Sometimes, when watching the ever-accelerating madness spreading through our ‘elites’, I worry. When Judith Shulevitz says “Scientists mostly agree that sexual identity is multifarious, not binary: fungible, not fixed.”, it sure sounds as if the EndTimes are approaching. You can recognize the fifth Horseman by the arrow through his head.
Then again, if you think about it, it’s just possible that this problem is going to solve itself. And in so doing, solve many other problems at the same time.
Polynesians are mostly descended from a population on Taiwan, represented today by Taiwanese aboriginals, and from a Melanesian population similar to New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. They’re about 25% Melanesian autosomally, 6% Melanesian in mtDNA, 65% Melanesian in Y-chromosomes.
Until recently, the dominant model was the slow-boat hypothesis, in which the Taiwanese-derived Lapita culture mixed with Melanesians in New Guinea and the Solomons before sailing out into the deep Pacific. The funny numbers for mtDNA and Y-chromosome were explain by some hand-waving matrifocal cultural bullshit.
Now they’ve looked at ancient DNA from Tonga and Vanuatu. The old samples don’t have any noticeable amount of Melanesian ancestry. So it was like this: the Lapita derived from Taiwan (thru the Philippines), settled Vanuatua and Tonga – then were conquered by some set of Melanesian men, who killed most of the local men and scooped up the women. Probably their sons extended the process, which resulted in a lower percentage of Melanesian ancestry while keeping the Y-chromosomes mostly Melanesian.
After this conquest, the Polynesians expanded further east, and those later settlement (Tahiti, Marquesas, Hawaii, etc) all had that ~25% Melanesian component.
If you want to approach this kind of problem with reasonable priors, read Robert E Howard, not Brian Ferguson.
There’s a recent article out arguing that since there is no gold-standard , randomized controlled study that shows that removing predators reduces livestock predation – so we should stop killing lions, tigers, and bears. Also wolves.
I guess that’s it for everything else we do that doesn’t have that kind of supporting evidence. No more arresting murderers!
Just kidding, of course. These guys are lying. Veeck effect, moving the fence up and down. They should be fired – and that’s no joke.
You can characterize a group by its gene frequencies – which can be thought of as a point in a very high-dimensional space. Another group is a different point, and the between-group difference is a vector in that space. Ignoring linkage, assuming no substructure, etc.
There’s a vector of this sort that describes the genetic differences between the Irish and Germans, or for that matter between the Irish and the average of the human race.
For Sardinians, that point is unusually distant from other Europeans, since they’re almost-pure examples of Europe’s first farmers. The Iceman genome is like that of a Sardinan, but even more so: more like Sardinia before Sardinian soaked up some genes from the mainland. More Sardinian than the Sardinians: the vector in that high-dimensional space between the Iceman and modern Italians is like the vector between Sardinians and the mainland, in the same direction, but with a greater magnitude. You would expect that the Iceman’s phenotype differed from mainland Italians in the same way that Sardinians do, only more so. Modern admixtures have produced many examples of this: mestizos differ from Spaniards in gene frequencies and traits: Amerindians (from central America, say) differ in the same general way, only more so.
With modern genetic technology, we could make these vectors even longer, while still pointing in the same direction – longer than they are in any existing population, longer than they ever were in any population that has ever existed.
So.. we could make synthetic Irishmen that were far more Irish than anyone in the emerald Isle – so Irish that they were barely human. It has been said that the Irish excel in all the qualities that make a man interesting rather than successful – compared to our new and improved product, today’s Irish would seem a nation of shopkeepers.
“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
Now square that.
Who should be head of the FDA?
Ideally he should understand how drug development is drying up and have some decent notions about fixing it – this is probably the biggest current problem. He should understand big pharma’s sins and virtues. He should not be paralyzed by some stupid ideology, or be in someone’s pocket. And the usual – know something about navigating Congress and the bureaucracy, not have any really hilarious personal habits involving small woodland creatures.
Looking for names, but also qualities/experience to add to this list.
Just to make things clear, most political reporters are morons, nearly as bad as sports reporters. Mostly ugly cheerleaders for their side, rather than analysts. Uninteresting.
how to analyze polls:
Who ever is ahead in the polls at the time of election is extremely likely to win. Talk about how Candidate X would have a ‘difficult path to 270 electoral votes’ when he’s up 2 points (for example), is pretty much horseshit. There are second-order considerations: you get more oomph per voter when the voter is in a small state, and you also want your votes distributed fairly evenly, so that you win states giving you a majority of electoral votes by a little rather than winning states giving you a minority of electoral votes by huge margins. Not that a candidate can do much about this, of course.
When you hear someone say that it’s really 50 state contests [ more if you think about Maine and Nebraska] , so you should pay attention to the state polls, not the national polls: also horseshit. In some sense, it is true – but when your national polls go up, so do your state polls – almost all of them, in practice. On election day, or just before, you want to consider national polls rather than state polls, because they are almost always more recent, therefore more accurate.
When should you trust an outlier poll, rather than the average: when you want to be wrong.
Money doesn’t help much. Political consultants will tell you that it does, but then they get 15% of ad buys.
A decent political reporter would actually go out and talk to people that aren’t exactly like him. Apparently this no longer happens.
All of these rules have exceptions – but if you understand those [rare] exceptions and can apply them, you’re paying too much attention to politics.
As I have said before, it seems likely to me that the Soviet Union put so much effort into treaty-violating biological warfare because the guys at the top believed in it – because they had seen it work, the same reason that they were such tank enthusiasts. One more point on the likely use of tularemia at Stalingrad: in the summer of ’42 the Germans had occupied regions holding 40% of the Soviet Union’s population. The Soviets had a tularemia program: if not then [“Not One Step Back!”], when would they have used it? When would Stalin have used it? Imagine that someone intent on the destruction of the American republic and the extermination of its people [remember the Hunger Plan?] had taken over everything west of the Mississippi: would be that too early to pull out all the stops? Reminds me of of an old Mr Boffo cartoon: you see a monster, taller than skyscrapers, stomping his way through the city. That’s trouble. But then you notice that he’s a hand puppet: that’s serious trouble. Perhaps Stalin was waiting for serious trouble, for example if the Norse Gods had come in on the side of the Nazis.
Anyhow, the Soviets had a big smallpox program. In some ways smallpox is almost the ultimate biological weapon – very contagious, while some strains are highly lethal. And it’s controllable – you can easily shield your own guys via vaccination. Of course back in the 1970s, almost everyone was vaccinated, so it was also completely useless.
We kept vaccinating people as long as smallpox was still running around in the Third World. But when it was eradicated in 1978, people stopped. There seemed to be no reason – and so, as new unvaccinated generations arose, the military efficacy of smallpox has gone up and up and up. It got to the point where the World Health organization threw away its stockpile of vaccine, a couple hundred million units, just to save on the electric bill for the refrigerators.
Consider that the Soviet Union was always the strongest proponent of worldwide eradication of smallpox, dating back to the 1950s. Successful eradication would eventually make smallpox a superweapon: does it seem possible that the people running the Soviet Union had this in mind as a long term-goal ? Potentiation through ‘eradication’? Did the left hand know what the strangling hand had in mind, and shape policies accordingly? Of course.
D.A. Henderson, the man that led the eradication campaign, died just a few days ago. He was aware of this possibility.
