Race: WTF?

Lately i've been interested in race and what makes people what race. Well, I dont think race exists at all after a ton of research. I think that race is just what a lot of biologists say it is ; a social construct.

Let's look at what we know of race. When we think race you might think, Black, White, Asian an that's about it. What about... Melanesians, Amerindians, Indians, Australian Aboriginal.

If you look at a Melanesian that person has dark skin colours, approaching those of a black person from the United States but do they really look 'Black' to you? Same thing with Aborigines. Also Indians. They can be as pale as Aishwarya Rai to as dark as a Tamil from Southern India? Why is that? Some say they're 'White'. Thats not true either.

Also, if you live in Africa lets say. You'll probably notice some Africans are different from the others. Egyptians dont look like other North Africans sometimes. A Berber wont look like a Fulani and a Fulani won't look like an Igbo. An Igbo won't look like a Tutsi and a Tutsi won't resemble a Baka pygmy and a Baka Pygmy wont look like a Maasai and a Maasai won't look like a Malagasy and Malagasy won't look like a Zulu and a Zulu won't look like a San Bushmen. So much diversity in one continent yet somehow they're all seen as 'Black'. Difficult to understand? I'll help you out.

The notions of Race we're most familiar of come from the United States. A 'Black' person is anyone with African blood. Even Barack Obama even though he's a mixture between Irish Americans and the Luo people from Kenya and a White person is anyone who's fully European. This is due to the social construct of the One-Drop rule which restricts the fluidity of genes a person might see except in Latin America. Stepping away from that let me drop some bomb-shells.

1) 11% of all White Americans have some Black Ancestry. Not surprising though. When America was finally given independance, 20% of the population was Black and a typical human being has a lot of ancestors. Your parents, their parents, your grandparents. In that 11% of White Americans at least 2 ancestors out of say 128 are 'Black'. Doesn't sound like a lot does it.

2) 20% of all Black people in the US have white ancestry. 10% of Black people in the US are 50% White in their genetic lineages.

So, how can Black people say they're black if a fifth of them are actually 'White' and how can White people be white if 11% of them aren't wholly white.

This racial definition is even more defeated when you looked at 'Mixed' people. Take Barack Obama for example. Say that he had a son and a daughter. That son carries his Y-Dna which is Kenyan Luo. Say that son marries a white woman. Their male child marries a white women. Lets say this trend continues. Obama's grandson may look like a White person right. But most of his Y-Patrilineal DNA will be Kenyan. While part of his M-DNA will be 'Black' and 'White'. All the while he make look your average 'White guy'.

This genetic admixture is not only common with the Mixed people. Everyone on Earth is mixed. We all have different Genetic Admixtures. Especially Y-DNA. A person's mother will always be their mother, and their mother. But a person can possible have a Persian Father, followed by a Kurdish man marrying their daughter. Followed by an Arab man marrying the Kurdish-Persian descendant. That person Mt-DNA will be Persian. Their Y-DNA will be Kurdish, Persian and Arab.

This is even made more clear with Human Haplogroups. Haplogroups are genetic markers people posess. So a person who lives in Yemen could have Haplogroup M and so could an Aboriginie from Australia. This utterly defeats the concept of race. As people from Haplogroup M spread around the Indian Ocean, they adapted to their environments through natural selection, sexual selection and population bottlenecks.

So, say you want a party with people from Mt-DNA Haplogroup B. Sure, why not invite the Chinese, Koreans, Chinese along with the Quechuas, Hawaiians, Cherokee etc. It still amazes me how diverse people got in the 200,000 years when Homo Sapiens Sapiens left Africa. But then again, Humans are the most homogenous Mammalian species on Earth. I guess the longer your species lives and stays away from each other, the more diverse they get. This is coming to an end but let me not get off topic.

When race isn't that big of a deal... whole 'races' can disappear. When Mexico declared Independence in 1810, 1/10th of its population was black. Nowadays it's 1.5% of its population is Black. Why is that? During the slave trade, 200,000 Africans arrived in Mexico compared to the 3 million sent to Brazil and the United States brought in over 500,000 slaves before the end of the Slave Trade if not slavery itself. Generations of intermarriage between Native Mexicans, Spaniards and other Europeans and of course mestizos contributed to this lack of visible Africans in Mexico. African DNA just diffused into the general population unlike the United States where the social construct of race and the One Drop Rule made this extremely difficult to do.

Egyptians know of this as well. Egypt is the Cross-roads for Empire and Egyptians will look as Dark as a Nubian to as light as an Israeli but these same Egyptians have been Egyptians since the stone ages. Although most of their elite maybe foreigners, the average man from Upper Egypt who tills the soil as his ancestors did thousands of years ago is just the same as that man thousands of years ago. Ancient Egyptian depictions of themselves in Ancient Egypt, Roman rule and of course attest to that. Egyptians are just North Africans and if you even wish to use language as a sort of test of ethnic heritage.... Ancient Egyptians spoke Afro-Asiatic languages which peoples in the Horn of Africa speak, which they're closely related to.

One more thing. Turks.. aren't that Central Asian. Go to google and type in Turkmen or Kirghiz or Tajik or even Kazakh to a picture of a modern day person living in Turkey. Today's Turkish people are just Turkified Greeks. When the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks took over Anatolia (Turkish region). They didn't kill all the inhabitants. They lived among them and assimilated them to become Turks. When scientists compared the gene flow from Mongolia to Turkey.. not alot of things were similiar. Despite the adoptian of a Altaic Language (Turkish) and Islam, the people of Turkey are still the Byzantine Greeks we know and love.

To conclude all of this mumbo-jumbo together. Race is a social construct. Often peoples can lose their race or become a member of another ethnic group due to assimilation, genetic diffusion and intermarriage. Most people on Earth are mixed in a myriad of ways and racists are just interbred who don't wish to enjoy the wonderous diversity of people... if you ever get a chance to gaze into the face of a San Bushman. You will see humanity.

The Asian epithantic fold, the full lips of an African, the flat nose of an Asian, the high cheek bones of a Central Asian, the skin which could become whiter or darker depending on UV exposure, the tightly coiled hair of an African, the thin limbed body of an Australian Aborigine, the barrel chest of a Siberian/Amerindian. In short, human beings in a microcosm.

* All the pictures are of Africans, see if you can identify the Australian Aborigine

The Horn of Africa : War Now, War Always

The Horn of Africa. The worst place to be if you're a hippie. This place hasn't had any peace, ever. Look at the countries in the Horn of Africa. You got Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti. Among the most fucked up countries on this Earth. All right next to each other and you got the scariest ethnic groups alive running them.

The Afar have Djibouti, the Tigrayans have Eritrea, Somalis have Somalia but Ethiopia is the weird exception. Its got all of those peoples except the Oromo (which in my opinion scare me the most) and Amhara (which until recently, ran the country). The Oromos and Somalis want out and only a thin coalition of Tigrayans and Amharas are keeping Ethiopia together. But something else is too. That something, is NATIONALISM. To me, Ethiopia seems more like 19th Century Europe than some poor sub-Saharan African country like Malawi or Zambia. These guys are more violent.

For centuries, the Amharas have been fighting of Nubians, Arabs, Somalis, Oromos and Tigrayans. Something they still do today but around the mid 1800s. This tribe along with the Oromo became united through feudal marriages and feudal wars between Ras (or Lords) of Ethiopian cities. One Ras, Ras Menelik won it all and became Negus (Emperor) of Ethiopia. This guy was a smart Emperor. He knew the mistakes of his predecessors. One guy, Tewdoros (or Theodore) got destroyed by the British in 1858. He knew he needed rifles and lots of them. He was different from most African rulers at the time. Rulers in Central, Southern and West Africa were content with posessing gold, harems and muskets. Menelik was just fine with this Bible and a good Martini-Henri at his side. He needed them too. He had to fend off rival Ras, plus Egyptians, Sudanese.

He needed European powers to help him out, in this case they were France and Italy. But Italy, double crossed them. (Are you surprised?). Italy formed when modern Ethiopia formed because just like Ethiopia, it was a bunch of feudal states trying to fend off big European players like France, Austria etc. In some treaty the Italians gave to the Ethiopians to sign, it basically said that Ethiopia was now Italy's colony (or bitch). No ruler in the 19th century could accept that. From little Paraguay, the Boer Republics and the Sikh Kingdoms to France, Prussia, Russia and Qing China they had a similiar disorder. They had the overproduction of testosterone. War was taken seriously back then, it meant life or death for your tribe whether that be (French, Zulu, Sioux whatever). War wasn't a joke. Nowadays, war is an excuse to make you corporate backers rich in much of the world. Except in the Horn of Africa (let's call it the Horn).

Italians had a little colonial base in modern day Eritrea where they could launch attacks on Central Ethiopia, the Amhara homeland. The Ethiopians had some 200,000 men (half of them had rifles). The Italians had a tenth of that number. It looked to be a classical brawl. After some Ethiopian hordes had gone ahead and smashed Italian Askari (African bitches) battalions the Italians dug in. So did the Ethiopians in this strange stalemate until.... the attack came. 20,000 Ethiopians with 8,000 cavalry charged at the Italians as Ethiopian gunners fired shells on their enemies positions. Can you imagine being an Italian on the receiving end of that? Ethiopians may have been short and wiry but their headresses composed of Lion hair made them seem much taller. Ethiopian cavarly speared Italians and native Askari alike. In the end, the battle shocked the world. Africans had beat Europeans??

Ethiopia managed to avoid colonization because of this battle and conquered Somalia. Not bad for Emperor Menelik, not bad.

The Italians come again in 1935 and they mean business. (I dont know why people mock French military history, the Italians have the worst, clearly). Poison gas, airplanes and machine guns beat the Ethiopians and it STILL took them 8 months to do it. The Emperor Haile Selassie of the time took a world tour and managed to start a fringe religion, Rastafarianism. When the Anglos came took liberate the Ethiopians they grabbed Italian Eritrea. This is where Ethiopia's colonialism begins.

But Haile Selassie was strangled and buried under a toilet when the Derg (Communist Revolutionaries) took power. They soon started a war with Somalia in 1977 over who controled the Ogaden region (where Somalis in Ethiopia live). Then in the 80's the Derg targeted Tigrayans and tried starving them to death to crush their liberation movement. That didn't work out too well because Eritrea was created soon after the Derg backer the Soviet Union fell... along with the Derg.

Ethiopia is now surrounded by ethnic states whose countrymen live within their borders. Thats a nightmare scenario for any 19th Century wannabe. Also, especially if you got a Prussia wannabe next door. Eritreans are the most war-like people today aside from Afghans. Just this year they nearly picked a fight with France over Djibouti. It had a war with Yemen in the mid 90s, and a HUGE war with Ethiopia in 1998 to 2000.

Eritreans fought in trenches using machine guns and artillery WWI style while Ethiopians acted like it had its own General Haig sending human waves over landmines (à la Iran). You have no idea how unusual it is for an African nation to engage in trench warfare or even human wave offensives. I told you, they're 19th Century wannabes. They want their watershed Great War. Ethiopian tanks tried to take the town of Badme on the border but Eritrean artillery smashed their formations. In that one battle, 15,000 Ethiopians were killed. Ethiopians can stomach that. Eritrea which has 2 to 3 million people can't. Hence, the trenches. Soviet weapons tries to destroy one another as SAMS, MiGs, Katyushas and more tried to obliterate the enemy. This happened while we were fascinated with Yugoslavia.

Although hundreds of thousands died. It created something, that something was NATIONALISM. That's what helped put Ethiopia in its current situation: Somalia.

Somalia should be a tight-nit country. They're all the same ethnic group, why can't they get along. I think they would, if their clans let them. Clans are not a good thing. They could divide a nation, ask the Scots! Since the Soviet Union fucked up their country and Siad Barre left. The country has lurched from clan war to clan war until the Union of Islamc Courts came in. Locals got tired of chaos and so they thought the least chaotic thing they understood (the Qur'an) was good enough. Just like how the Taliban came in after Afghan warlords made things intolerable... even for Pashtuns! Ethiopia hates this.

Just like in the olden days, Aksum (Ethiopia) wanted to see Nubia weak and vice versa. The same applies here. Also, the thought of seeing the Indian Ocean again must've made their eyes water. With US aid (America thinks all things Islamic are terrorist) Ethiopia invaded Somalia. So now Ethiopia has got a major Somali problem. Somalians in the Ogaden, Somalis in Somalia. Great. On top of that, Eritrea is helping the Somalis and on TOP OF THAT UN peacekeepers have left the Eritrean-Ethiopian border so I expect them to be at war as soon as Ethiopia leaves Somalia.

What about Djibout? You may ask... Djibouti can go fuck itself. It's France's bitch. Its a pseudo-colony. When Eritrea threatned Djibouti, you know who it calls. FRANCE! Pussies. They don't act like a Horn country at all. Maybe because it isn't.

Besides them. The Horn of Africa is a wonderful place to be a mercenary. Not so good a place if you wish to be a professional pacifist or hippie.Oh, and I hear business is booming for potential Somali pirates. As Tecumseh once said:

'Wage war on the Living, Wage war on the Dead! War now! War forever! War Always!'

How Will You Die?: How How Rich Your Country Is Determines Your Death

Death, you're gonna have to think about it eventually. Don't obsess over it now but be aware that it stalks you.

You're life is fine and dandy up to the age of 23. Thats when you're body's cells start dying quicker than they can be produced. A slippery slope of aging, impotence and death soon becomes all-embracing.

So depending where you live. Your death can be a quick glorious demise, or a slow-painful statistic. In the Horn of Africa, you can be a Somali Pirate dying at the hands of an American UAV trying to capture an Indian vessel. Or an Eritrean soldier, killed in a clash with Ethiopians near Badme. Thats what happened in 2000. There was trench warfare, armour clashes and everything. THAT is a glorious death.

Wasting away in a retirement home day-dreaming about pudding is not. Clearly, something is wrong with our cultural values. In a society when you have most of the things you want somewhat available, dying is much more painful I find. Chronic diseases plague us Westerners.

Strokes, Heart Disease, various cancers and alzheimers. What a way to go, by forgetting everything.

People in 3rd World Countries. Whom, I think are leading heroic lives, dying in battle or getting carried off by plagues have more interesting deaths. Malaria, Diarrhea, AIDS and Car Accidents carry these poor fellows off. Then again, dying because your intestines can't absorb the liquid from your shit isn't the cleanest way to die. Neither is a bad car accident. Trust me, I've been to a 3rd world country, you get into a car accident once every week. People do not obey traffic laws over there. Or any laws period. If its not a cultural taboo, do it. The general mantra of a 3rd World Country.

Seriously though, the rich lifestyle of the West is killing us. Working those stupid desktop office jobs while lunching at McDonalds every other day is calls for a heart attack, if not begging for one. Even the ones who dont consume that shit will die because their environment has so many carcinogens. Even a healthy jogger will drink out of a plastic bottle which is a carcinogen. Not to mention the stupid things we do like smoking. Doesn't matter what the drug is, inhaling a burnt substance into your lungs isn't a smart thing.

In a 3rd World Country, you will probably die because your government doesn't give a shit about you. You may have terrible water, worse homes, non functioning hospitals and clinics and even worse road conditions. You will die because of neglect and you know it. You become hyper religious at a young age to secure your placement in whatever after-life you believe in but you know death comes quick. Only a quater of people living in those countries live past the age of 70.

People in 2nd world countries die because of a messed up combo of those two extremes but countries like Russia are different. Russians simply live too hard. They drink to much, gamble too much, stress-out too much, shoot up too much, have sex too much. Too much, too young. They live 10+ years younger than us and for good reason. But, whats better. Dying from alcohol poisoning after the craziest night of clubbing in Moscow, or dying after 50 years behind a desk. That's up to you to decide.

The Normans: Land Vikings

The Normans. Among my favourite warrior peoples and that is why they're the Warrior Peoples of the week. Who were these strange peoples?

Imagine you're a French King in the 800s. Charlemagne, your great-great grandaddy is dead. Leaving you with a hefty inheritance, beset by barbarians. Including the Northmen. You need a plan, your native levies are terrified by these peoples. You decide to be smart about this. Why not invite these Northmen to stay instead of pillage. That way, you dont have to pay the greedy blondies everytime they threatned Paris.

A Danish Norsemen, Rollo was invited to stay with his people on coastal French land. Just as long as he defended it from other Vikings. Simple enough. In time, he became Christian but he was buried the traditional Viking way in a burning warship. His men soon intermarried with the local woman and a new people began to form. The Normans. The Normans weren't the only pseudo-Norsemen on the move. A group of Swedish ones went to Russia and the Volga River, Norwegian ones pillaged and settled in the British Isles. But the Normans were different...

Sure, most Vikings would pillage than settle down eventually. After all, Scandinavia was a bit crowded in those days. However, the Normans didn't stop after they settled down. Their greatest triumphs were AFTER they settled down. Their first adventures were in Italy. Some Norman pilgrims would go down to Italy to get to the Holy Land and Italian lords saw their natural martial skills. Soon, Norman bands were working for the Italians killing their enemies for some land and cash.

By the early 11th century, bands of Normans wandering around finally got some leadership. Under Robert "the Weasel" Guiscard. They conquered Sicily and soon Normans were all over the Mediterranean including the Byzantine Empire helping hold back the many Bulgars, Slavs, Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Russians etc who wanted them dead. This was all before 1066.

In England, King Edward the Confessor had died. He'd promised his throne to William, Duke of Normandy. Another person who wanted the throne was Harald Hardrada, a Norsemen from Norway. Harold Godwinson got the throne in the end and both Harald and William went about getting their forces ready to conquer England for themselves, since such was the Norse way.

Harold had to rush his troops to the north of England to defeat Harald's troops but just as soon as the battle was ended. News arrived that William of Normany had landed in the far south. He had to trot his army, though exhausted down south again. Perhaps the exhaustion did the Saxon Housecarls in but the Normans destroyed the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings and set about crushing England. So thoroughly was England crushed that only Norman lords resided over the country. This pattern was repeated in Wales and Scotland. Some Scottish clans like Montgomery are of Norman ancestry. Ireland was treated this way too.

The Normans didn't stop in England. Italian-Normans joined in the crusades as soon as they were started. Ever land hungry, the founded the Kingdom of Antioch. Surrounded by hundreds of thousands if not millions of Muslims, this kingdom lasted till near the 13th centuries.

Well, what happened to the Normans. Why aren't we speaking "Normish" or whatever language they spoke. Well, the Normans didn't have a culture. The Normans took on French culture after all. Wherever they went, they became the indigenous peoples. They became French, Italian, English, Scottish, Irish, Greek and Syrian. That's what happens to the best of them I suppose. They fade away....