[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
...and beating the natives with sticks whenever they don’t work hard enough.
The kind of ruthless racial self-assertion that these Chinks engage in is world-beating. Whites can’t compete with it. Not now that we have sunk into the abyss of altruism.
As Baudelaire said: The world belongs to the one who doesn’t care. These Chinamen don’t care.
It wasn’t that long ago that Whites were as hardcore as these Chinamen. Ask yourself: is the world really a better place now that they’re not?
“Western countries need to study these Chinese techniques and adopt them.”
Not adopt them. Whites need to adapt ruthless ferocity to the ethnonationalist cause. In the two examples, one would be correct, and one would not.
Where Islamic incursions are quelled, that is correct.
Going to an African country, enslaving them, beating them and so on - when it is not sheer self defense - is not.
But of course, such bad advice (e.g., that we should be brutal slave masters over Africans) is typical of right wing reactionaries - to look for a foundation in natural fallacy, in sheer might makes right supremacism beyond the complexity of social praxis. ...and, of course, when praxis is ignored, then broader patterns of nemesis correction are in store for the hubris.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 09 September 2018 22:27.
The Hill, “Trump: Japan ties could sour when ‘I tell them how much they have to pay”, 6 Sept 2018:
President Trump touted his good relations with Japan on Thursday but warned the relationship may sour over trade.
“Of course that will end as soon as I tell them how much they have to pay,” the president said of his strong ties with Japan in a call to Wall Street Journal assistant editor James Freeman.
Freeman shared the president’s remarks in a WSJ op-ed published Thursday. Freeman said Trump had called him shortly after the editor appeared in a segment on the Fox News Channel praising the president for the strong U.S. economy.
Trump’s comments about Japan come as the U.S. finds itself in a number of trade fights with allies and other countries.
Trump has slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. And he has threatened new tariffs on auto imports. Japan’s trade minister in August warned the country could possibly retaliate.
Trump last week announced a trade deal with Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. is separately negotiating with Canada but both countries have dug in during the contentious talks.
Trump has warned he is willing to go ahead and sign the deal with Mexico if Canada does not get on board.
“[T]here is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal,” Trump tweeted last week.
Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has vowed his country is “not going to accept is that we should have to sign a bad deal just because the president wants it.”
Trump is also escalating a trade war with China. Trump has floated another $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.
Stratford, “Japan’s Built-in Resistance to Pressure”, 5 Sept 2018:
Past protectionist pushes by the United States prompted Japan to build up a degree of insulation that could help it weather the current tariff threat. Even as it pursued its Cold War-era strategy to build up the Japanese economy as a U.S. bulwark in the Pacific, the United States moved to protect the U.S. domestic sector from Japanese competition. In the 1970s, the United States piled pressure on Japan, which ultimately agreed to self-imposed voluntary export restrictions on automobiles, which lasted from 1981 to 1994. This squeeze on Japanese automakers spurred a flurry of joint ventures and the movement of Japanese production onto U.S. shores.
Between 1978 and 1989, the top seven Japanese carmakers each set up production in the United States — an acceleration that gathered momentum with production of Japanese cars climbing from 620,000 units in 1986 to 2.15 million by 1994. This trend of increased Japanese manufacturing in the United States has continued to strengthen. The number of vehicles manufactured by Japanese carmakers in the U.S. rose from 3.3 million to nearly 4 million between 2006 and 2016. And of the 20 most popular light-duty vehicles sold on the U.S. market, five were Japanese models containing upwards of 50 percent of components produced in the United States.
The strong onshore presence of Japanese production facilities will partly blunt the effectiveness of the tariff tactics as the United States presses Japan to enter a bilateral dialogue. Japan still holds out hope that it can persuade the United States to reverse course on its abandonment of the CPTPP. This trade agreement fits more into Japan’s overall strategy in the Asia-Pacific to counter China’s rise by pulling the Asia-Pacific region’s economy more closely into both the U.S. and Japanese orbits. During the most recent high-level meeting of U.S. and Japanese trade officials on Aug. 9 — more than two months after the auto tariff threat — Japan continued to seek a U.S. return to the CPTPP, and the United States continued to push for bilateral talks. Instead of caving to U.S. pressure, Japan has offered up expanded investment, increased purchases of U.S. natural gas and large-scale military procurements in hopes of mollifying Washington by chipping away at the trade deficit.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, visited Tokyo in May where he agreed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cooperate on investment in infrastructure projects overseas. Reuters
Asian Review, “Japan and China take first step toward joint infrastructure abroad”, 4 Sept 2018:
Thai high-speed rail among candidates to be discussed at inaugural committee this month
TOKYO—Japan and China are moving ahead with their plans to cooperate on overseas infrastructure projects, with a newly established public-private committee scheduled to hold its first meeting in late September in Beijing.
A high-speed rail project in Thailand is seen as the first candidate for cooperation.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met in Tokyo in May and agreed to cooperate on infrastructure projects in third countries. Abe is considering visiting China in October and seeks to reach agreements on specific projects there.
Japan aims to avoid excessive competition with China on infrastructure projects by collaborating. Showing support for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative could also lead to better bilateral ties. China, for its part, seeks to avoid being labeled overseas as a disreputable investor by bringing Japan on board.
The public-private committee’s first meeting will be led by Hiroto Izumi, special adviser to the prime minister, from Japan, as well as Gao Yan, a vice minister of commerce, and Ning Jizhe, a vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, from China. Senior officials from Japan’s top business lobby, Keidanren, will also participate.
The committee discussion will form the basis for a high-level bilateral forum on cooperation to take place when Abe visits China. Tokyo and Beijing are planning to sign memorandums of understanding on 20 to 30 projects then.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 04 September 2018 09:36.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza died at age 96 (at a meeting in 2010. Photo: Luca Giarelli CC-BY-SA 3.0).
Medium, “The man who tried to catalog humanity”, 2 Sept 2018:
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza chased Darwin’s dream of a tree of humankind
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, known simply as “Luca” to generations of human geneticists, died this week at age 96. More than any other human geneticist, Cavalli-Sforza believed in the potential of genes and culture together to trace humanity’s origins. In the course of his work, he pioneered new ideas and models that brought together these two distinct areas of science.
Like most scientists, many of his ideas would turn out to be wrong in the details. But his work helped form the foundation of our current knowledge of human genome variation across the world.
In 1991, Cavalli-Sforza wrote an essay for Scientific American that explained the course of his life’s work to that point. He recollected a time as a young man when he worked in the Cambridge laboratory of Ronald A. Fisher, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory.
“I started thinking about a project so ambitious it seemed almost crazy: the reconstruction of where human populations originated and the paths by which they spread throughout the world.”
From his start working with microbes this idea was quite a massive leap. But he chose a lucky moment to enter the field of human genetics. During the 1950s, the nascent field was starving for data on how human variation connected to inheritance. New approaches were about to provide such data, along with new opportunities to understand the evolution of recent populations.
Anthropologists understood human variation by looking at traits like the shape of the skull. Such traits could be examined with complicated math, but geneticists needed simpler systems to start to unlock how human genes might vary. Some of the earliest-known examples of Mendelian inheritance were genetic disorders, and while these were very important, they were also very rare, meaning that they could not be broadly informative about normal human variation.
But a handful of traits, many of them invisible variations like blood types, likewise showed a Mendelian inheritance pattern. Postwar geneticists developed ways to test people for these traits, making it feasible to sample distant populations, at first by typing blood or carrying out simple tests like the ability to taste the bitter chemical phenylthiocarbamide, and later with electrophoresis of proteins in the laboratory.
These variations became known as “classical markers”. All of them obeyed Mendel’s laws of inheritance, making it possible for geneticists to use mathematics to understand how their frequencies might change over time. Geneticists traveled to the four corners of the globe, gradually building maps of the frequencies of blood types and other classical markers. No one really knew how old the blood groups were, or how long ago the differences between human populations might have arisen. But they could see big differences: Some populations had almost no type B blood, for example, while other populations had quite a lot of it. Until the 1980s, classical markers would remain the state of the art evidence of human genetic variation.
Cavalli-Sforza first made his mark in his native Italy, traveling to villages in the Parma Valley to sample blood. He worked to understand how inbreeding within these small towns was connected to the slight differences in frequency of blood groups. With several coworkers, he scoured church records of marriages and births, tracing the times when people moved between villages as well as the number of children they had. Tracing these multiple lines of evidence, he could show that consanguineous marriages, or inbreeding, were the main drivers of genetic differences between these small towns. In doing so, he provided some of the earliest evidence that humans were still being affected by genetic drift, the random change in gene frequencies that happens in small populations.
Cavalli-Sforza realized that if genetic drift could explain the gene frequencies in small Italian towns, it might have affected humanity over a much deeper past. Genetic drift was a force that over long periods of time tended to drive populations slowly apart, inexorably diverging in gene frequencies. Applied to a group of populations over long periods of time, genetic drift would form a tree.
It was during this period that Cavalli-Sforza began collaborating with the statistical geneticist A. W. F. Edwards, developing ways to reconstruct evolutionary trees from gene frequencies. The statistical methods used measures of distance, computed from the frequencies of several genes across populations, and they generated a new picture of human origins.
From Cavalli-Sforza 1966, “Population structure and human evolution.”
Here, the branches of humanity came into focus. American Indians, Asians, and Oceanians on one broad branch, Europeans and Africans on the other.
The tree looks very different from our understanding today, which places African populations as the most diverse elements of humanity, not a minor twig. It is worth noting why Cavalli-Sforza’s early trees turned out to be wrong. Blood groups were first discovered and studied in people of European descent, meaning that African variation was not fully included by looking at the traits that vary in Europe. These five loci in particular include several that reflect natural selection, especially the Fy, or Duffy, locus, which approaches fixation in many sub-Saharan populations. Today, using whole genome sequences, it is clear that the deepest branches of human population trees are African.
But more important, the tree illustrates an enormous limitation of the classical markers. The frequencies of a few genes simply do not provide enough information to tell when and how much mixture may have happened among the populations. Cavalli-Sforza, drawing upon his work in the Parma Valley, and later work with Pygmies in central Africa, was willing to assume that migration and mixture were rare. In his model genetic drift, not gene flow, was the main force driving human evolution. Natural selection happened, too, but with patterns that might be recognized by comparing to the predictions of genetic drift alone.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, visited Tokyo in May where he agreed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cooperate on investment in infrastructure projects overseas. Reuters
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza died at age 96 (at a meeting in 2010. Photo: Luca Giarelli CC-BY-SA 3.0).
From Cavalli-Sforza 1966, “Population structure and human evolution.”