This film uses strong imagery and language, but it is worth watching. It comes at a time when a strong pushback against decades of PC is needed.

I am not completely sure what the issues in Harney County are. But far as I know:

The precipitating issue is the Hammonds were sent back to prison for arson, which many find dubious and excessive.

The underlying issues are federal ownership and control of the land.

The argument for the feds is there is a lot of case law, bills from congress, and court rulings that show the feds do indeed own BLM land.

The argument against that position is 1) all of the above violates the Constitution, which it does appear to do, and 2) all the parties that claim the feds own the land are themselves federal—congress, courts, BLM, FBI, prosecutors, and probably more than that.

I really like the people in Harney County and tend to trust them. Seems to me the feds are pushing too hard, especially by sending the Hammonds back to jail for five years.

Also, I am strongly in favor of states’ rights because that is how our system is supposed to work.

That said, I also fear states’ right in land issues in the West because once states control that land it will be corrupt state officials selling the land to their friends, not necessarily being reasonable with ranchers.

It seems to me that the feds have overreached in this case and now can’t back down because they are a stupid bureaucracy. Would have been better to give the Hammonds a pass and let them continue ranching rather than send them back to jail.

Since they didn’t do that, it would still be better for the feds to back off, let the Hammonds out of jail, and let the County return to business as it was. Good law enforcement often calls for de-escalation and this case is an example of that, imo.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of a major turning point in modern Lithuanian history as well as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

On January 13, 1991 tens of thousands of unarmed Lithuanian citizens confronted Soviet tanks and soldiers at the Parliament building in Vilnius and the Vilnius TV Tower.

Iceland was the first country to recognize Lithuanian independence on February 11, 1991.

More about the events of January can be found here.

Edit 01/27/16: Lithuania opens mass trial for 1991 Soviet crackdown

A transcript of this video can be found here.

This is a much more in-depth analysis of the recent impact of mass migration on Germany and Europe than I posted yesterday and the day before. Highly recommended. ABN

Yesterday I discussed the basic principle of consanguinity and how that affects societies that practice it.

To continue in this vein, today I want to describe how some very basic anthropological concepts apply to Europeans.

Yesterday we saw how large groups of clannish people from consanguineous cultures are all but guaranteed to cause problems in Europe, which historically eradicated consanguinity and most clans.

But that leaves open the question of why Europeans are blind to the inevitable problems that will arise when consanguineous clannish cultures migrate into Europe in large numbers.

In the news this morning, I found this article: ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities.

Here are some quotes from it:

Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.

and

There has been widespread condemnation of the city’s police force after an official press release on New Year’s Day described the celebrations as “peaceful”.

…questions are being asked over why it took five days for the media to report the incidents.

So why did that happen?

The basic anthropological reason is Europeans are extremely sensitive to feelings of shame.

This is so because European communal bonds are built on the ideas of fairness and universal morality that developed after clans were eradicated in Europe.

These ideas have existed in European populations for so long that those populations have evolved to rely on them for social cohesion. This is an example of the co-evolution of genes and culture.

Co-evolution of genes and culture is a feature of all societies. It almost certainly accelerated during the past 3,000 years since the advent of large-scale agriculture.

In European society, this sort of co-evolution encouraged the emergence of a strong sense of shame or guilt. These emotions emerged because shame, public shaming, and guilt are used to police European post-clannish, universal morality.

Now we can answer the questions posed above from the linked article.

Why did police allow the large crowd of rowdy men to gather? Because they were ashamed to do anything because if they had, they might have been criticized for being “racist.”

The police not only did not break up the crowd to protect German women, they further falsely described the celebrations as “peaceful” in a press release.

How could German police feel more ashamed of a word (racist) than of not protecting German women?

The answer is their natural tendencies and professional requirements to protect German women (or anyone) were overruled by the dictates of their consciences.

Their brains malfunctioned so much that the police protected themselves against false imaginary accusations instead of doing their jobs by protecting actual women.

I say malfunctioned because in a larger context that is surely a malfunction.

But within German or European culture, actions like theirs have not so far been seen as malfunctions, except sometimes after the fact.

The Rotherham sex scandal in England is another example of widespread fear among police and officials of being shamed. There are literally hundreds of other examples throughout Western Europe.

These examples show how a culture that evolved in response to the absence of clans developed a sense of moral shame that is poorly adapted to the present world.

The actions of European politicians who have allowed these problems to develop and of the press that consistently hides these same problems can be explained in the same way the actions of police in Cologne have been explained.

A well-known difference in world cultures is the degree to which members of a culture marry close relatives. This is called consanguinity. The map below shows rates of consanguinity across the world. Click on the image to expand the map and see the numbers better.

Cultures with high rates of consanguinity tend to be clannish. This means that a basic organizational unit of the society is a clan made up of closely related members. Clans are usually hierarchical and demand primary loyalty from their members. And this generally results in nations with weak state institutions, corruption, and lots of fighting among clans.

Young males in clans generally learn from an early age that violence is the best way to settle disputes because that is how it has been for centuries and because there are no alternatives like a fair and effective legal system.

Clannish societies also engage in crowd behaviors such as those that occurred in Cologne on New Years Eve. To an anthropologist, attacks of that nature should not be surprising. They are a fairly normal aspect of clan-based behavior and psychology. Germans, though…

…have been shocked by the scale of the attacks, involving many groups of drunk and aggressive young men.

Witnesses and police said the men were of Arab or North African appearance. (same link as above)

Being shocked by something so predictable says a good deal about German idealism. Do they really think that just breathing the air in Germany will change the psycho-sociologies of migrants that have developed over thousands of years?

Displaying amazing ignorance of the root cause of what is happening in Cologne and many other parts of Europe, the Mayor of Cologne herself actually said

…that [German] women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve. (link)

When your ideals stubbornly do not match reality, it’s time to change your ideals.

Europe used to be a clannish society. But the Catholic Church banned consanguinity during the Middle Ages. Banning consanguinity was a deliberate and premeditated way to destroy the clan structure of much of Europe.

After that ban, a different sort of society evolved in Europe, based on strong state laws and a universal morality that sees other people as being largely “the same as” oneself and thus deserving of fair treatment.

Some other really basic differences between societies are the way women are treated (see the above) and how the truth is treated.

In Europe and European-derived cultures, the truths people believe in are open and ideally should be shared with others without prejudice. The scientific method is a good example of this. Europe did not keep its science and technology secret.

This is not the case in many other cultures. In many parts of the world codes exist that define what can be said or not said to “outsiders.” And in many of those societies it is considered right and proper to lie to “outsiders” in order to gain an advantage over them. If you allow large numbers of people like that into your society, you are going to have problems.

The ideas expressed above are so basic to human social psychology, it’s long past time to stop being ignorant of them or pretending they are more malleable than they are.