Philip II, Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I

Following in an ancient tradition that includes Pope Sixtus V, backer of the Spanish Armada of 1588, the Pope has picked a fight with a nationalist leader of the Anglosphere over borders and national autonomy. From the New York Times:

Pope Francis Suggests Donald Trump Is ‘Not Christian’
By JIM YARDLEY FEB. 18, 2016

ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRLINER — Inserting himself into the Republican presidential race, Pope Francis on Wednesday suggested that Donald J. Trump “is not Christian” because of the harshness of his campaign promises to deport more immigrants and force Mexico to pay for a wall along the border.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said when a reporter asked him about Mr. Trump on the papal airliner as he returned to Rome after his six-day visit to Mexico.

Previous Anglosphere nationalists declared to be not a Christian by popes include Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

George Soros writes in MarketWatch:

Opinion: George Soros: The EU ought to borrow money to pay for ‘surge funding’ for refugees

Published: Feb 18, 2016 9:52 a.m. ET

By GEORGE SOROS

MUNICH (Project Syndicate) — Important progress was made at the donors’ conference for Syrian refugees convened in London on Feb. 4. But much more remains to be done.

The international community is still vastly underestimating what is needed to support refugees, both inside and outside the borders of the European Union. To deal with the refugee crisis, while putting the EU’s largely unused AAA borrowing capacity to better use, requires a paradigm shift.

Rather than scraping together insufficient funds year after year, it is time to engage in “surge funding.” Spending a large amount of money up front would be far more effective than spending the same amount over several years. Front-loading the spending would allow us to address the most dangerous consequences of the crisis — including anti-immigrant sentiment in receiving countries and despondency and marginalization among refugees — more effectively. Making large initial investments would help tip the economic, political, and social dynamics away from xenophobia and disaffection, and toward constructive outcomes that benefit refugees and the recipient countries alike.

Soros has also been saying that refugees are part of Putin’s plot to destroy Europe. So, is Soro’s migrant surge proposal part of Putin’s diabolical plot? This stuff is getting too Master Strategisty for me to follow.

Female Presidential Candidate Who Was United States Senator, Secretary Of State Told To Be More Inspiring

NEW YORK—Citing her lackluster support among young voters, campaign consultants to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner who has served as both a U.S. senator and secretary of state, reportedly instructed the candidate this week to be more inspiring. “Right now, voters are looking for a candidate who stands for real societal change, someone who can stir something inside them,” said media advisor Jim Margolis, urging the woman—who overcame entrenched societal biases to build a successful legal career, became the first female senator elected in the state of New York, oversaw the Department of State during a period of widespread international tumult, and, if elected, would be the first female president in American history—to appear more uplifting to voters. “Many young people have completely lost faith in the political process, and they want to believe that true progress is actually possible. They want someone who embodies progressive ideals.” Margolis added that Clinton was too much a part of the establishment she spent decades breaking down barriers to enter.

Now owned by Clinton donor Haim Saban’s Univision, The Onion’s upcoming headlines will include:

Stop Your Insensitive Giggling: Hillary Really Is Cool

There’s Nothing Funny Whatsoever about Bill Clinton’s Wife Running for President to Smash Patriarchy

Hillary Has Sensible Ideas about the Economy and the Middle East and You Should Consider Voting for Her

Everybody Else Is Going to Vote for Hillary, So Why Don’t You?

In the NYT, an NPR host writes:

Donald Trump’s Secret? Channelling Andrew Jackson
By STEVE INSKEEP FEB. 17, 2016 COMMENT

SINCE Donald J. Trump shot to the top of Republican polls last fall, pundits have tried to make sense of his popularity. He has been described as a modern-day product of reality-TV narcissism, or the second coming of European fascism. But as he cruises into the South Carolina primary after beating his rivals by double digits in New Hampshire, it’s clear that neither idea quite explains his strength.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric resonates with a particular American political tradition. Voters may not know the details of that tradition, but they feel it viscerally when a politician taps into it. Mr. Trump has done just that by emulating a classic model of American democratic leadership.

A clue as to just which leadership model can be found on a map. While Trump fans are spread across the country, they are heavily concentrated in and near the Appalachian states — from Mississippi and Alabama all the way to western Pennsylvania and New York. The northwest corner of South Carolina is one of the most pro-Trump parts of the country. …

Is this true? I don’t have much sense of the geographical concentration of Trump supporters. Ethnically, Trump is German on his father’s side and Scottish Highlander (not Scots-Irish) on his mother’s side.

John McCain did well in Scots-Irish districts in 2008, but he was not seen as much of a threat by the Establishment because he is an Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World activist.

What could the voters of such a region possibly see in a loud and self-interested New York real estate tycoon? In some respects, he is a type of leader Appalachia has seen before. Students of history will recognize that Mr. Trump is a Jackson man.

Consciously or not, Mr. Trump’s campaign echoes the style of Andrew Jackson, and the states where Mr. Trump is strongest are the ones that most consistently favored Jackson during his three runs for the White House.

What Mr. Trump borrows from Jackson is not an issue, but a way of thinking about the world. Mr. Trump promises to fix his supporters’ problems, no matter who else is hurt. He’s a wealthy celebrity always ready for a fight, a superpatriot who says he will make America great again. He vows to attack government corruption and defend the common man. All this could be said of Jackson. …

Needless to say, Jackson and his Democratic Party enforced a certain idea of America — an America for white people. Jackson was personally cordial to people of other races, but their rights did not concern him. When white Southerners grew tired of Indian nations in their midst, Jackson forced them into internal exile in the West. He could have defended this policy using a Trump phrase: “We either have a country or we don’t.”

Mr. Trump’s proposal for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States until the government “can figure out what is going on” has a brutal simplicity that echoes Jackson. So does his promise to force Mexico to pay for a border wall. The people Mr. Trump favors are to be protected from all harm. Nobody else matters. …

Could Mr. Trump ride the Jackson vote to ultimate victory? Not unless he adds to it. Jackson’s old coalition no longer dominates the electorate. Nonwhite voters are growing in numbers, and many white voters have told pollsters they would be embarrassed by Mr. Trump as president. Mr. Trump would have to reckon with one of Andrew Jackson’s cherished principles: In America, the majority rules. Assembling a majority today is not the same as it used to be.

Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and the author of “Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab.”

Like I said in Taki’s recently in “Alexander Hamilton, Honorary Nonwhite” and “The Ultimate Minority Right,” there have been four stages of evolution of political ideology in the West over the last 400-500 years:

(1) hereditary right

(2) majority rule

(3) minority right

(4) the inalienable right of minorities to become the majority (while maintaining all the privileges of a modern minority)

ALEXANDRIA, VA: Hoping to head off awkward small talk with concerned Republican luminaries at Saturday’s funeral of long-time colleague Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas passed up dessert Wednesday, vowing to “hit the gym” at least twice before the weekend. “Oh, man, if I don’t lose five pounds right now,” Thomas grimaced, “Mitch McConnell will keep bringing up Jeb’s paleo diet, and Cruz will slip me the email of that personal trainer who only works with members of the Federalist Society.” The 67-year-old Justice asked his wife Virginia for the third time this week, “Are you sure it’s not socially acceptable to wear my black robes to a funeral?”

Donald Trump is a member of the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame for various forays, including bodyslamming WWE owner Vince McMahon at WrestleMania 23 in 2007. Whether this is appropriately Presidential is something for the voters to decide.

What I haven’t seen pointed out is that Trump’s seemingly novel methods are actually following in the footsteps of some of the paths blazed out by Justin Trudeau, who was elected Prime Minister of Canada last fall.

Trudeau’s path to power included celebrity, bad language, Twitter traffic, and the single most important event in his rise, a bruising 3-round triumph in a widely-publicized charity boxing match over a Conservative politician in 2012.

The video above shows the third round in which the taller Trudeau (in red), then 40, pummeled Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau (in blue), the former national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. (Brazeau has since been suspended from Canada’s Senate for various domestic violence and drug-related charges and is now the day manager at an Ottawa strip club.) Note Trudeau’s insolent stroll back to the neutral corner while the ref tries to assess how much neurological damage he’s done to his opponent.

From the NYT Magazine in 2015:

The younger Trudeau’s road to victory as prime minister truly began on a Saturday night in 2012 in a boxing ring in Ottawa. At the time, the Liberal Party was leaderless and lost, after a devastating defeat in the election of 2011 reduced its seats in Parliament to only 34, roughly one-tenth of the total at the time. … Aiming to change the political dynamic, Trudeau literally picked a fight. In what looked like a publicity stunt, he challenged a 37-year-old Conservative senator named Patrick Brazeau, known as Brass Knuckles, to three rounds of boxing to raise money for cancer research.

Everyone expected Trudeau to receive a royal beating, including his wife. Brazeau had a black belt in karate and a military background, and he grew up on hardscrabble First Nations reservations; his bar brawler’s physique, tattoos and trash-talking bravado made him the three-to-one favorite by fight night.

… The bout was stopped in the third round, saving Brazeau the indignity of hitting the canvas.

The commentator recognized the importance of the victory. ‘‘I can hear it already,’’ he sighed. ‘‘Trudeau for leader.’’

The Trudeau-Trump analogies haven’t been widely picked up on for reasons of:

- ideology (Trudeau is a Liberal);

- looks (Trudeau is a pretty boy who inherited the looks of his mom Margaret, one of the most famous model-groupies of the 1970s, rather than his dad, the saturnine prime minister Pierre);

- and American stereotypes of Canadians as mild. (In reality, Canadians love punching each other in the head: “I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out” — Rodney Dangerfield).

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

The Replication Crisis and the Repetition Crisis
by Steve Sailer
February 17, 2016

With data becoming ever more abundant, this should be the golden age of the social sciences. And yet they seem to be suffering two mirror-image nervous breakdowns—the Replication Crisis and the Repetition Crisis.

… One cause of the Replication Crisis has been that analysts grant themselves excessive post hoc liberties to crunch the numbers however many ways it takes to find something—anything—that is “statistically significant” (which isn’t the same as actually significant) and thus qualifies as a paper for publish-or-perish purposes. Hence, social scientists seem to be coming up with a surplus of implausible junk science findings on trivial topics, such as “priming” (the contemporary version of subliminal advertising), which then routinely fail to replicate.

In contrast, in what I’ll dub the Repetition Crisis (a.k.a. the Explanation Crisis), academics hamstring the interest and usefulness of their findings by ruling out ahead of time any explanatory factors other than the same tiny number of politically correct concepts that were exhausted decades ago.

The social sciences in 2016: Too little replication of exciting new findings, too much repetition of tired old rationalizations.

Read the whole thing there.

Speaking of the Repetition Crisis, from MedicalResearch.com:

Should Human Genetics Focus on Ancestry Rather Than Race?
Posted on February 15, 2016

Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH Chair & Associate Professor Drexel University School of Public Health

Medical Research: What is the background for this study?

Dr. Yudell: We came together as a group of scholars from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to address what we believe is a long-standing challenge: how to improve the study of human genetic diversity without recapitulating the controversial and problematic concept of race.

“Problematic” …

We believe that the cross-disciplinary focus of our work—an examination of the historical, biological, and sociological aspects of the race concept—can shed new light on the long-standing debate about the use of the race concept in genetics research. We believe modern genetics remains stuck in a paradox: that on the one hand race is a tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, and on the other hand race is believed three main concerns to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. …

Can the race concept in genetics elucidate the relationship between humans and their evolutionary history, between humans and their health? In the wake of the human genome project the answer seemed to be a pretty resounding “no.” In 2004, for example, Francis Collins, then head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and now Director of the National Institutes of Health called race a “flawed” and “weak” concept and argued that science needed to move beyond race. Yet, as our paper highlights, the use of race persist in genetics, despite voices like Collins, like Craig Venter—leaders in the field of genomics-who have called on the field to move beyond it. They, of course, were not the first to do, but we hope they are among the last. …

A lot of genome data has been collected since then.

Medical Research: What are the main concerns about using race as a factor in medical research?

Dr. Yudell: We have three main concerns about using race as a factor in biomedical research.

1) First, phylogenetic and population genetic methods do not support the classification of humans into discrete races;

2) Racial assumptions are not good biological guideposts. This is true for two reasons: first, races are genetically heterogeneous and they lack clear-cut genetic boundaries. And, two, because of this, using race as a proxy to make clinical predictions is about probability. Of course medicine can be about best guesses. But are we serving patients well if medical decisions are made because a patient identifies him or herself as part of a certain racial group OR is identified by a healthcare practitioner as belonging to a specific race? What if, for example, the probability is that if you are white you are 90% likely to have a beneficial or at least non-harmful reaction to a particular drug? That sounds pretty good. But what if you are that 1 in 10 that is likely to have a harmful reaction. That doesn’t sound so good, and that is the problem with most race-based predictions. They are best guesses for an individual. We are much better off looking directly at an individual’s genes; and

3) We do not believe that a variable that is so mired in both historical and contemporary controversy has a place in modern genetics. Race has both scientific and social meanings that are impossible to tease apart, and we worry that using such a concept in modern genetics does not serve the field well. An example of this is the concern many had in the wake of Nicolas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, which made wrongheaded claims about the genetic basis of social differences between races. Wade’s book forced a large group of leading geneticists to publicly refute the idea that genetics (and their work) supported such ideas.

Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?

Dr. Yudell: It is time to find a better way to study human genetic diversity. The use of racial assumptions are problematic at best and harmful at worst as we seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between our genes and our health with the goal of determining the best course of medical treatments. Sickle-cell anemia’s identification as a Black or African disease is a good example of this. Sickle-cell is not, of course, an African-American or African disease, but a disease that runs in higher frequencies in a number of populations globally, including in African-American and African populations. But these are not racial differences. Sickle-cell is a disease that is an evolutionary adaptation to exposure to the disease malaria. You find the sickle cell trait in higher frequencies in regions of Africa because populations there, as they did in other parts of the world, adapted to resist malaria. Sickle-cell appears in other regions of the globe, in other human populations, including populations in the Mediterranean basin, on the Arabian Peninsula, and on the Indian subcontinent where these populations also adapted to resist malaria. So sickle-cell disease is not an African disease and thinking of it in this way can wrongfully associate a particular disease with a particular race and may lead us to ignore sickle-cell symptoms in patients who are not believed to be at risk for it.

Sure, but, as Damon Runyon said, that’s the way to bet, or to structure your checklist priorities when confronted with a mysteriously sick child. Here are the CDC’s bullet points on Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) and Sickle Cell Trait (SCT):

SCD affects 90,000 to 100,000 Americans.
SCD occurs among about 1 out of every 500 Black or African-American births.
SCD occurs among about 1 out of every 36,000 Hispanic-American births.
SCT occurs among about 1 in 12 Blacks or African Americans.

The CDC doesn’t bother giving a fraction for SCD for non-Hispanic white births because it’s so rare. It could happen, but it’s very rare.

Medical Research: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Dr. Yudell: We make two proposals in our paper. The first: we call upon journals who publish in areas of research related to human genetics to encourage the use of alternative variables to study human genetic diversity and to rationalize their use. Journals should require scientists publishing in their pages to clearly define how they are using such variables in order to allow scientists to understand and interpret data across studies and would help avoid confusing, inconsistent, and contradictory usage of such terms. This has been tried before, but only in piecemeal fashion. We also recognize that the use of terms changes nothing if the underlying racial thinking remains the same. But we believe that language matters and that the scientific language of race has a considerable influence on how the public understands human diversity.

We prefer concepts like ancestry instead of race in human studies and it is important to distinguish the two. Ancestry is a process-based concept that helps us understand the admixing events that lead to one’s existence. Ancestry is also a statement about an individual’s relationship to other individuals in their genealogical history, thus is a very personal understanding of one’s genomic heritage. Race, on the other hand, is a pattern-based concept that has led scientists and laypersons alike to draw conclusions about hierarchical organization of humans, connecting an individual to a larger preconceived geographically circumscribed or socially constructed group.

Or maybe people should be told that race is actually about ancestry? Visual clues are used to guess ancestry. Physical anthropologists got very good by the second half of the 20th Century at using phenotype to guess genotype, which is why the genome analyses of the 21st Century have done so little to rewrite our understanding of the racial distributions of humanity.

Second, we are calling upon the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene an interdisciplinary panel of experts to help the field improve the study of human genetic diversity. As an honest broker in science policy, the Academies can play a constructive role in bringing together natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities to find ways to study human genetic diversity that does not recapitulate the confusion and potential harm that comes with using the race concept.

Sorry, but racial categories used in American medical research follow racial categories used by the U.S. government. They are not some ancient pre-scientific infliction of White Privilege, they are categories currently under the control of the Obama Administration.

The Race, History, Evolution Notes blog points out this earlier contribution by Yudell:

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RACE CONCEPT
By Michael Yudell

At the dawn of the 21st century, the idea of race – the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with their own physical, social, and intellectual characteristics – is understood by most natural and social scientists to be an unsound concept. … By the 1970s, many prominent biologists, including Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, came to see the race concept as a deeply flawed way to organize human genetic diversity that is inseparable from the social prejudices about human difference that spawned the concept in the 18th century and have accompanied its meaning since.1 Historians and social scientists believe that race is socially constructed, meaning that the biological meaning of race has been constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place.

On the other hand, because studying genetic differences can improve our understanding of human evolution, disease, and development, the relationship between genetics and human diversity remains an ongoing area of scientific inquiry. The challenge has been to develop a new scientific terminology and methodology that finds meaning in the study of human difference without recapitulating outmoded and racist notions often associated with the concept of race itself. Some scientists have developed novel ways to measure difference between various human populations, including using ancestry, ethnicity, and population as replacements or surrogates for race.

… Most scholars now accept the viewpoint that in the ancient world “no concept truly equivalent to that of ‘race’ can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians.”5

That’s not true. Vince Sarich and Frank Miele wrote in 2004:

“The art of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, and China, and the Islamic civilization from AD 700 to 1400 shows that these societies classified the various peoples they encountered into broad racial groups. They sorted them based upon the same set of characteristics—skin color, hair form, and head shape—allegedly constructed by Europeans when they invented ‘race’ to justify colonialism and white supremacy.”

Yudell goes on:

Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to categorize humans. The idea gained strength towards the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism towards Jewish religious beliefs, began to evolve into anti-Semitism. These blood kinship beliefs rationalized anti-Jewish hatred instead as the hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized, were considered a threat to Christendom by virtue of their ancestry because they could not prove purity of blood to the Inquisition.

Uhhhhhmmmm … The notion that “Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to categorize humans … rooted in … anti-Semitism” is a pretty self-evidently self-defeating assertion, since the word “anti-Semitism” itself is rooted in the Book of Genesis’s descriptions of the three sons of Noah, including Shem, progenitor of the Semites:

Chapter 10

1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. …

31 These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

The Old Testament is obsessed with this kind of stuff.

Yudell goes on:

At the core of this work, known as the American School of Anthropology, was the theory of polygeny, the belief that a hierarchy of human races had separate creations. Samuel Morton’s experiments on cranial capacity and intelligence sought to demonstrate this theory. Morton collected hundreds of skulls from around the globe, measured their volume, and concluded that the Caucasian and Mongolian races had the highest cranial capacity and thus the highest levels of intelligence, while Africans had the lowest cranial capacity and thus the lowest levels of intelligence.

More than a century after Morton’s death, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, using Morton’s same experimental material and methods, could not replicate the earlier findings. Gould concluded that Morton’s subjective ideas about race difference influenced his methods and conclusions, leading to the omission of contradictory data and to the conscious or unconscious stuffing or under-filling of certain skulls to match his pre-ordained conclusions.6 Indeed, the case of Samuel Morton illustrates how social conceptions of human difference shape the science of race.

Gould didn’t try to replicate Morton’s findings. He just asserted that Morton had been biased. Recently, actual scientists did replicate Morton’s findings, and thus failed to replicate Gould’s famous fantasy.

… At a June 2000 Rose Garden ceremony, President Bill Clinton, flanked by genome sequencers Francis Collins and Craig Venter, announced the completion of a draft sequence of the human genome. Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Venter, then President of Celera Genomics, offered their genomic data to the world – enhancing our understanding of human biology and holding the promise of to helping public health and medical professionals prevent, treat, and cure disease. On that day Venter and Collins emphasized that their work confirmed that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by the concept of race and demonstrated that all humans have genome sequences that are 99.9% identical. At the White House celebration Venter said “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”9 A year later, Collins wrote: “those who wish to draw precise racial boundaries around certain groups will not be able to use science as a legitimate justification.”10 Yet, since the White House announcement, there has been an increase in claims that race is a biologically meaningful classification.

That’s my understanding, too: today’s half-witted Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom stems from the speeches by Clinton and the others in the Rose Garden in 2000.

Of course, since then, there has been a flood of genome data, which has largely upheld the pre-existing views of race attained by physical anthropologists before the new technology arrived, although offering new details and new complexities.

The upsurge of claims that race is a useful taxonomic concept for humans seems to be driven by several factors. First, genomic technology has enhanced our ability to examine the 0.1% of nucleic acids in the human genome that, on average, vary between individuals. Some scientists are relying on the race concept to make sense of the genetic variation in this small sliver of our genomes. Second, the history of the biological race concept suggests that race is deeply embedded in scientific thought and that racialized thinking shaped genetics in the 20th century.

In other words, Bill Clinton doesn’t know anything about genetics and we should charitably ignore his 2000 Rose Garden speech instead of enshrining Clinton as the Wizard of Genes.