Uhm...I took it like Agnostic. If you look at semi-hunter gather Amerinidians in Brazil they are always smiling and happy. I can not confirm this but I would suspect that they have low rates of depression. 
 
Being poor is not psychologically more stressful than being well off if you don't understand that you are poor. 
 
Generation X in the States was known to be depressive, slackers, etc. You can look at the popular music of the early 1990's, i.e. Nirvana. Most of these kids were middle class and were dropping Prozac like certs. 
 
I would wager the suicide rate among Amazonian tribes is very extremely low. 
 
Who is more happy at the end of life? The guy who has a nice nest egg, bad relations with his kids, grandkids that he barely knows, various chronic diseases, 30 pills to take every day, and bills to worry about, all types of plans to make? 
 
Is this guy happier than the Amazonian Indian surrounded by all his family, no bills to worry about, etc. His only worry is being raided by another tribe and food.

Razib...too funny, but your points are well taken. 
 
It appears the normal pattern we see in Europe and Africa don't seem to apply well in East Asia. Even in Europe is it sketchy. Still one can say that generally Northern people have invaded to their South more than the other way around. 
 
One can also argue that the Arabs invaded considerably far to their north...all the way to present day Southern France.

Jason: 
 
I agree with you and Sailer on this North to South intrusion. 
 
This also occurred inside Europe. Germans and Slavs came from the North East and invaded South into former Roman (Latin and Greek) lands. 
 
In turn...Romans invaded Greece, Egypt, Carthage. Greeks invaded Egypt. 
 
Unlike the European examples...Mongols, Turks, and Tungustic tribesmen have never been shown to have higher IQs than Han Chinese in the South or Japanese. 
 
I would argue this is not as much about IQ as it is about being desperate, that likely compensates for a 2-5 point lapse in IQ. The Northern tribes were highly mobile and far more war-like, as competition for scares resources was more intense on the Eurasian Steppe than on the Chinese plain or in Japan. They developed a aggressive, mobile, fast hitting style of warfare that was not needed in China. 
 
I would point out that the Mongols had serious problems and loses in Myanmar, Vietnam, Japan, and Java. It appears the Mongols were never very good at fighting where they could not use their horsemanship extensively. Their type of warfare needed wide open grazing lands where they could support their horses, scavenge, and maneuver, feint retreats, etc. 
 
The Chinese raided to the North of them, but they rarely attempted to colonize anywhere to their far North, beyond the Great Wall. It was not until the Manchu (who were Northern) did the Chinese completely absorb Manchuria and all of Mongolia. They didn't need to. For what? It would be expensive to hold the territory and there is nothing there...it would and did provide security that is it. 
 
The Japanese did invade to their North consistently all the way into Siberia, displacing and absorbing occupied lands (although the Russian took those islands back illegally after WWII). 
 
Egyptians briefly controlled the Levant, but not for very long and the less populated areas of Nubia to their South invaded and controlled them for a short time. 
 
Despite these examples, I agree that generally invasion has been North to South...and while this may correlate roughly with IQ in many cases, it does not always (as in China and Japan). 
 
Razib: 
 
You are definately right...the Y Chromosome (I edited Wiki myself on this) for Han Chinese do not vary much. The variation is on the maternal side. It is well documented in Chinese history that there were many Chinese military movements into the South (all the way into Vietnam) since the Han Dynasty and during the Tang their was a mass exodus of Han Chinese (once again many court officials and soldiers)...it appears they married local woman (related to various South East Asian groups)...which is interesting in the fact that they should have dropped the average Chinese IQ...not increased it. Another mystery for another day.

I should add that in East Asia...the Northern people were always barbarians. Even inside of present day China, Beijing was a city with a Han Chinese population but control by barbarians since the Later Jin Dynasty (in the 10th century) and was not ruled consistently by Han Chinese until the Ming Dynasty. Manchuria was obviously full of Tungustic barbarians and also Mongol-related peoples. No one ever accused these people of being the epitome of civilization in East Asia, in fact the opposite...even the Koreans considered them barbarians. It is true that many Turkic, Mongol, and Tungustic peoples were absorbed into the Han after the Sinified but great civilization was not created by these people. 
 
They all lived in the North of China proper at the time. 
 
Even today, the Chinese with the highest IQs and highest living standard live in Shanghai and South...one can argue this is due to history and not genes, but it is also known that when various barbaric tribes invaded and conquered Northern China, Han Chinese tended to flee South. This is why Cantonese call themselves Tong Yi (Tang Ren or Tang Dynasty People). 
 
I say all of this to show that the premise does not hold for East Asia. Historically Cambodians (Khmer) were more advanced than people in Manchuria, Mongolia, and maybe even Korea at various periods. The Chinese spoke favorably of early Khmer society and these people were in a definite tropical zone. 
 
Going back to Japan, Japanese civilization (Yayoi) is thought to have started in Northern Kyushu and/or Southern Honshu, and most of the history involves moving North and South from there...displacing and absorbing "barbarians" like the Ainu/Emishi. 
 
So I'm not seeing this theory holding up.

A good 2/3 of China (at least in the east where over 75% of people live ) is tropical to subtropical. Most of Japan from Tokyo and south is tropical to Subtropical...only central Japan and the area of Tohoku and North to Hokkaido are colder than Subtropical. 
 
There IQs are higher than most of Europe where there is similar climate along the Med. 
 
What explains this?

Here is an interesting essay on ethnic-nationalism... 
 
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87203-p10/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html

pconroy: 
 
one last thing. 
 
As I implied there are many ways to suffer and everyone has their unique hell to deal with just depends on how recent the wound. 
 
Never spent time in Boston, but I have in Philly and the Irish Pubs are full of recent, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation Irish Americans who hate the English and use to raise a lot of money for the IRA and would talk about some of the atrocities you spoke about like the English did it to their parents last week. 
 
Hell, the Chinese I know who most hate the Japanese over World War II were not even born they are the kids and grandkids of the people who actually suffered. 
 
I can't speak for American Indians, as I've only met one "pure one" in my life. Black people, rarely in closed company talk about slavery and often hesitate to talk about racial admixture in their family because they feel it comes from rape (true or not) it is an issue of shame. 
 
Most black people I know who talk about these type of things talk about current issues of racism or Jim Crow (as many blacks alive today lived through that or were born at the end of it). To be honest, outside of an academic setting or on line I have rarely ever been with a group of black people and the topic turned to slavery. I think that would be odd and you would notice people start to get uncomfortable. 
 
I would suggest you pay less attention to talking heads, race pimps, and leftist academics...get to know real folks.

sorry last one was me...same name two different languages.

The only whites who were legally like slaves in North America that I know of were the convicts brought to Georgia who were forced to work. I have no idea how many there were, I know a lot of them were Irish/Scots/low class English, Welsh...Welsh names are pretty common in the South East of America even today. 
 
There were some isolated cases of whites, especially orphan children who were made slaves under the idea that they were "mulatto or octoroons" when they were not. Obviously there is little data on how common this was. I can imagine some private orphanages selling children, but I can't imagine it was "normal".

pconroy: 
 
Scots and Irish were not slaves, they were indentured servants who were held till they paid off their debt. It was not a life time thing and their kids were not born into this system. There was a big difference between indentured servants and slaves and indentured servitude largely ended by the mid 1800?s, slavery did not. As far as I know, indentured servants could legally marry, could not have their kids sold to someone else, they could not be summarily executed or tortured. Women could not be raped at will. I?m sure all these things did happen, but it was not legal because they were not considered ?property? they were more so just debtors who were in contract to work off the debt.  
 
Be careful of the sites on the new, a lot of them a shady as they are run by neoconfederates apologists. Reality is the Arab system was worse but that does not take away from Razibs point. 
 
It is kind of like saying...well Armenians didn't have it as bad as the Jews...what is the purpose of making such a statement to begin with?

Razib: 
 
This might be instructive as far as Lucy Lui: 
 
http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/east-asian-and-western-beauty-standards/ 
 
Look at the post at the bottom of this thread...there is a link to a Japanese Fashion Mag. Look at the women there and there are also links to some famous North American East Asian actresses. I think the difference is telling.

Razib: 
 
"the fact that lucy liu has become so popular has a lot of east asians scratching their heads. 
 
wutz wrong with her? i wouldn't say she's drop dead, but she's attractive it seems. though someone like ziyi zhang seems a notch or two above her." 
 
What's wrong? 
 
1) single eye lids (not double). 
 
2) too dark 
 
3) looks old, not girlish and "fresh" 
 
If you look at Chinese, Korean, and Japan celebrities (tv personalities, actresses) they tend to be quite pale (not pasty reddish white, but porcelain type white), have "double lids" (natural or through surgery, usually in Korea through surgery), and be very girlish and typically under 35. You would be hard pressed to find a 40 year old actress in an Asian nation that is very popular with younger people. My wife says the same thing as Wongba about Lucy Lui, and especially the Korean-Canadian chick on Grey?s Anatomy. She was not too fond of the Chinese-American (Ming Na Wen) that used to be on ER either. None of them would have jobs in East Asia on TV for anything but comedy, if that. I don?t feel that is an exaggeration. East Asian posters feel free to chime in.

Syarikat : 
 
Halle Berry is pregnant by a white super model.

"razib  
So in the UK , black women are about 2/3rd as likely as black men to be involved with a white. 
In the usa, black women are only 2/5th as likely as black men to be involved with a white. 
 
the basal rate of outmarriage of blacks is way higher anyway. there's less residential segregation, etc. the sex differences are probably being saturated by the fact that outmarriage is pretty much as common as inmarriage, while in the USA is around an order of magnitude difference (i believe more black men outmarry than inmarry). 
 
But, e.g. within nations when conditions are similarly fair for individuals, we see group diffs, so probably a lot of that is genetic." 
 
Since most blacks don't marry each other or anyone else, it might be better to look at birth rates, if we actually could get data on the race of parents.

As far as Hillary Clinton, I don't think what she said was "racist". What she said was factual. It was more how she phrased it, that some took as minimizing Dr. King's role. This was done on purpose. I think she was race bating. Not making a racist statement. Big difference. 
 
I believe she did that hoping that Obama would respond like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton so she could debase him as the "black man's candidate" and turn off most whites. That may have worked in South Carolina...but I don't think so. It definitely did not spread nation-wide. In a way this was her "neo-Southern strategy" as a last ditch attempt to kill Obama's campaign. What she did was alienate the black support she had (which was sizable, in fact greater than black support for Obama and make over 70% of blacks vote for him). So Hill-billy's plan backfired. She did not just annoy black people she annoyed Ted Kennedy (another big mistake and all Nanci Pelosi's surrogates mobilized in Cali making the vote very close although she has never formally endorsed anyone). Hillary messed up. Reality is all of them were scared. Blacks are about 1/5 the democratic party and unlike Hispanics they are key in a lot of swing states that Democrats need to win in a polarized election (Missouri, Ohio, even Virginia). What Hillary did might make black folks stay home, Dems can't win the election without black support.  
 
"I am aware that the gang called ?government? will not be defeated this year or next year. I am also aware that history often takes dramatic and unexpected turns ? the French Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. 
 
No government lasts forever. I hope to live long enough to see the destruction of the criminal gang know as the ?government of the United States.? 
 
I have no idea whether or not I will. But, eventually, it will indeed fall, as all governments eventually do." 
 
Well that tells me all I need to know really. I'm a pragmatist, not really an ideologue. So that means I focus on working within the system and tweaking it because that is much more realistic than thinking you are going to radically change it or destroy it. You are correct that all systems/organizations die at some point due to their inability to adapt, but I do not think a collapses of the U.S. government is in anyone's best interest and I do not see that as happening in the near future (my life time, which I'm guessing will be about 50 more years). 
 
America is not like Europe, Japan, South Korea or any other developed area. There will always be Ron Paul style libertarians out there in remote places of the country, but I think in the end most American's move to the center as they mature. How many Republicans have started off political life as radical leftists? Quite a few I suspect. How many kids who grew up as part of the religious right moved to the "big city" and modera
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Dave: 
 
If you are publishing a newsletter on a monthly basis and (more than once) it makes statements that are anti-semitic and racist would you as an educated man be obvious to that, especially when your name is signed on it digitally? If the person who wrote it was fired and you are running for president and the media confronts you with it. Would you say "I don't know who wrote it"? Come now. I would hope Ron Paul is more intelligent than that, if he is not, he definitely has no business being in the Oval Office. 
 
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca 
 
You think this could innocently happen to George Bush, Bill Clinton, etc.? In any case, if he is a racist/anti-Semite or just an incompetent weirdo he will never make it through a general election, he won't even make it to the Senate.  
 
It is commonly thought (at least where I live in DC) that Ron Paul is somewhat "crazy", eccentric at best. 
 
Politics is about sharing power and it is obvious he is obviously someone so attached to ideology that if they did manage to get in the White House (obviously an impossibility as I said from the beginning despite his online cults blathering several months back) he would not get 90% of what he wants done. There would be government deadlock, and as typically happens in America, people would keep the Dems in power in the Senate and Congress, but with Paul a lot of Republicans would not back him and likely side with the Dems to undermine him, because he is not just going to go against party norms, but the entire Washington establishment in such a way that it will threaten and alienate everyone. Washington is a small town and people like him won't "play well in the sandbox". 
 
So Ron Paul's movement will never be more than a fringe movement supported by the Cato Institute, some dope smoking, anti-federal tax isolationists, rural militia types with 50 guns waiting for the ZOG conspiracy or Helter Skelter, Hate groups, and predominately white male on-line fan boy types. That is not a constituency that is going to carry much water into the future as it is shrinking daily. 
 
Reality is, in number, I'm guessing these types are maybe 5-10% of white males, and less of white females. The number of minorities who hold these views might be less than 1%. Due to population growth dynamics, the current 66% of the population that is white, is shrinking, dramatically, in 50 years, current estimates, from what I read in BBC show that Hispanics will be 30% of the U.S. population and blacks about 16%. White males will be less than 25%.  
 
If we keep a two party system, their won't be a real libertarian or paleo that can get out of the primary system, and get anywhere in a state-wide election, but for maybe someplace like Alaska or Wyoming. Presidential election...forget it. There might b
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This issue is really very complicated. 
 
In states like Ohio, and other swing states in the region, there is a strong historic labor union presence. Most of these people are white and culturally conservative, but they feel Republicans are pro-big business and hostile to unions. This is also true in a lot of New England. 
 
Southern whites don't have a strong union tradition (or none at all), one might argue that voting Republican is against their short term economic interests, but there is also the racial issue. In many Southern states blacks have a lot of power in the Democratic party and since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" which was basically white identity politics that lured away angry white Dixicrats to the Republicans who were made at the Johnson Admin for signing the Civil Rights Act many whites in the South will never vote Democrat even if they are fairly liberal due to racial issues. That's reality, even today.  
 
you can see easily that Obama does bad among whites in Louisiana, South Carolina, etc. However states like VA (where the whites are urban, educated, and often migrants from the North) he did much better.

"One group, which dubs itself ?cosmopolitan,? ?progressive,? etc. wishes to exclude the other group, often called ?paleos,? who tend towards moral traditionalism. For example, the ?cosmopolitan libertarians? have denounced Presidential candidate Ron Paul because he is clearly not with them on cultural lifestyle issues (although he does favor drug legalization, etc.)." 
 
No, they don't like him because they think he is anti-semitic and closet racist who lets other folks speak for him. His arguments to the contrary were not really convincing. There is a reason certain groups support Paul (KKK, Skinheads, etc).

Razib: 
 
Obama's entourage are mainstream and liberal dems...nothing new. 
 
He has luke warm to no support among older civil rights era blacks although the black community supports him pretty strongly, especially after the racial divisiveness the Clintons tried to pull in South Carolina (which also caused a lot of liberal whites to distance themselves from the Clintons). 
 
I don't fear Obama's "people" anymore than Hillary, especially with all the scandals that Bill Clinton has been invovled in. 
 
The Clintons are typically left of center, barely. 
 
Obama is quite a bit more liberal but for some reason independents and centrist are rallying around him. It is odd.

"It's truly mind-boggling that after 20 years of Bushes and Clintons Americans seem to rally behind a new Clinton and the outbushing-Bush, invade/invite-the-world-McCainiac." 
 
I agree with this. Sometimes I wonder how democracy works at all when the average voter is so eager to vote in a political dynasty and also seems so uninformed.

Phys-Dave: 
 
"Most of what you say about Hillary is certainly true, but the lady is intelligent and competent in a policy wonk sort of way. Whether she is competent in terms of making deals, leading a coalition, etc., well, she actually may be a bit too much like some of us. 
 
No one ever called Hillary a “people person,” did they?" 
 
Chief bureaucrat, we are talking about “a leader” if you wanted a Policy Wonk, then Richardson far out does Hillary all day every day. Obviously people were not interested in that. They want someone who can lead and inspire. Leadership is not about being the most technically inclined, if it was the smartest guys in the room (not Hillary, McCain, or Obama) would be running for president. To be a leader you have to be smarter than most people but not the more intelligent or the most technical. One of the most technical presidents we have had in my lifetime was Carter and look how he turned out. Yes you need to be a people person to be president.

Obama has the best chance of beating a Republican: 
 
1) Hillary is divisive even in her own party. Significant party members hate her and have come out for Obama, not because they love Obama but because they hate the Clinton's hold on the Democratic party. A significant number of democratic males (of every race) hate Hillary as well and polling data on CNN from the previous primary and caucuses shows that. 
 
2) Obama has shown (as mentioned above) in exit polling data that he can capture moderate Republican and independence. Hillary can not. So if Obama is the nominee against someone like McCain or Romney he can get all of Hillary's votes in the Democratic party and more.  
 
3)The Clintons will causes the Republican base, which is currently fractured to rally together. Anyone who has listened to talk radio in a red state knows that mentioning Bill and Hillary Clinton is like talking about the anti-Christ. 
 
4) If elected the congress would be so polarized nothing will get done, like now, but likely worse, maybe like it was under Clinton when Newt was the Speaker of the House. I suspect that 2 years after the election in Nov, Republicans will regroup and return to congress, and the deadlock will begin. 
 
5) The Clintons have too much baggage. Republicans will go from White Water, through Bill's women and rape allegations, all the way to his current controversial deal with Kazakhstan 24/7 until Nov. 7, 2008.  
 
Why I don't like Clinton is not due to the fact don't like women. 
 
Hillary says she is a feminist, but she has never shown the ability to achieve greatness on her own merit. Hillary comes from a long tradition of women who gained power by who they were married to and or born to. These women include Benazir Bhutto, Megawati Sukarno, Indira Gandhi, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and all the way back to Cleopatria and before. These women road the coattails of men. They came from political dynasty. In this way, to me, Hillary Clinton is not even 1/4 the woman that Nancy Pelosi (House Speaker) is. She came up hard in the House, stood on her own feet as a woman. Hillary has never done that, even now her husband serves as her “champion” in attacks, on her behalf as if we were in the Romance Period of Europe. 
 
Dynasty, Nepotism, and Aristocracy are not the American promise. The American promise is meritocracy, something embodied in Barack Obama; not Billary. 
 
X) In any case Romney is finished and Mr. Flip Flop could never win a national election, he is spending his own money now and not getting a good return on investment. The best hope the Republicans have is McCain, if he can control his temper.