Korean Translation of One Cop No Legs Is Up

We have another Korean translation up, this time of the One Cop No Legs video, which is one strange video all right. Tons of Koreans are coming in to look at these weird videos of mine, so we are commissioning some translations for them.

It’s been quite a pleasure to work with young Koreans. Without insulting my White translators, the Koreans are simply better on average. First of all, they are young Koreans of both sexes and they are doing great work. Young Whites can sometimes do good work, but they often take awhile when they don’t flake out altogether. Of course, I don’t pay because there’s no funds to pay anyone, frankly. We all pretty much volunteer here at this website.

Young Whites are very oriented towards money are not really interested in working for free. On the other hand, a lot of them might as well volunteer because a lot of these guys are not doing much anyway. I get all sorts of young White guys saying they are going to work with me, and then they flake out. It’s gotten to be a cliche.

Also, young Whites tend to be quite independent-minded when they work for you. This is good, because it probably relates to the independent, creative and innovate potential of our people, but as a boss, it’s not so great. We pretty much want yes-men.

Which the Koreans are in spades! Koreans are very eager to please, and so nice and bend over to backwards to serve you boss that’s it almost seems naive. There’s quite an absence of difficult attitudes, rebellion and whatnot. On the other hand, I guess the downside is the stereotypical conformism of the Northeast Asian. I will say though that this conformism has been derided too much.

Young Koreans have been a delight to deal with. Some of them are willing to volunteer simply to improve their English, others to promote their “honorable” language. There was something heartwarming about a people that sees their language as so honorable that they want to volunteer to make it available to their fellow citizens.

I must say though that I wonder if NE Asians don’t quite rebel enough. I mean, cooperative employees are wonderful for a boss, but it is impossible to not rebel enough. In White society we have the corollary of the very straight, nerdy White guy who refused to rebel against his parents in any way, and didn’t even try to develop an independent mind or life.

This doesn’t really seem to be healthy. Adolescent rebellion is at least healthy in the sense that it signals a desire for independence and the creation of one’s own ego and value set, quite possibly a different one than your folks. This step is important in forging an independent minded adult from a child.

On the topic of ethnocentrism, which we are dealing with in the comments, it’s clear to be that all of the NE Asians are quite ethnocentric. They pretty much all feel they are better than anyone else, but I don’t mind, and I think they have a right to feel that way. At the same time, they can be very friendly, especially to Whites, since they supposedly respect us as a race.

It’s true that NE Asians don’t respect Blacks too much, and Blacks have a hard time in these countries. I don’t know what to say about that…when a Japanese man sees the stereotypical ghetto Black man who has had 7 kids by 7 different women and refuses to support any of them, he is offended on a very deep and intense cultural level.

In these societies, behavior like this is unheard of. That Black man is acting like a dog! To the NE Asian, that is, and they tend to have a pretty low opinion of dogs. Hell, that’s what a male dog does. He runs around and knocks up as many female bitches as he can, and of course he refuses to support or help raise any of the puppies. To the NE Asian mind, for a human to act like a dog is so low it’s almost indescribably bad.

The Korean language is interesting, and we touched on the Hangul alphabet the other day. Google’s Korean-English, English-Korean translator is basically useless. The text comes out hopelessly garbled, and it’s more or less useless. Probably the two languages are so hugely different that translation is a monumental task.

I suspect that Korean may have relatively free work order, but I’m not certain. In free word order languages, you can mix up the words in a sentence to some extent without changing the meaning of the sentence. English has pretty strict word order, and mixing it up just tends to produce gibberish. I don’t have the faintest idea how you create a software translator for a relatively free order language. It’s mind boggling.

It also seems to be an agglutinative language, though I’m not sure about that either. In an agglutinative language, you can stick all these morphemes onto each other and end up creating words that are as long as sentences,, just morphemes glommed onto each other into one gigantic word.

In Eskimo, I suppose you can have words something like:

Qanniqpataninajanngittungaqaiguvitniriniaqpitkaakkaangami niriqattaqtuqnaalangmangaarmititnalujungainuktitummik ilisailauqsimajunga.

All one word. I may be exaggerating somewhat, but you get the picture. Anyway, that word might mean something like,

“The guy who showed up last nite was a pretty nice guy and we ate some seal blubber together and then I let him sleep with my wife and then in the morning he got up and left with the first lights of Aurora Borealis.”

Or something like that. You could actually go back into that word and take it all apart and all of those meaning forms would be glommed onto each other in that Mother Of All Sentences.

Anyway, if Korean is aggultinative, it would make sense, because it is suspected to be an Altaic language, related to Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic. I believe in the Altaic Hypothesis, which is still controversial. Japanese, Korean and possibly Ainu form probably three separate branches of that family.

One of the problems with proving that Korean and Japanese are related, much less that they are part of Altaic, is that there has been the Mother Of All Borrowings between these languages. In particular, probably 70% of Japanese and Korean vocabulary is simply Chinese borrowings. A guy named Roy Miller made a good case for Korean and Japanese being related and a part of Altaic about 60 years ago.

The Nostratic guys (the project is now taken up by Starotsin’s son after the elder Starotsin’s untimely death) seems to have come up with some pretty good sound correspondences between Japanese, Korean and the rest of Altaic. I’ve seen those tables and it looks pretty good. Historical linguists nowadays demand sound correspondences for proving that languages are related. This means something like, whenever you have:

English “p”, you have say “f” in German and “b” in Danish (I’m making this up).

English  German  Danish
p        f, pf   b

Robert Lindsay Now In The Top 350 Blogs On The Net

The Blogger site has been getting bombarded in the past few days with traffic some South Korea, where we really hit the jackpot. I’ve commissioned a couple of Korean translations. That site is averaging 15,371 visitors/day, putting it incredibly in the Top 350 blogs on the net as per The Truth Laid Bear. This site averages around 3,000.

Still no advertisers, though, which is kind of weird. If you’re interested, we want $50/week and around $170/month for an ad, which is just a median rate, or actually quite a bit below one.

I don’t understand advertising very well.

Newspapers have the added luxury of claiming more than 1 reader for every subscriber. For instance, our local newspaper has a circulation of 12,500 3 times weekly, but they figure 2.5 readers per issue. That’s probably an exaggeration, because with some folks it’s going to be zero readers per household for each issue. Anyway, they bump up their eyeballs rate to 36,000 readers three times a week. Of course those 36,000 are the same readers 3 times a week. Their effective circulation is something like 15,000/day I guess, if you average it out across the week.

As you can see, even small daily papers have effective circulation that is as large as the biggest blogs out there. The local large newspaper, the Fresno Bee, has a circulation around 300,000/day, day in and day out, I believe. If you factor in the 2.5X multiplier, you get something like 750,000 readers/day. That’s the size of the the biggest blogs around.

So you see that in terms of effective circulation, the print media still beats online media in terms of eyeballs. They’ve been losing ads mostly to Craigslist, which is offering free classifieds in most places, which is a price that is impossible to compete with.

Just thought I would give you an overview of the online advertising market. It’s not exactly the goldmine it is played up to be.

Anyway, a Top 350 blog is going to be very difficult to sustain for any significant amount of time, and I don’t expect this to last long at all.  But it’s nice to be up there with Marginal Revolution, Talk Left, Balloon Juice and Wizbang and the rest of the big boys if only for a few days or so.

I’m sorry I’m not writing much lately, but I’m exhausted and I’m a bit blocked too for some weird reason. Hopefully, Alpha Unit can keep on churning out some stuff in my absence.

Korean Translation of Dive Fail Is Up At The Old Site

This is my first Korean translation and I am very excited about it!

Right now, the diving video is going insanely viral over in South Korea and the site is getting bombarded with traffic. We had 34,000 visitors to both sites yesterday. That’s way more than any previous day. The vast majority of them were coming from Korea.

Korea is another extremely wired nation, one of the most wired, if not the most wired, on Earth. They have the fastest broadband speeds for the lowest prices per Kb. Once again, this is because the failed state that needs to get the Hell out of our lives and off our backs is heavily involved in Korean broadband. Funny how all the nations that are the most and best wired have heavy state involvement in broadband.

Hopefully, we are going to be having a lot more Korean translations lately. I’ve also found that Koreans are some of my finest translators, with superb work skills, highly responsible and agreeable and do great work work very quickly with few complaints. It’s no wonder their NE Asian economies do so well.

The working title so far is:

다이빙 사고 두 얼굴을 나눠 함께

I haven’t the faintest idea what that chicken scratch means, but that’s the title.

Actually, the Korean alphabet known as Hangul , though we make fun of it, is said to be one of the most perfect alphabets ever made by man. It’s actually quite hard to make a good alphabet, and the English alphabet really sucks. Why is knight pronounced “nite?” It’s senseless and mad.

Actually, most alphabets in use by humans suffer from various deficiencies, but of all of these orthographies, Hangul is said to come to the closest to perfection. Part of its mastery is said to be its elegance and ingeniousness, yet being paradoxically simple and utilitarian.

“People Are Scared” by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. This post is about the increase in death threats against the President since Obama came into office. There are five times more death threats against Obama than against Bush. I found this intriguing. The normal response is to say that this is due to racism. However, that may not be the case. I thought about this for a few days, and I finally decided that it must be due to White racism, and can’t possibly be due to anything else.

I suppose one could argue that the threats are due to his liberalism, but that seems a little dubious. Is Obama really all that more liberal than Bill Clinton? Not really, or not by much anyway. Hell, Hillary is his Secretary of State. Anyway, Richard Nixon was about as liberal as either Obama or Clinton.

That leaves race. It’s got to be race. White racism against a Black President.

AU told me that when Black Hank Aaron was moving in on White Babe Ruth’s home run record, he started getting lots of death threats, all from Whites apparently. As he got closer and closer to breaking the Babe’s record, the death threats went up and up.

I always thought Blacks were paranoid and nutty about this “the Whites won’t let us succeed”, and “every time a Black man succeeds, the Whites try to tear him down” stuff, but it looks like there is a grain of truth there.

People are scared. Really scared.

They’re so scared they want to kill. They want to kill the one who’s making them feel this way. This is a dangerous situation.

Barack Obama, please stop scaring the hell out of these people.

You just don’t know what these people are going through. If you did, you’d have no problem dealing with the reported 400% increase in death threats against the POTUS since George W. Bush left office. It would be clear why there was a mad rush to join certain support groups since you got elected.

Some of these people are in such a bad way that they’ve not only called for you to be killed, they’ve called for your wife to be killed. They’ve called for your kids to be killed. One called for your wife and kids to be killed in front of you.

Damn. That’s messed up.

I don’t know what you’d call this kind of mindset. “I don’t like what’s going on in this country, so somebody needs to die! And his little kids, too!”

You must act, Mr. President. What you need to do is put on a white suit. Be sure to have on a white shirt underneath. Find a red bow tie and put it on. Next, get one of those puffy chef’s hats, and put that on.

Find a nice, steaming bowl of farina and hold it up. Smile really big.

You’ll look just like the Cream of Wheat man.

They’ll recognize you, then. They’ll know for sure that you’re not gonna hurt ‘em. And that you’re only here to serve.

Death Tolls For Western Imperialism, Colonialism and 3rd World Capitalism

Repost from the old site.

Via Gideon Polya. In general, the figures are post-WW2. He also takes to task the “incompetent governance” in South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India and Pakistan) over the massive deaths.

The Global Avoidable Mortality blog looks pretty interesting, and I have mucked around there a bit.

The part about 500 million dead Muslims post-1950 looks pretty interesting, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

More Polya here.

Total excess mortality per year as of 2004:

Iraq        122,000

Afghanistan 359,000

India       2.2 million

Pakistan    478,000

Bangladesh  288,000

In Iraq and Afghanistan, those are the excess deaths that are probably occurring due to Coalition activities (especially in Iraq). In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the excess deaths are probably due to the lack of socialism.

Does Welfare Cause Crime?

Repost from the old site.

In the comments, Uncle Milton says:

I have spent extensive time in third world countries. In general I found them much safer than the inner cities of the US which are filled with people who collect checks from the government and still feel strongly they are owned something and will take it out on each and anyone wandering into their midst.

 

The notion that “welfare causes crime” is very problematic. I don’t believe that the folks pushing this argument have ever proved their case. In Europe, there is a good model backed up with many studies that shows that the more socialism you have in the system, the less crime you have.

The more capitalism, the more crime. This is proven in the transition from socialism to capitalism in the FSU, Eastern Europe and China which were followed by tremendous crime waves.

If you cut all those folks in the ghetto off of all the welfare, would they be any less criminal?

There doesn’t seem to be any theoretical model for why welfare would cause crime. Why would giving someone stuff turn him into a criminal? According to Uncle Milton, it is because they “feel they are owed something.”

But aren’t people owed something under Communism? Basic needs were provided for everyone. Perhaps Communism was the ultimate welfare state. At least this is what conservatives say. How then did Communist states have the lowest levels of crime around?

Furthermore, I would point out that the 3rd World equivalent of our ghettos are often vastly more dangerous that US ghettos. I worked in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles for years and I lost one car battery in East LA and I had the wires cut on another car battery in Watts. Of course, I was usually out of there before dark.

I lived in Oakhurst, a town in the Sierra Nevada, for 16 years. I don’t know the figures, but word is that the welfare use rate was very high the whole time I was there. Girls got pregnant as soon as they got out of high school (18-20 or so) and the guy may or may not be around.

Many just became single Moms for various periods of time. I suppose there were guys floating in and out of their lives, but that’s how it goes with single Moms in general. In my apartment complex, there were two single Moms out of six tenants.

The guys support the kids in some cases and marry them in others, but in quite a few cases, they don’t marry the woman, and in other cases, they do not support them either.

Although the rate of this sort of thing among the Amerindians in town is insanely high, I would like to focus on the Whites. There is a very high rate of welfare use among Whites in this town. This includes all kinds of welfare – food stamps, Medicaid, welfare proper, etc. There was very little crime in this town.

The crime rate was so low that I often did not lock my car at home and often left the house without locking the door. I did that for years with no break-ins. Violent crime was nearly nonexistent. Gangs did not exist, and juvenile crime did not seem to be significant from my POV.

I had heard that it took a long time for a welfare culture to develop as kids come of age and become pathological due to being raised in a welfare family. I watched this scene for 16 years and no welfare culture develop. I assume that was enough time.

It’s an interesting question why high welfare use seems to be associated with mass pathology in some groups (Hispanics and Blacks) but not in others (Asians and Whites). Even in Oakhurst, relatively high levels of pathology coincided with extremely high welfare use among Amerindians. Nevertheless, with Amerindians about 5% of the population, they were not a significant crime problem.

So much for welfare causes crime.

Fraud and Cronyism Under Neoliberalism – A Feature, Not a Bug

Repost from the old site.

In the comments section, Uncle Milton suggests that the massive fraud perpetuated under the Bush regime (I would add under Reagan too) was antithetical to a free market system. A true free market system is supposed to make fraud illegal.

By any definition of classical economics, what happened to the real estate market was fraud on a massive scale. PS No bid contracts in Iraq as you might guess as nothing to do with free market economics. Crony capitalism and corruption are in conflict with free market economics. If you take a turd, paint it white, and call it beautiful.. it’s still a turd.

 

By your definition, Unc, free market economics hardly occurs anywhere. This seems to be the problem. Once these neoliberal systems are put in, they are very prone to corruption and crony capitalism. Extremely prone! Everyone wails about it, but it seems to be almost an inherent part of the system. A feature, not a bug.

And the proponents of the free market tend to be very tolerant of massive fraud to the point of not even tolerating it. The more free market the system, it seems the more fraud and cronyism.

As more socialist leaning groups come in, they tend to reign in the fraud to some extent. Europe has very low levels of fraud (it’s considered to be a safe place to do business), and it has high levels of socialism in its system.

China moving from socialism to capitalism was followed by massive fraud and cronyism. Same with Russia and to a much lesser extent Eastern Europe. The neoliberal revolution in Latin America coincided with a tremendous amount of crony capitalism and fraud as state enterprises were sold off to friends of the state in a cronyist fashion for pennies on the dollar.

The way to reduce fraud and cronyism in a capitalist system is to empower the state more (social democracy). Culture also plays a role though.

As an aside, I would point out that the free market ideologists spreading the gospel of neoliberalism had almost nothing to say about the massive cronyism, fraud, graft and out and out theft associated with their neoliberal revolution.

While the billionaires looted Russia bare and bled the country dry, the Jeffrey Sachs’ (the mastermind of the plan and yes, he is Jewish) of the world said nothing. The corporate media mostly just cheered.

The Friedmanites out of the Chicago School have for the most part been fashioning a free market vision in which fraud, graft, cheating, lying and even out of out theft seems to be legal when done by big capitalists wearing suits under a legalistic veneer. There were few persecutions for the massive fraud that occurred under Reagan and now under Bush.

If, as Unc notes above, the financial crash was predicated on massive amounts of out and out crime, it should be clear to us in the next year or so that almost no one is going to go to jail over it.

The FBI looked into investigating the financial crash and seems to have decided that there were far too many criminals committing far too many crimes for the FBI to even begin to get involved at current staff levels, especially with the needs of the War on Terror, so it looks like most of the criminals are just going to get away with it.

As I note above, increasingly, it seems as if mass cronyism, fraud and financial crime in general under neoliberalism is more of a feature than a bug.

The Holocaust and the Industrialization of Murder

Repost from the old site.

I hear variations of this argument used all the time by Holocaust cultists*, Jewish Zionists, etc., and it’s always kind of bothered me. The reason we need to single out the Holocaust over all the other genocides down through history is because it was an instance of industrialized murder. Therefore, the Jews get Israel and are above all critique.

There is an excellent critique available of the way that that Zionist Jews have used Holocaust-mania and Holocaust faddism to enshrine Zionism and make the Jews into some sort of super special people who I guess can do whatever the fuck they want and no one can say boo to them. Why? Cuz theyy got killed in the Ho-lo-caust.

However, I did enjoy this explication (below) of why the West is so obsessed with the Holocaust. It has three parts, and this is the second part.

Part 1 is “The Holocaust serves as the foundational story of the country of Israel.” Indeed, and this is why so many anti-Zionists are reflexively hostile to the whole story, and why so many of them start to dabble in varieties of Holocaust Denial and Revisionism.

The Holocaust story, taken in its full form as International Jewry has manufactured and presented it, seems to render the Zionist project nearly untouchable to anyone with a smidgen of a soul. It seems the only way to protest Zionism, for many folks, is to remove from the Holocaust its magical powers. In practice, this ends up as a sort of minimization that seems Nazi-like, but that’s not what’s driving it.

The Jews have stolen Palestine, and are using this magical talisman called The Holocaust to justify their theft. This talisman has so much power that it mesmerizes folks, especially Whites, with crushing guilt. The anti-Zionists want to rip that talisman from the Jews’ hands and throw it away somewhere, or put it in a museum. To suck the power out of it.

And if there had been an Israel during WW2, not nearly so many Jews would have been killed. If, then, so. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. You can go on like this forever. When people do this about their lives (“If only bla bla bla, then everything in my life would have turned out all right.”) we rightly call them neurotic. It’s time to call bullshit on the “If only Israel had existed” story too in the same regard.

Another story so often parroted by Zionists is the “No one would save the Jews from the Holocaust.” Once again, this is why the Jews need Israel. We get the stories about the tragic ships sailing to the US, only to be turned away by US nativists.

I’ve done some research into those ships. They were sailing around 1939. America was returning the Jews to Germany 1939, where the mass killing of Jews had not yet started. It was a shitty place to be Jewish all right, but it wasn’t the ovens. The lie that evil American Gentiles cruelly turned Jews back to the Nazis to their certain death, knowing full well what they were doing, needs to be confronted.

No Americans returned fleeing Jews back to nations where they were being exterminated. Show me one case.

Anyway, here it is:

Genocide isn’t new. Yahweh was all about not just genocide, but extermination of every living thing neighboring tribes possessed. One thing that troubles people over the Holocaust is that it implemented every single facet of a modern, industrialized mass society, and turned it directly towards murder.

It’s one thing to capture the neighboring tribe, enslave them and work them to death. Old story. But the story of the 20th Century, at least in America, was technological progress. Managerial progress. Growing business bureaucracy meant everyone would have better consumer products next year.

The Holocaust, which went unstudied largely until the end of the fifties (the seminal text’s title escapes me), took all the aspects of the modern industrialized managerial society and showed, unequivocally, that they were not inherently good.

I think that deep down inside, many people simply won’t admit that the technologies that run our society actually run our society or that they might be used for depraved ends. Hence the fixation with the Holocaust.

*I believe in the standard Holocaust narrative whereby 5.7 million Jews were deliberately murdered by Nazis and their allies in WW2.

Revisions to Races of Man Classification

Repost from the old site.

Click to enlarge. This is the chart from the paper, The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study, utilized in this post.

I usually try to be very conservative about adding in new races to my races of man post, but sometimes I just feel like I’m forced to. Based on this article, and in particular, the figure above, forced me to make some new splits.

The question was what to do about the Taiwanese people. Not the Taiwan aborigines – but the Hakka and Min Nan people of SE China who settled in Taiwan in the past 400 years. It turns out that they appear to be a discrete race, and that they are linked to Singapore Chinese and the Thai Chinese. In Singapore and Thailand, Chinese form a market-dominant minority position.

They are a minority of the population, but they tend to run businesses and be very wealthy. Similar cases are seen in Indonesia and the Philippines, where tiny Chinese minorities of 2-3% control up to 70% of the wealth in the nation.

So the interesting question arises – who exactly are the Chinese minorities of Thailand and Singapore? By genetic studies, we can now see that they are SE Chinese people related to the Min Nan and the Hakka.

The Min Nan and Hakka both speak languages that are called Chinese dialects, but in reality, they are completely separate languages. Both languages are doing fine – Min Nan (Southern Min) with 49 million speakers and Hakka with 34 million speakers.

Min Nan and Hakka both strangely lack official status anywhere, although Southern Min is widely spoken in Taiwan. It’s odd that some of the world’s most widely spoken languages lack official status – Min Nan is the 24th largest language, and Hakka is the 35th largest language, in terms of numbers of speakers.

Both languages are vigorous and are in good shape. Southern Min has a roman script that is fairly widely used. Hakka also has a roman script, but I am not sure how widely it is used.

Southern Min is actually a number of separate languages: Min Nan proper, Amoy, Teochew and Hainanese , at the very least.

Click to enlarge. Here is a map of the various Chinese languages. These are not Chinese dialects, but actual separate languages. Some may be dialects of other Chinese languages though. The main languages are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka and Gan. Ping, Hui and Jin are classed above as dialects of those larger languages.Jin is classed as a dialect of Mandarin, but it is actually a separate language with 45 million speakers, making it around the 25th largest language in the world.Min is said 5 separate languages, but it is actually many separate languages. The 5 separate recognized languages are Min Nan, Min Dong, Min Zhong, Min Bei and Puxian. Min Nan itself is a number of separate languages. Huizhou, or Hui, is a separate language that is actually a set of related languages. Wu is more than one language.

Ping is traditionally considered to be part of Cantonese, but it is a separate language. Mandarin is also a set of related languages instead of one language. Cantonese is also be more than one language. Hakka is also be more than one language.

It is nonsense to say someone speaks “Chinese”. There is no such thing as a language called “Chinese”.

Instead, there are various languages in the Chinese language family – at least 14 separate languages, and actually many more. Mandarin is by far the largest of these languages, and most of the smaller languages are suffering under the influence of Mandarin. In addition, the Chinese government favors Mandarin and does not support the other languages much, if at all.

I also split off a group called the Li and another group called the Oroqen based on the chart above.

The Li are a transitional group between the Northern Chinese and the Southern Chinese, though they live on Hainan Island in the far south of China. They speak a Tai-Kadai language called Hlai which has 667,000 speakers. Use is vigorous; the language is doing well, but it is generally not written, although a Roman script exists. Mandarin is used for writing.

The Oroqen are nomadic people who live in far northeastern China and speak a Tungusic tongue. As you can see from the chart, they are closer to the Japanese than to the NE Chinese. There are only 1,200 speakers left out of a small 7,000 population, but there are 800 monolinguals, and use is vigorous by those who speak the language.

They live by hunting and used to practice shamanism. They still lack an official script for their language, but there are radio programs in Oroqen.

The truth is that both the Oroqen people and their language are in poor shape, and most of the blame can be placed on the Communist Chinese regime, even though the regime has also done many good things for the Oroqen. The Cultural Revolution in particular was a period of insanity, stupidity and terror.

An Oroqen Race was added to the NE Asian Major Race due to the extreme divergence of these people. I also added Inner Mongolians to the Mongolian Race inside of NE Asian.

I added the Buyei to the Tai Race within the SE Asian Major Race and created a new race called SE Chinese Race, consisting of Min Nan, Hakka, Singapore Chinese and Thai Chinese. The Buyei live in southern China and northern Vietnam and speak a Tai language that has over 2 million speakers yet has no official status. Buyei language use is vigorous, and it is in good shape.

There is a romanized script, and there are newspapers in the language, but they mostly use Mandarin for writing. The Buyei language is probably made up of a few separate languages, because some of the dialects are not mutually intelligible. The language is very close to the Zhuang language.

The SE Chinese Race really consists of the descendants of the ancient Chinese people known as the Yueh. The Yueh, or Yue, formed a state in southeastern coastal China during the Warring States Period and the Spring and Autumn Period. The state lasted from about 525 BC to 334 BC. The Chinese were already involved in metallurgy and were producing excellent swords during these periods.

The new lineup looks like this:

Northeast Asian Major Race*

Japanese-Korean Race
Southern Japanese Race (Honshu Kinki – Kyushu)
Ryukyuan Race
Ainu Race***
Gilyak Race**
Northern Chinese Race (Northern Chinese – Qiang – Manchu – Hui)
Oroqen Race
Sherpa-Yakut Race
Nepalese Race (Nepali – Newari)
Mongolian Race (Mongolian – Inner Mongolian – Buryat – Kazakh)
Northern Turkic Race (Dolgan – Altai – Shor – Tofalar – Uighur – Chelkan – Soyot – Kumandin Teleut – Hazara)***
Central Asian Race (Kirghiz – Karalkalpak – Uzbek – Turkmen)
Tuva Race
Tungus Race (Even – Evenki – Russian Saami)
Siberian Race
Beringian Race** (Chukchi – Aleut – Siberian Eskimo)
Koryak-Itelmen Race
Reindeer Chukchi Race
General Tibetan Race (Tibetan – Lisu – Nu – Karen – Tujia – Hui – Akha – Burmese – Bai – Yizu – Pnar – Mizo)
Bhutanese Race
Siberian Uralic Race (Nentsy – Samoyed – Ket – Mansi – Khanty)
Nganasan Race
Uralic Race (Komi – Mari)
North American Eskimo Race

Southeast Asian Major Race*

Southern Chinese Race (Hmong – Mien – Dong – Henan Han – Yi – Naxi)
Li Race
Southeast China Race (Hakka – Min Nan – Singapore Chinese – Thai Chinese)
South China Sea Race (Filipino – Ami Taiwanese Aborigine – Guangdong Han)
Tai Race (Thai – Lao – Lahu – Aini – Deang – Blang – Shan – Dai – Vietnamese – Muong – Buyei)
Kachin Race (Kachin – Va – Nung – Lu)
General Taiwanese Aborigine Race (Ayatal – Bunun – Yami)
Island SE Asian Race (Paiwan Taiwanese Aborigine – Sea Dayak – Sumatran – Balinese)
Indonesian Race (Sulawesi – Borneo – Lesser Sunda)
Malay Race (Javanese – Sarawak – Malaysia)
Zhuang Race (Senoi – Zhuang – She – Santhal – Ho – Nicobarese)
Austroasiatic Race (Mon – Khmer – Khasi – Nongtrai – Bhoi – Maram – Kynriam – Wajaintia)
Meghalaya NE Indian Race (Khasi – Garo – Lyngngam)
Philippines Negrito Race (Aeta – Ati – Palau Micronesian)
Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race
Andaman Islands Negrito Race**
Semang Malay Negrito Race***

References

Lin M, Chu CC, Chang SL, Lee HL, Loo JH, Akaza T, Juji T, Ohashi J, Tokunaga K. March 2001. The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study. Tissue Antigens:57(3):192-9.

Mountain Yellow-Legged Frogs in the Sierra Nevada

Repost from the old site.

I don’t write much about amphibians on here, but I am amphibian nut, in addition to being a mammal, reptile and bird nut. I would be a plant and insect nut too if I could only figure out how to identify them. I’m interested in fish, but they are a little harder to observe in the wild unless they are at the end of your hook.

Anyway, I have long taken an interest in amphibians here in California and to a much lesser extent, throughout the entire West. I am particularly interested in threatened and endangered amphibians here in the state.

The mountain yellow-legged frog has declined disastrously here in the state, starting with heavy fish stocking in the Sierras by pack mules, and then declining wildly with arial stocking of high country lakes via airplane that began after World War 2. This arial stocking has since proven to be one of the stupidest things that the California Department of Fish and Game has ever done.

Every year, countless fingerlings were dropped into lakes all up and down the Sierras, even though after a while almost all of these lakes had completely self-sustaining populations and many lakes saw few if any fishermen in a given year. Furthermore, the populations grew so high that the fish became stunted and malnourished.

In addition, they caused serious problems to the entire ecosystem of the Sierra. This is because in general, fish were absent from much of the high country in the Sierra. The exception was in the Southern Sierra, where the golden trout was native. In the North, Paiute Cutthroats and Lahontan Cutthroats were native to some streams.

Rainbow trout were present, but mostly at the lower elevations. Apparently the streams were so steep that trout were not able to climb up the rivers and creeks to even get into the high country. When men first came in numbers to the High Sierras in the late 1800’s, they found most waterways devoid of fish.

However, there were vast populations of amphibians, in particular mountain yellow-legged frogs. They were so numerous at many high country lakes that you could almost hardly walk around without almost stepping on them.

Before World War 2, limited fish stocking began in the Sierras. Stocking was done in the high country via mule trains and was not particularly effective. However, the stocking was already starting to cause declines in the mountain yellow-legged frog population.

After WW2, arial stocking began and soon turned into a comedy routine and a massive waste of taxpayer money. The CDFG was addicted to fish stocking in the Sierras and refused to stop it or even study it even when environmental groups demanded that they do so.

CDFG claimed that the fish stocking program was somehow exempt from CEQA, California’s landmark environmental law and probably the one law that California’s business class hates more than anything else. Business interests have been trying to get rid of CEQA for decades now, but it’s not going anywhere.

The reason environmental groups wanted the stocking stopped was because studies began to show that fish were having a devastating effect on the mountain yellow-legged frog (MYLF) populations. This is because the MYLF did not evolve in the presence of fish and hence had adopted no defenses against them. Wherever fish were present, MYLF was either not present or there in only reduced numbers.

The fact that CDFG dragged their heels on protecting the MYLF for ages shows that CDFG hardly has an environmentalist agenda at all. They almost never propose any species for threatened or endangered (T & E) status anymore, and usually reject almost all petitions by environmental groups to list anything. They hardly protect anything once it does get listed anyway, so one wonders what good the listing even does.

The CDFG screams that budget cuts means they can’t do anything at all, and another problem is that much of their budget is funded out of fishing and hunting licenses. I have met quite a few individual biologists who work for the agency and by and large they are good folks. I think that there are political appointees at the top that thwart just about anything reasonable getting done though.

It’s not well understood that California is not really a very liberal state in many ways. The voters are still mostly White and older and they are much more conservative than the population as a whole.

Despite blatherings by White Nationalists that Euro Whites are the only race that bother to protect any nonhuman life that lacks utilitarian use for man, since 1980 and US Whites voting rightwing, there has been no greater enemy of the environment and nonhuman life in the US than Whites.

These Whites have solidly supported a pro-business and pro-corporate agenda that has declared war on the environment and every living thing in it. If we let capitalists have their way, they will exterminate all nonutilitarian nonhuman life on this planet, all because those living things get in the way of making a buck.

Hence we have a state run by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger that is almost totally beholden to corporate and business interests. This has been the case for every California governor since Jerry Brown.

Anyway, various hypotheses have been proposed for the decline of the MYLF. The non-native fish hypothesis has born out well. Pesticides from the Central Valley drifting up the mountains have also been suspected in the decline, along with the ozone hole.

There is some evidence that pesticides are related to MYLF declines, but testing the ozone hole hypothesis has shown that a thinning ozone layer is not frying frog eggs, even at high elevations. However, the thinning ozone layer has been having a bad effect on other frog and toad species. It seems that different species are variably effected by the thinning ozone layer.

Another hypothesis has been that a fungus called chytrid has been killing MYLF’s. This seems to be the case, and the killings are accelerating. Chytrid has been devastating frog and toad populations in various distant parts of the world, especially North, Central and South America and Australia.

An article was recently published in the journal Nature claiming that global warming was causing chytrid to spread. However, a subsequent article was published in another journal that seemed to indicate that global warming had not been proven to be behind chytrid’s spread. A cautious analysis seems to indicate that neither side has proven its case yet.

This particular type of chytrid seems to have escaped from a lab in Australia and has since been devastating frog and toad populations. First it pounded populations in Australia, then it moved to the Americas. Frogs and toads may not have evolved with this fungus, so it’s been hammering them hard. If any frogs and toads can survive the fungus, they may be able to pass on an immunity to it and enable the species to survive.

There have been widespread chytrid outbreaks in the Sierras in recent years. Just when some recent efforts to eliminate fish from some national park waters in the Sierra seemed to be bearing fruit, the fungus has been nailing the MYLF but hard. There have been 25-30% reductions of all types of frog populations in the Sierra over the past five years due to the fungus.

One theory is that the fungus has always been there but that recent environmental changes such as industrial and agricultural contaminants in the air, the frogs’ immune systems have been compromised, making them susceptible to the fungus.

However, some populations get hit very hard by the fungus for a while and then bounce back. The theory is that they have some sort of genetic resistance to the fungus. If this is true, then maybe the MYLF can survive in the Sierra after all.

As usual, the Bush Administration, the most anti-environmental President in recent history, refused to list the MYLF although it has been petitioned repeatedly. The most recent designation is “warranted but precluded “.

This is a sickening game that the Fish and Wildlife Service has been playing for some time now, dating back the “liberal” Clinton Era. The game says that the species qualifies for listing, but there are no funds to list it. It’s just a despicable bureaucratic game. How much does it cost to publish a listing notice in the Federal Register? Very little.

At the same time that the Administration pricks whine that there is no money to list any new species, they cynically and dishonestly cut the budget for listing new species! “Liberal” Bill Clinton started this bullshit, but Bush took it to overdrive. Sometimes, there is no lower life form than a politician.

Anyway, there are all sorts of species sitting on this idiotic warranted but precluded crap list for ages now. As the MYLF has declined by 93.3% in the last 100 years, that’s an endangered listing right there, and I’m not even a biologist. I know the listing criteria.

The Southern California population, which may be a separate species, is virtually extinct. It has declined by 99%. The Bush Administration did list this frog, but it’s almost gone anyway, as there are only 79 frogs left.

Probably no man has done more to save the MYLF than Roland Knapp, a Research Biologist at the University of California Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory.

These guys associated with universities are usually pretty honest and non-corrupted, while the fisheries and wildlife biologists and botanists I met working for the local National Forest were some of the most awful, corrupted and dishonest people I have ever met. If you don’t care about species and whether they go extinct or not, don’t take a job with the feds dedicated to protecting them.

The local national forest, the Sierra National Forest, is doing absolutely nothing to my knowledge to protect MYLF and MYLF is almost gone from Sierra National Forests anyway. Truth is that even USFS wildlife and fisheries biologists are ecstatic if a rare species of extirpated or nearly extirpated from their forest. Now we don’t have to save it! Less paperwork! I’m not kidding.

It was Knapp’s research a while back that conclusively proved that it was nonnative fish that were driving the MYLF extinct.

Knapp’s MYLF blog. Knapp’s MYLF page.

Fishermen are understandably upset about fish removal projects in the Sierras. To date, these projects have been very limited. It is probable that the main reason that the Feds are not listing the frog is that a listing would mandate fish removal from many or most Sierra waters. Those fish were not even there to begin with, and the MYLF is only present at high elevations anyway. There are plenty of low elevations to fish in.

I’ve done fishing in the High Sierras myself, but if you are so shallow that you can’t hike into the High Sierras and just dig it for what it is without wetting a line, I don’t even think you should even be back there.

Even better, fish removal would probably reduce the number of humans in the backcountry. It’s mostly wilderness anyway, so why do we need tons of people back there? They can remove the fish from most of those waters for all I care. If there are no fish in the lakes, just bring a book or lie on your back or explore around all day.

Recent research indicates that there are three separate genetic units of the MYLF in the Sierras, a Northern, Central and Southern genetic unit. At present, these have been split off into a new species, the Sierra Yellow-Legged Frog , or Rana Sierrae.

The Southern California population and some southern Sierra populations have been split into a whole new species, the Southern Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog. Distribution maps for Rana Sierrae and Rana Muscosa. Rationale for the split. The two species are estimated to have split 2.4 million (!) years ago. Hence, the Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog, the subject of this post, no longer exists in its former form.

This split was done on the basis of an article last year (Vredenburg et al 2007). Whether the three separate genetic clades of the Sierra Yellow-Legged Frog warrant splits into subspecies has not yet been determined. In order to split into subspecies, usually a certain X genetic distance must be shown.

In February of this year, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned again to list Rana Sierrae as endangered. Surely it qualifies.

Lots of cool frog, tadpole and terrain photos at the links.

References

Lips, Karen R., Diffendorfer, Jay, Mendelson III, Joseph R., Sears, Michael W. 2008. Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines. PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 3.Pounds JA, Bustamante MR, Coloma LA, Consuegra JA, Fogden MPL, et al. 2006. Widespread Amphibian Extinctions From Epidemic Disease Driven by Global Warming. Nature 39: 161–167.

Vredenburg, V. T., R. Bingham, R. Knapp, J. A. T. Morgan, C. Moritz, and D. Wake. 2007. Concordant Molecular And Phenotypic Data Delineate New Taxonomy And Conservation Priorities For The Endangered Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog. Journal of Zoology 271:361-374.