I found Razib Khan’s post on human genetic diversity fascinating. Here’s one of the key passages:

93-98.5% of the ancestry of humans outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (among those with no recent Sub-Saharan African ancestry, obviously) derives from a breeding population of 1,000 to 10,000, which expanded rapidly 60,000 years ago (reaching Australia and Europe around 45,000 and 50,000 years ago, accordingly).

So the simple “Out of Africa” narrative of a population crash and explosion across the world holds for North Africans, Eurasians, Oceanians, and Amerindians, some six and a half billion of us. But the origins of modern populations south of the Sahara are clearly more complex. Any bottleneck’s effects were much weaker within Africa, and multiple proto-modern populations seem to have been separating into distinct lineages as early as 200,000 years ago.

More graphically from a genetic standpoint Swedes and the Han Chinese resemble each other more closely than some people in neighboring villages in sub-Saharan Africa.

And speaking of graphics he includes some stunning graphics in his post. His map of migrations highlights and documents a point I have made here: as long ago as 15,000 years ago and almost certainly as long ago as 5,000 years ago human beings were just about everywhere in the world. No wonder the 16th and 17th century European explorers weren’t surprised to find people wherever they went. They were only surprised when they didn’t find people.

His post also ties in with another little news story, from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — What makes humans unique? Scientists have taken another step toward solving an enduring mystery with a new tool that may allow for more precise comparisons between the DNA of modern humans and that of our extinct ancestors.

Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

“That’s a pretty small percentage,” said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. “This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals.”

The research draws upon DNA extracted from fossil remains of now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans dating back to around 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, as well as from 279 modern people from around the world.

all of which supports a point I’ve made here: the available evidence supports the hypothesis that present day human beings, Neanderthals, and Denisovans all belong to a single species. The relationship among us is more like the relationship among different breeds of dogs or horses than it is like a difference between species. What about Homo antecessor (800,000 ya) or erectus (1.7 million ya)? We may never know but I wouldn’t bet against all of us being members of the same species.

Does anyone have a prediction for what the Social Security trustees’ report for 2021 will say? It’s already three months late (not unheard of although if it hasn’t been produced by August that will be unheard of). What are the odds that the Medicare trust fund is already depleted or will be within a year or so? IIRC the 2020 report said 2025.

At The Strategist professor of strategic studies Brahma Chellaney is critical of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in no uncertain terms:

Afghanistan is on the brink of catastrophe, and it is US President Joe Biden’s fault. By overruling America’s top generals and ordering the hasty withdrawal of US troops, Biden opened the way for Taliban terrorists to capture more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s districts. Now, the Taliban are pushing towards Kabul, and the United States is looking weaker than ever.

Unlike most he does not shrink from proposing his alternative:

Biden had a better option: the US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, that would have violated the deal Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.

which is not unlike what I proposed 16 years ago: maintaining a small, lethal force with the dual missions of counterterrorism and force protection in Afghanistan indefinitely. Notate bene: I didn’t think we should have invaded Afghanistan in the first place. If it were felt that we needed to do something, we should have engaged in the punitive raid to end all punitive raids and left it at that.

But all of this makes me wonder if we’re going to see the return of something like the malaise about which President Jimmy Carter warned 42 years ago. There are major differences between now and 42 years ago not the least of which is that then we had the world’s largest economy very nearly by an order of magnitude. If we have another “crisis of confidence” it will be well-deserved.

If you like polemic, you might try reading Matt Taibbi’s critique of Robin DiAngelo and her latest book, probably in that order. Here’s a snippet:

DiAngelo is a unique writer, being dishonest, dangerous, and moronic in magnificent quantities, probably in that order.

and later:

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over.

Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel, Matt.

I should have titled this post “Monetizing White Guilt”.

I wish that Americans would refrain from criticizing or even commenting on the internal matters and politics of other countries, with which they are even less familiar than they are their own. Or, at least count 10 before letting fly. Let’s begin with the first sentence of the Washington Post editorial to which I linked earlier:

Poland’s right-wing nationalist ruling party, Law and Justice, has been steadily losing ground in recent months.

What is a “right-wing” party in Poland? I have no idea. These characterizations do not translate well. So, for example, the UK’s Conservative Party more closely resembles the American Democratic Party or, at least the Democratic Party before it began its mad dash towards its progressive wing, than it does anything an American conservative would recognize. Actually, both of our major political parties are more like the Tories than any other British political party, as the Brits have laughed about for years. A “right-wing party” in continental Europe is frequently a royalist party.

Also is the PiS (no comment) actually a “nationalist” party? Again I have no idea.

Poland has a parliamentary system. The ruling coalition (called “the United Right”) is twice as large as any other coalition. Said another way it doesn’t matter whether PiS loses a seat or two as long as the coalition remains in power which is a pretty good likelihood.

After the throat-clearing here’s what they’re complaining about:

It should be no surprise, then, that Law and Justice is reviving an effort to neuter the country’s highest-rated news station, TVN24, which unlike state-owned channels broadcasts independent news and critical commentary about the government. This week the head of the state broadcast regulator, a former Law and Justice member, told Reuters that the station was in violation of foreign ownership rules, and that its license might not be renewed by a Sept. 26 deadline.

What’s their specific complaint? The news is dominated by a state-owned channel practically everywhere in the world other than the U. S. France 24 is state-owned. Germany didn’t even have privately-owned channels until the late 1980s. Why isn’t the WaPo complaining about the BBC?

Here’s their conclusion:

The Biden administration has taken note of what would be a devastating blow to media freedom in Poland. The U.S. charge d’affaires in Warsaw and the State Department’s spokesman have tweeted their concerns. “Strong democracies welcome a free and independent press,” said State’s Ned Price. That’s just the problem: Under Law and Justice, Poland’s democracy has become progressively weaker. The United States must use all the leverage it can muster to ensure that independent television news in the country survives.

which I think is hyperventilating. Let me provide another way of looking at matters. The Poles and Hungarians are fighting a rather desperate rearguard action to preserve their own languages and cultures. Both Polish and Hungarian are spoken almost exclusively within their respective home countries, by their diaspora and children, and a few language scholars. Both are rather small countries. Both are very Christian countries which struggled under Communist rule for 40 years. Both countries have historic experience of depradations by Muslim invaders and they see themselves as having defended Germany from the same fate.

The actual problem is Germany. The euro is a vehicle for German exports. It was Germany that invited open immigration from the Middle East and North Africa—it furthered German ends. I feel safe in suggesting that very few of the people from the Middle East who accepted Germany’s invitation spoke either Polish or Hungarian. Shouldn’t the Poles and Hungarians be excused for believing they are fighting for national survival?

One more point. The German are quite ignorant of history including their own. They don’t know what happened during World War II. They don’t know what happened in the 1930s. They don’t know what happened during World War I. What they do learn invariably casts Germany in a favorable light. What else would you expect when the education (other than job training) of 2/3s of Germans ends at 10th grade?

It used to be that the Washington Post was the news outlet closest to and that most accurately reflected the prevailing wisdom in the nation’s capitol. Is that still the case? If so, I think we have a lot about which we should be concerned.

This morning when I checked the WaPo’s online opinion page, as I do every morning, I was treated to George Will’s column to which I linked yesterday as the lead opinion piece. As was noted the piece reflected an oddly distorted view of events and called attention to events of whose interpretation I am far from certain. Certainly not as certain as George Will. They were events that could be leading us closer to a major war.

I can’t remember the last time that one of Mr. Will’s columns held the lead position on the WaPo’s online opinion page. Clearly, the piece has caught some attention and the WaPo’s editors broadly approve of it.

Today’s lead editorial is about the Polish government’s move against an (ultimately) American-owned 24 hour news station on the grounds that it violates foreign ownership rules in Poland. I’ll have more to say about the editorial later but here’s my question: why refer to it as an “attack”? Journalists are supposed to be wordsmiths so any claim that it was inadvertent rings hollow. “Move” as two fewer letters so the word wasn’t chosen to save space.

Which leads to the question in my title: why is the WaPo so bellicose? Does that reflect the prevailing view in DC these days?

Meanwhile, Joseph Sternberg draws attention to some interesting developments on the climate change front in this piece in the Wall Street Journal:

It’s a startlingly broad phenomenon. The Swiss last month rejected a referendum to impose a fuel tax and a tax on airline tickets. The British cabinet, which on Wednesday proposed major new carbon restrictions for transport industries, also is split over previously announced plans to ban gas-fired home heating and require landlords to boost energy efficiency in rental units.

The EU hadn’t even unveiled its marquee new climate package this week before furious lobbying erupted in opposition from almost everyone. French officials sound particularly alert to the danger, and no wonder. President Emmanuel Macron has seen his agenda knocked off course for the better part of three years by grassroots protests against a diesel tax hike that started in 2018.

Meanwhile in Japan, climate-minded shareholders have just wrapped up a disastrous (for them) season of annual shareholder meetings. Resolutions codifying aggressive corporate carbon targets were defeated at all three companies where activists proposed them— Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo and Kansai Electric Power.

This followed the announcement in April that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest with around $1.6 trillion under management, is abandoning trendy ESG investing. (It stands for “environmental, social and governance.”) The strategy was a financial loser, and “we can’t sacrifice returns for the sake of buying environmental names or ESG names,” Kenji Shiomura, senior director of the fund’s investment strategy department, said in an interview with Bloomberg. Given Japan’s impending glut of retirees and shortage of workers, Bloomberg’s reporters had to concede that “pensions are a more sensitive subject than climate change.”

Over the period of the last 30 years the strategy for reducing carbon emissions that has been used both in Europe and the U. S. has been to offshore heavy industry to China. That is and has always been a futile approach. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether China emits the carbon or we do.

I don’t see the developments that George Will calls out in his Washington Post column in quite the favorable light that he does but I did find them interesting:

The Queen Elizabeth, one of only 18 large carriers worldwide, is the largest ship ever built for the Royal Navy. Before it left Britain in May, the government said the strike group would be “confident but not confrontational” in the South China Sea, where China illegally claims near-total sovereignty. Unfortunately, “nonconfrontational” means that the group will not sail through the Taiwan Strait. Beijing will surely interpret this avoidance as a flinch. Still, with the British Army now smaller than at any time in more than three centuries, the Royal Navy, Europe’s most formidable naval power, augments the complications confronting Chinese as well as Russian war planners.

The Financial Times recently reported U.S.-Japan joint military exercises — presented as disaster relief training — in the South China and East China seas, and “top-secret tabletop war games” in case of “a conflict with China over Taiwan.” Presumably someone thought the no-longer-quite-so-secret games should be publicized, perhaps for the edification of China. The westernmost island in the Japanese archipelago is 68 miles from Taiwan. The Senkaku islands in the East China sea are administered by Japan but claimed by China.

Heino Klinck, a Pentagon official who oversaw military relations with Japan and Taiwan late in the Trump administration, tells the Financial Times: “The Japanese government has increasingly recognized, and even acknowledges publicly, that the defense of Taiwan equates to the defense of Japan.” Evidence of this includes the Hudson Institute’s June 28 virtual event on “The Transformation of Japan’s Security Strategy,” at which Japan’s State Minister for Defense Yasuhide Nakayama described the Taiwan Strait as a “red line of the 21st century.”

He said, “We have to protect … Taiwan as a democratic country.” He called Taiwan more than a “friend,” a “brother,” and said, “We are family.” Emphasizing the increasing collaboration of China and Russia in military exercises near Japan, he stressed the importance of European militaries “exercising in Asia.”

Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso was recently quoted (in remarks at a political fundraiser) saying that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would threaten Japan’s “survival,” so “Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.” This, even though Japan officially adheres to the “one-China policy” — the increasingly threadbare fiction that Taiwan and People’s Republic of China are somehow part of a single polity.

The Wall Street Journal noted, “In the balance of power between the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and China, the world’s third-largest economy, Japan, is critical.” And retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, says that “over time” the U.S. policy is to confront China with a “global maritime coalition” that includes, in addition to Japan, “Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.”

We’ll see if such a coalition actually emerges. I don’t believe it’s reasonable to put Russia and China in the same category. Yes, both China and Russia are pursuing their own national interests. Yes, they both have national interests. But China is behaving increasingly aggressively while Russia has responded to what they deem to be Western aggression.

The key point to understand is that neither the United Kingdom nor Japan do much of anything at the behest of the U. S. If they’re acting, it’s because they’re becoming increasingly nervous. While I think it’s an interesting development, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. Just as I think that the U. S. has interpreted its national interest far too broadly I don’t think that the Chinese authorities should be interpreting China’s interests as broadly as they rather clearly are.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are puzzled by Republicans’ attitudes towards getting vaccinated against COVID-19:

About 65% of Americans over the age of 12 and nearly 90% of those 65 and older have received at least one dose. Widespread inoculations have resulted in plunging cases, hospitalizations and deaths in recent months even as most states lifted their lockdowns and mask mandates.

Cases have fallen by some 90% and hospitalizations nearly as much since their January peak. Deaths are 95% lower, and hospitals have more room to admit less ill patients. Returns are diminishing on each new vaccination as herd immunity approaches, but the societal goal should still be to vaccinate as many adults as possible. The more vaccinations, the lower the chance that breakouts this fall and winter could burden the hospital system and result in lockdowns.

Most Americans believe the personal benefits from vaccination outweigh the potential risks. Governments haven’t needed to resort to coercion, though some have tried to prod people with financial incentives. Yet the question now is what to do about the third of Americans who haven’t been vaccinated, especially as the Delta variant spreads.

Experts have been guilty of overplaying the risk of new variants to justify lockdowns. But the Delta variant deserves special caution. It is estimated to be more than twice as contagious as the original strain. The Pfizer vaccine is also between 10% and 30% less effective in blocking transmission of the variant, though it still appears to be more than 90% protective against severe illness.

All of this means breakthrough infections are more likely to occur, and more people will have to be inoculated to achieve herd immunity. That’s why we’re seeing cases increasing, especially in pockets with low vaccination rates. Many of the unvaccinated are young adults who haven’t got around to it or don’t feel threatened by Covid.

A recent study of the group mentioned by the editors, young adults, published at the Journal of Adolescent Health casts some interesting light on the subject. The top reasons given by those surveyed (ages 18-25, with a reasonable distribution of racial and ethnic groups) were:

I think the message here is don’t politicize diseases or their treatments. Even when it’s an election year. Even when you think defeating the incumbent is a moral necessity. Even when you think re-electing the incumbent is a moral necessity. The consequences can persist long after the utility of the politicization has vanished.