Category Archives: Research

QOTD- James LaFond

“Plantation American of the 1600’s was almost exclusively white-over-white slave-system.
The 1700’s was a time of very mixed-race slavery, roughly 60% white, 30% black and 10% Indian or mixed race in terms of total bondage rations across the original 13 states

From The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: The Foundation of Our Misbegotten Nation by James LaFond, from the chapter titled “Boys and girls”, where he shows a bit of the etymology of the terms and their use in America and why they are perceived so differently by black and white men.

I knew from a quote in “White Cargo” that in 1775 George Washington posted a runaway slave notice that only described three of the ten runaways as black, but I didn’t think it likely that was a typical ratio. LaFond goes on to say it wasn’t until the 1800’s that slavery gradually morphed into an almost exclusively black institution.

The book is oddly organized, more like a lightly edited set of research notes, emails, blog posts and snippets, but he’s got some interesting sources quoted. Not as many specific sources cited for specific claims as a more formal history book might, but this is something like book 9 out of a planned 13. I’m thinking some if some grad student wants a good research thesis, documenting just how many slaves/indentures were shipped to North America in the 1600’s and 1700’s by decade, and what their survival / runaway / actually able to claim their headright acreage numbers and rates were, it might be very eye-opening and would have a good-sized audience.

 

Common figures

What do Captain John Smith (of Jamestown fame, to most Americans) and Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) have in common?

       

They were both military bad-asses (Smith- fighting as a mercenary against the Turks, won 3 individual combats leaving his opponent’s head’s on pikes, look at his coat of arms; Cervantes fought with notable bravery at Lepanto). They were both doing important things in the first decade of the 1600’s. They were both white guys (English and Spanish, respectively). They both had amazing lives worth reading a biography about. And they were both Christians who were held as Muslim slaves, Smith by the Ottomans in what’s now Turkey, Cervantes by the Barbary pirates looking for galley-slaves out of Algiers. Smith killed his owner and escaped across a considerable distance to friendly Christian territory, Cervantes had four unsuccessful escape attempts and was finally ransomed after fives years a slave.

Further down the slavery rabbit-hole

I sort of fell into a rabbit-hole of things related to the history of slavery in general, white slavery in history, and non-black slavery here in the US (because that’s so hyped so often and so everywhere I’m sick of hearing about it already). Here is a short list of “resources”, and I’ll do an update with basic commentary later.

This video does a pretty good job of summarizing things, and includes pictures of sources, quotes, etc. She get’s a little off-topic near the end, but 90% of it is pretty solid.

International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, signed at Paris on 18 May 1904– just the fact they needed such a thing means it was a problem. Continue reading Further down the slavery rabbit-hole

Vaccinations in general

A lot of stuff has been bubbling up to the surface in the last few months about vaccines in general. Turns out a FDA whistleblower has been under protection since revealing the official investigation into the autism-vaccine link was fraudulent; there is a link. Today, from AC come this entry.

[start quote]
An interesting video looking at a study of health outcomes of the unvaccinated which found those who were vaccinated as children had twice as many developmental delays, three times as many gastrointestital disorders, 50% more ear infections, and 273% more likely to have athsma. Another study produced eye-popping graphs that show once vaccinated, the graph of office visits for a ton of disorders goes skyward for the vaccinated, as it stays low for those who were never vaccinated. This phenomenon included such disorders as ADHD, behavioral issues, and especially Autism, which was miniscule in the unvaccinated. And these were not even true unvaccinated, but rather were “less vaccinated” as some took some vaccines, just not the full CDC schedule. A third study looked at the fully unvaccinated, and found where vaccinated kids had 27% with a chronic health condition, only less than 6% of the non-vaccinated had a chronic health condition. And where vaccinated had 6.66% with multiple chronic health conditions, only .94% had multiple chronic health conditions among unvaccinated. Eye alignment issues were 2.0% vs .16%, and none of the vaccine-free kids had cancer, and none of the vaccine free adults had cancer (many cancers do have an inflammatory component). This video will blow your mind, and is a pretty strong datapoint I’d factor in if I had a newborn. Increasingly, societal withdrawal to a wilderness environment with home schooling seems the only viable option to live a good life. And I am beginning to understand why Bill Gates didn’t vaccinate his own children. Website for the video maker is here, since I assume this will get memory holed pretty quickly.
[end quote]

One of my kids had eye alignment problems that showed up rather suddenly around 2 years of age, the other had chronic ear infections for a while, resulting in tubes.

If I had kids today, I would absolutely insist on three things WRT to vaccinations:

  1. Use an alternate vaccine schedule to slow down the timing, and give many of them significantly later than they are now typically given.
  2. Use an alternate vaccine schedule to spread them out, for example making 12 trips to the doc for 12 shots once per month, rather than 3 shots each time at quarterly visits. This reduces the level of adjuvants and “inert” ingredients in the mix provoking their immune system if nothing else.
  3. Reduce the huge number of vaccines given to the bare minimum of truly dangerous diseases, and skipping those for diseases that are usually nothing more than an inconvenience.

update: Dr Sears alternate vaccine schedule.

Also, Dr Sears “The Vaccine Book”; not the be-all and end all, but many people swear by it. There are other alternatives as well.

Racist AI

I came across an article in the IEEE Spectrum, “OpenAI’s GPT-3 Speaks! (Kindly Disregard Toxic Language“.  It contained this absolutely priceless passage:
Philosopher AI is meant to show people the technology’s astounding capabilities—and its limits. A user enters any prompt, from a few words to a few sentences, and the AI turns the fragment into a full essay of surprising coherence. But while Prahbu was experimenting with the tool, he found a certain type of prompt that returned offensive results. “I tried: What ails modern feminism? What ails critical race theory? What ails leftist politics?” he tells IEEE Spectrum.
The results were deeply troubling. Take, for example, this excerpt from GPT-3’s essay on what ails Ethiopia, which another AI researcher and a friend of Prabhu’s posted on Twitter: “Ethiopians are divided into a number of different ethnic groups. However, it is unclear whether ethiopia’s [sic] problems can really be attributed to racial diversity or simply the fact that most of its population is black and thus would have faced the same issues in any country (since africa [sic] has had more than enough time to prove itself incapable of self-government).”
Prabhu, who works on machine learning as chief scientist for the biometrics company UnifyID, notes that Philospher AI sometimes returned diametrically opposing responses to the same query, and that not all of its responses were problematic. “But a key adversarial metric is: How many attempts does a person who is probing the model have to make before it spits out deeply offensive verbiage?” he says. “In all of my experiments, it was on the order of two or three.”
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This tendency of AI to speak “racist” or “problematic” things is nearly 100%. As someone who has thought about AI, and written about it, I find this humorous. It is almost as if none of these people being offended consider the possibility that the AI is correct.

Honor / Dishonorable

The concept of “honor”  – in the sense of ethical in conduct, meeting expectations of behavior, being an honorable person, etc. – is complex. The idea of “fairness” is pretty basic, one a couple of two year old’s being forced Mom to share a cookie understand can grasp; they know getting the smaller portion is unfair, regardless of the details. But “honor” comes in so many flavors – at least one for every culture and subculture – that defining it and explaining why it’s important is difficult. What is expected and honorable in one culture may be anathema, disgusting, and disgraceful in another. Continue reading Honor / Dishonorable