May 9, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

Miscellaneous stuff today:

• "As Mount St. Helens Earthquake Swarm Sparks New Eruption Concerns Relive The 1980 Devastation [Video]"--The Inquistr. 
• "The Massive Wildfire Burning in Alberta"--The Atlantic. A photo essay of the fire, some of the damage, and of the people impacted.
• Global Catastrophic Risks-2016 (PDF). A report from the Global Challenges Foundation. The focus of the report is ostensibly on global catastrophic risks (GCRs)--threats that could eliminate 10% or more of the global population. I haven't had time to read the report in depth, but skimming through it, it seems a rather shallow report big on charts but little else. The primary bogeyman is, of course, global warming. Other threats considered are nuclear war, asteroid impact and pandemic. They also throw in artificial intelligence. What the report really is, though, is scare-mongering with the aim, to quote the group's founder, to "develop a model where a majority of the world’s nations, with strong support from leading nations, can make binding decisions which can be enforced in an effective and fair way. This would imply that individual nations waive their sovereignty in favor of one or more organizations that have a mandate to decide on how to mitigate GCRs." 
• "Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News"--Gizmodo. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that a company operated by liberal progressives would censor conservatives. (Sarc.).
• "Is religion about to die out? Growing wealth is causing belief in moralising gods to decline - and it could make it vanish entirely"--The Daily Mail. The gist of the article is that, according to one theory, moralistic religions arose to assuage grievances between a wealthy elite who enjoyed access to plentiful resources and an impoverished majority stuck in a Hobbesian existence by discouraging the impoverished majority from revolting by promising rewards in an afterlife (in other words, a verbose way of stating that "religion is the opiate of the masses"); and that because we now live in a period of plentiful resources for all, the need for religion has disappeared. From the article:

According to evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, affluence causes humans to switch to a slower lifestyle where they have babies later and fewer children. 

Around 2,500 years ago it was just the elite members of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean who adopted this lifestyle.

The rest of the population, however, continued to live fast and die young, which left the wealthier people at a competitive disadvantage from an evolutionary perspective, explained Dr Baumard.

As a result the elite promoted moralising gods as a way to ensure the more sexually active and aggressive general populous did not usurp them.

But now, as affluence becomes more ubiquitous around the world, this could ultimately lead to the downfall of moralising religions too, Dr Baumard wrote in New Scientist. 

The article also explains:

But many scientists have been puzzled as to why these moralising religions emerged relatively late in human evolution – long after the rise of large civilisations in Egypt and Sumeria. 

Instead Dr Baumard and his colleagues argue one of the key predictors of the emergence of moralising religions was the amount of energy people were consuming each day.

They argue that when individuals had access to more than 20,000 kilocalories a day, it promoted a switch in people's behaviour and so their psychological outlook.

When this happened society became more stable and predictable while those who did not have access to this calorie intake, continued to live a faster way of life.

Dr Baumard said: 'You are clearly at a disadvantage if you follow a slow strategy when others follow a faster strategy - if you are faithful when others grab sexual opportunities, if you forgive when others avenge, if you work when others have fun.

'This disadvantage incentivised the elite to morally condemn fast behaviours, in part by adopting and promoting the new religions that legitimised and reinforced a slow morality and promised punishment for trangressors.

'The same idea could also explain the gradual decline of moralising religion in wealthier parts of the world such as Western Europe and the northern parts of North America.'

It struck me that this is a direct challenge to r/K theory; it is, in fact, essentially a reversal of r/K theory. That is, these researchers argue that resource restrictions leads to r-behavior, which must be constrained by social mores, whereas free resources leads to K-behavior: i.e., greater self-control.  However, this flies in the face of actual knowledge, not the least being that the ruling classes have always been known for their debauchery and whims, whether you examine ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, or the British Empire; and sexual promiscuity seems to have increased in modern times as welfare has become commonplace. Real world evidence suggests that the lack of morals is related to resource abundance, not scarcity. 

• "What You Need To Know To Survive A Police Interrogation"--The Return of Kings. Basically, shut up. Read the whole thing, though, because it has examples of how an interrogation will be carried out and what can go wrong (basically, that you will admit to anything just to make the whole unpleasantness stop).
• "Kerry slams Trump's wall, tells grads to prepare for 'borderless world'"--Washington Examiner. As I've noted before, this election (at least for the electorate) is coming down to globalist versus nationalist.
• "Liberals' Kids Get the Golden Ticket While Yours Get Scraps"--Town Hall. A meritocracy can only last one generation. 
• "Glenn Reynolds: How to make the U.S. collapse-proof"--USA Today. Working off of Tainter's thesis on what causes a complex society to collapse, Reynolds argues that the way to prevent a collapse is to reduce the complexity; in this case, by returning to the original foundational principles of our nation and Constitution including a small and limited federal government. Michael Walsh makes a similar argument. However, not everyone believes it is possible to prevent collapse because of the lack of social cohesion. From Vox Popoli: 

The correct approach is not to attempt to save, or fix, the United States of America. As I noted back in 2004, it's dead. It is no more a true nation than Yugoslavia, or South Africa, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were. 

 The long term American focus should be on successfully doing what the South Africans failed to do, which is peacefully dividing the empire between the various nations. This will no doubt be difficult for many to accept, but it is what is going to happen anyway, and the sooner that "conservatives" understand that this is the only way to preserve the actual nation, as opposed to the mythical "proposition nation" which is now based on nothing more than Magic Dirt Theory, the more likely it is that they will be able to come away with something sustainable.

• Related: "Watch two centuries of immigration to the US: Incredible animation shows the populations that have arrived in America since 1820"--The Daily Mail. Although there was some immigration from China and Mexico, the period up through World War II was almost all immigration from Western Europe (and before 1900, was predominantly from the UK or Germany). Then watch what happens as immigration restrictions were lifted in the 1960s.... 

• Thoughts on the Apocalypse from The Anonymous Conservative, writing about the spread of transgenderism:

Clearly, looking at this and how far the pendulum has swung toward r-selection, there is every reason to believe that the Apocalypse which resets this will be epic, with unimaginable levels of death and destruction. Vast swaths of this world are going to have to die horribly. It will be awful.