Heritage

I think heritage is a fascinating thing.  Of course, if you look at my HBD tab, you'll see part of the reason why.  Something on the order of 80% of our behavior is genetic.  That doesn't mean that we can't overcome genetic tendencies and determine our own fate, of course, but it does mean that the form of our natural man is different, maybe, than our neighbors.  Actually, in a normal nation, our neighbors would have similar tendencies, because that's the definition of a nation; a people sharing a common culture, language and genetic heritage.  But our nation would perhaps have a different natural man than your nation, and because the people in one nation would have the same expectations of behavior, communities would be more or less peaceful.  As long as people of other nations lived in the community in small enough numbers that they couldn't upset this community balance, or if they were merely visitors or passing through, then we'd have a path to world peace.  Ironic, isn't it, that segregation is one of the worst bogeymen of the false religion that passes for modern philosophy, yet in reality, segregation is the key to peaceful coexistence between neighboring nations?  Just ask the American Indians what they think of segregation, and if they'd be willing to give up their reservations and assimilate in the name of inclusivity.

The other side of this same coin is that we are told repeatedly the proverb that if only we'd spend more time with other people, we'd understand them better and get along better.  In reality, we've spent too much time together, we understand each other all too well, and rather than causing us to get along, it's caused us to fail to spectacularly.  Up until I went to college, I'd only ever met one person who was an Indian national.  This isn't because I was in some podunk little town, but because the vast wave of H1-B migration hadn't happened yet.  Nobody knew any Indians.  In fact, if you heard the word Indian, you'd be thinking feathered headresses, teepees and peace pipes.  But my exposure to many Indians from India in the years since has not caused me to develop a greater appreciation for their culture. Quite the opposite; I now see hundreds if not thousands of small ways in which we are culturally incompatible due to frequent exposure.  And when the only reason that millions of them are here is because they're acting as foreign, mercenary scabs to take jobs that can and should have gone to Americans, and to depress Americans' wages, then it almost doesn't matter what positive qualities their culture has, because they are not here in good faith providing a benefit to America; they are, in fact, a detriment, deliberately imposed on America.  And they don't even have the benefit of bringing good food with them like the Chinese or the Mexicans.

Now, Indians can practice their culture in India to their hearts' content, and that's great.  I have no problem whatsoever with their behavior in their own country, where for the most part, what they do is peaceful, and their interactions with their own people cause no problems.  But Indians and Americans interacting and pretending that we're one nation and one people with cultural, linguistic and genetic bonds is a farce, and it doesn't cause us to get along better at all.  It's as if I were to invite one of the members of the ward who is significantly different in terms of personality and approach to child-rearing, and everything else to live in my house with me.  While we have our own separate houses, we can be good friends.  But make us live together in the same house, and we'd just get on each others' nerves too much; we wouldn't get along anymore.  We're incompatible for that close of a relationship.

Almost everyone is familiar with this concept from room-mates at college or missionary companions.  People that you get along with great in one setting, maybe even your best friends, often aren't anymore when you live together because of the hundreds, and even thousands of little things that are incompatible between your behavior.

Anyway, I'm thinking about this because I went to another ward yesterday for some stake business and as a favor to the bishop; I'm the merit badge counselor for a merit badge his son is working on, and he wanted to review some stuff with me and get it signed off.  Since I'm also assigned to be the liaison from the stake YM's presidency with that ward (and a couple of others) I thought it convenient to kill two birds with one stone; make a visit, meet with the boy about his merit badge, and talk to the ward YM president about some YM stuff.  Anyhoo, a member of the stake presidency was on the stand.  He's actually from that ward.  When the sacrament meeting talks ended, there were just a few minutes left, so he spoke for a bit.  One of the things he mentioned, and this wasn't the point of what he was saying, but it's what caused me to reflect, was that he and his family had lived in Alabama for a number of years for work before moving here where we live now.  As he was preparing to move, locals would caution him about moving up among those "rude Northern Yankees."  He thought this was odd and wondered if Northern Yankees really are rude, although upon some quick and dirty observation, he did note that Southerners are more overtly and superficially friendly than Northerners—although he noted that by being friendly, he could get the Northerners to become just as garrulous as anyone else.

But, of course, that's only one aspect of the differences between Yankees and Southerners, and a very superficial one at that.  As an ethnic Southerner living here in Yankeeland, I can see the hundreds if not thousands of details that separate us as different nations, and make our current situation of pretending to be "one nation under God" untenable.  Almost weekly I'm surprised at something that some Yankee will say to someone else and expect it to be OK, and this is after nearly twenty years of living here.  By the same token, I'm often shocked by what they don't say.  I've been accused at times of being too blunt, too casual, maybe, and of offending people as well, in ways that don't seem like they'd be an issue to me.  But that's because I'm a Southerner (and in many ways, almost a caricature of one) living among Yankees.  To me, the biggest disconnect, though, is the way in which Yankees perceive only dimly and in theory the concepts of free agency and individual sovereignty.  Yankees have a tendency to expect and even demand community scale conformity in a way that is totalitarian to me; a nannying-busybodyishness that is completely incompatible with the doctrine of free agency as we understand it in the church.  If you can't be made to conform via social pressure, then there are really only two responses: 1) double down on the social pressure, and 2) exclude you from the community.

To me, this is the real source of the perception among Southerners that Northerners are "rude."  Northerners are just too into your business in general, and feel that they have the right (even the obligation!) to tell you what you should be doing all of the time.  They really struggle to just leave you alone, accept your idiosyncrasies, and get along with you just fine in spite of them.  And this carries on with Yankees, even when they move.  One of the things that I've also noticed is that the majority of members of the Church in America are Yankees. (See some of the JayMan links on the HBD tab.)  This shouldn't be surprising; the Church was organized in New England among the descendants of Pilgrims and Puritans, and the core of the membership in America has always been such.  It's actually a better explanation for their failure to make a place for themselves in Missouri and Illinois; it's not so much religious intolerance as it was cultural incompatibility that made them unwelcome.  As immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain came to Deseret, they reinforced and bolstered this cultural founder effect, and the culture of Greater Deseret in the American West is a subset of Yankee culture overall.  Since most people all across the country who are members of the church are recent immigrants to the places they live from this Greater Deseret pioneer heritage gathering, most members of the Church have this Yankee personality and mentality with them.  Against this is the doctrine of free agency, but the two cause an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and friction, in my experience.

Now, I don't mean this to be a Yankee-bashing exercise.  Yankees' sense of community is also what has allowed them to build things that in the South we probably would never have done because we're too individualistic and iconoclastic to ever work together well enough to have done so.  If Yankees are prone via their natural man towards community-scale totalitarianism, the heresy of Babel; thinking that they can build utopian communities on Earth, and frequent moral panics and witch-hunts (and they are; would you really have expected anything else from the descendants of the Puritans?) my people are way too fractious, don't get along very well, have poor impulse control and a lower time preference for decision making in general.  Benjamin Franklin once said of my people that we were "a race of runagates and crackers; equally wild and savage as the Indians."  Another drama that I saw once had one of my people shot in a gunfight; while his mother was bandaging him up, she told him to quit complaining; our people don't die of gun shot wounds, they die of alcoholism and heart disease.  This is the legacy and natural man that I have to overcome.  I'm not very likely to try and make anyone else conform to my vision; in fact quite the opposite; I need to learn better how to lead my family, because my natural tendency is too individualistic; I tend to even think my family should take care of their own problems.  But I'm relatively short-tempered, have poor impulse control, and frequently set the same goals over and over again year after year because my progress towards them has been negligible.  None of those should be surprising to people who understand heritage, HBD and genetics.  Those are among my weaknesses, because it's my genetic heritage to have them as weaknesses, and overcoming the negative aspects of that natural man is my great challenge, whereas some Yankee will probably have as his greatest challenge learning how to respect others and not try and cram them into fitting to his ideal of what society should look like.

As an aside, I should probably point out that there are two completely different behavioral phenotypes in the South, and they conform to two completely different genetic heritages and cultural origins.  When I say that I'm a Southerner, you shouldn't imagine the genteel plantation type and their households.  I'm not Gone With the Wind, I'm more like The Dukes of Hazzard.  My people were fractious border people from the beginning of recorded history, occupying the border country near Hadrian's Wall where barbarism and civilization had their frontier.  After the Romans left, it eventually was raided by the Vikings and became a different border country between the British and the Danelaw.  Later, it was the border between northern England and lowland Scotland.  It was the home of the Border Reivers, who are my people; part English, part Scottish, all anti-authoritarian.  When the border was finally pacified and the Border Reiver way of life started disappearing because a strong enough crown to squash it out finally rose in London, my people came to America because they chafed under the yoke of too much authority and structure.  They immediately headed for the backwoods and the frontiers, and became the second type of southerner; although to be fair, some of them were Northerers too, at least if the Mason Dixon line is any guide.  They were eager to fight in the Revolutionary War because fighting was what they were arguably best at.  They were eager to expand the frontier, and didn't have any problem fighting Indians. Andrew Jackson is the only one of my people that I know of to have ever been elected President.   They sided in the Civil War with whomever they thought was likeliest to leave them alone, because they had little interest in bowing to the yoke of the neo-Puritan Yankees or the elitist plantation owners either one.  My people in West Virginia, for example, famously made the wrong call and sided with the north, only to regret it shortly after the war and side with the south politically, echoes of which still linger today in electoral maps.

Anyway, like I say, this heritage stuff intrigues me greatly.  And, I think it's vital to understanding not only the problems that we have today as a nation (or "nation" as the case really is) but trends of current events and what is likely to happen in the near and middle term future.  People who are ignorant (sometimes deliberately) of this stuff will continue to make the wrong calls, to not understand, and to be surprised by what happens.

Ron Unz on the Jews

Isaiah 11:13 "The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim."

Well, that hasn't happened quite yet.  Don't forget; Ron Unz is a Jew.  At least, ethnically, although I doubt he's very observant of the religion, if at all.

The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving

The JFK Assassination, part II: Who Did It?

Oddities of the Jewish Religion

The Bolshevik Revolution and its Aftermath

The Nature of Anti-Semitism

Jews and Nazis

Holocaust Denial

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

The ADL in American Society

Some commentary of mine on Facebook about MeToo

Another member of the Church posted an article from the National Review which fretted about how the Brett Kavanaugh circus is damaging the MeToo movement, and we should all be worried about that.  There was some lively discussion, but here's my take on it.  I thought it worth documenting in a venue somewhat less ephemeral than comments on a Facebook post.

The MeToo movement never had very much credibility to begin with; it has absolutely zero now. It also has no momentum, and no energy; the last time I saw a story in the news—ANY news—that bore the tag MeToo was over a month ago, and it was about a few minor celebrities distancing themselves from and disavowing the movement. I don't know who the National Review is fooling by dragging around the corpse of a disgraced and long-dead movement and pretending like it still has some currency or social cachet, but at least when Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy did it in Weekend at Bernies, they had the sense to do it while the corpse was still fresh. Facebook isn't a very good medium to explain in depth why the movement is less serious than the brief hysterical moral panic in the 80s about Satanic cults taking over day care centers, but I'll do my best to be both brief and as complete as possible. 

1) Everybody already knew what Hollywood and NYC careers were like. It's been well-known since the 1920s. Even if it wasn't, Shirley Temple's autobiography and Judy Garland's biography were published decades ago and were best-sellers. Nobody can profess ignorance with a straight face anymore. It's hard to take seriously the claims of alleged victims of sexual impropriety when they willingly and even ambitiously courted people who were well-known for it to advance their careers. Also; if they WERE sexually assaulted or molested, why are they coming out years after the fact, in most cases? Why did many of them take payments, and then CONTINUE WORKING WITH THEIR ALLEGED MOLESTORS for years, and even decades in some cases? Normal Americans saw MeToo start, and rolled their eyes, saying, "Yeah, even Grandma knew better decades ago than to get involved in a career like that if chastity were something she valued." It's a little bit like suggesting that soldiers made an honest mistake if they thought joining the Army were just about getting snazzy uniforms and were shocked to actually be asked to go to war. 

2) The most visual voices of MeToo, which propelled it into brief, faddish moral hysteria status, were all so incredibly flawed that they substantially and materially damaged the movement. Rose McGowan had older pictures of her standing basically naked on the red carpet back when she was younger and a more in demand commodity, and then she was arrested for possession of large amounts of cocaine, plus her hysterical behavior on social media made the whole thing seem absurd. Ashley Judd was revealed to have worked with Weinstein on several projects AFTER she was allegedly harassed, which calls into serious question her sincerity. She clearly is nothing more than a huckster and fraud attempting to get in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it. Asia Argento was one of its most vocal proponents, and she was revealed to be a sexual predator herself, engaging in under-age illicit liaisons while married to Anthony Bourdain. The MeToo movement was largely a victim of its own incompetent and dishonest so-called leaders. Normal Americans saw this movement as a freak show coming out of a clown car and paid little attention, other than to note with some satisfaction that at least a few absolutely terrible people were publicly scalped and driven from the public eye in disgrace. 

3) The timing could not have been worse; it was only;what, a year ago that the Rolling Stone frat house rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud, that the mattress girl rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud and not that long before that the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud. Anyone paying attention has noted two things: a) the oft-cited numbers of 1 in 4 women sexually assaulted in college is obviously a fraudulent number, based on flawed and even simply made up statistics. If it were anything at all of the sort, nobody would ever send their daughters to college. In reality, the number is closer to 1 in 500. b) several studies, two of which that I'm familiar with because I've read them myself by the DoD and the CDC, have independently confirmed that somewhere between 45-60% of all rape allegations are outright false and never happened. 

Now, granted, in the case of some of the public MeToo scalps, they never even contested the allegations, so they were obviously true. But again; normal Americans saw all of this and realized that there was a strong element of mass hysteria associated with the whole thing. 

4) The targets started to get really uncomfortable. It was one thing when it was a bunch of Hollywood moguls, but when it spread into the news media industry, reports and stories started to dry up. After all, it's not a very good career move to go on the air saying, "Tonight's top story; is my boss a sexual predator?" Also, some people started tallying the accused and realized that over 75% of them were Jewish. It got so bad that both the Jewish Times and Haaretz felt like they had to address it by questioning whether or not there was something specific to the Jewish male character that made them susceptible to this particular problem, and Larry David even commented on it during an SNL monolog. All of them were pretty much fluff pieces that amounted to little more than some smoke, some mirrors and loads of gratuitous Holocaust references and dark implications, but nobody ever really addressed the issue in a way that was substantive, and the media rather quickly moved to other topics. 

5) In spite of the hysteria, it was clear that the root of the problem wasn't touched, and only a few disposable targets that Big Hollywood and Big Media didn't have any use for anymore were offered up to be lynched by the mob. And even some of the accused skated through. Did anything actually ever happen to Al Franken? Nope. What about Corey Booker? Nope. Story buried. What about the ubiquitous chatter about pedophilia and child abuse in Hollywood? Discussion about it spiked briefly several months ago, but absolutely nothing happened, nothing changed, nobody was arrested or even investigated, and the media mostly tried to distract everyone from thinking about it too much. A handful of new stories from Corey Feldman and a few others saw the light, only to be forgotten as quickly as they surfaced. 

Again, normal Americans saw the movement as hypocritical and useless. It was all a bunch of virtue signaling and mob hysteria, but the real problems that it was dancing around remain as strong and untouched as ever. 

And Angie's comment way up above is also outright false. It absolutely IS a partisan issue, because there is a strong correlation between political affiliation and sexual assault, to the tune of liberals are over 50% more likely to be guilty of it. (That number would be statistically even MORE stark if liberal Republican politicians were properly classed as leftists and not rightists.) The partisan nature of sexual assault is scientifically unassailable, and what's more, it's hardly surprising anyway because its common sense. When one ideology preaches hedonism and lauds sexual libertines, is anyone surprised that that's the ideology where sexual assault is much more common? Of course not. Also, the entire thing is predicted by r/K-selection theory applied to politics anyway, which is one of the most useful models of describing the political landscape that I've ever seen, because it never fails to not only describe but even correctly predict what other models simply cannot.

UPDATE:  Also; surprise, surprise!  https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/10/09/human-resources-study-shows-a-stunning-unintended-backlash-to-the-me-too-movement/  Granted; that's maybe not actually bad news.  Getting women back home and recreating the nuclear family that we've largely had culturally stolen from us is a good thing in general.  But it can be a disaster specifically to some individuals, of course, to have their livelihood cut out from under them.

Last word on numbers and the dating market

Maybe not the last word, but just a data point that shows things are getting worse, not better.  MGTOW, or "men going their own way" basically means men deciding that the dating and marriage market is simply too harrowing to bother with.  Embracing bachelorhood, sometimes permanently.  Going Galt.  Refusing to engage in a system that is rigged against them.

It's a cowardly approach, and one not worthy of a Priesthood holder, in my opinion, but I can understand certainly why it happens.  But what it means is that the odds, which are already not good for girls in the Church, are actively getting worse.

What is real nationalism?

I don't mean the "I'm better than you because of my nation" nonsense, which Elder Ballard has rightly condemned.  I mean, what is nationalism?

I've been struck while reading the Book of Mormon with my family recently; we just got finished with Alma's mission to the Zoramites, and tonight we'll start on his instructions to Helaman, then Shiblon and Corianton, and then the Lamanite Wars and Captain Moroni start in earnest.  But what struck me was the Ammonites.  When the Nephites granted them sanctuary, they gave them unused land to be a land for their inheritance, in Jershon.  When the righteous Zoramite converts left the land of the Zoramites, they sought refuge among the Ammonites, and the Ammonites also gave unto them a land to be their inheritance.

This wisdom, which was so apparent to most generations of humanity that nobody really had to mention it, has been totally lost in the wake of Holocaust and globalist propaganda, and the idea of the nation-state is now considered passe, if not in fact evil.  It's not.  Sovereign nation-states are no more evil than sovereign homes owned by a family, and in fact, are basically the same thing anyway.  It's the best path towards peace; everyone has their home.  They can visit another home.  They can intermarry with another home, even.  But their home is their home and someone else's home is someone else's home, and respecting boundaries and the sovereignty of the family within the home is the solution to peace, not some bizarre notion of doing away with homes altogether, of having no homelands, of having no land for our inheritance where we can practice our culture in peace and allow others to do the same in their own homelands.

Anyway, a few quotes.  First, Teddy Roosevelt.  Civic nationalists, who believe that Paperwork Americans are as real as Heritage Americans love to quote parts of this out of context, but they don't really want to quote the entire thing, or think about what it really means if they do.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts ‘native’ before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. 

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

What do you do with those who do have divided loyalties?  How many people are comfortable with telling at least half (if not more) of American Jews that they have to go to Israel, because clearly their loyalty is stronger to Israel than to America?  For instance?  As Vox Day says about this very quote, and the person (Peter) who brought it up:

No doubt that is true. But the problem with Peter's thinking is that loyalty to an artificially constructed "nation-state" cannot be manufactured simply by everyone of goodwill electing to pretend that they are all part of the same nation. Even after centuries of being unified under a single British crown, the Scots voted for independence - it was the votes of the non-Scots resident in Scotland that caused the "Scottish" independence vote to fail. 

And even Teddy Roosevelt himself said that "there ought to be no room" in the country for those who do not consider themselves to be Americans and nothing else. That means forcibly deporting most of the post-1965 immigrants, all of the Jews, and all of the African-Americans, just for starters. And that's a more extreme position than that espoused by the average member of the Alt-Right. I very much doubt most of the civic nationalists who cite Roosevelt's stirring rhetoric realize precisely what it is they are implicitly endorsing. 

The rise of 4GW has broken the state's monopoly on violence. Once nukes or other weapons of mass destruction are accessible to non-state actors, that will break the state's monopoly on political legitimacy as well, because there will be strength without the numbers provided by unity. 

And like nukes, identity politics are not going to disappear simply because some people happen to find them distasteful. Identity politics are not a Marxist plot or a "right-wing SJW" tactic, they are nothing less than the political environment in which Americans now find themselves due to their foolish and ruinous immigration policies of the last 53 years.

And as Stilicho (not the famous, historical one) says, in addition:

European immigrants are generally capable enough of intermarriage with Americans to integrate into a single nation (although that nation is/will be significantly different than the original). And we are too far gone down that path to avoid those changes. Non-European immigrants are not acceptable to Europeans for marriage in sufficiently large numbers to integrate in that fashion, so there will be no meaningful integration and they cannot ever be a part of the American nation outside of a few outliers (but even those will experience a reversion to the mean if their children don't intermarry with Americans). So the 35 million or so Africans will have their own nation (they already do in one sense, but they will need a land of their own if they are to survive). Ditto for those among the 50 million or so "hispanics" who don't intermarry and become Americans. There will be war. Only the details remain to be worked out. A South African ought to realize that no amount of money, education, good intentions, wishful thinking, or pixie dust will make an African anything other than an African or ever make him resemble a European in any meaningful way. They are different. Aceept it.

And as another guy (who's LDS and who has worked as an expat for the State Department and lived overseas with his family) says:

Not too many years ago I was a civic nationalist kind of guy. As far as I could tell the melting pot more or less worked and that failure to assimilate more recent groups was just more due to their size and recentness. Figured everyone would more or less get with the program. I didn't believe in cabals of people hellbent on unmaking my country for their benefit. I was always conservative and didn't like a lot of the social changes taking place but did not make the connection somehow that culture is downstream from demographics. 

Now...I cannot unsee what I have seen. My place of work has been uniquely instructive. I have learned a whole lot. About how some groups are more equal than others. About nepotistic practices. About separation of church and state for "thee but not for me." About personnel from some groups that cannot be gotten rid of no matter how disastrous they are because they have too many pokemon points. Etc.  

Waking up to all of this was totally depressing. But the world makes much more sense as things fall apart. 

I also note that while I often call myself a pretty much exact picture, physically, culturally, by personality, etc. of the backwoods southerner descended from the Anglo-Scottish and Scots-Irish Borderers, that's not really completely true genetically.  On my mother's side, I'm pretty much a typical Utah Yankee Mormon, with ancestry from Massachusetts and the rest of the New England area before moving west along with the Mormons.  That doesn't seem to have contributed much to my personality, I don't think, but it is what it is.  Perhaps more interestingly is that the "pureness" of the Anglo-Scottish Borderer ancestry isn't really pure.  In the late 1600s, Arnold Jahn (spelled Yonn and even Yawn in later generations) was the descendant of a Prussian Jew.  In the earlier 1800s, Antonio Henriques from the Portuguese island of Madeira made his way with his wife, Anna Julia de Freitas.  His son, born in Illinois, married another Portuguese immigrant, but his grandson did not (a good, old-fashioned American of Scottish descent named Galloway.)

The point is, these people, who contributed what is now a thin thread of genetic legacy to me, abandoned their old identity and became Americans, to Stilicho's point above.  They gave up their religion (in fact, it looks like they did before even leaving the Old Country, which was probably a significant contributing factor in their decision to emigrate), married locals, gave up their language, named their kids American names.  The Henriques even disavowed their Portuguese heritage, and my great-grandmother (a Galloway) refused to her dying breath to believe that her husband had been ethnically Portuguese even after my uncle (who served a mission in Brazil) and my dad did the research to figure out exactly who they were and where they came from.

So, they're the outliers mentioned by Stilicho.  But you can see how they managed to become outliers; by not holding on to their original culture and identity, but rather by crafting an American one, and by intermarrying with Americans, and by raising kids who were American.  There's often a reversion to mean when the difference is very visible, but after many generations, I'm very, very, little Jewish and Portuguese, to the point where I only mention it occasionally as a point of curiosity, and don't consider it to have contributed meaningfully to who I am, really.

A bit more information, from Vox, in the comments to his comment:

Why specifically all of the Jews and all of the Africans versus other ethnicities post 1965? 

Because Jewish-Not-Americans and African-Not-Americans are far and away the worst offenders with regards their absolute refusal to assimilate and become unhyphenated Americans. Jews openly describe assimilation as "a silent Holocaust" and Africans overtly reject even the use of American-style names. 

The two groups are also the most visible in actively waging war against American history and American cultural traditions in their own perceived interests. 

I have no problem with either group protecting its own identity. But they're not Martians, they're not fish, and they're not Americans. And pretending otherwise isn't fooling anyone anymore.

Yes, true. This is easy enough to suss out if one goes to the trouble to try and do so.

The Crumbling of the Cult of Holocaustianity

Ron Unz, who I'll highlight (again) is himself Jewish, systemically calls into serious question the most basic tenets of the Holocaust narrative.

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/

This is very long... but very interesting.  And it moves me significantly more into the camp that "something is extremely fishy with regards to our Holocaust narrative."

Vox Day offers an interesting, albeit speculative (by his own admission) syllogism.  Let's assume the major premise that a large number (not 6 million, but something that can reasonably called a large number, at least) were killed in the lead-up to and during the years of WW2 is in fact true.  Let's assume the minor premise, that the Germans who are notoriously bureaucratic, did not keep any records detailing the process of the Holocaust (which is in fact true.)  What is the parsimonious solution, then?  That someone else is responsible for killing the Jews, not the Germans.

Reading Unz's article, what are some interesting things that pop up?  1) Most of the supposed Jewish victims were not living in Germany, but in Eastern Europe.  2) All of the evidence of the Holocaust actually comes from the Soviets, 3) Who were responsible for, among other things, the Katyn Forest massacre and a Holocaust of his own peoples that dwarfs that of the Jews, even as historical revisionism has lowered his numbers and raised that of the Germans. 4) Most of the American political and military personnel of the 50s and even the 60s, many of whom actually served in the European theater, thought the Holocaust narrative was nonsense, 5) The American government was literally riddled with Soviet spies, as the Venona Papers conclusively proves, so much so that Joseph McCarthy is not only completely vindicated, but it's clear that he didn't go nearly far enough in his accusations.

So.. did Stalin actually perpetrate whatever Holocaust actually happened?  Vox Day isn't actually suggesting as much, merely pointing out that it's more plausible than the narrative that we actually have.

Anyway, again—read the entire article linked above.  It's kind of amazing.

On numbers and the dating market, part 2

https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/20/living/mormon-dating-app/index.html

Some confirmation of a lot of my back of the napkin calculations, (in this post) especially after I looked up the BYU's sex ratio, and found that I had other, corroborating evidence that suggested that that number was correct not just for the universities specifically, but for the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in the church overall.  A few quoted sections:

Mormons today face longer tenures in singledom and a skewed gender ratio. There are 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men, according to one study, creating a statistical dilemma that complicates church leadership's bold project to ensure all youth attain a temple marriage. In total, 51% of Mormon women over age 18 are single, according to internal statistics cited in a church public relations video, which leaked on the website "MormonLeaks." For these women, the dream of previous generations -- 87% of married Mormons have a Mormon spouse -- may not be statistically attainable.

3:2 sex ratio in the church. Half of eligible women unmarried.  And unlikely to be so.

The Mutual app is presented as if it's the way to solve this dilemma, but it's not, except in the case of a relatively few individuals who find success with it. More quotes from the article:

There's no data to prove that Mutual will ensure the continuity of Mormonism. Stories of marriages from the apps are powerful anecdotes, but their evidence is only qualitative. 

Mutual also shares the criticism that has recently been levied at Tinder: that the prospect of infinite choice is making users lazier, and more selective. According to Pew, roughly 1/3 of online daters fail to convert on a fourth down -- they chat with matches on apps but say they have "never" been on a date with someone they met online. 

Yep.  The idea that Mutual will be more successful in the Latter-Day Saint niche than Tinder is more generally is a very, very dubious one that I wouldn't count on.

As I described in my last post on this particular topic, unless you're one of the General Authorities, or a Singles Ward bishop, or the High Councilor over YSA and SA in your stake, or some such, it's probably not something you should or even could worry about much other than making sure that your own kids—especially your daughters—are prepared for the environment.  Because seriously; what can you do about a 3:2 sex ratio?  It's all well and good to talk about retention and activation, but that's already a major emphasis anyway.  It's not changing the ratio overall.  Unless plural marriages come back, there's going to be close to half of all women who just simply can't get the temple marriage that they want because the numbers preclude it.  It's just math.  Harsh, black and white, and unassailable.  Plural marriage is the only solution to that particular conundrum.

But in the meantime, what you want to do is 1) teach your daughters how to greatly reduce the odds of being one of the nearly half of all women who are left behind by teaching them how important it is to be the kind of woman that will attract the kind of man that they want to marry, rather than simply believing that simply showing up at one of the BYUs is sufficient, and 2) teach your sons to take marriage seriously, and to be selective and discriminating.

The single biggest challenge most of the girls who end up not being married will face is the specific constant cultural thread runs through Western civilization that teaches women and girls to be narcissistic, honestly.  That they're entitled to everything that they want just because they're such special little princesses, who graced us with their presence. Because they showed up, and daddy loves them, and Heavenly Father loves them, so why shouldn't everyone else too? That being pleasant to be around, that being likable, that focusing on skills and personality traits that will actually make you a high quality wife, mother, home-maker, etc. are passé, and should be passed over in favor of careerism, self-indulgence, self-actualization, etc.  This persistent threat in our culture is one of the most pernicious, because there are few things that have led to more destruction (and less formation in the first place) of the family, which is integral to God's plan for us and our happiness.

Another recent anecdote from my recently married son.  He came out to visit us recently for a few days.  His wife couldn't get the time off work, but he was free, between classes, etc., and we were willing to pay for it, so he spent about a week here at home.  His wife said in church while he was gone that many other young married couples commented to her that they never would have "let" their husband go away on a trip to visit his family for a few days.  Huh?  My son is very lucky to have married someone who has no trace of this kind of entitlement, but it was a great opportunity to speak to my other, younger, teenaged sons about the idea.  It is important as a husband that you listen to and counsel with your wife.  That you take seriously her concerns and worries.  That you make decisions together, and be of one mind as much as possible.  But that's a long way from the idea that a wife has any right to "let" her husband do anything.  What kind of self-respecting man would ever take seriously as a spouse a woman who feels that she's entitled to put a leash on her husband?  What self-respecting man would tolerate for long having that kind of leash?  No, most likely that's a time bomb of building resentment waiting to happen.  And while maybe the "let" language is spoken halfway jokingly, I've been around long enough to know that it's only halfway, if that.  If it is a joke, it's funny because it's all too often true.

Now, I don't mean to put that burden entirely on the shoulders of the young women of the Church, of course.  Young Men falling into inactivity and otherwise being unavailable to marry worthy young women is completely unacceptable; an abdication of duty and privilege both.  Young men turning away from marriage because they're turned off by the bad behavior of too many of the young women that they interact with isn't much better.  This is sometimes called the MGTOW movement; "Men Going Their Own Way" and it is a reaction to the gynarcho-tyranny tendencies of our society.  Dr. Helen Smith in her great book Men On Strike refers to it as men "going Galt;" opting out of institutions that no longer serve their needs, and in fact, actively attack and thwart them.  (That book is really worth reading, by the way.  I highly recommend it.)  But deciding that marriage isn't for you because it's hard to find a worthy young women that you actually can stand to be married to for eternity is both a denial of the plan of our Heavenly Father as well as, ultimately, kind of an act of cowardice.

Young Men absolutely need to step up, be worthy, be the best versions of themselves that they can be, and be willing to preside over and lead a worthy young woman to the temple and into the formation of a celestial family.  But the reality is still what it is; there will be fewer such men than there are women. Which means that the men who do this can afford to be much more selective than young women sometimes wish to notice.  And that even so, a lot of young women will end up without a chair when the music stops, because of the mathematical reality. While this sounds rather bleak for young women (or the parents of young women) I think that things aren't quite so grim, or at least they don't have to be so individually.  Pleasant, nice girls who cause little in the way of drama and headaches tend to find that they rarely lack for social company from young men.  It's not sufficient, of course—but girls who do the best that they can to be as attractive as possible, to develop social skills, and frequent places where they can meet the kinds of guys that they want to meet, most often will do so, especially if they do so in a prayerful way, seeking and acting on inspiration from the Lord.

But again; you have to be the kind of girl that a man you want to marry would also want in return.  To me, that's the part that is often missing, and which few seem to be addressing, because few have seen the pattern and the trend so that it occurs to them to address it.  And so for those who can see the pattern, it's very predictable and easy to tell way in advance which girls are likely to find themselves unwilling old maids.  Because they've developed few if any of the traits that would make them less likely to avoid that.  I said flippantly to my sons once that those are the girls are might as well order up cat lady starter kits now, because the way that they're trending, that's the most likely outcome for them.  But what else do you expect when you're actively broadcasting how uninterested you are in having men take you seriously, by cultivating a brand that's unpleasant, sassy to the point of constant irritation, angry or bitter or resentful, entitled, bossy and pushy, and otherwise the kind of personality that any self-respecting young man would never consider suitable in a serious candidate for marriage?

Apparently, that's a mean thing to say, at least directly to a woman.  And I agree that flippant remarks are unlikely to be taken seriously anyway.  But unfortunately, it's true.  And in the end, what's meaner, telling someone a wintry truth (to paraphrase Neal A. Maxwell) that they don't want to hear, but which knowing will help them have a happier, more fulfilling life, or telling them a pretty little lie which may make them happier in the short term, but which increases their chance at finding little more than a lifetime of disappointment for missed opportunities that she didn't even know that she was sabotaging?