Friday, November 18, 2022


More on prehistoric European civilization

As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. And that applies to the development of civilization in S.E. Europe (mostly in the territory of modern Serbia). I wrote yesterday about the elaborate civilization known to archaeologists as Vinca. The degree of modernity in the Vinca culture can be rather startling and the time of its emergence is even more startling. It emerged BEFORE the civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria.

But Vinca did not arise out of nothing. As is usually the case, it evolved from something earlier. And it is an earlier culture I want to mention here: Lepenski Vir. It was obviously much more primitive than Vinca but its remains do entitle it to be called a civilization.

And it is VERY early, much earlier even than Vinca -- starting as early as 9500 BC. So once again we are entitled to say that civilization was a European invention, not an invention from the Middle East. The Middle East is where WRITING that we can decipher originated but the other features of civilization can be found first in "Old Europe"

As a scholarly study of European genetics concluded: "Our study shows that southeastern Europe consistently served as a genetic contact zone between different populations. This role likely contributed to the extraordinary series of cultural innovations that characterize the region"


A fish god sculpture from Lepenski Vir: Half human, half fish. Fishing was a major food source for the inhabitants. Their settlement was on the Danube in a spot good for fishing

There are various theories of where the populations concerned came from but there is little doubt that they were an admixture resulting from several population movements. The admixture was however powerful. Just as the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Normans fused to produce the very influentil current population of Britain, so the admixture in South Eastern Europe developed into something much more significant than the various genetic streams from which it originated. They started out as farmers but went on to something much more than that.

We know that when one group moves into an already-populated place, the old population is not normally wiped out. At it worst, all the men may be wiped out but the women will be retained to produce children, a highly desired "commodity" where lifespans are short.

And the most recent move into S.E. Europe was of the Slavs, a very successful population that now controls most of Eastern Europe. So one wonders whether the genetics of "Old Europe" have survived the Slavic hegemony. It seems possible but how much has survived? The study of S.E. Europe mentioned above gives a figure of 5% but that is S.E. Europe-wide. In the heartland of Old Europe" -- Serbia -- the percentage could be higher. Serbs do have claims to be descendants of the world's oldest civilization.

Wikipedia has a very extensive and thorough article on Lepinski Vir so I reproduce just its opening paragraphs:


Lepenski Vir located in Serbia, is an important archaeological site of the Mesolithic Iron Gates culture of the Balkans. The latest radiocarbon and AMS data suggests that the chronology of Lepenski Vir spans between 9500/7200–6000 BC. There is some disagreement about when the settlement and culture of Lepenski Vir began, but the latest data indicates that it was between 9500–7200 BC. The late Lepenski Vir (6300–6000 BC) architectural phase saw the development of unique trapezoidal buildings and monumental sculpture. The Lepenski Vir site consists of one large settlement with around ten satellite villages. Numerous piscine sculptures and peculiar architectural remains have been found at the site.

Archaeologist Dragoslav Srejovi?, who first explored the site, said that such large sculptures so early in human history, and the original architectural solutions, define Lepenski Vir as a specific and very early phase in the development of European prehistoric culture. The site was notable for its outstanding level of preservation and the overall exceptional quality of its artifacts. Because the settlement was permanent and planned, with an organized societal life, architect Hristivoje Pavlovi? labeled Lepenski Vir as "the first city in Europe".

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The sin of masculinity

Daisy Cousens

The importance of the presumption of innocence was highlighted last week. Virginia Giuffre, who alleged she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to multiple men when she was a minor, has dropped a defamation proceeding against high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz. After initially identifying Dershowitz as one of many men Epstein forced her to have sex with, Giuffre has now admitted she ‘may have made a mistake’.

‘I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations,’ her statement read.

‘I now recognise I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz.’

While Alan Dershowitz has acknowledged Virginia Giuffre was young and in a traumatic, vulnerable position at the time, her 2014 accusation trashed his reputation, perhaps irreparably. No room was made for the possibility that Dershowitz was, in fact, telling the truth when he denied having sex with Giuffre.

This disregard for the presumption of innocence greatly accelerated in the wake of the #metoo movement. Too often over the past five years we have seen feminist ideologues clutch at cases like Alan Dershowitz’s in an attempt to demonstrate that affluent, university-educated, Western women are actually living in an oppressive patriarchy, in which men are never held accountable for their bad behaviour. But in an interesting cultural double standard, it’s often the other way around.

Men are publicly browbeaten by feminists into collectively atoning for the bad behaviour of every man who has ever done anything wrong, ever… This includes comparatively minor indiscretions, such as (to use feminists’ own terminology) creating ‘hostile working environments’ for women. However, there is no public campaign to have women atone for the toxic elements of their own behaviour; such as the workplace bullying of women by (shock horror) other women.

Rather than being admonished for their ‘queen bee’ syndrome, women’s bad behaviour towards women at work is often blamed on (you guessed it) men. After all, if men didn’t create such a hostile working environment, women wouldn’t feel like they’re competing with each other for limited spaces at the top, right?

Regardless of their circumstances, men are treated as oppressors-in-waiting. This denigration begins, in some cases, when they’re little boys; the most obvious example being Victoria’s ‘Respectful Relationships’ program. This program is taught from the early grades, and allegedly seeks to prevent domestic abuse. However, it merely posits the vague notion of ‘gender inequality’ as the root cause of family and domestic violence (FDV).

Such an approach is inaccurate, and ideologically motivated, as among other things, it ignores the fact a reasonable chunk of FDV victims are not women. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 42 per cent of victims of FDV-related homicide in 2021 were male. It also contradicts a 2019 study from the Australian Institute of Criminology, which found the great predictors for domestic violence are alcohol abuse and low socioeconomic status. The AIC study also found a tiny minority of men were responsible for a hugely disproportionate amount of domestic abuse.

Regardless of these inconvenient truths, schoolboys in Victoria are still being forced to apologise for their gender in the classroom, in some cases quite literally. An assembly at Brauer College on ‘rape culture’ last year, in which boys were forced to stand up and apologise to girls for the ‘behaviours of their gender’, is a case in point.

This double standard in the discussion of FDV is not solely caused by the toxic feminist-victim cultural narrative. Society just cares less about men than it does about women. Take, for example, the relentless reminders that a large majority of victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) related homicide are women. According to the latest National Homicide Monitoring Program from the AIC, 80 per cent of IPV homicide victims in 2019-2020 were women.

This ghastly fact is wielded by everyone from feminist chieftains to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; as a way of promoting the ten days of domestic violence leave his government has written into law, he tweeted on November 2, ‘Right now, one woman dies every 10 days at the hands of an intimate partner.’

However, for all this anti-violence talk, we never hear it mentioned that in 2020, 67 per cent of the nation’s total victims of homicide and related offences were men, according to the ABS. This increased to 70 per cent in 2021. As such, while feminists insist that IPV-related homicide is a ‘gendered’ problem for women, they turn a blind eye to the fact that by their own logic, homicide at large is a gendered problem that disproportionately affects men.

This is not a new phenomenon. According to the ABS, men have been the primary victims of homicide and related offences in Australia since at least the 1990s. They are also the primary victims of armed and unarmed robbery. And while much is made by political and cultural leaders of the fact that according to the most recent Personal Safety Survey, women are more likely to be violently attacked in their homes, and by somebody they know, they do not display the same frantic concern for men, who are much more likely than women to be attacked in public by a stranger. An issue that should also be considered gendered, if feminist logic were applied.

In my experience, when these cultural double standards are pointed out, feminist activists justify men’s suffering by highlighting that in most violent incidents against men, the perpetrator is also a man. Former Labor MP Terri Butler epitomised this mentality on an episode of the ABC’s QandA in 2019.

‘Women are more likely to be the victims of violence at home, men are more likely to be the victims of violence in public, but the common factor is it’s men committing the violence by and large … so these rigid ideas of masculinity hurt everyone,’ she stated.

The implication here is, (as I see it): ‘If men would just collectively atone for the sin of toxic masculinity, then maybe they wouldn’t be violently attacked!’

Apparently, in yet another glaring cultural double standard, victim blaming is okay – if the victim is a man.

Such double standards extend to many layers of men’s experiences. For example, according to the 2019 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), men are more likely than women to drink at risky levels (one in four men versus one in ten women). They also use illicit drugs like cannabis, methamphetamine, and cocaine at higher rates than women.

Despite the fact men are more likely than women to consume harmful substances, there is no campaign to label substance abuse a gendered issue. If it were women sniffing coke and smoking joints at disproportionately high rates (pardon the pun), we’d never hear the end of it from feminists.

Another glaring cultural double standard is public discussion of homelessness. According to the most recent 2016 census data, 58 per cent of Australia’s homeless population are men. This number is consistent with census data from previous years. However, public commentary mentioning homelessness and gender focuses on the recent phenomenon that women over 55 are the fastest growing group of homeless people. Not the fact that men are, and have been for some time, the majority of the homeless.

Then, of course, there are the everyday double standards; like the seemingly endless public initiatives to advance the welfare of women and girls, with meagre attention given to initiatives to support men and boys. For example, International Women’s Day and International Day of the Girl are recognised by the United Nations, and officially celebrated internationally.

However, International Men’s Day, which is coming up this weekend on November 19, receives a comparatively minuscule amount of public recognition. To add insult to injury, not only does the UN not recognise International Men’s Day, it officially recognises November 19 as World Toilet Day.

Consider also the relentless push to get more women into male-dominated industries like STEM, with a mind to somehow improving these industries with added estrogen. However, there is no public effort to push more men into female-dominated industries like teaching. This is a shame; given boys have been holding up TikTok celebrity and faux-masculine caricature Andrew Tate as an example of positive manhood, a few more male role models in the classroom would likely do boys a world of good.

The cherry on top of these double standards is that thanks to affirmative action, discrimination in the workplace against men on the basis of gender is culturally accepted, promoted, and celebrated, rather than rejected and reviled.

Despite the feminist claptrap, it’s clear society at large does not intrinsically care about men’s wellbeing. Fortunately, there are certain organisations that do, and I am fortunate enough to be a board member of one such organisation; Men’s Legal Service. Men’s Legal Service was established in 2016 upon observing the limited assistance available to men going through family law events.

Considering many men lack the financial resources to navigate the family law system, and as a result can lose contact with their children, the service MLS provides is invaluable in redressing this double standard. As a not-for-profit law firm, the focus of MLS is to ensure fathers remain part of their children’s lives after separation and divorce; another invaluable initiative, given how the role of fathers has been culturally devalued over the past few decades.

There will always be ideologues who point to the comparatively small number of very powerful men as apparent evidence that all men are inherently privileged. However, the experiences of a tiny percentage of a group does not reflect the experience of the group as a whole. Before our political and cultural leaders rush into casting society’s perceived villains, they would do well to consider all the facts, not just some.

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Red wave was no trickle – it was real

Why is mention of electoral fraud verboten? Indeed, the US Department of Homeland Security includes electoral fraud claims (but only by Republicans) as one of those items social media should remove as ‘misinformation’.

In addition, the mainstream media almost invariably describes Donald Trump as ‘falsely’ claiming that the 2020 election was rigged.

This is despite the fact that examples of fraud were included in newscasts during the 2020 election, and pleadings in the Supreme Court case Texas v. Pennsylvania demonstrating how changes in state electoral laws, increasing the potential for fraud, were clearly unconstitutional.

The fact is that in the mid-term elections, the door was still left open to fraud in certain key states.

Australians should not feign superiority. Our electoral system is more open to fraud than most comparable countries.

In 1983, the Hawke government legislated to make it ‘easier to vote’. So instead of voting in a nearby subdivisional polling station, I found I could vote in about 40 places, all without ID or any controls. Even when controls became easily available through the internet, they were never installed. Then in the middle of the 2010 election, the High Court moved against John Howard’s blocking of the usual tsunami of fraudulent, unverifiable enrolments in the week after the calling of an election. Declaring it unconstitutional, the Court waited until near Christmas to publish their unconvincing reasons and reveal their decision was taken by the narrowest majority. Meanwhile, GetUp! boasted it had 100,000 additional names inserted onto the rolls.

Writing here last week when early voting in the US was still underway, I argued that while a Republican victory in the House seemed more than likely, the Senate result was not clear because Republicans had to defend many more seats this round.

Others predicted a red wave but most now dismissively talk of a ‘trickle’.

There is no doubt. There was a red wave. Even with its proportion of the vote reduced by fraud in some states, including the potential for vast numbers of Biden’s illegal immigrants to vote, the Republicans still led the Democrats, 52.8 per cent to 46.6 per cent.

While this produced a narrow majority of nine seats, compare that with the 2010 election when Republicans led with less, 51.3 per cent to 47.2 per cent at time of writing.

Yet this ‘Tea Party Wave’ produced a large majority, one of 63 seats.

Why? I suspect the small mid-term majority is due to increased Democrat gerrymandering. This was encouraged by the Supreme Court suddenly deciding in 2019 that the issue is not justiciable, i.e., something the Court should not rule on.

American electorates are not exactly ‘rotten boroughs’, but enjoy nothing like the fairer boundaries normal in Australia.

Not only was the Republican percentage of the vote lower in 2022 because of electoral fraud, Democrats are using gerrymandering to dilute it.

As to electoral fraud, the continuous shrieking condemnation of Donald Trump by the mainstream media for daring to suggest the 2020 election was rigged has been so successful, few Republicans dare mention this.

Given that the methods of rigging used in 2020 are still in place in many states or have even been increased, this must be a significant part of the reason the predicted red wave was realised but not reflected in the results.

There were of course other factors which impacted adversely on the real Republican vote.

One was the Supreme Court’s legally correct decision that abortion is a state matter and never a constitutional right.

For some educated, relatively wealthy white women, belief in abortion is now akin to a religion and influences their vote. Yet few of them have any need to have recourse to abortion. This occurs disproportionately among poor, black and unmarried women. This leads to the killing of a large and disproportionate number of healthy, black babies.

The other factor was the high turnout among the young who are even more inclined to vote Democrat than previous generations, no doubt the result of the Marxist capture of education. This was balanced to an extent by the increasing support for Republicans among Asian, Hispanic and, from a small base, black voters.

Where the red wave was reflected in votes counted was in Florida where Ron DeSantis won 59.4 per cent of the vote. This was not only because he has proved to be an excellent governor, but also because he wisely closed the door to fraud in ‘mail-in’ voting and ballot harvesting, while cleansing the roll of the dead and requiring voter ID.

Rather than pointing to systemic fraud and gerrymandering as reasons for the failure of the red wave being reflected in seats won, the usual suspects, and not only Democrats, the never-Trumpers, RINOs, the mainstream and social media, but also panicking Republican grandees, joined together in blaming Donald Trump.

They have foolishly made him the ubiquitous and principal enemy of the people, just as Emmanuel Goldstein was in the Oceania of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The mainstream media might as well host a daily two-minute Trump hate session at 11am similar to Goldstein’s.

The fact is that as in 2016, when the lead contenders were Donald Trump and the excellent Ted Cruz, the Republicans have a veritable stable of quality choices for worthy future US presidents and thereby leaders of the free world.

The Democrats, now a neo-Marxist rabble, have none.

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On Gas Prices, Simple Economics Trumps Biden’s Partisan Agenda

President Joe Biden has an energy problem. He lambasts oil and gas companies as “war profiteers” and has threatened a windfall tax on their “record profits.” It’s true that earnings are up, but we don’t have to embrace the bogeyman of corporate greed as an explanation. Instead, the culprit is basic economics, amplified by the harmful consequences of the president’s regulatory agenda. His proposed windfall tax on oil-company profits will only make the situation worse.

Biden’s approach to energy makes production and distribution more difficult. The U.S. economy is producing millions fewer of barrels of oil per day than it did during the 2017–2020 boom. This decreased U.S. production is not caused by the war in Ukraine. U.S. policy decisions make oil and gas quantities lower and prices higher than they otherwise would be. Domestic production lags because companies can’t risk new investments floundering on the administration’s costly climate policies. As a result, oil prices are 40 percent higher now than they were in January 2021.

Simple economics explains energy companies’ high profits. In the oil industry, total revenues equal the price per barrel of oil times the number of barrels produced and sold. Policy-induced stagnation lowers quantities and raises prices. Here’s the key: Demand for oil isn’t very sensitive to price changes. Economists call this “inelastic demand.” With few good substitutes for fossil fuels, consumers won’t scale back much when prices rise. As a result, the price hikes outweigh the quantity drop-offs. That means more money for oil companies. Profits are downstream from market conditions, which the administration is actively harming. Supply and demand 1, Biden 0.

The president’s proposal of a windfall tax on profits would make a bad situation worse. One of the most important lessons in economics is that the burden of a tax rarely falls on those who are legally required to pay it. Instead, the tax burden is borne by the party that’s the least price sensitive. While fossil fuel consumers are not very price sensitive, domestic fossil fuel suppliers are because they can avoid a windfall profit tax by supplying markets abroad. A windfall profit tax would further decrease domestic supplies and drive prices at the pump even higher. Consumers, not corporations, would foot the bill.

The president has every reason to castigate the corporate-greed bogeyman. He can’t admit that our energy and gas wounds are self-inflicted—or, rather, inflicted by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party on the rest of the country. The party’s climate agenda necessarily drives fossil fuel prices higher. While Americans may like green policy in the abstract, the high fossil fuel prices that come with it are deeply unpopular. Hence the scapegoating: It’s political damage control.

The great economist Thomas Sowell taught us that the first lesson of economics is scarcity. That implies making trade-offs, such as bearing the burden of higher prices to transition away from fossil fuels. Sowell also observed that the first rule of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. That’s exactly what Biden and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are trying to do. Going by recent public opinion polls, voters aren’t buying it.

The economics of the situation are as clear as day. If we want lower prices, we need more production. Rescinding high-handed executive orders and regulations that disincentivize new investment will increase output and, eventually, lower prices. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but political fiat cannot withstand the laws of supply and demand.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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