vdare--2020-12-31--Stereotype-Shattering Black Serial Killer Dies After Murdering Up To 93

Earlier : `` America 's Deadliest Serial Killer '' ( 90 Victims ) Is Black—Many Of His Victims Were White Women From the Associated Press : Man called most prolific serial killer in US history dies By JOHN ROGERS an hour ago LOS ANGELES ( AP ) — The man authorities say was the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history , with nearly 60 confirmed victims , died Wednesday in California .
He was 80 .
Samuel Little , who had diabetes , heart trouble and other ailments , died at a California hospital , according to the state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was serving a life sentence for multiple counts of murder .
… A career criminal who had been in and out jail for decades , Little denied for years he ’ d ever killed anyone .
Then , in 2018 , he opened up to Texas Ranger James Holland , who had been asked to question him about a killing it turned out Little didn ’ t commit .
During approximately 700 hours of interviews , however , Little provided details of scores of slayings only the killer would know .
A skilled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dozens of paintings and drawings of his victims , sometimes scribbling their names when he could remember them , as well as details such as the year and location of the murder and where he ’ d dumped the body .
By the time of his death , Little had confessed to killing 93 people between 1970 and 2005 .
Will Little hold the record for long ?
Kenyan immigrant Billy Chemirmir , who robs and smothers old people in Dallas , has so far been indicted of 17 murders , but who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Back in 2010 , the LAPD admitted that it had overlooked at least five separate serial killers active in South Central Los Angeles during the crack years around 1990 , figuring that all these dead prostitutes who kept showing up were just murdered in Bloods vs. Crips drug disputes .
Strikingly , Little , who murdered ten women in that period in Southern California , was not one of the overlooked five .
( Four of the five were black . )
Authorities , who continue to investigate his claims , said they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no reason to doubt the others .
… The numbers dwarf those of Green River killer Gary Ridgeway ( 49 ) , John Gacy ( 33 ) and Ted Bundy ( 36 ) .
Almost all of Little ’ s victims were women , many of them prostitutes , drug addicts or poor people living on the edges of society .
They were individuals , he said he believed , who would leave few people behind to look for them and not much evidence for police to follow .
From Wikipedia ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I count 36 black women , one black trans , eight white women , and one Hispanic .
If FBI “ profilers ” hadn ’ t promulgated the stereotype of serial killers as white , would somebody have caught this black serial killer before he murdered 90 people ?
We are constantly warned against stereotyping .
Yet , one of the more disastrous stereotypes of the second half of the 20th Century — that being a serial killer was a white thing — is seldom mentioned even though it seems to have led @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Samuel Little was murdering somewhere 50 and 93 women .
Racial profiling is okay , however , as long as it ’ s anti-white .
Wikipedia ’ s account of Little ’ s criminal career suggests how lax imprisonment was following the triumph of civil rights : … He attended Hawthorne Junior High School , where he had problems with discipline and achievement .
In 1956 , after being convicted of breaking and entering into property in Omaha , Nebraska , Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders .
Little moved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his late 20s , working at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant ( by his own account ) .
He said he then “ began traveling more widely and had more run-ins with the law ” , being arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence , fraud , shoplifting , solicitation , armed robbery , aggravated assault , and rape… .
In 1961 , Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain ; he was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , America started to get more concerned about The New Jim Crow under which black men were always being accused of dangerous crimes .
So , prison sentences got shorter .
Hence Samuel Little ’ s career became busier : By 1975 , he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including theft , assault , attempted rape , fraud , and attacks on government officials .
In 1982 , Little was arrested in Pascagoula , Mississippi , and charged with the murder of 22-year-old Melinda Rose LáPree , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that year .
A grand jury declined to indict him for her murder .
However , while under investigation , Little was transferred to Florida to be brought to trial for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount , whose body was found in September 1982 .
Prosecution witnesses identified Little in court as a person who spent time with Mount on the night before her disappearance .
Due to mistrust of witness testimonies , Little was acquitted in January 1984 .
Little moved to California , where he stayed in the vicinity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he was arrested for kidnapping , beating , and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros , who survived .
One month later , he was found by police in the backseat of his car with an unconscious woman , also beaten and strangled , in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros .
Little served two and a half years in prison for both crimes .
Upon his release in February 1987 , he immediately moved to Los Angeles and committed more than 10 additional murders .
Little was arrested on September @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shelter in Louisville , Kentucky , and extradited to California to face a narcotics charge , after which authorities used DNA testing to establish that he was involved in the murders of Carol Ilene Elford , killed on July 13 , 1987 ; Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca , killed on September 3 , 1987 ; and Audrey Nelson Everett , killed on August 14 , 1989 .
All three women were killed and later found on the streets of Los Angeles .
A Three Strikes law in this one guy ’ s case would @ @ @ @ @ @

Earlier: "America's Deadliest Serial Killer" (90 Victims) Is Black—Many Of His Victims Were White Women
From the Associated Press:
Man called most prolific serial killer in US history dies
By JOHN ROGERS
an hour ago LOS ANGELES (AP) — The man authorities say was the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, with nearly 60 confirmed victims, died Wednesday in California. He was 80. Samuel Little, who had diabetes, heart trouble and other ailments, died at a California hospital, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was serving a life sentence for multiple counts of murder. … A career criminal who had been in and out jail for decades, Little denied for years he’d ever killed anyone. Then, in 2018, he opened up to Texas Ranger James Holland, who had been asked to question him about a killing it turned out Little didn’t commit. During approximately 700 hours of interviews, however, Little provided details of scores of slayings only the killer would know. A skilled artist, he even provided Holland with dozens of paintings and drawings of his victims, sometimes scribbling their names when he could remember them, as well as details such as the year and location of the murder and where he’d dumped the body. By the time of his death, Little had confessed to killing 93 people between 1970 and 2005.
Will Little hold the record for long? Kenyan immigrant Billy Chemirmir, who robs and smothers old people in Dallas, has so far been indicted of 17 murders, but who knows what the real toll is.
Most of the slayings took place in Florida and Southern California.
Back in 2010, the LAPD admitted that it had overlooked at least five separate serial killers active in South Central Los Angeles during the crack years around 1990, figuring that all these dead prostitutes who kept showing up were just murdered in Bloods vs. Crips drug disputes. Strikingly, Little, who murdered ten women in that period in Southern California, was not one of the overlooked five. (Four of the five were black.)
Authorities, who continue to investigate his claims, said they have confirmed nearly 60 killings and have no reason to doubt the others. … The numbers dwarf those of Green River killer Gary Ridgeway (49), John Gacy (33) and Ted Bundy (36). Almost all of Little’s victims were women, many of them prostitutes, drug addicts or poor people living on the edges of society. They were individuals, he said he believed, who would leave few people behind to look for them and not much evidence for police to follow.
From Wikipedia’s listing of victims with race mentioned, I count 36 black women, one black trans, eight white women, and one Hispanic.
Kentucky authorities finally caught up with him in 2012 after he was arrested on drug charges and his DNA linked him to three California killings.
If FBI “profilers” hadn’t promulgated the stereotype of serial killers as white, would somebody have caught this black serial killer before he murdered 90 people?
We are constantly warned against stereotyping. Yet, one of the more disastrous stereotypes of the second half of the 20th Century — that being a serial killer was a white thing — is seldom mentioned even though it seems to have led to nobody noticing that black serial killer Samuel Little was murdering somewhere 50 and 93 women.
Paul Kersey wrote in VDARE:
According to a 2016 Radford University study, just 51.7 percent of all serial killers in America since 1900 have been white. Roughly 40 percent were black. The numbers have become more lopsided in recent decades. In the first half of this decade, 60 percent of serial killers were black, while only 30 percent were white. Blacks have been the outright majority of serial killers since 1990.
Racial profiling is okay, however, as long as it’s anti-white.
Wikipedia’s account of Little’s criminal career suggests how lax imprisonment was following the triumph of civil rights:
… He attended Hawthorne Junior High School, where he had problems with discipline and achievement. In 1956, after being convicted of breaking and entering into property in Omaha, Nebraska, Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders. Little moved to Florida to live with his mother in his late 20s, working at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant (by his own account). He said he then “began traveling more widely and had more run-ins with the law”, being arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and rape…. In 1961, Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in 1964.
After 1964, however, America started to get more concerned about The New Jim Crow under which black men were always being accused of dangerous crimes. So, prison sentences got shorter. Hence Samuel Little’s career became busier:
By 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials. In 1982, Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and charged with the murder of 22-year-old Melinda Rose LáPree, who had gone missing in September of that year. A grand jury declined to indict him for her murder. However, while under investigation, Little was transferred to Florida to be brought to trial for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body was found in September 1982. Prosecution witnesses identified Little in court as a person who spent time with Mount on the night before her disappearance. Due to mistrust of witness testimonies, Little was acquitted in January 1984. Little moved to California, where he stayed in the vicinity of San Diego. In October 1984, he was arrested for kidnapping, beating, and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. One month later, he was found by police in the backseat of his car with an unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled, in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros. Little served two and a half years in prison for both crimes. Upon his release in February 1987, he immediately moved to Los Angeles and committed more than 10 additional murders. Little was arrested on September 5, 2012, at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California to face a narcotics charge, after which authorities used DNA testing to establish that he was involved in the murders of Carol Ilene Elford, killed on July 13, 1987; Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca, killed on September 3, 1987; and Audrey Nelson Everett, killed on August 14, 1989. All three women were killed and later found on the streets of Los Angeles.
A Three Strikes law in this one guy’s case would have saved dozens of lives.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-01-30--Fallon Fox's Right to Beat Up Women for Money Is, for Some Democrat Intellectuals, the Most Sacred I

Fallon Fox's Right to Beat Up Women for Money Is, for Some Democrat Intellectuals, the Most Sacred Issue

Back in the spring of 2013 , while reading a massive New York Times article about how deplorable it was that an ex-man martial arts bruiser named Fallon Fox wasn ’ t being allowed to beat up women for money , it dawned on me that this was The Establishment ’ s next crusade , the one they had lined up for after gay marriage .
And , indeed , Fallon Fox ’ s right to slug women in the face for cash has ascended into the moral stratosphere .
From Vox : … He has a particular distaste for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2017 JRE episode with Shapiro , he describes his radicalization on the issue as stemming from anger at Fallon Fox , a trans woman who competed in women ’ s MMA fights : “ I didn ’ t have a dog in this fight .
I was completely open and liberal about it — until there was a case where a man who had been a man for 30 years became a woman for a little less than two years and then started MMA fighting women .
Beating the fuck out of these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he or she used to be a man … if you ever watch the fights , she wasn ’ t winning because she was skillful .
She was fucking manhandling these women , it was ugly.
” This very short paragraph contains all the classic tropes of transphobia : a denial of the authenticity of trans people ’ s identity , an insinuation that they ’ re a threat to cis folks , and a claim that they ’ re using their gender identity to somehow get ahead in life .
It is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and one of many such examples when it comes to trans issues .
The Joe Rogan controversy revealed something important about the American left On Joe Rogan , Bernie Sanders , and the hidden moral philosophy of American politics .
But Rogan ’ s popularity is owed in part for his vocal rejection of “ political correctness , ” which can take the form of transphobia ( he once called trans woman mixed martial artist Fallon Fox “ a fucking man ” ) , … But I think the debate has also been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American political discourse , a divide that maps closely but not perfectly with the divide between socialist-identified , Bernie-supporting leftists on the one hand and more traditional liberal Democrats on the other .
The divide concerns the latent moral theories that each side uses , and in particular whether they think political disagreements regarding discrimination and bigotry can be understood using the same moral language as disagreements about , say , tax policy or foreign affairs .
Most liberals have what I would characterize as a deontological opposition to discrimination .
That is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ maligning someone on the basis of membership in a protected class — women , trans people , black people , and other racially oppressed communities , etc .
— violates a rule that should be inviolable .
And how does a “ protected class ” not ultimately turn into a “ privileged caste ” when their right not to be criticized is “ inviolable ” ?
In this view , such discrimination ( be it legal , or expressed through hate speech , etc . )
is not just wrong because it has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ members of the groups in question ; it ’ s wrong because we have a duty to treat humans as equals , and it is never acceptable to violate that duty , even when doing so seems politically expedient .
This mode of moral argumentation came through in the Rogan controversy when Sanders and Rogan ’ s critics took pains to stress that accepting a Rogan endorsement was not merely unwise but immoral , and that these two judgments were distinct .
Accepting the endorsement was not wrong because it hurt more people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people ) than it helped ( by increasing the odds that a pro-trans Sanders administration comes to power ) ; it was wrong because it is wrong to coddle and amplify bigots , full stop .
It is funny how Fallon Fox ’ s right to punch women for money is , for many Democrats , the Ultimate Issue .
Except is isn ’ t really funny in reality .
From Knuckle Junkies : In the co-main event , Fallon Fox and Tamikka Brents engaged quickly with Fox unleashing a brutal barrage of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cut on the forehead of her opponent .
Brents had no choice but to pull guard , and worked from an open guard before Fox passed and would eventually take the back .
That is where Fox rained down punches and put the on the hurt Brents , who was unable to answer or improve her position and forced a stoppage to the fight .
And now also from Vox , a voice of moderation : The case against the case against Joe Rogan His support is valuable precisely because he ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Joe Rogan has shared ugly opinions about trans people on his popular show … The drama obscures the fact that Rogan ’ s support is evidence for the theory of the Sanders campaign , which is that he can pull in unconventional voters — a goal that all liberal activists should share but too often do not .
… His backing is valuable in part because he has such a large audience .
But it ’ s also valuable because he ’ s a controversial figure who doesn ’ t hold progressive opinions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happen if Yglesias came right out and said out loud in a Vox staff meeting that he agrees with Joe Rogan that ex-man Fallon Fox should not be allowed to beat up real women for money ?

Back in the spring of 2013, while reading a massive New York Times article about how deplorable it was that an ex-man martial arts bruiser named Fallon Fox wasn’t being allowed to beat up women for money, it dawned on me that this was The Establishment’s next crusade, the one they had lined up for after gay marriage.
And, indeed, Fallon Fox’s right to slug women in the face for cash has ascended into the moral stratosphere. From Vox:
Bernie Sanders’s Joe Rogan experience
Joe Rogan’s controversial endorsement of Bernie Sanders, explained. By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com Jan 24, 2020, … He has a particular distaste for the trans rights movement. In a 2017 JRE episode with Shapiro, he describes his radicalization on the issue as stemming from anger at Fallon Fox, a trans woman who competed in women’s MMA fights: “I didn’t have a dog in this fight. I was completely open and liberal about it — until there was a case where a man who had been a man for 30 years became a woman for a little less than two years and then started MMA fighting women. Beating the fuck out of these women, and then not proclaiming that he or she used to be a man … if you ever watch the fights, she wasn’t winning because she was skillful. She was fucking manhandling these women, it was ugly.” This very short paragraph contains all the classic tropes of transphobia: a denial of the authenticity of trans people’s identity, an insinuation that they’re a threat to cis folks, and a claim that they’re using their gender identity to somehow get ahead in life. It is, to quote Rogan, ugly, and one of many such examples when it comes to trans issues.
Also from Vox:
The Joe Rogan controversy revealed something important about the American left
On Joe Rogan, Bernie Sanders, and the hidden moral philosophy of American politics. By Dylan Matthews @dylanmattdylan@vox.com Jan 27, 2020, 11:00am EST But Rogan’s popularity is owed in part for his vocal rejection of “political correctness,” which can take the form of transphobia (he once called trans woman mixed martial artist Fallon Fox “a fucking man”),… But I think the debate has also been profoundly revealing about a divide within left-of-center American political discourse, a divide that maps closely but not perfectly with the divide between socialist-identified, Bernie-supporting leftists on the one hand and more traditional liberal Democrats on the other. The divide concerns the latent moral theories that each side uses, and in particular whether they think political disagreements regarding discrimination and bigotry can be understood using the same moral language as disagreements about, say, tax policy or foreign affairs. Most liberals have what I would characterize as a deontological opposition to discrimination. That is, they think that discriminating against or maligning someone on the basis of membership in a protected class — women, trans people, black people, and other racially oppressed communities, etc. — violates a rule that should be inviolable.
And how does a “protected class” not ultimately turn into a “privileged caste” when their right not to be criticized is “inviolable”?
In this view, such discrimination (be it legal, or expressed through hate speech, etc.) is not just wrong because it has bad effects, or because it harms members of the groups in question; it’s wrong because we have a duty to treat humans as equals, and it is never acceptable to violate that duty, even when doing so seems politically expedient. This mode of moral argumentation came through in the Rogan controversy when Sanders and Rogan’s critics took pains to stress that accepting a Rogan endorsement was not merely unwise but immoral, and that these two judgments were distinct. Accepting the endorsement was not wrong because it hurt more people (by amplifying bigoted speech against vulnerable people) than it helped (by increasing the odds that a pro-trans Sanders administration comes to power); it was wrong because it is wrong to coddle and amplify bigots, full stop.
It is funny how Fallon Fox’s right to punch women for money is, for many Democrats, the Ultimate Issue.
Except is isn’t really funny in reality. From Knuckle Junkies:
In the co-main event, Fallon Fox and Tamikka Brents engaged quickly with Fox unleashing a brutal barrage of knees from the clench opening a nasty cut on the forehead of her opponent. Brents had no choice but to pull guard, and worked from an open guard before Fox passed and would eventually take the back. That is where Fox rained down punches and put the on the hurt Brents, who was unable to answer or improve her position and forced a stoppage to the fight.
And now also from Vox, a voice of moderation:
The case against the case against Joe Rogan
His support is valuable precisely because he’s not progressive on everything. By Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias matt@vox.com Jan 30, 2020, 12:35pm EST Podcast star Joe Rogan has shared ugly opinions about trans people on his popular show … The drama obscures the fact that Rogan’s support is evidence for the theory of the Sanders campaign, which is that he can pull in unconventional voters — a goal that all liberal activists should share but too often do not. … His backing is valuable in part because he has such a large audience. But it’s also valuable because he’s a controversial figure who doesn’t hold progressive opinions on some issues.
But what would happen if Yglesias came right out and said out loud in a Vox staff meeting that he agrees with Joe Rogan that ex-man Fallon Fox should not be allowed to beat up real women for money?


vdare--2020-01-30--NATIONAL REVIEW Finally Acknowledges ELECTING A NEW PEOPLE...And Refuses To Link To It

Links in original , absence of link to our site also in original .
Here 's Electing A New People @ @ @ @ @ dead-tree National Review in 1997 .
Here 's Ed Rubenstein 's projection of what a @ @ @ @ @ the Republican Party ( and America , of course ! )
if it had happened @ @ @ @ @ To Rethink Immigration was published .
And finally , check out Even If Immigration Continues @ @ @ @ @ Still Win It For The GOP In 2050 , Steve Sailer 's 2009 analysis , @ @ @ @ @ Sailer Strategy , in which the GOP appeals to its white base , rather than @ @ @ @ @ conservatives , would not only win as late as 2050 in the same way it @ @ @ @ @ would have won in 2008 for John McCain .

Here's Peter Brimelow on Twitter:
2/4 So here's our Must-Not-Be-Linked article. Note that dimwit Geraghty STILL won't consider an immigration moratorium although admitting naturalizations put GOP 750K in hole every year https://t.co/O9wHXj1ewn — Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) January 31, 2020
But look on the bright side, there's still time! https://t.co/KWDkfG3eN5 — Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) January 31, 2020
Here's Geraghty:
Links in original, absence of link to our site also in original.
Here's Electing A New People, originally published in the dead-tree National Review in 1997.
Here's Ed Rubenstein's projection of what a moratorium could have done for the Republican Party (and America, of course!) if it had happened in 1992, when Time To Rethink Immigration was published.
And finally, check out Even If Immigration Continues, The Sailer Strategy Could Still Win It For The GOP In 2050, Steve Sailer's 2009 analysis, which pointed out that the Sailer Strategy, in which the GOP appeals to its white base, rather than pursuing the chimera of minority conservatives, would not only win as late as 2050 in the same way it won in 2016, but would have won in 2008 for John McCain.


vdare--2020-01-30--Reflections On Richmond: Whites Are Stirring. And The Left Is Afraid

The Left/ Main Stream Media know exactly what happened in Richmond on January 20 , when tens of thousands of white gun owners assembled in the capital of the Confederacy to defend their Second Amendment rights .
And those angry Virginians also intuitively know but have been trained not to say what housebroken Establishment conservatives explicitly understand but purposely won ’ t say : The Democrat-controlled state ’ s forthcoming unconstitutional gun-control laws are aimed at law-abiding whites—because they own most of the guns .
As the Left consolidates power by Electing A New People through immigration policy , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ myriad social media memes tried to peddle the idea that blacks favor gun rights because a few showed up .
This false “ Blacks-Love-The-2A ” narrative demonstrated just how race-whipped Beltway Conservatives are : NBC reporter Ben Collins spread misinformation on Sunday when he tried to tell reporters to not spread misinformation at the `` white nationalist '' rally .
Since it is Virginia , I did see three Confederate flags among the thousands of people , but for every Confederate flag that I saw , there were dozens of American flags and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ [ Virginia 's Second Amendment Rally Was Hyped Up to Be Racist and Violent— It Was Not , by Julio Rosas , TownHall.com , January 20 , 2020 ] But “ hundreds of minorities ” floating in a sea of whiteness ignores the reality that the crowd was 99 percent white—which scared the living daylights out of the Left/ MSM .
Certainly this quest for respectability has sunk deep roots in the normie psyche .
I was at a gun store after the rally and spoke to a white employee who estimated a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somewhat sheepishly added that the rally was 99 percent white .
But that ’ s the reality of those who want a strong Second Amendment , I said .
His answer : We need to reach out to blacks and Hispanics to help fight the battle !
“ No , we don ’ t , ” I laughed , and walked away .
In the wake of the rally , the Left/ MSM reacted viscerally : the implicit whiteness of the pro 2A movement was becoming explicit .
Rebellion was stirring .
• @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorists , ” a white scribe for the Philadelphia Inquirer invoked the ghost of Martin Luther King : This week would be a good time to channel the ferocity of King , who stood up to bullies with non-violence and won more victories against entrenched white supremacy than anyone dreamed possible .
MLK understood that an absence of tension , also known as silence , was the path to injustice .
He also would have called out the violent intimidation of Monday ’ s mob for what it was — terrorism — and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s MLK Day gun rally what it was : An outbreak of terrorism on American soil , by Will Bunch , Philadelphia Inquirer , January 21 , 2020 ] “ How was Richmond ?
” I ’ m asked .
I pause , overwhelmed with the task of summing up the hours spent in the cold , surrounded by more white men with guns than I ’ d ever seen in one place in my life .
“ Uneventful , thankfully , ” I respond .
I refuse to use the word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s in the word I now see popping up in most headlines to describe Monday ’ s gun rally downtown and at the capitol .
It was not peaceful—it never escalated , but it was far from peaceful .
[ Holding a City Hostage Is ‘ Peaceful ’ Now ?
: I ’ ve been to peaceful protests before .
The gun rally in Richmond was not that , January 22 , 2020 ] • Retweeting Ettinger , Kris Brown , the president of @ Bradybuzz , yet another group of busybodies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ there was no violence in Richmond because no one made the gun-carrying protesters feel threatened .
It was a display of white supremacy in action.
” • Writing for GQ , Talia Lavin , infamous for seeing Nazism in a wounded American veteran 's tattoo , went beyond even Ettinger ’ s self-absorbed hysterics : GQ ’ s clever artists helpfully illustrated Lavin ’ s anti-white propaganda piece with a swastika fashioned with what appear to AR-15s .
• And let ’ s not leave out The New Yorker , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whites ( the 2015 cover at right is a typical example ) .
Not one shot was fired , but the mere sight of white men with guns advertised a “ race problem : ” Message To Conservatism , Inc .
This is what they think of us … and you .
So here ’ s a reality check on race and guns .
• 82 percent of American gun owners are white , Pew reported in 2013 , a figure that has not , obviously , changed [ Gun Ownership Trends and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 2013 ] .
• Last year , Gallup found that 61 percent of Republicans live in a household with firearms while just 28 percent of Democrats do .
Fifty-three percent of conservatives live with guns , while 29 percent of liberals do .
Half of whites live in a home with a gun , but fewer than a third of blacks or Hispanics [ What Percentage of Americans Own Guns ?
, by Linda Saad , August 14 , 2019 ] .
Moral : Gun ownership is almost exclusively white and conservative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gun owners and want to disarm them .
Armed conservatives could be trouble .
• In 2014 , Pew asked whether it was more important to “ [ protect ] the right of Americans to own guns or [ control ] gun ownership.
” Unsurprisingly , Hispanics favored gun control by 62 to 36 percent .
Black support for curtailing gun rights was even more lopsided : 71-26 .
Whites , on the other hand , favored gun rights 59-39 [ Latinos ’ Views on Selected 2014 Ballot Measure Issues , by Mark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eileen Patten , and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera , October 16 , 2014 ] .
• Almost five years ago , UCLA Professor Adam Winkler [ Email him ] crowed that demographics will overwhelm the NRA ’ s lobbying power because 80 percent of registered-Asian American voters and most blacks and Hispanics want stricter gun laws [ The NRA will fall .
It ’ s inevitable , The Washington Post , October 19 , 2015 ] .
Along with those numbers , consider these crime stats : • Throughout Virginia , blacks were 19 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the arrests for homicide [ Crime in Virginia , 2018 ] .
That means blacks are eight times more likely than non-blacks to be for murder .
• In Richmond itself , 95 percent of homicide suspects were black in 2016 -- down from 97 percent in 2015 !
!
[ Regional killings soar past 100 , reach highest level in decade , by Mark Bowes , Richmond Times-Dispatch , February 18 , 2017 ] .
Those last two points help explain why blacks want gun control : The near totality of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As well , and of particular interest to VDARE.com and immigration patriots , the data on Asians and Hispanics show why mass immigration must be stopped .
Third World immigrants are terrified of guns -- perhaps , like blacks , for a good reason .
However , white gun owners aren ’ t inner-city blacks or Third World immigrants .
Black and Hispanics have a problem with guns , but that ’ s no reason to disarm law-abiding whites .
Of course whites should welcome blacks , Hispanics , and anyone else @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ownership is a white thing .
It ’ s time to admit that .
Gun control targets law-abiding , conservative whites .
The Left knows that , which is why it ’ s inventing such tyrannies as red-flag laws and national registries .
Whites with guns might not lie down for Leftist revolution as The Great Replacement proceeds apace .
Symbolically , the pro2A protestors were greeted by a new statue , Rumors of War , featuring a black man in a hoodie on a rearing horse , described by the Virginia Museum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Confederate statues that line Monument Avenue ” [ Sculpture Created by Kehinde Wiley for VMFA , VFMA.museum ] .
This bronze effigy that ostentatiously opposes the monuments to Robert E. Lee , Stonewall Jackson etc.is a black-power symbol .
It ’ s in-your-face warning -- what American whites , not just those descended from Confederates , can expect if they don ’ t stop cowering in fear of being labeled “ racists.
” The radical Left will defile and destroy their symbols , dismantle what ’ s left of their civilization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inherited from their ancestors who created the Historic American Nation .
In the frontline of those rights—the right to own guns .
The Left should be afraid .
Richmond suggested that White America won ’ t give up those rights without a fight .
Jack Dalton [ Email him ] is a recovering conservative in Virginia .

The Left/ Main Stream Media know exactly what happened in Richmond on January 20, when tens of thousands of white gun owners assembled in the capital of the Confederacy to defend their Second Amendment rights. And those angry Virginians also intuitively know but have been trained not to say what housebroken Establishment conservatives explicitly understand but purposely won’t say: The Democrat-controlled state’s forthcoming unconstitutional gun-control laws are aimed at law-abiding whites—because they own most of the guns. As the Left consolidates power by Electing A New People through immigration policy, this means trouble.
Respectable Right pundits and myriad social media memes tried to peddle the idea that blacks favor gun rights because a few showed up.
This false “Blacks-Love-The-2A” narrative demonstrated just how race-whipped Beltway Conservatives are:
NBC reporter Ben Collins spread misinformation on Sunday when he tried to tell reporters to not spread misinformation at the "white nationalist" rally. Since it is Virginia, I did see three Confederate flags among the thousands of people, but for every Confederate flag that I saw, there were dozens of American flags and hundreds of minorities in the crowd. [Virginia's Second Amendment Rally Was Hyped Up to Be Racist and Violent— It Was Not, by Julio Rosas, TownHall.com, January 20, 2020]
But “hundreds of minorities” floating in a sea of whiteness ignores the reality that the crowd was 99 percent white—which scared the living daylights out of the Left/ MSM.
Certainly this quest for respectability has sunk deep roots in the normie psyche. I was at a gun store after the rally and spoke to a white employee who estimated a crowd of more than 50,000. He somewhat sheepishly added that the rally was 99 percent white.
But that’s the reality of those who want a strong Second Amendment, I said.
His answer: We need to reach out to blacks and Hispanics to help fight the battle!
“No, we don’t,” I laughed, and walked away.
In the wake of the rally, the Left/ MSM reacted viscerally: the implicit whiteness of the pro 2A movement was becoming explicit. Rebellion was stirring.
Calling whites “Nazis” and “terrorists,” a white scribe for the Philadelphia Inquirer invoked the ghost of Martin Luther King:
This week would be a good time to channel the ferocity of King, who stood up to bullies with non-violence and won more victories against entrenched white supremacy than anyone dreamed possible. MLK understood that an absence of tension, also known as silence, was the path to injustice. He also would have called out the violent intimidation of Monday’s mob for what it was — terrorism — and so should we. [Call Richmond’s MLK Day gun rally what it was: An outbreak of terrorism on American soil, by Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 21, 2020]
Eve Ettinger’s piece in the leftist Vice argued likewise:
“How was Richmond?” I’m asked. I pause, overwhelmed with the task of summing up the hours spent in the cold, surrounded by more white men with guns than I’d ever seen in one place in my life. “Uneventful, thankfully,” I respond. I refuse to use the word “peaceful,” even though it’s in the word I now see popping up in most headlines to describe Monday’s gun rally downtown and at the capitol. It was not peaceful—it never escalated, but it was far from peaceful. [Holding a City Hostage Is ‘Peaceful’ Now?: I’ve been to peaceful protests before. The gun rally in Richmond was not that, January 22, 2020]
Retweeting Ettinger, Kris Brown, the president of @Bradybuzz, yet another group of busybodies who would grab your gun, argued that “there was no violence in Richmond because no one made the gun-carrying protesters feel threatened. It was a display of white supremacy in action.”
"There was no violence in Richmond because no one made the gun-carrying protesters feel threatened. It was a display of white supremacy in action." #IStandWithVirginia https://t.co/lZ4tUa7ICc — Kris Brown | President, bradyunited.org (@KrisB_Brown) January 23, 2020
Writing for GQ, Talia Lavin, infamous for seeing Nazism in a wounded American veteran's tattoo, went beyond even Ettinger’s self-absorbed hysterics:
The thousands of armed individuals roaming the streets of an American city openly proclaimed their intent not to obey laws they might disagree with. Yet their very whiteness rendered them invisible as a threat: in America, if you are white, you can wear a mask and carry a gun and hang a governor in effigy, and go home quietly at the end of the day, unmolested.” [That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful”, by Talia Lavin, GQ.com, January 22, 2020]
GQ’s clever artists helpfully illustrated Lavin’s anti-white propaganda piece with a swastika fashioned with what appear to AR-15s.
A great analysis of the violence proudly threatened by men descending on Richmond with AR-15s and sniper rifles.The rally had its intended intimidating effect, shutting down the regular business of the capital and sending a legislator to a safe house. https://t.co/emp6b7xmCY — Cindy is a Pro Roe Voter (@clwsteelers) January 26, 2020
And let’s not leave out The New Yorker, which never misses a chance to spit on whites (the 2015 cover at right is a typical example). Not one shot was fired, but the mere sight of white men with guns advertised a “race problem:”
The claim that it was “safe” or “peaceful” was belied by the barely suppressed atmosphere of fear and the poses of intimidation taken by the armed and masked members of militias. The most typical attendee was white, male, and conservative, but a small group of Black Panthers attracted the attention of social-media posters, who were seeking evidence that the gun-rights movement didn’t have a race problem. [A New Backlash To Gun Control Begins In Virginia, by Emily Witt, January 28, 2020]
Message To Conservatism, Inc. This is what they think of us … and you.
So here’s a reality check on race and guns.
82 percent of American gun owners are white, Pew reported in 2013, a figure that has not, obviously, changed [Gun Ownership Trends and Demographics, Pew Research, March 12, 2013].
Last year, Gallup found that 61 percent of Republicans live in a household with firearms while just 28 percent of Democrats do. Fifty-three percent of conservatives live with guns, while 29 percent of liberals do. Half of whites live in a home with a gun, but fewer than a third of blacks or Hispanics [What Percentage of Americans Own Guns?, by Linda Saad, August 14, 2019]. Moral: Gun ownership is almost exclusively white and conservative, which explains why the Left demonizes gun owners and want to disarm them. Armed conservatives could be trouble.
In 2014, Pew asked whether it was more important to “[protect] the right of Americans to own guns or [control] gun ownership.” Unsurprisingly, Hispanics favored gun control by 62 to 36 percent. Black support for curtailing gun rights was even more lopsided: 71-26. Whites, on the other hand, favored gun rights 59-39 [Latinos’ Views on Selected 2014 Ballot Measure Issues, by Mark Hugo Lopez, Jens Manuel Krogstad, Eileen Patten, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, October 16, 2014].
Almost five years ago, UCLA Professor Adam Winkler [Email him] crowed that demographics will overwhelm the NRA’s lobbying power because 80 percent of registered-Asian American voters and most blacks and Hispanics want stricter gun laws [The NRA will fall. It’s inevitable, The Washington Post, October 19, 2015].
Along with those numbers, consider these crime stats:
Throughout Virginia, blacks were 19 percent of the population but 70 percent of the arrests for homicide [Crime in Virginia, 2018]. That means blacks are eight times more likely than non-blacks to be for murder.
In Richmond itself, 95 percent of homicide suspects were black in 2016--down from 97 percent in 2015!! [Regional killings soar past 100, reach highest level in decade, by Mark Bowes, Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 18, 2017].
Those last two points help explain why blacks want gun control: The near totality of their experience with guns is a fatal bullet.
As well, and of particular interest to VDARE.com and immigration patriots, the data on Asians and Hispanics show why mass immigration must be stopped. Third World immigrants are terrified of guns--perhaps, like blacks, for a good reason.
However, white gun owners aren’t inner-city blacks or Third World immigrants. Black and Hispanics have a problem with guns, but that’s no reason to disarm law-abiding whites.
Of course whites should welcome blacks, Hispanics, and anyone else into the pro-2A movement. But gun ownership is a white thing. It’s time to admit that.
Gun control targets law-abiding, conservative whites. The Left knows that, which is why it’s inventing such tyrannies as red-flag laws and national registries. Whites with guns might not lie down for Leftist revolution as The Great Replacement proceeds apace.
Symbolically, the pro2A protestors were greeted by a new statue, Rumors of War, featuring a black man in a hoodie on a rearing horse, described by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as “direct response to the Confederate statues that line Monument Avenue” [Sculpture Created by Kehinde Wiley for VMFA, VFMA.museum].
This bronze effigy that ostentatiously opposes the monuments to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson etc.is a black-power symbol. It’s in-your-face warning--what American whites, not just those descended from Confederates, can expect if they don’t stop cowering in fear of being labeled “racists.” The radical Left will defile and destroy their symbols, dismantle what’s left of their civilization, and repeal the constitutional rights they inherited from their ancestors who created the Historic American Nation.
Finally seeing Kehinde Wiley’s ‘Rumors of War’, and I’m still reeling that this, a more powerful and majestic monument of a regular black dude in Nikes stands just a few blocks away from, and in defiance of, an entire street of confederate army generals. pic.twitter.com/AbAdodoB2h — chris kindred (@itskindred) December 23, 2019
In the frontline of those rights—the right to own guns.
The Left should be afraid. Richmond suggested that White America won’t give up those rights without a fight.
Jack Dalton [Email him] is a recovering conservative in the South.


vdare--2020-01-30--Patrick J. Buchanan: Is Bernie's Hour of Power at Hand?

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States ?
It 's hard to believe but not impossible .
As of today , Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better , if not best , bets for the nomination .
Polls have him running first or second in the first three contests : Iowa on Monday , and then New Hampshire and Nevada .
If Bernie can best main rival Joe Biden in Iowa , he will likely thump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign , built around `` electability , '' could suffer a credibility collapse before he reaches South Carolina , where Joe is banking on his African American base to rescue him if necessary and give him a send-off victory straight into Super Tuesday .
If Sanders can beat Biden two or three times in the first four primaries in February , the last remaining roadblock on Sanders ' path to the nomination could be Mike Bloomberg 's billions .
Hillary Clinton may sneer , `` Nobody likes him , '' but Bernie has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , especially among millennials , and tens of thousands more small-dollar donors than any other Democratic candidate .
He is flush with cash .
He has a radical agenda that appeals to the ideological left and the idealistic young .
The rising star of the party , Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , is campaigning alongside him .
And , say what you will , Sanders is no trimmer or time-server .
He has consistently voted his values and views .
He voted no to Bush 41 's Gulf War , no to Bush 43 's @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no to GATT .
In the '80s , when President Reagan battled the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua , Sanders was on the other side .
But what makes Sanders an appealing candidate for the Democratic nomination may prove poisonous to him as a party nominee in the fall .
For what does Bernie promise ?
Free tuition at public colleges and forgiveness of all student debt .
`` Medicare for All , '' a single-payer government-run health care system that would require a huge hike in middle-class taxes and abolish private health insurance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He would break up the big banks , go after Wall Street , add $ 60 trillion of federal spending in the next decade , and raise income , corporate , capital gains , estate and inheritance taxes .
He would expand the government 's share of the U.S. economy to levels rivaling that of France , the highest in the free world .
Bernie was first to back the Green New Deal and pledges to reach carbon neutrality in 10 years in energy and transportation .
As for our oil , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they `` have evaded taxes , desecrated tribal lands , exploited workers and poisoned communities . ''
How would Sanders deal with the millions of illegal migrants now within the country ?
He 'd welcome them all in .
Bernie has proposed the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection and wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million to 22 million illegal migrants already here .
He would decriminalize border-jumping and give health and welfare benefits to the invaders .
He would decriminalize the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My first executive orders , '' tweeted Bernie last week , `` will be to reverse every single thing President Trump has done to demonize and harm immigrants , including his racist and disgusting Muslim ban . ''
Leaders of the center-left think tank Third Way warn that a Sanders nomination risks a Democratic rout of the magnitude of the 49-state losses of George McGovern in 1972 and of Walter Mondale in 1984 .
Vulnerable Democrats in moderate and swing districts would have to jump ship , abandoning the ticket to survive the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a Sanders-Trump race , super PACs run by moderate Democrats have begun to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads to blunt his momentum in Iowa .
What Socialist Jeremy Corbyn did to Britain 's Labour party—leading it to the worst defeat since the 1930s—Sanders could do to the Democratic Party , write Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of Third Way .
In 2016 , Sanders ran a surprisingly strong race for the nomination , and it was later learned that a supposedly neutral DNC had been in the tank @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the party elite , had collaborated to put the fix in against Bernie .
Yet Sanders supported Clinton that fall .
If , however , Bernie 's last chance at the nomination is aborted by an establishment piling on , party super PACs running attack ads against him , and major media taking time out from trashing Trump to break Sanders , the Democratic Party will have the devil 's time of it bringing Bernie 's backers home in the fall .
Bernie 's believers might just conclude that the real obstacle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neither the radical right nor Donald Trump , but the elites within their own party .
Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers ; his books State of Emergency : The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America , and Suicide of a Superpower : Will America Survive to 2025 ?
are available from Amazon.com .
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “ The Greatest Comeback : How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority .
His latest book , published May , 2018 , is “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
” See Peter Brimelow ’ s review : “ Wheel And Fight ” —Pat Buchanan ’ s Nixon Book Provides Road Map For Trump .

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible.
As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls have him running first or second in the first three contests: Iowa on Monday, and then New Hampshire and Nevada.
If Bernie can best main rival Joe Biden in Iowa, he will likely thump Joe in New Hampshire. Biden's campaign, built around "electability," could suffer a credibility collapse before he reaches South Carolina, where Joe is banking on his African American base to rescue him if necessary and give him a send-off victory straight into Super Tuesday.
If Sanders can beat Biden two or three times in the first four primaries in February, the last remaining roadblock on Sanders' path to the nomination could be Mike Bloomberg's billions.
Hillary Clinton may sneer, "Nobody likes him," but Bernie has a large, dedicated, loyal following, especially among millennials, and tens of thousands more small-dollar donors than any other Democratic candidate.
He is flush with cash. He has a radical agenda that appeals to the ideological left and the idealistic young. The rising star of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is campaigning alongside him.
And, say what you will, Sanders is no trimmer or time-server. He has consistently voted his values and views. He voted no to Bush 41's Gulf War, no to Bush 43's Iraq War, no to NAFTA, no to GATT. In the '80s, when President Reagan battled the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Sanders was on the other side.
But what makes Sanders an appealing candidate for the Democratic nomination may prove poisonous to him as a party nominee in the fall.
For what does Bernie promise?
Free tuition at public colleges and forgiveness of all student debt. "Medicare for All," a single-payer government-run health care system that would require a huge hike in middle-class taxes and abolish private health insurance for the 160 million Americans currently enrolled.
He would break up the big banks, go after Wall Street, add $60 trillion of federal spending in the next decade, and raise income, corporate, capital gains, estate and inheritance taxes.
He would expand the government's share of the U.S. economy to levels rivaling that of France, the highest in the free world.
Bernie was first to back the Green New Deal and pledges to reach carbon neutrality in 10 years in energy and transportation. As for our oil, gas and coal producers, says Sanders, they "have evaded taxes, desecrated tribal lands, exploited workers and poisoned communities."
How would Sanders deal with the millions of illegal migrants now within the country? He'd welcome them all in.
Bernie has proposed the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection and wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million to 22 million illegal migrants already here. He would decriminalize border-jumping and give health and welfare benefits to the invaders.
He would decriminalize the breaching of America's borders.
"My first executive orders," tweeted Bernie last week, "will be to reverse every single thing President Trump has done to demonize and harm immigrants, including his racist and disgusting Muslim ban."
Leaders of the center-left think tank Third Way warn that a Sanders nomination risks a Democratic rout of the magnitude of the 49-state losses of George McGovern in 1972 and of Walter Mondale in 1984.
Vulnerable Democrats in moderate and swing districts would have to jump ship, abandoning the ticket to survive the slaughter.
Fearful of such an outcome to a Sanders-Trump race, super PACs run by moderate Democrats have begun to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads to blunt his momentum in Iowa.
What Socialist Jeremy Corbyn did to Britain's Labour party—leading it to the worst defeat since the 1930s—Sanders could do to the Democratic Party, write Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of Third Way.
In 2016, Sanders ran a surprisingly strong race for the nomination, and it was later learned that a supposedly neutral DNC had been in the tank for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic establishment, the party elite, had collaborated to put the fix in against Bernie.
Yet Sanders supported Clinton that fall. If, however, Bernie's last chance at the nomination is aborted by an establishment piling on, party super PACs running attack ads against him, and major media taking time out from trashing Trump to break Sanders, the Democratic Party will have the devil's time of it bringing Bernie's backers home in the fall.
Bernie's believers might just conclude that the real obstacle to their dream of remaking America is neither the radical right nor Donald Trump, but the elites within their own party.
COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM
Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his books State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, and Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? are available from Amazon.com. Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.
His latest book, published May, 2018, is “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
See Peter Brimelow’s review: “Wheel And Fight”—Pat Buchanan’s Nixon Book Provides Road Map For Trump.


vdare--2020-02-02--Another Caravan Gathers on Mexico’s Southern Border  and "They Come for Revenge"

Yet another caravan is forming on the Guatemalan side of the Mexican border .
( See here for what happened @ @ @ @ @ .
The caravan was organized in San Pedro Sula , Honduras , from whence it @ @ @ @ @ with only 170 persons .
But by means of Whatsapp , the caravan was able @ @ @ @ @ from El Salvador and Nicaragua .
So small groups were arriving until they formed a @ @ @ @ @ of February 2. ''
'They come for revenge ' , added activist Luis Garcia Villagran @ @ @ @ @ of those deported in the first caravan of 2020 return to the border with every @ @ @ @ @ Guard ... `` The caravan plans to enter on Monday the 3rd .

Yet another caravan is forming on the Guatemalan side of the Mexican border. (See here for what happened to the previous caravans).
From el Heraldo de México:
Approximately 1000 Central Americans await more persons on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, to organize a caravan to cross the Suchiate River.
[Mil migrantes se concentran en el río Suchiate; quieren entrar a México ("A Thousand Migrants Concentrate on the suchiate River. They Want to Enter Mexico.") Heraldo de México, February 2, 2020]
The caravan was organized in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, from whence it departed on January 31st, with only 170 persons. But by means of Whatsapp, the caravan was able to bring in more caravanners from El Salvador and Nicaragua. So small groups were arriving until they formed a caravan of 1000, as of February 2.
" 'They come for revenge', added activist Luis Garcia Villagran, who said that many of those deported in the first caravan of 2020 return to the border with every intention of confronting the National Guard... "
The caravan plans to enter on Monday the 3rd.


vdare--2020-02-02--DERB'S JANUARY DIARY: Charles Murray Good On Sex, Bad On Race; Hasidim Having Fun;  ETC. (12 ITEMS)

Face fungus .
In the mysterious way these things come round , it 's been a mustache month .
There was this weird story about Harry Harris , our Ambassador to South Korea .
He has a mustache .
He was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father .
That 's got the South Koreans stirred up .
O-kay .
Given that we have committed our troops—28,000 of them last time I looked—to defending South Korea against an adversary with one-half the South 's population and one-fiftieth its GDP , I think we should tell the Sorks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then of course , John Bolton was in the news .
In my January 31st Radio Derb I did my best to extend some charity towards Bolton , but the temptation to make fun of his extraordinary face fungus proved irresistible : And then , in an idle hour I was browsing in Bryan Ward-Perkins 2005 book The Fall of Rome , which sets out to debunk the revisionist `` late antiquity '' thesis of , amongst others , Peter Brown .
Brown et al .
have argued that the end of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the years ad 250-800 in Europe—that 's `` late antiquity '' —were buzzing with cultural development and vibrant intellectual ferment .
Au contraire , argues Ward-Perkins , the fall of Rome really was a horrible catastrophe and the Dark Ages really were pretty damn dark .
Well , along the way there Ward-Perkins gives us a fascinating three-page digression on mustaches .
The Romans , he says , just did n't have them .
Really ?
I checked with my Cassell 's Latin Dictionary .
There were mustaches around in the period under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of German-ness .
Theodoric the Ostrogoth had a mustache : Ward-Perkins shows him mustached on a gold medallion of the period .
His successor Theodahad likewise .
It was a Germanic thing , an ethnic marker .
Name that virus .
One side effect of the news about corona virus has been on sales of Corona beer .
Apparently large numbers of people think the virus is caught from drinking the beer .
Prophesy what you like about Artificial Intelligence ; I doubt it will ever be a match for Natural Stupidity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ there 's a business opportunity here for virologists : For a Brit of my vintage , Corona is neither a beer nor a virus .
It is , and forever will be , a brand of pop ( =soda ) sold in Britain way back around 1950 , sealed with a complicated wire-and-plug arrangement .
I can still taste their dandelion and burdock ‹sigh› .
Scruton .
Conservative intellectual Sir Roger Scruton left us this month .
I posted a very brief ( because I knew him only very slightly ) tribute at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most luminous I have read came from Jonathan Price in First Things .
Price did know Sir Roger well : '' Misfits '' ?
I should say .
How on earth did they evade the attentions of the Thought Police ?
Well , Scruton himself did n't .
I have only one other personal recollection of Sir Roger , and it is as inconsequential as it could possibly be .
During a brief spell of prosperity in mid-1980s London I patronized a good West End tailor .
Among the items he made for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather loud tweed .
On one of the occasions I was in the same room with Sir Roger Scruton , he was wearing a sports jacket identical with mine .
Did we share the same London tailor ?
I thought it would be impertinent to ask .
Too late now .
Hasidim having fun .
I still do n't have the Jew Thing , so I guess I 'll have to go on putting up with emails from people sneering at me for my cowardly refusal to Name The Jew .
The Jew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Holocaust , the influence of Jewish and Israeli lobbies on our politics—are fascinating to ( a ) Jews and ( b ) antisemites .
To those of us who are neither thing , they are not very interesting .
The Holocaust was a terrible thing that happened in history , which is full of terrible things .
AIPAC and their friends are a nuisance ; but given our constitutional protections for lobbying , I do n't see what can be done about it .
My attitude , if I 'm obliged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As I have written : If it 's really true that 97 percent of the U.S. population is dancing to the tune of the other three percent , the more fool they .
People who tell me this are just practicing another kind of victimology : `` Poor us !
We have no agency !
… '' The hell with that .
Stop dancing .
Occasionally , though , my attention dwells for an hour or so on some aspect of Jewishness .
So it was early this month when the Mrs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movie A Stranger Among Us , in which a New York City cop investigates a murder among the Hasidim .
Yes , yes , I know : The Hasidim are no more representative of Jews at large than the Amish are of Swiss-Germans , and a lot of their fellow Jews do n't like them .
They are an aspect of Jewishness , OK ?
We came away from the movie with the impression that being Hasidic is a lot of fun .
Dancing , singing , fellowship … hey .
It 's @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and not one well-regarded by the critics , but there 's food for thought there .
I dimly remember a straight-journalism article about New York Hasidim by some social scientist , in one of the magazines ( New Yorker ? )
thirty-odd years ago , telling us inter alia that Hasidic women enjoy unusually high levels of sexual satisfaction .
Watching A Stranger Among Us , it 's not hard to believe .
Bolt-hole news .
I 've been speculating for years — more than ten years—that Uruguay might be just the place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things go pear-shaped in the Northern Hemisphere .
Perhaps I should have kept quiet .
Uruguay had a presidential election in November .
The winner , who takes office March 1st , was Luis Lacalle Pou , who is tagged as `` center-right '' in reports I 've read .
My knowledge of Uruguayan politics is neither deep nor wide , although I did have a soft spot for old lefty José Mujica , a sort of honest version of Bernie Sanders , who was president from 2010 to 2015 .
This new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Mujica league for personal character , but he has decided the country needs more people … of the right kind .
He wants to loosen up residency requirements so that persons who buy $ 500,000-worth of real estate and live in the country for 90 days will get permanent residence .
I predict an incoming flood of Chinese .
But hey , at least Lacalle Pou is n't so godawful barking stupid as to propose mass settlement of Somalis .
That msn.com story I linked to , by the way , fortifies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
With the turn of the decade , people are coming forth with predictions .
Psychologist James Thompson 's over at Unz Review are the most minimalist I have so far seen : • Very few people will be using flying taxis , other than those already using conventional flying taxis .
• Very few people will be being driven by autonomous vehicles .
• Most cars will be powered by internal combustion engines .
• Batteries will be only a little better than they are at the moment .
• People all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ healthier .
• Population growth will stabilize , except in Africa .
In particular zones of interest , geneticists Razib Khan and Spencer Wells offer Top 10 human genetics & evolution predictions for the 2020s .
Number Ten snagged my attention .
Perhaps that will do something to turn around the `` Sex Recession '' I 've been reading about for at least a year , since The Atlantic coined that phrase in a December 2018 article .
Here was another piece about this , in the New York Post .
The paradox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sorry … ) on Radio Derb five years ago : Perhaps we could ask the Hasidim about it .
Power of the word .
In the matter of Human Biodiversity ( HBD ) , the event of the month was the January 28th publication of Charles Murray 's new book Human Diversity : The Biology of Gender , Race , and Class .
My review is here , Steve Sailer 's is here .
Content aside , Human Diversity offers an interesting take on some of our current denominative neuroses .
I winced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ title .
What 's wrong with `` sex '' ?
Sure , the social-justice language police do n't like it , but that 's all the more reason to favor it .
Murray trots along amiably for a few pages using `` gender '' in the approved fashion .
Then , on page 19 , he turns Derbish .
Yess-ss-ss !
Murray does n't hold the line as tightly as I 'd like : The word `` gender '' subsequently occurs a hundred-odd times in his book .
A high proportion of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from other writers , or the titles of referenced articles , or the names of things like the UN 's Gender Development Index .
Murray 's heart is definitely in the right place .
He let me down on `` race , '' though .
That follows 200 words of argument making the case for dropping `` race . ''
It 's not a bad case , but there is a real loss to the language here .
`` Population '' ?
My town has a population , but we are not a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distinct meanings into one word .
`` Ancestral population '' ?
Trading in one syllable for seven ?
That 's the kind of thing that bureaucrats and crooked lawyers like to do to make it harder for us to think .
Sorry , but I am going to go on using `` race '' to mean what I have always supposed it meant : a localized , mostly-inbred old population .
Where taboo words survive .
While I 'm grumbling about word fashions , I may as well add this one .
My @ @ @ @ @ @ @ [ at 32m33s here ] about SOAS , the School of Oriental and African Studies in London , of which I nurse fond memories from forty years ago .
The place has , of course , gone to the dogs , like a great deal of academia in Britain .
A listener wondered why they are allowed to go on using the word `` oriental '' in their name .
He had been told by some member of the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police that `` oriental '' is an offensive word .
Yes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too .
The taboo goes way back .
When I published a novel about Chinese people back in 1996 , one reviewer scolded me for using it .
For the names of longstanding institutions , there seems to be some exception to the taboo rules allowed .
We still have the United Negro College Fund and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , although both just identify themselves by their initials wherever possible .
Who today would dare to say `` Negro '' or `` colored '' in any context @ @ @ @ @ @ @ naming of parts .
The things that come up in idle conversation !
Sitting around with two gents of my own generation the other day , the following question was posed : `` How did your father refer to his penis ? ''
My own sire—born 1899 in Lancashire , England—called his `` my old man . ''
There seems to be a universal tendency to identify our most intimate parts with the senior demographic , I suppose because both the parts and the demographic tend to be … wrinkly .
Followers of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ word anus means `` old woman . ''
There are puzzles within puzzles , though .
I have a Chinese friend who , as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution , was sent down to the countryside .
He once told me that a male Chinese peasant refers to his organ of generation as lao er , `` old number two . ''
Me : `` If that 's number two , what 's number one ? ''
TV is for geezers .
Browsing idly on the internet I saw someone saying : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TV . ''
I did n't think about it at the time and did n't bookmark it , but it lodged in my head somehow and kept coming back .
At last I thought I 'd check it out .
We have a 24-year-old living at home with us , so I tackled him .
Does he watch TV ?
He : Nah , not really .
Me : Come on .
I 've seen you watching TV .
He : Eh .
When I 've got nothing to do and there 's @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the movie .
That 's about it .
All right , that 's what quantitative social scientists call an N=1 study .
I have no grounds for claiming that Junior is a typical American twentysomething .
He 's smart and well-socialized though , with four years in the military , now two and a half further years studying business at a respectable university , getting decent grades .
( Thank you , GI Bill ! )
I do n't see him as a behavioral outlier in any way .
He spends more time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but he does n't let it get in the way of his studies , and spends plenty of his free time out of the house with friends .
Asking around among other parents , I believe it 's true .
We 're losing TV .
This is one of those social changes that sneak up on you .
I 've been taking TV for granted all these years .
Now it 's slipping away .
I only just found out .
Muh Latin .
I was throwing some Latin around back there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paid more attention to Latin in school .
How much attention did I pay , actually ?
Quantify , quantify .
My school reports show me having the following rankings in a class of 33 or 34 boys for the twelve semesters of Latin I did , three semesters a year for four years , last semester not ranked : Hard to know what to make of that .
Why was I absent for Spring term 1959 , when I plunged to 20th in my class ?
I have no recollection .
Fall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 19 , looks like an attitude problem .
Ah , adolescence !
As we Latinists say : Intemperans adolescentia effetum corpus tradit senectuti .
On a whim , I asked Santa to bring me the American Mathematical Society page-a-day calendar for 2020 .
Santa accordingly did so .
Now each day I can turn up some mildly-interesting math factlet .
So far , I must say , the thing is rather lame .
It is of course woke as all get-out .
The first actual mathematician featured , on the page for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Although undoubtedly a very smart lady , Kovalevskaya was not a first-rank mathematician .
In Charles Murray 's Human Accomplishment she is ranked 113th .
But hey , she had a vagina !
( Did she , as mathematical folklore suggests , grant access thither to Karl Weierstrass , a much more consequential mathematician ?
We shall never know ; Weierstrass burned all her letters to him after she died . )
For January 13th we get a poem , or what passes for a poem nowadays—no rhyme or meter , of course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ `` 13 January 2009 , '' which you can read for yourself about two-thirds of the way down this American Scientist web page .
Sheesh , guys , if it 's mathematical verse you 're wanting , I am always available .
And then , January 16th : the hyperbolic soccer ball .
Meh .
I would n't say this topic is totally lame .
I 'll allow that it might get a smart highschooler thinking about serious mathematical concepts like negative curvature of a two-dimensional surface .
It 's lame-ish , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are soccer-phobic .
Here 's the idea .
Imagine a soccer ball , or just google `` soccer ball '' to remind you what the thing looks like .
Ignoring the curvature due to inflation , it consists of twelve regular pentagons ( black ) and twenty regular hexagons ( white ) put together in a pleasantly symmetrical way .
Mathematically speaking , it 's a truncated icosahedron .
Here 's how you could make one .
Start with one black regular pentagon and five white regular hexagons having the same edge length @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , edge to edge .
You get a nice floral figure .
There is daylight between adjacent edges of adjacent hexagons , though .
To get rid of the daylight , you could fold up the hexagons until the edges meet , making a shallow bowl .
If you now attach more pentagons and more hexagons in an appropriate pattern , the extended bowl closes in altogether on itself at last .
You end up with a finite solid figure—a soccer ball !
For a hyperbolic soccer ball , instead of starting with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a regular black heptagon ( seven edges ) .
Take seven white regular hexagons having the same edge length and attach them to the heptagon , edge to edge , just as before .
This time there is no daylight between adjacent edges of adjacent hexagons .
In fact there is overlap .
This is not good .
Folding up the hexagons as before does n't help ; the overlap just gets worse .
If your model is made from some substance that bends—paper is the usual thing—you can none the less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ warping the polygons .
This strikes me as cheating .
This in fact is where I start muttering `` lame … lame … '' under my breath .
You do get an object of sorts , though ; and some people , although obviously not me , think it 's cool .
And then , as before , you can add more heptagons and hexagons in a mathematically suitable way , until … Until what ?
Does this thing ever close up into a finite solid object ?
Intuition tells me that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had the patience to think the matter through rigorously .
If I 'm right , the hyperbolic soccer ball is just an uneven surface stretching away to infinity in all directions .
Try playing soccer with that !

Face fungus. In the mysterious way these things come round, it's been a mustache month.
There was this weird story about Harry Harris, our Ambassador to South Korea. He has a mustache. He was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father. That's got the South Koreans stirred up.
The gist of the criticism is that with the mustache, Harris resembles the reviled Japanese leaders who ruled the Korean Peninsula with an iron fist during the Japanese occupation.
Some of Japan's most prominent wartime leaders—like Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister who was later executed by a postwar tribunal, and Emperor Hirohito—had mustaches.
O-kay. Given that we have committed our troops—28,000 of them last time I looked—to defending South Korea against an adversary with one-half the South's population and one-fiftieth its GDP, I think we should tell the Sorks where to stick their criticism.
And then of course, John Bolton was in the news. In my January 31st Radio Derb I did my best to extend some charity towards Bolton, but the temptation to make fun of his extraordinary face fungus proved irresistible:
Still, I'm sure a case can be made for him. No doubt he's a good husband and father, kind to small animals. Heck, I bet he's a jolly companion down at the pub over pints of ale, with a fund of witty anecdotes to charm and amuse you as you try not to watch him suck the ale-froth from his mustache. [At 4m58s here.]
And then, in an idle hour I was browsing in Bryan Ward-Perkins 2005 book The Fall of Rome, which sets out to debunk the revisionist "late antiquity" thesis of, amongst others, Peter Brown.
Brown et al. have argued that the end of the Roman Empire was no big deal and the years ad 250-800 in Europe—that's "late antiquity"—were buzzing with cultural development and vibrant intellectual ferment. Au contraire, argues Ward-Perkins, the fall of Rome really was a horrible catastrophe and the Dark Ages really were pretty damn dark.
Well, along the way there Ward-Perkins gives us a fascinating three-page digression on mustaches. The Romans, he says, just didn't have them.
There is no representation that I know of, from any century, that shows a Roman, or indeed a Greek, with a moustache (unless it is accompanied by a beard); and there is not even a word in the Latin language for "moustache."
Really? I checked with my Cassell's Latin Dictionary.
moustache, render by the phrase labrum superius non radere, not to shave the upper lip (Caes.)
There were mustaches around in the period under question, but they were a mark of German-ness. Theodoric the Ostrogoth had a mustache: Ward-Perkins shows him mustached on a gold medallion of the period. His successor Theodahad likewise. It was a Germanic thing, an ethnic marker.
(I have used the American spelling there except when copying from British authors. The pronunciations are different, too: "MUS-tash" in America, "mus-TOSH" in the Old Country.)
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Name that virus. One side effect of the news about corona virus has been on sales of Corona beer. Apparently large numbers of people think the virus is caught from drinking the beer. Prophesy what you like about Artificial Intelligence; I doubt it will ever be a match for Natural Stupidity.
At least one wag has suggested that there's a business opportunity here for virologists:
Whoever names the next virus should blackmail valuable brands into not naming [it] after them and use funds to finance a cure.
For a Brit of my vintage, Corona is neither a beer nor a virus. It is, and forever will be, a brand of pop (=soda) sold in Britain way back around 1950, sealed with a complicated wire-and-plug arrangement. I can still taste their dandelion and burdock ‹sigh›.
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Scruton. Conservative intellectual Sir Roger Scruton left us this month. I posted a very brief (because I knew him only very slightly) tribute at VDARE.com.
Of other tributes, the most luminous I have read came from Jonathan Price in First Things. Price did know Sir Roger well:
Sir Roger was my teacher, mentor, and friend. For a decade, beginning in 2010 and ending only when he became ill, I attended his gatherings of young philosophers: twice-termly symposia in his rooms in Oxford or his apartment in London. One of us would present a paper, and then Roger and the others would criticize it, assisted by bottles of vintage French wine. He called us his "Refugees": a collection of misfits in modern philosophy departments; lovers of culture, place, history, beauty, and time; lost in late modernity. [Remembering Sir Roger by Jonathan Price; First Things, January 17th 2020.]
"Misfits"? I should say. How on earth did they evade the attentions of the Thought Police? Well, Scruton himself didn't.
I have only one other personal recollection of Sir Roger, and it is as inconsequential as it could possibly be.
During a brief spell of prosperity in mid-1980s London I patronized a good West End tailor. Among the items he made for me was a sports jacket in a rather loud tweed.
("Sports" in this context means shooting sports. A loud jacket reduced your chances of being shot in error, like the unfortunate beater in that James Mason movie.)
On one of the occasions I was in the same room with Sir Roger Scruton, he was wearing a sports jacket identical with mine. Did we share the same London tailor? I thought it would be impertinent to ask. Too late now.
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Hasidim having fun. I still don't have the Jew Thing, so I guess I'll have to go on putting up with emails from people sneering at me for my cowardly refusal to Name The Jew.
The Jew Thing and issues arising from it—the quantification of the Holocaust, the influence of Jewish and Israeli lobbies on our politics—are fascinating to (a) Jews and (b) antisemites. To those of us who are neither thing, they are not very interesting. The Holocaust was a terrible thing that happened in history, which is full of terrible things. AIPAC and their friends are a nuisance; but given our constitutional protections for lobbying, I don't see what can be done about it.
My attitude, if I'm obliged to have one, is fundamentally Darwinian. As I have written: If it's really true that 97 percent of the U.S. population is dancing to the tune of the other three percent, the more fool they. People who tell me this are just practicing another kind of victimology: "Poor us! We have no agency! …" The hell with that. Stop dancing.
Occasionally, though, my attention dwells for an hour or so on some aspect of Jewishness. So it was early this month when the Mrs and I watched that 1992 Melanie Griffith movie A Stranger Among Us, in which a New York City cop investigates a murder among the Hasidim. Yes, yes, I know: The Hasidim are no more representative of Jews at large than the Amish are of Swiss-Germans, and a lot of their fellow Jews don't like them. They are an aspect of Jewishness, OK?
We came away from the movie with the impression that being Hasidic is a lot of fun. Dancing, singing, fellowship … hey. It's only a movie, of course, and not one well-regarded by the critics, but there's food for thought there.
I dimly remember a straight-journalism article about New York Hasidim by some social scientist, in one of the magazines (New Yorker?) thirty-odd years ago, telling us inter alia that Hasidic women enjoy unusually high levels of sexual satisfaction. Watching A Stranger Among Us, it's not hard to believe.
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Bolt-hole news. I've been speculating for years — more than ten years—that Uruguay might be just the place as a bolt-hole to flee to if things go pear-shaped in the Northern Hemisphere.
Perhaps I should have kept quiet. Uruguay had a presidential election in November. The winner, who takes office March 1st, was Luis Lacalle Pou, who is tagged as "center-right" in reports I've read. My knowledge of Uruguayan politics is neither deep nor wide, although I did have a soft spot for old lefty José Mujica, a sort of honest version of Bernie Sanders, who was president from 2010 to 2015.
All through his public career Mujica has lived very frugally. Elected president, he would not move to the presidential palace, preferring to stay on the small farm he runs with his wife, who he seems to have lived with for ever. As president, he continued driving his beaten-up 1987 Volkswagen beetle, and donated most of his salary to left-wing charities. [Radio Derb, 8/24/2018.]
This new chap doesn't seem to be in the Mujica league for personal character, but he has decided the country needs more people … of the right kind. He wants to loosen up residency requirements so that persons who buy $500,000-worth of real estate and live in the country for 90 days will get permanent residence.
I predict an incoming flood of Chinese. But hey, at least Lacalle Pou isn't so godawful barking stupid as to propose mass settlement of Somalis.
That msn.com story I linked to, by the way, fortifies my bolt-hole argument.
Uruguay has a lot to sell. Nestled between Argentina and Brazil, it's one of South America's wealthiest nations. The coast is lined with stunning beaches, the countryside dotted with picturesque farms and vineyards.
(For those who like trivia questions: I'm pretty sure that of all the nations on Earth, Uruguay has the southernmost northernmost point. If you say this, someone will try to counter with New Zealand; but New Zealand owns some remote islands that are further north than northernmost Uruguay. Quick now: Which nation has the northernmost southernmost point?)
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The sex recession. With the turn of the decade, people are coming forth with predictions. Psychologist James Thompson's over at Unz Review are the most minimalist I have so far seen:
Very few people will be using flying taxis, other than those already using conventional flying taxis.
Very few people will be being driven by autonomous vehicles.
Most cars will be powered by internal combustion engines.
Batteries will be only a little better than they are at the moment.
People all over the world will be richer and healthier.
Population growth will stabilize, except in Africa.
In particular zones of interest, geneticists Razib Khan and Spencer Wells offer Top 10 human genetics & evolution predictions for the 2020s. Number Ten snagged my attention.
There will be "dating apps" or "match-making" apps that use DNA.
Perhaps that will do something to turn around the "Sex Recession" I've been reading about for at least a year, since The Atlantic coined that phrase in a December 2018 article.
Here was another piece about this, in the New York Post.
According to the latest data by the General Social Survey, men between the ages of 18 and 29 are having less sex than ever; the number of abstinent men has nearly tripled in the last decade, from 10 percent in 2008 to 28 percent last year. [Why today's young men are terrified of sex, by Eric Spitznagel; New York Post, January 11 2020.]
The paradox here is the one I nailed (sorry …) on Radio Derb five years ago:
Human beings today are much more sexually attractive than they used to be, thanks to much improved standards of health, hygiene, and grooming; but this seems not to have led to any actual increase in coitus.
A hundred years ago there was no Brazilian waxing, most people got enough hot water to bathe in only once a week or less, skin diseases were rampant, and there was no proper detergent to get clothes clean: yet not the fitchew nor the soiléd horse went to't with a more riotous appetite than our hairy, dirty, smelly, pimply forebears. [Fifty shades of paradox; Radio Derb, February 14th 2015.]
Perhaps we could ask the Hasidim about it.
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Power of the word. In the matter of Human Biodiversity (HBD), the event of the month was the January 28th publication of Charles Murray's new book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. My review is here, Steve Sailer's is here.
Content aside, Human Diversity offers an interesting take on some of our current denominative neuroses.
I winced at that "gender" in the title. What's wrong with "sex"? Sure, the social-justice language police don't like it, but that's all the more reason to favor it.
Murray trots along amiably for a few pages using "gender" in the approved fashion. Then, on page 19, he turns Derbish.
From now on I will usually refer to "sex differences" instead of "gender differences." "Gender" was popularized in the 1960s to designate socially constructed differences. But it turns out that there is no clear division between biological and socially constructed differences and no point in trying to pretend otherwise—which is what the widespread use of "gender" amounts to. In the technical literature, many scholars who write on these topics have resumed the use of "sex" to apply to all kinds of differences between males and females. So do I.
Yess-ss-ss! Murray doesn't hold the line as tightly as I'd like: The word "gender" subsequently occurs a hundred-odd times in his book. A high proportion of those occurrences, though, are in quotes from other writers, or the titles of referenced articles, or the names of things like the UN's Gender Development Index. Murray's heart is definitely in the right place.
He let me down on "race," though.
The combination of historical and scientific reasons makes a compelling case that the word race has outlived its usefulness when discussing genetics. That's why I adopt contemporary practice in the technical literature, which uses ancestral population or simply population instead of race or ethnicity, throughout the rest of Part II. [Page 135.]
That follows 200 words of argument making the case for dropping "race." It's not a bad case, but there is a real loss to the language here. "Population"? My town has a population, but we are not a race. You've just collapsed two distinct meanings into one word. "Ancestral population"? Trading in one syllable for seven? That's the kind of thing that bureaucrats and crooked lawyers like to do to make it harder for us to think.
Sorry, but I am going to go on using "race" to mean what I have always supposed it meant: a localized, mostly-inbred old population.
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Where taboo words survive. While I'm grumbling about word fashions, I may as well add this one.
My January 31st Radio Derb included an item [at 32m33s here] about SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, of which I nurse fond memories from forty years ago. The place has, of course, gone to the dogs, like a great deal of academia in Britain.
A listener wondered why they are allowed to go on using the word "oriental" in their name. He had been told by some member of the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police that "oriental" is an offensive word.
Yes, I've been told that, too. The taboo goes way back. When I published a novel about Chinese people back in 1996, one reviewer scolded me for using it.
For the names of longstanding institutions, there seems to be some exception to the taboo rules allowed. We still have the United Negro College Fund and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although both just identify themselves by their initials wherever possible. Who today would dare to say "Negro" or "colored" in any context other than those organization names?
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The naming of parts. The things that come up in idle conversation! Sitting around with two gents of my own generation the other day, the following question was posed: "How did your father refer to his penis?" My own sire—born 1899 in Lancashire, England—called his "my old man."
There seems to be a universal tendency to identify our most intimate parts with the senior demographic, I suppose because both the parts and the demographic tend to be … wrinkly. Followers of the philosopher Schopenhauer know that the Latin word anus means "old woman."
There are puzzles within puzzles, though. I have a Chinese friend who, as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, was sent down to the countryside. He once told me that a male Chinese peasant refers to his organ of generation as lao er, "old number two."
Me: "If that's number two, what's number one?"
He: "I dunno. His head, I guess."
I guess so.
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TV is for geezers. Browsing idly on the internet I saw someone saying: "Americans under thirty don't watch TV." I didn't think about it at the time and didn't bookmark it, but it lodged in my head somehow and kept coming back.
At last I thought I'd check it out. We have a 24-year-old living at home with us, so I tackled him. Does he watch TV?
He: Nah, not really.
Me: Come on. I've seen you watching TV.
He: Eh. When I've got nothing to do and there's a movie on, I'll watch the movie. That's about it.
Me: Sitcoms? Current affairs? Late night comics? News programs? Sports?
He: Nah.
All right, that's what quantitative social scientists call an N=1 study. I have no grounds for claiming that Junior is a typical American twentysomething.
He's smart and well-socialized though, with four years in the military, now two and a half further years studying business at a respectable university, getting decent grades. (Thank you, GI Bill!) I don't see him as a behavioral outlier in any way. He spends more time than I'd like playing computer games, but he doesn't let it get in the way of his studies, and spends plenty of his free time out of the house with friends.
Asking around among other parents, I believe it's true. We're losing TV.
This is one of those social changes that sneak up on you. I've been taking TV for granted all these years. Now it's slipping away. I only just found out.
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Muh Latin. I was throwing some Latin around back there. Last month I regretted not having paid more attention to Latin in school. How much attention did I pay, actually? Quantify, quantify.
My school reports show me having the following rankings in a class of 33 or 34 boys for the twelve semesters of Latin I did, three semesters a year for four years, last semester not ranked:
3, 1, 1; 2, 3, 1; 1, 20, 1; 19, 6, ?
Hard to know what to make of that. Why was I absent for Spring term 1959, when I plunged to 20th in my class? I have no recollection.
Fall of that year, when I dropped to 19, looks like an attitude problem. Ah, adolescence! As we Latinists say: Intemperans adolescentia effetum corpus tradit senectuti.
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Math Corner.
[Note: My solution to the second part of the December brainteaser, as originally posted, was wrong. There's a correction at the end of this link. Sorry sorry.]
On a whim, I asked Santa to bring me the American Mathematical Society page-a-day calendar for 2020. Santa accordingly did so. Now each day I can turn up some mildly-interesting math factlet.
So far, I must say, the thing is rather lame. It is of course woke as all get-out. The first actual mathematician featured, on the page for January 15th, is Sofia Kovalevskaya. Although undoubtedly a very smart lady, Kovalevskaya was not a first-rank mathematician. In Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment she is ranked 113th. But hey, she had a vagina! (Did she, as mathematical folklore suggests, grant access thither to Karl Weierstrass, a much more consequential mathematician? We shall never know; Weierstrass burned all her letters to him after she died.)
For January 13th we get a poem, or what passes for a poem nowadays—no rhyme or meter, of course. It is actually Sarah Glaz's "13 January 2009," which you can read for yourself about two-thirds of the way down this American Scientist web page. Sheesh, guys, if it's mathematical verse you're wanting, I am always available.
And then, January 16th: the hyperbolic soccer ball. Meh.
I wouldn't say this topic is totally lame. I'll allow that it might get a smart highschooler thinking about serious mathematical concepts like negative curvature of a two-dimensional surface. It's lame-ish, though, especially to those of us who are soccer-phobic.
Here's the idea. Imagine a soccer ball, or just google "soccer ball" to remind you what the thing looks like. Ignoring the curvature due to inflation, it consists of twelve regular pentagons (black) and twenty regular hexagons (white) put together in a pleasantly symmetrical way. Mathematically speaking, it's a truncated icosahedron.
Here's how you could make one. Start with one black regular pentagon and five white regular hexagons having the same edge length. Attach the hexagons to the pentagons, edge to edge. You get a nice floral figure. There is daylight between adjacent edges of adjacent hexagons, though. To get rid of the daylight, you could fold up the hexagons until the edges meet, making a shallow bowl.
If you now attach more pentagons and more hexagons in an appropriate pattern, the extended bowl closes in altogether on itself at last. You end up with a finite solid figure—a soccer ball!
For a hyperbolic soccer ball, instead of starting with a regular black pentagon, you start with a regular black heptagon (seven edges). Take seven white regular hexagons having the same edge length and attach them to the heptagon, edge to edge, just as before.
This time there is no daylight between adjacent edges of adjacent hexagons. In fact there is overlap.
This is not good. Folding up the hexagons as before doesn't help; the overlap just gets worse.
If your model is made from some substance that bends—paper is the usual thing—you can none the less join adjacent edges of adjacent hexagons by warping the polygons. This strikes me as cheating. This in fact is where I start muttering "lame … lame …" under my breath.
You do get an object of sorts, though; and some people, although obviously not me, think it's cool.
And then, as before, you can add more heptagons and hexagons in a mathematically suitable way, until …
Until what? Does this thing ever close up into a finite solid object? Intuition tells me that it doesn't, although I've never had the patience to think the matter through rigorously.
If I'm right, the hyperbolic soccer ball is just an uneven surface stretching away to infinity in all directions. Try playing soccer with that!
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