I am a lover of large fighting and survival knives, just the sort of things which men need in this world to keep their T-levels up. While I thought I knew a fair bit about the Bowie knife, this was mainly American knowledge.     Gustavus von Tempsky, born in East Prussia in 1828, one year after Jim Bowie’s famous Vidalia Sandbar fight, was an adventurer who moved to Australia during the gold rush period, but did not make much money, so he tried his hand in New Zealand. He wound up in the Forest Rangers, a type of special ops designed to fight the Maori uprising in the bush. Firearms in the 1860s were more reliable than in Jim Bowie’s day, but von Tempsky felt that men should be equipped with a Bowie knife, and the fighting techniques he had learnt while in America and Mexico. So, he introduced the Bowie knife to New Zealand. This is what a leading expert on the Bowie, Paul Kirchner, has to say about the  significance of this fine act of cultural exchange:
  http://bowieknifefightsfighters.blogspot.com/2011/04/bowie-knife-fighter-gustavus-von.html

“To equip his troops, Tempsky had about 30 bowie knives made to his specifications by a cutler in Auckland. They were crafted from wagon springs, one of the few sources of steel available to New Zealand blacksmiths in 1863. The blade was about nine inches long, 2½ inches wide near the handle, and ¼-inch thick. Tempsky taught his men to use the knife in close-quarters combat, holding the knife in the left hand to fend off an opponent's attacking blows while using a revolver with the right hand. Here's a brief mention of Tempsky in Britain's Roll of Glory; or the Victoria Cross: Its Heroes and Their Valor:

     Companies will get diverse, or else:
  https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/goldman-says-it-wont-take-companies-public-without-at-least-one-diverse-director-heres-what-it-should-have-said/

“Now Goldman Sachs  has made an announcement of its own that’s very much a part of the times: its CEO, David Solomon, today told CNBC that beginning this year, Goldman will no longer take companies public if they don’t have at least one “diverse” member on its board of directors. “Starting on July 1st in the U.S. and Europe, we’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women,” Solomon said specifically on the network’s “Squawk Box.” Some will, perhaps rightly, see the announcement as little more than marketing. After all, it’s already widely viewed as unacceptable for a company to go public without at least one female board member and preferably far more “diversity” than that. WeWork, for example, tried to go public last year with an all-male board, only to realize soon after that if it wanted to pursue an initial public offering, it had better mix it up a bit. (Of course, by the time it amended its S-1 to name Harvard professor Frances Frei as its first female board member, its offering was already starting to implode.) Adding one’s first female board member ahead of an IPO is such a cliche at this point that the more interesting question is how close to the filing a related announcement will be made.

     Here is another feminist telling white people not to have children to save the planet, or whatever.
  https://summit.news/2020/01/22/feminist-author-calls-on-germans-to-stop-having-babies-to-save-the-planet/

“Feminist author Verena Brunschweiger has called on Germans to stop having babies to save the planet, despite the fact that the country’s native fertility rate is already at just 1.4 children per woman. In an interview with Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Brunschweiger warns “we are on the brink of ecological collapse” and that the only solution is “the renunciation of one’s own reproduction.” Claiming that this topic is being kept hidden in “pro-natalist Germany,” Brunschweiger, who herself is childless, remarked, “It is…above all because of the masses of people that we have such big environmental problems. We are just too many and hardly anyone wants to limit themselves. If we were fewer people and restricted ourselves, we could save something.” Brunschweiger claimed that she felt like she was “in Saudi Arabia in the 14th century” when trying to voice her message, but that she had received support from a lot of women. The feminist is directing her message to Germans despite the fact that the country’s native fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, well below the necessary 2.1 replacement rate. “Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year in which the number of newborns has exceeded the number of deaths,” reports Arutz Sheva. Despite her passion for population reduction, Brunschweiger’s “virtue-signalling has not yet reached the continent of Africa,” reports Free West Media. “Africa’s child population will reach 1 billion by 2055, making it the largest child population among all continents.” Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa will produce the most births for the rest of the century, so if Brunschweiger really cared about lowering the global population to save the planet, she would be telling Africans to stop breeding, which would of course be racist. And after all, to progressives it’s better to be dead than called racist!”

     I found this one interesting: Bantu expansion in Africa in ancient times, marginalised the Pygmies. So much then for the exclusive guilt of the white colonialist, for dominance seems part and parcel of the human story, rightly or wrongly:
  https://www.amren.com/news/2020/01/the-old-weird-africa-ancient-pygmy-dna-uncovered-by-david-reich/

“With the New Bantu Expansion gearing up to be perhaps the most important global event of the 21st Century, it’s worth looking at the cost paid by Pygmies and other diverse groups during the Old Bantu Expansion of prehistory. Svante Paabo’s breakthrough in being able to sequence DNA from ancient skeletons drove much of the most interesting science of the decade now just closed. But, we’ve tended to be lacking in ancient DNA from sub-Saharan Africa because DNA breaks down faster in warm and wet climates. A variety of other evidence has been pointing towards some interesting weirdnesses in current sub-Saharan DNA, such as indications of a lost “ghost archaic” ancestral population. I wrote about the “The Ghosts of Africa” two years ago in Taki’s Magazine in my third review of geneticist David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here.

     Anyone who was following the immigration and multiculturalism debate in the 1980s and 1990s, would remember that the key argument of the Growths was that none of this would change the Australian way of life, but that diversity would enrich it, with all the metaphors of meals, dinners, salads and things that the decadent chattering class, liked. It was a lie for the time, just like populate or perish was for the World War II era. Here is Ross Gittins, still going at it, God bless him:
  https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/high-immigration-is-changing-the-aussie-way-of-life-20191126-p53e5e.html

“The nation’s economic elite – politicians of all colours, businesspeople and economists – long ago decided we need to grow our population as fast as we can. To them, their reasons for believing this are so blindingly obvious they don’t need to be discussed. Unfortunately, however, it’s doubtful most ordinary Australians agree. A survey last year by researchers at the Australian National University found that more than 69 per cent of respondents felt we didn’t need more people, well up on a similar poll in 2010. This may explain why Scott Morrison announced before this year’s election a big cut in our permanent migrant intake – while failing to mention that our booming temporary migrant intake wouldn’t be constrained. He also foreshadowed measures to encourage more migrants to settle in regional cities. What he didn’t say is what he’d be doing differently this time, given the many times such efforts had failed in the past. In between scandalising over the invading hordes of boat people, John Howard greatly increased the immigration intake after the turn of the century, and this has been continued by the later Labor and Coalition governments. “Net overseas migration” accounts for about 60 per cent of our population growth. In 2000, the Australian Bureau of Statistics projected that our population wouldn’t reach 25.4 million until 2051. We got there this year. Our population is growing much faster than other developed countries are. The growth in our economy has been so weak over the past year that they’ve had to stop saying it, but for years our politicians boasted about how much faster our economy was growing than the other economies. What they invariably failed to mention was that most of our faster growth was explained by our faster-growing population, not our increasing prosperity. Over the year to June, for instance, real gross domestic product grew by (a pathetic) 1.4 per cent, whereas GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent. That’s telling us that, despite the growth in the economy, on average our material standard of living is stagnant. All that immigration isn’t making the rest of us any better off in monetary terms.”

     Can it be that all of those rockets scientists-to-be, who will be paying for Swedish boomer pensions, are abusing the welfare system? That must be some kind of racist prank, surely?
  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/01/10/former-insurance-directors-warn-migrants-can-abuse-welfare-system-easily/

“Three former Swedish insurance fund directors have claimed that since 2015, accounting for migrants in the Swedish national social insurance system has practically collapsed, leading to a high potential for abuse. Stig Orustfjord, Gunnar Johansson, and Erik Kärnekull have claimed that the large number of migrants received by Sweden at the height of the migrant crisis has overwhelmed the bureaucracy and accounting for migrants has “almost collapsed”. “The system got its final crack in 2015 when the integrity of the public records could no longer be guaranteed. Today, the bookkeeping and control of immigrants have almost collapsed. We no longer have control over who lives and resides in the country,” the three said in a debate article in Nyheter Idag. “We have a large number of co-ordination numbers, which give the right to social security’s residence-based contributions, to persons whose identity is not confirmed. Swedish citizenship has been assigned to people whose identities we have not been able to establish and who have in many cases been assigned parallel Swedish identities,” they explained.”

     Here is a problem, at least prima facie, for the abortion argument; unborn babies before 24-weeks can feel pain:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7903507/Unborn-babies-feel-pain-24-week-abortion-limit-scientists-say.html

“Unborn babies may be able to feel pain before reaching 24 weeks, say scientists – meaning they could suffer as they are being aborted. Until now, the consensus of medical opinion has been that foetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks' gestation, after which abortion is illegal in Britain except in special cases. But two medical researchers, including a 'pro-choice' British pain expert who used to think there was no chance foetuses could feel pain that early, say recent studies strongly suggest the assumption is incorrect. The studies indicate unborn babies might be able to feel 'something like pain' as early as 13 weeks, they say. Women going for abortions who have reached this stage of pregnancy should be told the foetus could experience pain while being terminated, they argue. And medical staff should ask if the woman wants it to be given pain relief. To carry on regardless of new evidence 'flirts with moral recklessness', they write in the influential Journal of Medical Ethics. Last night, anti-abortionists said the scientists' claims should change attitudes towards abortion and the practice of it – suggestions that were swiftly rejected by the country's biggest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. The lead author of the controversial article is British professor Stuart Derbyshire, who has acted as a consultant to the Pro-Choice Forum in the UK and Planned Parenthood, a leading American pro-choice organisation. In 2006, he wrote in the British Medical Journal that avoiding talking to women seeking abortions about foetal pain was 'sound policy based on good evidence that foetuses cannot experience pain'.”

     There was a group of young Chinese girls handing out leaflets on a city street here in Melbourne, and I naturally took one, which read: “Falun Gong Meditators Killed in China for Their Organs.” Naturally I was interested. But before I could speak, this large Chinese guy rushed over to me, telling me not to read the leaflet. Maybe he was a Kung Fu expert, which John Steele tells me, quoting Mixed Martial Artist Ramsey Dewey (himself based in Shanghai China) would make me relatively safe, given how bad Kung Fu is as a fighting system:
  https://www.youtube.com/user/balletman/videos

     Anyway, I told the lad to rack off, or words to that effect, that this is still Australia, land of the free, and if he wanted my leaflet, he would have to take it from me, prying it from my cold, dead fingers. At this point, he simply snatched the leaflet from me, as easy as his country men are harvesting, with their combine harvesters, Australia’s water, and he viciously tore it up. But, then I got another leaflet, and ran, or did what I thought was a close approximation to running, zig zagging to make it hard for him to follow me, maybe even see my aged form. At times I stopped running, gasping for breath, and went in reverse, then did a few circles. People looked on in amazement, as he had long ago stopped following me. For your reference on organ harvesting:
  www.EndTransplantAbuse.org
  https://endtransplantabuse.org/organ-transplants-crimes-against-humanity-in-china-an-australian-issue-maria-a-fiatarone-singh/
  www.dafoh.org
  www.fofg.org

To The Age         Brian Edgar is surely right (21/1) that there is only one race on our planet - the human race. However, this is divided into various ethnic groups and loyalty to one's own ethnic group appears to be natural and should not be condemned as "racist". That word should be carefully reserved for unjust behaviour based on ethnic identity. It was surely inevitable that, as a global culture developed during recent centuries, more and more mixing would occur between ethnic groups and that, while very welcome to some, this would be unwelcome to others. Caution, patience and consideration for those of different ethnicity and different views about ethnicity should be encouraged. This includes care to avoid misuse of the word "racist".
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

To The Age        There is self-interest behind Dvir Abramovich's commentary on the Holocaust ("We have to fight anti-Semitism at every turn", 23/1). Is this not really a case of a Jew demanding special treatment for his own group at the expense of others? And is this in fact another example of that promotion of Jewish supremacism which rightly worries many decent commentators around the world? Abramovich uses excessive language several times ("hisses with diabolical resonance", "This earthbound place of limitless hell", "acts of unspeakable cruelty", "a crime against all humankind" and "this demonic factory"). This is typical of those who wish to establish the Holocaust as being beyond criticism, the centrepiece of a new quasi-religious cult. What really is a crime against humankind is the ongoing demonisation of Holocaust revisionists. To stop that an evil taboo has to be lifted. This does not mean approval of Nazi crimes against Jews or others. It does mean genuine commitment to intellectual freedom.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     Not everything is going swimmingly for China. First, there are demographic woes, even given the country’s pro-natalist policies:
  https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/18/WS5e22494fa310128217271d58.html

“The birthrate on the Chinese mainland reached a record low last year, figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday showed. The total number of babies born last year was 14.65 million, a decrease of 580,000 from the previous year, while the birthrate stood at 10.48 per 1,000 population－the lowest over the past seven decades, according to the bureau. Meanwhile, total population on the mainland narrowly exceeded 1.4 billion by the end of last year, an increase of 4.7 million year-on-year. Last year marked the third consecutive year of falling births on the mainland despite the universal second-child policy having been adopted at the beginning of 2016. The policy, which encourages all couples to have two children, was designed to boost births to cope with rapid population aging. Births reached 17.86 million in 2016, the highest since 2000, according to the National Health Commission, but they fell to 17.23 million in 2017 and to 15.23 million in 2018. Ning Jizhe, head of the NBS, said at a news conference on Friday that despite the decrease, the total number of births last year on the mainland was still very big, and the universal second-child policy has played a very important role in encouraging births. The decrease last year was the smallest, he said. Births fell by 630,000 in 2017 and by 2 million in 2018. "Of all babies born last year, 59.5 percent were the second or more child, with the percentage rising over the past few years," Ning said. The percentage has remained at about 50 percent since the universal second-child policy was enacted, according to the National Health Commission. Despite the policy, many couples in China were not willing to have a second baby, for reasons such as the high cost of raising children and a lack of nursery facilities, according to a survey organized by the commission.”

     Albert Einstein once complained in a letter about how pushed around American men were by their women, and he did it in tones that would be howled down today; but he was right. I can’t quickly find the letter on the net, but Einstein has been in hot water for realistic portrayal of various nations in his travels at the time.
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/12/einsteins-travel-diaries-reveal-shocking-xenophobia

     Now the tide turns, and the claim of his wife Mileva Maric Einstein, to his intellectual contribution is being made:
  https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/

     The annual Women’s March has occurred in the US, basically a Leftist, feminist, anti-Trump event, with a mast song in Spanish, America’s soon to be national language, titled, “A Rapist in Your Path”:
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/17/womens-march-promotes-2020-rallies-spanish-language-song-titled-rapist-your-path/

“The anti-Trump inspired Women’s March is taking place on Saturday in Washington, DC, with “patriarchy” and “rape” as themes, according to the event’s website. “Three years of marching, training, organizing, and building power – it’s all been leading up to this. In 2020, we have the chance to strengthen the movement we started three years, and to unite together in the face of continued attacks on our bodies, our rights, our immigrant communities, and our planet,” the website states. “This year, we aren’t just marching. We’re putting our bodies on the line hand in hand with other mass movements.”

     I have always felt uneasy about X-rays, I mean, it is quite unnatural to be able to see inside one’s body. Surely if God wanted this, He would have made us with zippers, or transparent! 
And, now that we, well, maybe not me, but scientists, know about DNA and mutations, there are other questions to ask:
  https://www.studyfinds.org/radiation-levels-comparable-to-x-rays-cause-mutations-in-lab-grown-human-cells/

“X-rays have been a staple of modern medicine for a long time, and any doctor or radiologist is quick to tell their patients that there are absolutely no risks or harmful side effects associated with the radiation necessary to perform an X-ray. Now, researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center and Oncode Institute in the Netherlands have discovered that low doses of radiation, long believed to be safe, did in fact create breaks in lab grown human cells that allowed additional DNA to enter the chromosome. In more simplistic terms, the radiation caused mutations on the cellular level. To be clear, these findings do not mean that going to have an X-ray is going to harm you, and extensive further research is necessary involving actual living animals, and eventually humans, before any real conclusions can be drawn. Still, the results of this study at the very least are concerning, and seem to indicate that there are still some aspects of how radiation interacts with our bodies, on a cellular level, that science has yet to fully understand.

This is just a light-hearted piece, that occurred to me when reading about men who have their backs to the wall, and facing losing everything, requested by the court, trial by combat. And, of course, such a request is thought, wrongly, to be incompatible with modern law, but not all law.
  https://nypost.com/2020/01/15/kansas-man-wants-to-settle-ugly-custody-battle-with-trial-by-combat-with-japanese-swords/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_combat

“Unlike trial by ordeal in general, which is known to many cultures worldwide, trial by combat is known primarily from the customs of the Germanic peoples. It was in use among the ancient Burgundians, Ripuarian Franks, Alamans, Lombards, and Swedes. It was unknown in Anglo-Saxon law, Roman law and Irish Brehon Law and it does not figure in the traditions of Middle Eastern antiquity such as the code of Hammurabi or the Torah.
The practice is regulated in various Germanic legal codes. Being rooted in Germanic tribal law, the various regional laws of the Frankish Empire (and the later Holy Roman Empire) prescribed different particulars, such as equipment and rules of combat. The Lex Alamannorum (recension Lantfridana 81, dated to 712–730 AD) prescribes a trial by combat in the event of two families disputing the boundary between their lands. A handful of earth taken from the disputed piece of land is put between the contestants and they are required to touch it with their swords, each swearing that their claim is lawful. The losing party besides forfeiting their claim to the land is required to pay a fine. Capitularies governing its use appear from the year 803 onwards. Louis the Pious prescribed combat between witnesses of each side, rather than between the accuser and the accused, and briefly allowed for the Ordeal of the Cross in cases involving clerics. In medieval Scandinavia, the practice survived throughout the Viking Age in the form of the Holmgang. An unusual variant, the marital duel, involved combat between a husband and wife, with the former physically handicapped in some way. The loser was killed.”

     Many municipalities in Germany are clambering, indeed, falling over themselves to get more magical refugees, whom they believe will pay boomer pensions, I suppose. The idea is that as always, migrants will solve every problem, being, well, magical.
  https://www.dw.com/en/german-municipalities-demand-action-refugees-mediterranean/a-51990144

     But, maybe not:
  https://www.dw.com/en/immigration-not-going-to-stop-germanys-demographic-problem/a-18993548

     The ultra-paranoid John Steele has come to the big smoke for a few days, and he is with me now, both of us drunk on the cheap alcohol he went out and brought. I do not complain, being so poor I can’t’ afford a dentist, or to get my fridge fixed (which seems to have the motor run for 15 minutes, then stop, for another 15 minutes, then run again, running up my power bill), so getting drunk is my only temporary release. Anyway, onto the joint masterpiece, not my whinging …

    With global nuclear annihilation, one possible future, the question arises as to what the remnant will eat in the post-apocalyptic wasteland:
  https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/10744317/doomsday-diet-revealed-nuclear-apocalypse/

     The growth of survivalism, or doomsday prepping has been attributed to the media generating fear of existential threats:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-14/new-study-finds-media-generated-fear-driving-doomsday-prepping
  https://www.studyfinds.org/study-finds-rise-in-doomsday-prepping-due-to-mainstream-american-culture-of-fear/
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/obamageddon-fear-the-far-right-and-the-rise-of-doomsday-prepping-in-obamas-america/BDF4879C45C6F86F4E2F9FBEBF35D55E
  http://allnewspipeline.com/2019_The_year_Of_The_Prepper.php

““Doomsday prepping” or stockpiling food, medicine, weapons and other supplies in case of an apocalyptic scenario has long been considered peculiar behavior only exhibited by conspiracy theorists and other extremists in the United States. However, such prepping has actually been steadily on the rise in the U.S. over the past decade. So, what’s causing this surge in stockpiled rice packets and underground bunkers? One group of researchers say it is an ever growing sense of impending doom in American culture. Many have speculated that this surge in doomsday preppers over the last 10 years was linked to an extreme political reaction among many conservatives to Barack Obama’s initial election in 2008, but a new study out of the United Kingdom finds that neither the Obama presidency nor extreme right-wing conspiracy theories in general are the main cause of this growing phenomenon. Researchers interviewed preppers from 18 U.S. states and asked about their motivations for stockpiling food and supplies. The results indicated that, although most did seem to be conservative and fear liberal policies, the main reason behind their motivations was the overall sense of fear currently dominating U.S. culture across a variety of media channels. Most Americans can’t seem to log online or turn on the television without being hit by a grim view of the future being reported or speculated on.

     I will be producing articles attacking the naïve empiricism of sites like American Renaissance over the IQ issue, especially their ranking of East Asians over Nordics/Northern Europeans. Anyway, here is some material about how nations cheat with the economic statistics, which is something the naïve empiricist school does not address:
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/world-s-fastest-growing-economy-may-not-be-so-fast-after-all

“India’s statistics may have been painting a far rosier picture of economic growth than the more modest reality of the past decade. The nation has held the crown of the world’s fastest-growing major economy until recently, but a new study by former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian says the expansion was overestimated between 2011 and 2017. Rather than growing at about 7% a year in that period, growth was about 4.5%, according to the research paper, published by the Center for International Development at Harvard University. The overestimation occurred after the previous Congress-led government changed the methodology in calculating gross domestic product in 2012. One of the key adjustments was a shift to financial accounts-based data compiled by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, from volume-based data previously. This made GDP estimates more sensitive to price changes, in a period of lower oil prices, according to the research paper. Rather than deflate input values by input prices, the new methodology deflated these values by output prices, which could have overstated manufacturing growth. The Statistics Ministry defended the data, saying in a statement on Tuesday that the GDP estimates are “based on accepted procedures, methodologies and available data and objectively measure the contribution of various sectors in the economy.”

     I am always amazed at how sites like American Renaissance have an uncritical acceptance of data, such as IQ, especially that always ranking whites second to other special  groups, even though the entire field of the social science is stricken by a replication crisis, and the widespread existence of fraud and misplaced use of statistics. Thus, we have a highly cited  paper arguing that most published  research is false:
  https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.”