July 25, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web (Updated)

"Sam Harris Drops the Red Pill on IQ"--Bastiat Report (8 min.)

Harris argues that it is foolishness to argue that races can (and do) vary physically, but not mentally.

• "Ancient humans had sex with non humans"--New Zealand Herald. DNA analysis of human remains in sub-Saharan Africa shows that humans there had interbred with another, unknown ("ghost") species of hominid. The evolutionary tree is not as clean and neat as researchers would like to portray it. 
• "Medieval Knight RACES Modern Soldier in Obstacle Course"--The Firearms Blog. It sounds like a joke: a firefighter, a knight in Renaissance plate armor, and a soldier with a modern load out run an obstacle course. Who wins? The firefighter, followed by the knight, with the soldier trailing far behind.
• "Anybody Can Fire This 'Locked' Smart Gun With $15 Worth of Magnets"--Wired. The firearm is the Armatix IP1 "smart gun." Per the article:

The IP1 purports to limit who can fire it by requiring that the shooter wear a special Armatix watch. If the gun and the watch can't connect via a short-range radio signal that extends just a few inches, the gun won't fire. That's the idea, anyway. But Plore showed that he can extend the range of the watch's radio signal, allowing anyone to fire the gun when it's more than ten feet away. He can jam the gun's radio signals to prevent its owner from firing it—even when the watch is inches away and connected. And most disturbingly, he can mechanically disable the gun's locking mechanism by placing some cheap magnets alongside its barrel, firing the gun at will even when the watch is completely absent.

• "Gun Cases are Notoriously Hard to Make Stick. New York Thinks It Has the Answer"--The Trace. New York is engaging in an ambitious program to test all firearms it seizes for trace DNA (from the trigger, grip and slide), in order to build up a DNA database and match firearms with perpetrators.  Although the article acknowledges that the DNA evidence becomes too unreliable when the DNA sample contains traces from 4 or more people, it fails to note that DNA trace evidence is inherently unreliable. The problem is that a swab sample of trace DNA "may include DNA from several people, in roughly equal proportions, all mixed together." Another article notes:

       This so-called "touch DNA" or "trace DNA" has given investigators much more evidence to analyze, but it comes at a cost. We leave traces of our DNA everywhere, in dead skin cells, stray spit and strands of hair. The hardest job for investigators is to differentiate DNA that belongs to the criminal and DNA that randomly finds its way to the crime scene.

       "There's something called 'accidental transfer' or 'secondary transfer,'" says Phillips. "The DNA on a weapon might come from the person who actually touched the object or the person who shook hands with the person who touched the object."

       In 2015, forensic researchers asked pairs of people to shake hands for two minutes and then handle separate knives. In 85 percent of the cases, DNA from both people was found on the knives, and 20 percent of the cases showed more DNA from the secondary source.

       Sometimes it's the forensic investigators themselves who accidentally contaminate the evidence. The guide shares the bizarre example of Adam Scott, a man wrongfully convicted of rape when his DNA was found in a genital swab. Scott's DNA was a perfect match — a one in a billion probability — and it was the only evidence used to convict him, despite Scott's claim that he was more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) away the night of the incident.

       Scott spent five months in custody before the truth came out. A technician in the crime lab had reused a plastic plate that contained a sample of Scott's saliva from an unrelated "spitting incident." Phone records also corroborated Scott's claim that he was in his hometown at the time of the attack.

Yet another article describes how trace DNA was transferred from one scene--where paramedics were responding to a call involving a homeless man--to a murder scene miles away to which the paramedics were called a few hours later. Even flies, feasting on blood or semen at one location, can contaminate a crime scene at a different location--transferring DNA from the first scene to the second. 

• "Britain Planning To Outlaw All Knives"--The Captain's Journal. It isn't so much a ban on all knives, as an extension on the prior ban on fighting weapons: this ban will extend to "dangerous weapons that glamorise violence," including sword sticks, butterfly knives and blowpipes, as well as a range of martial arts weapons such as deathstars and handclaws. There will be an exception for people possessing the weapons for bonified ceremonial or religious reasons. I wonder if that includes "jihad"?
• And another blow to the "magic dirt" theory of Americanism: "Bay Area ISIS Supporter Wanted to 'Redefine Terror,' Kill 10,000"--PJ Media. Amer Sinan Alhaggagi was born and raised in California.
• This is one way to take down a knifeman: "CCTV captures the dramatic moment police overpower a knife-wielding man as he attacks an officer shouting 'Allahu akbar' near the Spanish-Moroccan border"--Daily Mail. You know those big, plastic pedestrian barriers that resemble Jersey barriers? When officers surrounded the "culture enriching" suspect, one of the officers picked up the plastic barrier, hurling it at the terrorist and striking him in the head and shoulders.
• Diversity is our strength: "People close to notorious Zetas cartel helped immigrants found in truck in Walmart parking lot cross the Rio Grande, according to survivor"--Daily Mail. So, depending on whom you rely, there were between 100 and 200 people crammed into that trailer. Of those, only 39 were inside when authorities arrived--the rest escaped.
• We live in perilous times: "Former CIA Director Calls For A Coup If Trump Fires Mueller"--Zero Hedge. The article reports that former CIA Director John Brennan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, at the Aspen Security Forum, that if the White House tries to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, government officials should refuse to follow the president orders.
• Corruption: "FBI Says ‘Awan Brothers’ Hard Drives Were Smashed After Confiscated As Law Enforcement Evidence"--True Pundit (h/t Anonymous Conservative). From the article:

       Reports of the FBI seizing computer hard drives form the home of the congressional IT director and aide of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz are accurate, according to FBI sources: with the exception of one major detail. The computer hard drives were not damaged when they were confiscated, FBI sources said.

       The FBI, who is working in some capacity to assist with the Capitol Police on the Awan investigation, confirm the hard drives and other computer equipment have been damaged but are pointing the finger at the Capitol Police’s chain of custody with the evidence. The FBI, they said, would not damage evidence and stressed if someone went to the trouble of destroying evidence before a seizure they normally would discard of it as well, federal sources said.

       Capitol Police officials would not respond to requests for comment.

• True colors: "Trump messes with Sessions, and Senate Republicans are not pleased"--McClatchy. Top Senate RINOs are upset over Trump's criticism of Sessions and his failure ot investigate voter fraud involving Hillary Clinton. The article notes, in not so many words, that the problem is that Trump doesn't understand where Session's loyalty lies, mistakenly thinking that it lies with the American people, the Constitution, or, at a minimum, his boss. Instead, as the article states:

Sessions spent 20 years in the Senate, winning a reputation for affability and party loyalty. He understood and doggedly practiced the code of what's been called the world's most exclusive club: You can disagree without being disagreeable, but you protect the institution and its members.

• A new Woodpile Report. Lots of good comments and links, as usual. One portion leaps out in particular: the author's warning for those prepping for when this house of cards comes down:

       ... The signature event of survivalists is bugging out ... to their fortified bolt hole as society collapses in a fiery heap behind them. For preppers it's the remote homestead with gardens and solar panels.... Either may be part of a militia, bands of brothers training to defend their own in Mad Max times. All are responding to a partial, almost optimistic understanding of the coming disaster.

       DC has plainly stated, in public documents, they will requisition food, transportation, equipment, supplies and involuntarily servitude of any kind, in any amount, to whatever extent that pleases them in a "national emergency". Their control of the cities would rest on food distribution and essential services, then as now, and the rest of America would be stripped to make it happen. This is, plainly said, calculated annihilation, held as not only necessary but just.

       DC considers their power base—the urban west and east coasts and a few colonies in between—to be the real America, supported unwillingly but rightly by deplorables [aka, the fellaheen] living elsewhere who would otherwise act solely from pathologies born of willful ignorance and native ill will. ...

       Compliance with DC's quotas would become law enforcement's number one priority. It would fall to the military to deal with organized resistance, which history suggests is a near-certainty. Calories and survival are nearly the same thing. The European undergrounds of World War II grew into effective forces only when workers and foodstuffs were transferred to Germany. ...

       DC needn't target survivalists and prepper communities directly, they'd feel the follow-on effects. Towns and villages forced to ante up their quota to support the cities wouldn't endure famine when known stores of food and supplies were retrievable. Those preppers who didn't voluntarily hand over their deep larders "for the common good" would find armed committees at their door. Nor should they expect equitable treatment, they'd be condemned as unconscionable hoarders, feasting while toddlers with empty stomachs cry the night away.

It is the fellaheen, as Oswald Spengler terms them, that always have to pay for the delusions of the globalists. Spengler explained (underlines added):

All world-improvers and world-citizens [e.g., progressives and socialists] stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warriorgroups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannae seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror's hands to another's, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and for ever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed world-peace never diminishes that alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes. "Lever doodt al s Sklav (better dead than slave)" is an old Frisian peasant saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.

Update (7/26/2017): I initially had misapplied the fellaheen definition, because when Spengler wrote about it, he used the term to describe the peasants of any late stage civilization, and so I wrongly attributed it to the "deplorables." However, Spengler was speaking of "the great mass of peasants who adapt and survive from one civilization to the next without becoming part of any, thus remaining separate from the great movements of history." But Spengler does not use the term when referring to the pre-civilization peasants, which in his mind, encapsulate the culture; rather, it is always in reference to late-stage civilization or, even, post-civilization people that live in virtual slavery to whomever asserts dominion over the land on which they live. For instance, in another part of his book, speaking of the spread of Islam among the then-Christian, Jewish, and Persian nations of the Near- and Middle-East, he wrote:

With the end of the first millennium of our era these nations one and all pass over into the form of fellah peoples, and it is as fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the Balkans under Turkish rule, the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe have lived ever since.

(Decline of the West (Kindle location 13280)). Thus, the fellaheen are those that will tolerate being subjected to the rule of a more aggressive peoples. The fellaheen, in our case, would include the rabbity left: the left-wing hipsters, pajama boys, and others uninvolved in and uncaring of their nation or national fate.