* The choice of Hebrew was quite conscious and it had nothing to do with practical considerations. The Zionist pioneers had to reconstruct a nation from the ground up and somehow re-connect themselves to this land where none of their ancestors had lived for almost 2,000 years. The use of Hebrew was/is important part of national mythology. Most educated modern Israelis also speak English or another language and their economy is doing quite well, so it doesn’t seem to have hurt them much.
As I have mentioned before, the adoption of Hebrew was a tremendous feat of national will – something that is literally unprecedented and could only have been pulled off by a very intelligent and determined group of people (it also helps to be an ideologue). Imagine disciplining yourself so that your children would learn Latin as their first language instead of English. Even at the height of the black nationalist craze, I doubt the average American black learned more than 10 words of Swahili.
On the other hand, if the Israelis all spoke German (or more likely Yiddish – that was the language that made the most sense pre-WWII when almost all of the pioneers were Ashkenazic and already spoke Yiddish as their native language, although Yiddish is also written in non-Roman (Hebrew) characters), then the Arab demands that the Jews should “go back to Europe” would be further validated. There is also the problem that German was the language of their murderers.
Israel is a nation of (mostly Jewish) immigrants and they are used to hearing people speaking very bad (or no) Hebrew and are very forgiving about it. They are not snotty like the French who pretend not to understand you even though they do. There are also all sorts of programs to teach Hebrew to immigrants.
* Some Donald/Jew articles:
Donald: Racial Profiling is Proved to Work in Israel:
5 of the 20 members of Trump’s top fundraising team are Jewish:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/five-jewish-donors-on-joint-gop-trump-fundraising-team/
Profile of Trump advisor who has known and worked for Trump for 19 years and once did security on a West Bank settlement:
http://forward.com/news/national/338915/no-experience-necessary-meet-trumps-orthodox-israel-advisor/
If Donald Trump wins the White House, he’ll probably be the first U.S. president whose top adviser on Israel used to do guard duty at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank armed with an M-16 assault weapon.
“I do rely on him as a consultant on Israel,” Trump said of Greenblatt at an April 14 meeting with Jewish reporters, including JTA. “He’s a person who truly loves Israel. I love to get advice from people that know Israel, but from people that truly love Israel.”
Greenblatt, 49, has an unusual resume for a prospective presidential adviser on Middle East affairs. An Orthodox Jewish father of six from Teaneck, New Jersey, who wears his kippah at work, Greenblatt has worked for Trump for the last 19 years dealing exclusively with real estate and company matters. His titles are executive vice president and chief legal officer. He has self-published three travel books, one about a family trip to Israel, and runs a parenting blog, InspireConversation.com.
Greenblatt said Trump has been hugely understanding about his religious needs (Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, converted to Judaism before marrying husband Jared Kushner, and the family is involved in Orthodox observance). Greenblatt recalled the time he was leading a complex negotiation when he sheepishly told Trump he had to stop everything for a three-day Jewish holiday.
“He said, ‘Go home, go pray, be with your family and we’ll pick it up after the holiday,’” Greenblatt said of Trump. “He didn’t just not make an issue of it; he made me feel great about it.”
There is more fun stuff in the article where Greenblatt makes the common sense proposal that Palestinians be paid to leave the West Bank, and Trump as a real estate mogul would be perfect to negotiate these deals.
* Think of all the gay Jews in Hollywood, the media, etc.
Realistically you can get Jews to vote Republican if a Democratic/lefty-identified group is attacking them physically (a la France or Crown Heights), but it’s otherwise a tough sell.
And, honestly, sending thousands of tweets with gas chamber jokes doesn’t help things.
* Bethlehem once was a primarily Arab Christian town but most of the Christians have left, for the same reason that white people aren’t moving to Ferguson anymore.
Israel’s GDP is impressive if you compare it to what it was in the ’70s when it was run on Permit Raj Socialist lines. It’s also impressive if you compare it to nearby Arab countries and given the fact that they started from basically zero. You also have to consider that half the Jewish population is non-Ashkenazic. The true Sephardim who are of Spanish descent are pretty bright but there are a lot of Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews that have Arab/African admixture not to mention the Ethiopian “Jews” who are about as bright as you would expect (and not actually Jewish either).
* This pattern is also really shitty for competent blacks, who get promoted into spokesmodel type jobs with a nice title and salary but no opportunity to develop their talents and make something of themselves. I watched this happen with a very smart, hard working black woman in my office–she was put into a management position she wasn’t remotely ready for to make the racial numbers look good, and given no management responsibilities. Without the “helpful” special treatment, she’d have been brought up through the normal process, and by the time she’d have been promoted to a high management job, she would have been able to do it.
As far as I can tell, affirmative action programs are done mostly for the benefit of companies and agencies and universities, and often are actively harmful for their alleged beneficiaries. (See also: AA admissions that let you into a school where you’re outclassed.)
* I can’t wait to hear Elton John’s Jo Cox version of “Candle in the Wind.”
Hey, look, humans are emotional creatures and nine times out of then they will do what feels right rather than what is rational. Jo Cox was pro-EU, so, gosh darn it, let’s stay, and I’m sure she’s looking down from heaven right now, along with Lady Di and Queen Victoria wanting us to think of England. OTOH, Maggie Thatcher is also there but all she wants us to think about is doing whatever we can to weaken Germany.
* It’s like that old saying about lawyers. When the law is on your side you argue the law. If the facts are on your side you argue the facts. If neither is on your side you bang the table and change the subject.
* Yesterday on CNN.com, the top story was how some county official in Alabama from a county that 99.8% of the country had never heard of is refusing to fly the flag at half staff for the massacre victims.
The top story.
Top story.
Talk about abrogation of journalistic duty.
* The Dead Tree Press still lives in the pre-internet era, that is: we control the means of communication and will tell you what to think.
Even if the internet didn’t exist there would have been a massive increase in samizdat printing by now to counteract the official lies. The Lugenpresse is at least as bad as the old official press of the Soviet Union.
* Watching the morning news I see where everything is given an anti-Trump spin under the guise of merely reporting what the Trump bashers are saying. It’s hard to understand exactly why the establishment is so attached to Muslim immigration. Is it the billions that the Saudis spend with us that’s created this lobby?
* It is stating the obvious that those control the minds of people have total power, and clearly the one that controls the microphone controls the minds. The question is how these people managed to take power, is this because they were the smartest and this was some a triumph of their moral ideas or is this because they have the least amount of morals and are simply good at manipulating the masses for their own ends?
* Because the coalition of the fringes is not only turning on each other, but spilling each other’s blood. This has to terrify Democrat Party and liberal elites. So they have no other choice but to do a grand diversion and blame Trump and the NRA, because they can’t do anything which threatens the existence and cohesion of their coalition. That, and Trump and the NRA are currently two powerful threats to blue team electoral success.
It’s why it frustrates me that the greater right is falling for the diversion and arguing so much about guns in the last week. That’s precisely what the other side wants. They don’t want legislative victories on gun issues as such as they want people talking about guns either way, so that we’re not talking about their fringe coalition murdering each other.
* Why?
From the story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut (absolutely worth a read):
“George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”
And that is why. The hate must be loud, non-stop and 24/7 . Otherwise people with 100 + IQs might take unfair advantage of their brains.
* The real problem is the right talking about ditching Trump. It’s eating up air time, trending on Google news, etc, when Trump needs more of himself in the news, not loser Repub governors and senators.
* Guns = Men. Assault Guns = White Men.
The Democratic coalition has always needed something to run against and the obvious choice, and now the only choice, are white men. But they cannot openly say it, so what has happened is that they have had to develop a proxy.
Gun control is to Democrats is what abortion is to Republicans. It is a political loser that counts in the primary but hurts them in the general election. A lot of people where speculating, pre-Orlando, why Hillary Clinton was making this an issue but after thinking about it, it is clear that the left needs an issue they can demagogue and rally the troops around. The Democrats have a problem with turnout and now that President Buck Naked is not longer holding the torch they will have a harder time getting blacks and Hispanics to show up at the polls. The leadership of the identity troika on the left is not easily interchangeable and so some adjustments are being made.
Post-Orlando, it is even worse. The Democrats just witnessed one of their precious identity groups massacre two other more precious identity groups. So naturally they have to blame someone else and the obvious choice are assault guns = white men.
* Limbaugh has made it a point to mention the ‘microphone’ as to why the Republicans in Congress won’t oppose anything from the soon to be ex-president; the local media in their state or district will trash them and they have no way to respond. Which is the truth. It’s only in the safe Republican districts can they pretty much ignore the media, swing not so much.
Until you get somebody like Trump, who gets trashed by everyone, even his own party, and just rolls with it and keeps on going. That was the thing about Trump that first got me interested, that he wouldn’t go begging the SJWs to be nice to him. They kept throwing and nothing stuck to him; must have been really frustrating for those assholes.
* A sop for that simp Anderson Cooper, who is the most fantastically gay gay man in America. He’s made a point of wearing short sleeved shirts in all his live Orlando performances to show how much he works out. Even after a massacre, the preening can’t be stopped.
* It’s multi-faceted, with different factions having differing goals. The rich like anything that will bring down wages, and any warm body will help with that. The powerful understand (at some level) that divide and conquer is THE best strategy for a small number of people to lord it up over a large number of people, and no other group, even SSAs, will be as divisive as Sunni Muslims with their completely insane beliefs coupled to a genome prone to acts of extreme individual violence. (If they could get organized like Europeans (used to) get organized, they’d probably exterminate the entire planet in the name of ALLAH and 72 boys to fuck in the ass for all eternity.)
And then there are the lesser players. The bureaucrats realize this means more demand for bureaucratic functions to “handle” the situation – everything from additional intelligence assets to additional law enforcement & prison workers, from teachers to welfare workers. The SJW types like anything that sticks it to straight white men and/or allow them to show how much better they are than Bubba from Hickville, Alabama. And TEH GAYS like it because now they won’t have to travel to MENA to get their swarthy Arab fix of buggery. (Not to mention it will probably still be safer to engage in such activities here, despite the occasional massacre, than overseas in some country where TEH GAYS are not officially at the top of the POKEMON DIVERSITY POINTS scale.)
It’s a win/win/win situation for the people in power, and a lose/lose/lose for everyone else, including most of the Muslims that will immigrate.
* Here’s a link to a fine NYTimes (!) article on so-called “rampage killings” dating from 2000. It’s an amazingly (for nowadays) well researched and well documented piece that tells it like it is, numbers included!
What’s stupefying about the article is its objectivity. It reminds one of the halcyon days when the NYT deserved its reputation as the newspaper of record and it was worth reading. Plus, you don’t have to read to the bottom of the article to find the meat and potatoes–as Steve has pointed out as is true today of most of the content of the Times. In fact, other than the misleading quote I refer to below, there was no social justice posturing. It’s almost as though the editors used the liberal lead in as click bait, just to engage the white-hating reader’s attention and then proceeded to enlighten them with the truth! What a reversal of today’s agenda!
My only complaint was a misleading statistic about whites being number one perpetrators which appeared in the second paragraph. Well, why should that be a surprise since the statistical data base spanned 1950–2000 and during that time, the nation was preponderantly white. So, no surprise there, but the proportions matter.
But overall, the article hews to a fair line and unflinchingly points out that blacks committed a disproportionate number of murders AND rampage killings in America. Surprisingly, Asians committed rampage killings at a much higher than proportionate rate.
And most surprising of all was the profile of the typical rampage killer, who unlike the “normal” murderer, had attended college, was unemployed or recently divorced, wasn’t acquainted with his victims and either committed suicide or made no attempt to escape after having completed his atrocity.
* Over the last thirty years, there have been several hundred thousand conservative white men in this country who both 1.) possess “assault weapons” (the term is meaningless, by the way), and 2.) are “homophobes” (ditto). And yet not one of them ever shot up a gay bar. It took a gay muslim Democrat to do that. So perhaps the media ought to be talking about that.
* I have to agree with whoever it is in Alabama. What is it with all this flag-lowering anyway?
The victims were not federal employees. It did not happen on federal property. No one was acting in any official federal capacity. In a grim irony, the only federal connection is that the attacker’s family was brought into the country in some obscure maneuver by federal employees (CIA?), but that’s hardly the sort of thing that you’d think the feds want to draw attention to.
It occurred to me…that in the eyes of our current Federales, all homosexuals, Latinos, Afghan immigrants, (everyone but straight white men) ARE in fact de facto Federal clients, so anything that happens to them is automatically a Federal cause célèbre. Anything that happens to straight white men is just background noise.
Mystery solved. Ockham’s Razor observed.
* In case others were wondering, the official who didn’t have the flag lowered wasn’t doing some anti-homo stunt but was doing so under the principle that we should only lower the flag for military and government officials.
Of course the cryer in chief has lowered the flag more than any other president. You can’t lower the flag for everyone, otherwise it loses its meaning.
* It is actually pretty remarkable how Trump just picks himself up each day and continues with the program.
He has developed the reputation for having a thin skin, and perhaps in certain respects he does or may seem to. But how many people do you know, or know of, who could take all of the denunciations of “racist”, “bigot”, “fascist”, “Hitler”, shrug them off like gnats, and march down exactly the same path he started on?
That requires a strength of personality rarely seen anywhere, and virtually never in the public domain.
Even the richest of the rich can’t seem to stand being thought of as anybody who crosses some taboo. Think of the political pusillanimity and abject conformity of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
What avails it a man to gain the whole world, and not be able to speak his mind, or have a mind to speak?
* Here’s Trump’s speech addressing the attack in Orlando, which he gives to an audience of Republicans and other conservative supporters:
For those who don’t have time, I’ll quote the racist Nazi hate speech part:
“The horror is beyond description. The families of these wonderful people are devastated… Likewise our whole nation… is devastated. We express our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families. We mourn as one people for our nation’s loss and we pledge our support to any and all who need it…
Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando’s LGBT community… It’s a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation. It’s an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”
Trump says he wants to be President to support all citizens, and I believe it.
* I think, that muslims are the weak spot in the idea that /diversity is good/ – if some diversity is objectively not good, then being rational and not sentimental gains a toehold and opens the way to analysis of others of the diverse, and the whole ideology could tear and unravel. They fear that as muslims go, so goes all of the coalition of the fringes against the normal.
* Justin Raimondo at Antiwar-com: “The idea that we could use Islamists to fight jihadists was always crazy, and yet that is what the foreign policy Establishment and the congressional warhawks in both parties have been pushing. The “Sunni turn,” initiated by the Bush administration, supported (and funded) by the Saudis, the Turks, and the Gulf states, and escalated by the Obama administration, has empowered our worst enemies and endangered the American people. And here is the ultimate irony: it was done in the name of “fighting terrorism.” This gives new meaning to the concept of “blowback,” CIA parlance for an action (often covert) that has the unintended consequence of blowing back in our faces. It certainly blew back in the faces of those partygoers in Orlando – in a hail of bullets.”
* Only a pathetic 4 percent of Muslim voters in The U.S voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Importing more Muslim immigrants into The U.S is a losing strategy for The Republican Party.
I understand why pro-open borders Republicans want more Hispanics in The U.S, but why do they want more inbred Sand N Word people?
Arab Muslims are not going to be the nanny of their children, mow their lawns, clean their multi-million dollar homes, cook their meals, etc. Arab Muslims don’t come to The U.S to become the domestic help of affluent White Infidels. That is what the Hispanics are for.
* What happened to the iSteve archive of old long form articles? iSteve.com redirects to a takedown notice because it seems to have been hacked by someone selling fake Michael Kors clothing, and then taken down by his lawyers.
I hate to give Steve a chore, but I hope he can get this fixed ASAP. A lot of his articles there had excellent Google rankings built up by years of links to them. The longer the website stays down, the worse Google will treat it.
This is a reminder for webmasters to make your passwords both long and not duplicated elsewhere. iSteve was probably targeted by spam hackers because of its strong google ranking.
I had to deal with a spam hacker taking down a website at work once. It took about 3 hours to fix, though better nerds than me probably could have done it in 1/4 the time. Basically you run a utility from Google than tells you what particular pages have issues and restore them to a version from years ago. Then you tell Google to try to fix it again.
Here it looks like iSteve was taken down by court order because it was not fixed soon enough. It might just be necessary to move everything to a new domain, iSteve2.com. I don’t see how the court order could be lifted without a lot of legal expense.
As a possible work-around, you could switch web hosts, restore the old version of the website, and presumably Kors’s lawyer will not care anymore if the offending counterfeit products are no longer sold or linked. It is probably the current webhost that is doing the redirect.
