotine is known to increase focus and increase your cognitive abilities. It’s why writers and computer programmers were all smokers. In fact, STEM fields in the 20th century were dominated by men who chain smoked at their desks. Anyone who has had to sit for hours working a math problem knows how exhausting it can be. Even a small boost in focus has enormous results.

What if the apparent uptick in Western IQ was accelerated by smoking? Tobacco was introduced to the West in the 16th century and its use increased steadily. By the 18th century, the use of tobacco was common. By the 19th century, smoking cigarettes was ubiquitous. Everyone smoked. It also corresponds with the Industrial Revolution. Once tobacco use became universal, Western technological progress took off like a rocket, culminating in a rocket literally taking off and putting men on the moon.

Once the anti-smoking crusades got a purchase in the 60’s and smoking rates declined, it does appear that the West began to decline. Perhaps that small boost to our cognitive ability had a huge impact on our intellectual achievements. Now that the crutch is gone, we’re doing idiotic things like putting minorities in charge and inviting in low-IQ barbarians from the fringes of civilization. Perhaps the lunacy that has gripped the West is simply the withdraw symptoms of kicking the habit.

Maybe we need to start smoking again.

The New Ways Of War

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Early warfare, as best we can tell, was more like gang fights in the modern ghetto than the sort of stuff we associate with war in Antiquity. One settlement would round up some men, who would take on the men of the neighboring settlement. They went at one another in a melee, using axes, clubs and short swords, maybe, with the leaders right there in the middle of it, leading their war bands. A lot of it may have been ritualized, rather than actual combat, but that’s speculation. What’s clear is ti was small scale.

Prosperity changed that as better organization and better agriculture allowed for more men to be full time warriors. Greater prosperity also meant better weapons. Ranged weapons made the full speed charge, by men on foot, a losing proposition, unless you could put your men on horses or in chariots. Speed meant you could have formations and then flanking maneuvers, which required strategy and execution. Each innovation led to more innovations. The ways of war changed as military technology and tactics evolved.

Changes in military technology often have unforeseen consequences. The introduction of the machine gun in the Great War is the best example. Even with the new artillery, war was expected to be men advancing on one another over open fields. This was the way war was fought and the way the French were prepared to fight it. They even had their officers in colorful uniforms so they could be seen by their men. The machine gun made this style of war utter insanity, but no one thought about that until the bodies piled up.

The machine gun, along with fantastic improvements in artillery, resulted in trench warfare that was hopelessly expensive and bloody. That led to new tactics and new weapons. The tank, for example, was developed to counter the trenches and barbed wire. Eventually, planes became another answer to fixed defensive positions. All of these new weapons eventually led to new strategies.The Battle of Cambrai, in which the British used tanks, artillery, infantry and air power is one of the first examples of combined arms tactics.

The point to all of this is that war evolves and not always in ways that are predictable or even imaginable. Every new advance in weapons and tactics leads to responses and new weapons and tactics. The most recent example if the “little green men” that suddenly popped up in Crimea. Instead of an invading Russian army, a pro-Russian mercenary force appeared out of nowhere to lead a revolt against Ukrainian control of the region. It was, to a great degree, an example of Fourth Generation Warfare.

A question to ponder is what happens when energy weapons become a practical response to ballistic missiles and drones? The US military has been making steady progress developing mobile laser systems, able to knock out ballistic missiles. They are a decade away from anything usable, but it is not unrealistic to imagine a time in the near future when it is possible to knock out incoming missiles. This sort of technology has a funny way of advancing quickly after it gets deployed.

Of course, a weapon that can render another weapon obsolete is a very dangerous weapon. The reason ground-based, anti-missile systems are such a sensitive subject is because they throw off the balance of arms and require a response. A missile defense system in Europe, that could plausibly knock down Russian missiles, would require the Russians to make a lot more missiles, in addition to other plans to counter this new weapon. That’s a big unknown so everyone treads lightly.

Logically, the sudden advance in military technology 100 years ago, along with the lethality of the new technology, should have made war less likely. Cannonballs and bayonet charges are terrible things, but they pale in comparison to massed machine gun fire on advancing infantry. It would seem blazingly obvious that unless you have an answer for the machine gun, much less the new artillery, you don’t willingly go to war. That’s not what happened. Two great industrial wars latter and the West was just about dead.

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind while thinking about what’s happening with military technology, as well as military strategy. Laser weapons may be a ways off, but drone technology is here and changing how we fight wars. A sky full of flying death robots, capable of working in concert or independently, to bring death to an enemy is going to change how nations go to war. It means new weapons and new ways of fighting. Even the Arabs are adapting to drone warfare. Imagine what the Chinese are doing.

Of course, the new responses do not have to be strictly military. The Million Mohammedan March into Europe surely included jihadis willing to die for Allah. Maybe some of those jihadis were trained by Syria, at the behest of Russia. If you are Russia, you have to be looking at the truck attacks and thinking that could be an effective weapon. If you cannot win the technology fight, maybe the answer lies in some other area of the battlefield. New technology may result in a proliferation of asymmetric warfare waged by state actors.

It’s fun to speculate, but flying death robots alone change the way the world will be fighting wars in the future. Things like carriers can quickly become white elephants in a world where a swarm or drones can fall out of the sky or come up from the depths of the ocean. Everyone forgets about the coming proliferation of a independently controlled torpedoes that can literally roam the ocean looking for targets. The microprocessor goes from being a force multiplier to a force nullifier.

It would be nice if the proliferation of killing machines worked as a deterrent to war, but that is not the lesson of history. The one exception has been nuclear weapons, which probably kept the the Soviets from invading Europe and the US from systematically undermining the Russian government, as we see going on today. The new technology does not promise to destroy the world so it probably will not be much of a deterrent. If anything, as we have seen with the neocon warmongering, it will make everyone reckless.