cement walls nine feet thick...,

theextinctionprotocol | Nuclear fallout, tsunamis, zombie invasions– impending horrors are scaring the rational thinking out of even the world’s best and brightest. And for good reason. Life is risky when lived above ground. Anybody who has ever been crapped on by a pigeon knows – living with our precious heads exposed to the sky may not be worth the hazard. Hence the new, ‘location, location, location’ driven trend in underground doomsday real estate. No bunker is quite as fail proof and luxurious as Larry Hall’s Survival Condos. Buried deep below Kansas’s golden prairies, the luxury condo complex was engineered with enough tenacity to withstand everything from epic solar flares to infectious pandemics. Built into an old missile silo, the condos feature a pool, movie theater, library, a live in orthodontist and doctor, and cement walls nine feet thick to protect occupants from something as threatening as an atomic blast. The first wave of his indestructible, underground bunkers sold out almost immediately, and now he is well into construction on his second phase. I briefly spoke to Hall about his silo success and this is what he had to say, “Survival Condo’s success had been a long time coming,” he recalled of his sustained effort in engineering the facilities. “However, as soon as people came onsite and viewed the facility for themselves and realized it was not a hoax, but a fool proof survival getaway, they wrote checks immediately and bought their share of the property on the spot,” says Hall. The condos are ranging in price from one million dollars for half a floor, to two million dollars for a full floor. The luxury hideout is fully sustainable and self-supportive; Hall is even installing an indoor farm with the hopes of growing fish and vegetables to feed seventy people for five years. But most importantly the complex has a large water tank for optimal hydration, and an advanced military security system to keep the needy masses from pillaging the vital contents of the endurable fort.

geometry for the selfish herd

sciencemag | To escape a hungry wolf, a sheep doesn't have to outrun the wolf, just the other sheep in its flock. Many researchers think that such selfish behavior, not cooperation for the benefit of the whole crowd, shapes the movements of groups of animals. But the decades-old "selfish herd theory" has been hard to back up with data. Now, a detailed analysis of how a flock of sheep moves to avoid a sheepdog has found that the theory holds true. Each sheep heads to safety in the center of the flock, rather than running directly away from the dog.

"It's really difficult to measure 2D spatial information on large animals in the wild," says biologist Theodore Stankowich of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in the new work. "They've taken advantage of a unique opportunity to work with the sheep to answer these types of questions in a controlled environment."

Studies on seals, crabs, and pigeons have shown that those animals seem to herd for selfish reasons, but the data have often been crude. Biologist Andrew King and colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College of the University of London attached GPS backpacks to 46 sheep and to a trained Australian Kelpie dog. When they released the dog to herd the sheep, they recorded the location of each animal every second. Then, they analyzed the data to determine what factors influenced each sheep's path. The movements of the sheep, the researchers reveal today online in Current Biology, could be best predicted by the center of the flock. Rather than run in a line away from the dog, scatter in all directions, or follow their nearest neighbors, the sheep all hurried toward the flock's center. The sheep began to converge when the dog was 70 meters away. Even as the flock as a whole moved, each sheep continuously competed to be as near the middle as possible.

"The fact that they're running toward the center reduces the chances of their being on the edge and being picked off by a predator," says King. It's a selfish behavior since each sheep puts the animals at the fringes of the flock at risk in order to save itself.

you didn't build that: systemic collapse summarized

businessinsider | The eurozone is on a path into a deep recession. As one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world, its centrality to a system of highly-interconnected global supply chains is taken for granted.

David Korowicz, a physicist and human-systems ecologist, recently authored a lengthy 78-page white paper titled: "Trade-Off: Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse."

It explores the increasing systemic risk brewing in the global financial and trade systems. Using complex systems analysis, he explains how within weeks of the next major economic shock, like a major bank failure or a country exiting the eurozone, contagion would quickly spread through global supply chains, causing an "irreversible global economic collapse."

Korowicz warns that in the next crisis, "neither wealth nor geography is a protection. Our evolved co-dependencies mean that we are all in this together."

We read the paper and boiled it down to its key points.

not even a fan, but the Hon.Bro.Preznit obviously meant roads and bridges...,

TheAtlantic | President Obama uttered those four little words Republicans never tire of hearing -- "you didn't build that" -- on July 13, nearly a month ago, and yet if you do a Google News search for "Obama you didn't build that" you will turn up nearly 70,000 hits, the most recent posted within hours. It was a self-inflicted wound from which the president's reelection campaign continues to bleed steadily, if not profusely, despite the Romney campaign's not entirely satisfactory assault on the injured tissue. The election drawing ever closer in the mid-August heat, liberals wonder why the issue will not go away, and conservatives wonder why it did not immediately doom Obama's campaign. Both questions have the same answer: Obama made a shift so profound, but so easily misunderstood, that neither side has been able to end the debate, although Obama thus far is winning.

Here is what Obama said at Fire Station No. 1 in Roanoke, Va., (which Obama won with 61 percent of the vote in 2008, an island of blue in the sea of red that was western Virginia). I include the entire relevant quote so there is no question about the context:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That's how we funded the G.I. Bill. That's how we created the middle class. That's how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That's how we invented the Internet. That's how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that's the reason I'm running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You're not on your own, we're in this together.

Like any classic, it is just as good the hundredth time as it was the first time and the Romney campaign has kept repeating the snippet, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." But by "that," did Obama mean the "business" or the "roads and bridges" of the previous sentence? Let's be charitable and take the White House at its word that the president meant to say "those" and not "that." Is the whole controversy then a Machiavellian construction of the "right-wing noise machine?"

much too much fun to watch.....,

here's where you humans are sucking the planet dry...,

what happens if the mighty mississippi runs dry?

thetrumpet | If the world’s largest navigable river system goes dry, the economic consequences will be felt around the world. What is the single greatest reason America is so wealthy? According to the analysts at Stratfor, it is because of a river.

They have to be joking, right?

What about America’s vast gold resources? What about its mountains of coal? America is the world’s third-largest oil producer—surely that is why. Then there is America’s temperate climate and fertile soils that traditionally make it the world’s breadbasket. And don’t forget America’s human capital, Yankee ingenuity, and Protestant work ethic. Surely these factors are cumulatively more important than a river.

Not according to one of America’s premier think tanks. Many countries have large natural resources and hospitable climates, but don’t even come close to having America’s wealth. What sets America apart from the rest of the world is the Mississippi River basin. It is what makes exploiting America’s resources economically possible.

But now, due to the worst drought since the 1950s, the Mississippi may be about to go dry.

In Memphis and Vicksburg, the shrinking river is obvious: slower river, exposed river banks, and more sandbars. The water is down more than 13 and 20 feet in each city respectively. The Mississippi on average is about 13 feet below normal—and a whopping 55 feet below where it was at this time last year. On some stretches, the water level is perilously low. On July 17 it was reported that a 100-mile stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska, had dried up.

For each one-inch loss of water, the standard barge must unload 17 tons of cargo—that is a loss of 204 tons, per barge, for every one-foot loss. A typical tow on the upper Mississippi river may have 15 barges. A one-foot loss of water translates into a loss of 3,000 tons of capacity. Tows on the lower Mississippi River may have up to 45 barges, resulting in a loss of capacity of over 9,000 tons. It would take almost 600 semitrucks to haul the freight unloaded by one large barge grouping under those conditions! There are thousands and thousands of barge strings that ply the Mississippi each year. The shutdown of the Mississippi would be an absolute catastrophe!

history of the world in two minutes

Fist tap Big Don.

is collapse humanity adapting to its own presence?

automaticearth | I think about history ... a lot. It has always been my deepest fascination. When I was little I would construct whole civilizations with my Legos and play out their existence. Monuments would be constructed, kings would die, wars would start, cities would be rebuilt, lineages would rise and fall. I suppose as a child what captivated me was the magnitude of the human epic, the drama of the shifting patterns of human relationship over the course of generations. I simply loved telling their stories, and the sort of melancholic beauty that one feels reflecting on all that has passed, all that has succumbed to time and is irretrievable.

The western historical canon is well known to us in its essential form. The basic narrative runs, "Humans gave up their wandering and settled the fertile crescent, cities emerged, myths and legends were established. Then came the Greeks and all that is noble and virtuous in western culture was born: reason, art, democracy, etc. Next the Romans who brought, law, order and engineering until crushed by the barbarians and the rise of Christianity. The dark ages ensued until Europeans pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and proceeded to make their rightful claim on the world as the descendents of Greece and Rome."

The characters of our narratives have become so familiar to us that we tend to simply view our ancestors as us, separated only by time. I have watched the siege of Troy, the burning of the library of Alexandria and Gladiatorial games all carried out with clipped British accents as though everyone living in the past 10,000 years spoke the queen’s English. What happens in the reshaping of history through our narrative lens is, if you will, a cultural-morphic personification.

We attribute to our ancient cultures our own cosmologies and create a linear relationship between our cultures. Now I am not saying that we are not the descendents of the ancients that preceded us and that they have not had a powerful influence upon us. What I am saying is that we distort our ability to truly empathize and understand the humanity of those who preceded us and in doing so we distort our ability to understand our own position in history and relationship to those that will follow us.

The truth is that the ancients were radically different cultures than ours. The stories they told about themselves are not the same as the ones we tell about them. Though we can only reconstruct their worlds now using what facts we know, it is important that we work to empathize with their reality as best we can so that we might understand our own more fully. We must work to imagine the condition of the ancients. I often think of what it would have felt like to go into battle.

Can you imagine standing on the field, heat bearing down on you as you stare out at the mass of humanity on the opposing side, light glinting off of metal? You would have that deep anxiousness in the pit of your stomach. Drums beating as you and the columns start to move, first walking, jogging, then running, everything moving faster and faster.

Leather and metal strapped to your body chafing against your skin, the scent of other humans and dust from thousands of sandals hitting the earth surrounds you. Blood and adrenaline pumping through your body to match the pounding of the war drums. Closer and closer the inevitability of the clash descending upon you, the roar of thousands of voices screaming in unison fill the air and... impact.

What was the psychology of these humans? What ordered their world, what was the visceral intensity of their experience? What makes them "us", what gives them their own unique truths? The people that we call the "Greeks", were an Iron age people in the Mediterranean, already with their own vast history filled with legends and fallen civilizations as distant from their times as we are from them.

Certainly the Hellenes form part of the DNA of our culture, their ideas and actions have been transmitted through the shifting dynamics of human society and played a large role in the shape and expression of our cultures. Yet they were not "Westerners" or "Europeans". They were a people trying to make sense of the process in which they were embedded, trying to create a coherent narrative out of all that they had inherited and did not even remotely imagine of us.

Yet why is this idea of reframing the narrative so important? I would argue that if we do not demythologize our history we will be incapable of demythologizing ourselves, and if our understanding of our lineage is mythic then our relationship to our own times is equally so. That when we respond to our condition with pre-scripted narratives we are attempting to conform reality to our own thoughts, assumptions and biases. This reduces our adaptability because it reduces our ability to see possibilities and to embrace a diversity of perception and response. Think of all the humans burned at stakes, all the texts that have been obliterated simply because they challenged the dominant narratives.

conservation by other means: the world crisis in 1000 words or less

economic-undertow | Our crisis is the unraveling of modernity and associated industrialization due to resource/capital depletion (Hall,Kümmel). This is the consequence of a ‘culture of excess’ that refuses to accept limits: there is human over-population, too many machines along with extractive industrial agriculture. Failures in credit- political- and production sector marketplaces are the manifestation of resource/capital depletion. What is underway is ‘conservation by other means’.

Modernity is a long-running process (400 years). It has been too successful too long for it to continue. Modernity cannibalizes its capital, as such our crisis is irreversible. Conventional marketplace remedies such as debt jubilees/write-offs, re-distribution, bailouts, stimulus, austerity policies, monetary easing, etc. have no effect on outcome other than to worsen conditions. These are efforts to reclaim capital that no longer exists. Consequently, remedies accelerate unraveling process by increasing gross debt (claims against capital) while exposing remaining capital to consumption at higher rates. The capital ‘pie’ cannot be redistributed, only a new and much smaller pie is to be had and carefully tended. Our smaller pie of non-renewable resources is what we have to make use of, to last us and the rest of the world’s creatures until the end of humanity.

Economists insist that the crisis is one of debt and out-of-control finance. Rather, the crisis is a non-productive physical economy which monetizes resource waste. Pop culture promotes the process, management policy defends the process’ beneficiaries from any undesirable consequences.

Economists insist that capital is symbolic (money) rather than material. Capital = resources (Daly), all industrial money is debt. Abstract money is infinitely reproducible, material inputs are not. Existence of debt-money is incentive to waste even as input constraints unravel input-dependent enterprises (petroleum fuel, also topsoil, water and waste-carrying capacity).

Waste-based economy depletes the capital it requires. Adjusting the waste-based economy to operate at greater efficiency depletes capital more thoroughly at a higher rate (Jevons).

global food security index sponsored by dupont...,

the hunger wars in our future

tomdispatch | Wherever you look, the heat, the drought, and the fires stagger the imagination. Now, it’s Oklahoma at the heart of the American firestorm, with “18 straight days of 100-plus degree temperatures and persistent drought” and so many fires in neighboring states that extra help is unavailable. It’s the summer of heat across the U.S., where the first six months of the year have been the hottest on record (and the bugs are turning out in droves in response). Heat records are continually being broken. More than 52% of the country is now experiencing some level of drought, and drought conditions are actually intensifying in the Midwest; 66% of the Illinois corn crop is in “poor” or “very poor” shape, with similarly devastating percentages across the rest of the Midwest. The average is 48% across the corn belt, and for soybeans 37% -- and it looks as if next year’s corn crop may be endangered as well. More than half of U.S. counties are officially in drought conditions and, according to the Department of Agriculture, “three-quarters of the nation's cattle acreage is now inside a drought-stricken area, as is about two-thirds of the country's hay acreage.” Worse yet, there’s no help in sight -- not from the heavens, not even from Congress, which adjourned for the summer without passing a relief package for farmers suffering through some of the worst months since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

In sum, it’s swelteringly, unnerving bad right now in a way that most of us can’t remember. And that’s the present moment. The question of what lies ahead is the territory occupied by TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. From the time he published his book Resource Wars back in 2001, he’s been ahead of the curve on such questions and he suggests that we’re going to have an uncomfortably hot time in all sorts of unexpected ways on this increasingly hot planet of ours.

that old martial spirit...,

kunstler | A great orgasm shuddered through the money world last week when Mario Draghi paused between scamorza con arugula tidbits to remark that the European Central Bank (ECB) would stop at nothing to keep the financial blood of Europe circulating. Of course you wonder how many pony glasses of Campari he knocked back before that whopper came out. The markets squirmed with glee. I suppose it feels good to have quantities of smoke blown up your ass.

This is the last month of the Great Pretending over on that lovely continent of exquisitely preserved towns and the corniche winding down to the crashing green sea, and the lunch table under the grape arbor... I mean, compared to, say, the universal slum vista of tilt-up, strip-mall America along the deafening highways, with the wig shops, tattoo dens, pawn shacks, dollar stores, parking lot swap-meets, and supersized citizens waddling through the greasy 100-degree heat of a new climate regime. When things blow, as you may be sure they will, at least the Europeans will sink amid all that loveliness while the American experience will be more like getting flushed down a toilet.

The more you reflect on the Draghi remark, the more you wonder whether absolutely anyone out there is paying attention to the fact that there is no money backing up these pledges of continued bailouts. All the major banks of Europe are functionally insolvent and all of the nations that charter the banks are structurally insolvent, and the economies that depend on the circulation of funds around this Euro organism really cannot escape some sort of cascading collapse. The big unknown element of the story is how angry and batshit crazy the citizens of all these countries will get when summer ends. I don't believe they will fight each other just now, but it is very likely that the lampposts of all these lovely towns and cities will be decorated with swinging corpses of bankers, ministers, and a choice selection of politicians while a fight over the table scraps of a 30-year-long debt banquet occupies the folks in the streets.

greece rounds up thousands of immigrants in weekend sweep

LATimes | Greek police arrested more than 1,000 immigrants and detained thousands more in a massive weekend sweep that comes as the strapped nation has increasingly soured on hosting foreigners.

The vast roundup in Athens was jarringly named Xenios Zeus -- after the Greek god known as the patron of hospitality. Police stopped and detained 6,000 immigrants, out of whom 1,600 were arrested for illegally entering Greece and sent to holding centers, according to the Associated Press. Greek media reported that similar sweeps are in the works for other cities.

Leftist political parties slammed the crackdown as an assault on human rights that had fostered fear and racism, while the extreme right Golden Dawn party accused the government of not actually sending anyone back to a home country, merely holding a “badly organized PR stunt,” Athens News reported.

Public Order and Citizens' Protection Minister Nikos Dendias defended the roundups as necessary to keep Greece from unraveling, arguing that the country faced the biggest “invasion” since the influx of the ancient Dorians thousands of years ago. Dendias had earlier claimed that "unbelievably high" numbers of immigrants were involved in crime, according to Greek news reports.

As for naming a roundup after the god of hospitality, Dendias reportedly told Greek media that the name was fitting because immigrants were living in miserable conditions, crammed into decrepit apartments after being conned by smugglers into thinking that they would be able to get jobs.

“Now they will return to their home countries. ... It's the best thing that could happen to them,” Dendias was quoted by the Kathimerini newspaper.

record heat killing midwest fish...,

NPR | This summer, extreme heat and drought have brought on larger than normal "fish kills" throughout the Midwest. Fish are dying by the tens of thousands. All Things Considered host Audie Cornish speaks with Aaron Woldt, Fisheries Program Supervisor for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Midwestern Region, about what's happening in these waters.

failing even before the greatest depression, yet another killer-ape goes turner diary

Boston | The gunman who killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before he was shot to death by police was identified Monday as a 40-year-old Army veteran and former leader of a white supremacist metal band.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Haanstad in Milwaukee identified the shooter as Wade Michael Page. Page joined the Army in 1992 and was discharged in 1998, according to a defense official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information yet about the suspect.

Officials and witnesses said the gunman walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee and opened fire as several dozen people prepared for Sunday services. When the shooting ended, seven people lay dead, including Page. Three others were critically wounded in what police called an act of domestic terrorism.

Page was a "frustrated neo-Nazi" who led a racist white supremacist band, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Monday. Page told a white supremacist website in an interview in 2010 that he had been part of the white-power music scene since 2000 when he left his native Colorado and started the band, End Apathy, in 2005, the nonprofit civil rights organization said.

He told the website his "inspiration was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole," according to the SPLC. He did not mention violence in the website interview.

End Apathy's biography on the band's MySpace page said it began in 2005 and was based in Nashville, N.C. It said their music "is a sad commentary on our sick society and the problems that prevent true progress."

Joseph Rackley of Nashville, N.C., told the AP on Monday that Page lived with his son for about six months last year in a house on Rackley's three acres of property. Wade was bald and had tattoos all over his arms, Rackley said, but he doesn't remember what they depicted. He said he wasn't aware of any ties Page may have had to white supremacists.

too much magic: wishful thinking, technology, and the fate of the nation

kazibookreview | In his latest non-fiction work, James Howard Kunstler delivers a sobering message about what a post-oil society might look like and how we got ourselves into this situation.

Too Much Magic is both a history lesson and a warning. The warning concerns how we as a society will have to deal with a world where cheap, plentiful oil is a thing of the past. The history lesson is all about how we came to live in such an oil-dependent society bent on expanding its suburbs to infinity.

Kunstler is also the author of 2005 book The Long Emergency which dealt with similar topics: the passing of peak oil production, climate change, and the reorganization of society in a lower-energy environment. He argues that advances in technology cannot replace dwindling fossil fuels in our economy, and we are unwilling as a people to prepare or plan for this eventuality.

One of Kunstler’s major beliefs is that the result of a lack of oil will be a necessary restructuring of our society on a more local basis. Geographical areas will have to be responsible for producing their own food and water. Waterways will become important again as a means of transportation, and people will have to adjust their living situations to be close to such waterways. He also advocates a more robust national rail system, as that may be the only way to reliably travel long distances quickly once our oil supply is gone.

Another main argument is that alternative energies such as wind and solar cannot produce enough energy to replace what we burn in oil right now. Also, the equipment needed to harvest these energies requires some form of fossil fuels to be used in the first place. Kunstler is not against trying what we can, but he feels that any of that will be a “transitory phase of history” before we settle into a “low-energy,” more local society. Another effect is that major parts of the country (such as the southwest) may become uninhabitable as we won’t have the electricity to pump water and run air conditioning in these areas.

religious conservatism: an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy

tandfonline | Issues of purity and symbolic cleansing (e.g., baptism) play an important role in most religions, especially Christianity. The purpose of the current research was to provide an evolutionary framework for understanding the role of disgust in religiosity, which may help elucidate the relationship between religious conservatism and non-proscribed prejudice (e.g., prejudice toward sexual minorities). The behavioral immune system (BIS) is a cluster of psychological mechanisms (e.g., disgust) that encourage disease-avoidance (Schaller, 2006). Out-group members have historically been a source of contamination. Consequently, evidence suggests that the BIS predicts negative attitudes toward out-groups (Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004). The purpose of the current research is to investigate whether religious conservatism mediates the relationship between the BIS and prejudice toward sexual minorities. Study 1 demonstrated that the disease-avoidant components of disgust (e.g., sexual and pathogen disgust), but not moral disgust, were positively correlated with religious conservatism. Additionally, the data supported a model in which religious conservatism mediated the relationship between disgust and prejudice toward homosexuals. In Study 2, the correlations and mediation model were replicated with a more diverse sample and different measures. The current research suggests that religious conservatism may be in part an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy.

ethnic nepotism: its proponents don't just study it, they practice it

wikipedia | In sociology, the term ethnic nepotism describes a human tendency for in-group bias or in-group favouritism applied by nepotism for people with the same ethnicity within a multi-ethnic society.

The theory views ethnocentrism and racism as nepotism toward extended kin and an extension of kin selection. In other words, ethnic nepotism points toward a biological basis for the phenomenon of people preferring others of the same ethnicity or race; it explains the tendency of humans to favor members of their own racial group by postulating that all animals evolve toward being more altruistic toward kin in order to propagate more copies of their common genes.

"The myth of common descent", proposed by many social scientists as a prominent ethnic marker, is in his view often not a myth at all.[clarification needed] "Ethnicity is defined by common descent and maintained by endogamy".[2]

To guard one's genetic interests, Frank Salter notes altruism toward one's co-ethnics:

Hamilton's 1975 model of a genetic basis for tribal altruism shows that it is theoretically possible to defend ethnic genetic interests in an adaptive manner, even when the altruism entails self sacrifice. He argued mathematically that an act of altruism directed towards the tribe was adaptive if it protected the aggregate of distant relatives in the tribe. In sexually-reproducing species a population's genetic isolation leads to rising levels of interrelatedness of its members and thus makes greater altruism adaptive. Low levels of immigration between tribes allow growing relatedness of tribal members, which in turn permits selection of altruistic acts directed at tribal members, but only if these acts "actually aid in group fitness in some way...." Closely related individuals are less likely to free ride and more likely to invest in and thus strengthen the group as a whole, improving the fitness of its members.[3]

Regarding how this translates into politics and why homogeneous societies are more altruistic, Frank Salter writes:

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States, Africa and South-East Asia find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. Moscow beggars receive more gifts from fellow ethnics than from other ethnics. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogenous cities.

whooped sharipova like she stole something then crip-walked...,