May 24, 2016 Dennis Prager: A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Dennis Prager: A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes: I devoted many hours of radio and many columns to criticizing Trump. His virtually assured nomination has therefore caused me grief as an American, a Republican and a conservative. That his character defects, gaps in knowledge on some important issues, and lack of identifiably conservative principles came to mean little to so many Republican voters is quite troubling. (Though, I might add, it is even more troubling that virtually all Democrats ignore the even worse character of Hillary Clinton, as well as the idiotic socialist ideas of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)

#NeverTrump conservatives, such as (in alphabetical order) Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, Bret Stephens and George Will are not merely people I admire — they are friends and colleagues. Goldberg, Stephens and Will have made multiple videos for Prager University, which receive millions of views. Shapiro and I have spent Shabbat together. I have had the privilege of writing for Kristol’s The Weekly Standard and having him on my show many times. And I have enthusiastically promoted their books. These individuals are special to me not only as thinkers, but as people.

However, in the final analysis, I do not find their arguments compelling.

Take the “conscience” argument that one can sleep with a clear conscience by not voting for Trump. I don’t find it compelling because it means that your conscience is clear after making it possible for Clinton or any other Democrat to win.

In fact, the “conscience” argument is so weak that Goldberg — to his credit — published a column two days ago titled “Sorry, I Still Won’t Ever Vote for Trump.” He wrote, “If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump.”

Shouldn’t all Americans vote as if their vote were the deciding vote? Including those whose votes “don’t count” because they live in states that are so left-wing they would still vote Democrat if Vladimir Lenin headed the Democratic ticket?

The choice this November is tragic. As it often happens in life, this choice is between bad and worse, not bad and good.

But America has made that choice before. When forced to choose between bad and worse, we supported Joseph Stalin against Adolf Hitler, and we supported right-wing authoritarians against Communist totalitarians.

It seems to me that the #NeverTrump conservatives want to remain morally pure. I understand that temptation. I am tempted, too. But if you wish to vanquish the bad, it is not possible — at least not on this side of the afterlife — to remain pure.

The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer’s house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say that Opdyke’s actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.

In my view — and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians — she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because (SET ITAL) circumstances almost always determine what is moral (END ITAL), even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That’s why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.

In the 2016 presidential race, I am not interested in moral purity. I am interested in defeating the left and its party, the Democratic Party. The notion (expressed by virtually every #NeverTrump advocate) that we can live with another four years of a Democratic president is, forgive me, mind-boggling. To that end, with at least one, and probably multiple, additional leftists on the Supreme Court, a Republican presidential victory in 2020 would mean little. All the left needs is the judicial branch, especially the Supreme Court. Left-wing judges pass so many left-wing laws that they render those who control Congress, and even the White House, almost irrelevant.

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

–Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

–Increase the defense budget.

–Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

–Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

–Repeal Obamacare.

–Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

–Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

–Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

–Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

Posted in Dennis Prager, Donald Trump | Comments Off

Derbyshire, Hanson & National Review

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

John Derbyshire writes July 25, 2013: Victor Davis Hanson’s Tuesday column “Facing Facts About Race,” published at the National Review Online website, continues to draw commentary. I passed some brief remarks myself here at VDARE.com the day it appeared.

Since most of the subsequent commentary points out the undeniable parallels between Prof. Hanson’s NRO column and one that I published on TakiMag last April titled “The Talk, Nonblack Version”—the piece that caused National Review to drop me from their contributor lists—I thought I’d say something more substantive.

The first thing I’ll say—I see no reason to strike a pose of false modesty—is that Prof. Hanson’s piece isn’t half as good as mine. As web opinion journalism, in fact, it isn’t very good at all.

For example: My piece contained 37 hyperlinks, most of them to sites supporting some statement of fact I made. Prof. Hanson’s piece contains no links at all. Nor did his NRO editors bother to add any. (The weekly columns I send in to VDARE.com always contain lots of links; but the VDARE editors invariably add more, and sometimes upgrade the ones I’ve included to better, more apt ones. That’s editing.)

And then, right there in Hanson’s paragraph 2, we get some wobbliness with the facts.

Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws.

Here’s what the President said:

I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

Having said that, of course, the President indeed went ahead and talked about SYG anyway (apparently oblivious to the fact that these laws disproportionately favor blacks!). But he had at least conceded, albeit in passive-aggressive, self-referential Obamaese, that Florida’s SYG laws not having been used in George Zimmerman’s defense was a “fact.” Which is not what you would gather from reading Prof. Hanson.

There followed some Hanson speculations on the President’s reasons for speaking, none of them one-tenth as penetrating—let alone as witty—as Steve Sailer’s riff on the speech.

Then—The Talk! Prof. Hanson writes:

Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial…Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males.

That gives Prof. Hanson a segue into his version of “The Talk, Nonblack Version”—hence the comparisons with my April 2012 piece.

His “lifelong Democrat” father, says the Prof., after a mugging experience in San Francisco, advised him: “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.”

After suffering some similar experiences of his own, Prof. Hanson tells us, “I offered a similar lecture to my own son.”

He hastens to assure us that the lecture contained “constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race.”

Yeah—that and $2.50 will get you a ride on the subway, pal. My Talk had those reminders, too, as did my column:

Any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship . . . While always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals…

It does no good. You may as well not bother. I won’t, in future.

Prof. Hanson further assures us that: “The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping.”

Actually, notions we infer from experience are closer to subjective stereotyping than to objective stereotyping, which relies on rigorous statistics, a branch of the mathematical sciences.

A careful study of differential crime rates by race, for instance, would lead one to objective stereotyping, a perfectly sound and rational foundation for action, one on which, in fact, quite large and important zones of human activity—industrial quality control, for example—depend for their efficacy.

I tried to base my own advice to my kids on objective stereotyping—the good, rational kind.

Prof. Hanson’s column actually perks up a bit after that—we’re about halfway—as he goes off into general observations about the racial situation in today’s U.S.A. Many of these observations are spot on:

There is no evidence in our increasingly self-segregated society that white liberals stand out as integrationists. [They] increasingly have the capital to school their children far from the inner city, to live largely apart from inner-city blacks, and in general to avoid the black underclass in the concrete as much as they profess liberal nostrums for it in the abstract.

True, even if not original: Joe Sobran said the same thing thirty years ago. Men more often need reminding than instructing, though. And I doubt any of the Young Republicans running NRO ever heard of Joe Sobran. “One of those old conservative guys? Eiuw!”

But there are still one or two nits I’d pick in that second half of Hanson’s column:

First, America is now a multiracial nation. The divide is not white versus black.

Wrong: So far as racial hostility is concerned, most of the divide is white versus black. The race issue in America is a tadpole, with black/nonblack the mighty head and everything else an inconsequential tail.

In per capita intensity of feeling, black hatred of nonblacks is about an 8 out of 10, nonblack dislike of blacks about a 3 or 4, and any other antagonism you care to name—Hispanic hostility to East Asians, Hmong feelings about Native Americans, whatever—well down below 1.

And in the sheer amount of sturm und drang generated, the conflict is, as I keep telling you, really just between two big blocs of white people who loathe each other, the liberal bloc recruiting nonwhites as not-much-trusted support troops—a Cold Civil War. As Prof. Hanson said, the liberal bloc personally avoids the great mass of blacks as much as they can—except when a latrine trench needs digging.

First out of the gate (I think) in responding to Prof. Hanson’s piece was professional black person Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic. After a couple of shots at spelling Prof. Hanson’s surname correctly (I wonder if he can read cursive?) Mr. Coates gets to his main point: the advice offered in Prof. Hanson’s Talk is “stupid.”

If I were to tell you that I only employ Asian-Americans to do my taxes because “Asian-Americans do better on the Math SAT,” you would not simply question my sensitivity, but my mental faculties.

No, I wouldn’t. I’d think it was a bit extreme to only employ As-Ams; but if I need to make a quick choice from half a dozen candidates to do my taxes, and the ceteris are all paribus, it would be logical and sensible to choose the candidate from a group exhibiting high average math skills.

(My own tax accountant, for the record, is of British and German ancestry. He’s been doing a great job for me over a decade and more. Thanks, guy!)

And people with intact mental faculties surely do behave like that. This is from Tom Wolfe’s eerily prescient 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities, Chapter 18:

“You don’t see too many black guys in Legal Aid.”
“That’s not true. There’s quite a few . . . But the big-time black wiseguys, the drug dealers, they don’t want a black lawyer representing them. The small-timers don’t, either. One time I was in the pens, and this black lawyer from the [assigned counsel pool] comes in looking for the client he’s been assigned, and he starts yelling out his name. You know the way they yell out the names in the pens. Anyway, the guy he’s been assigned is black, and he comes walking over to the bars, and he looks this guy in the eye and he says, ‘Get lost, mother—I want a Jew.’”

All right, it’s a novel. Wolfe’s a damn good journalist, though, and I’ll bet—I speak as someone who’s sat at dinner with the man several times—that episode was taken from life.

We then get some of what I think of privately as “ballistics tennis.”

One way to teach a person to play tennis would be to come at it through mathematical ballistics: train the student to solve chains of simultaneous differential equations in his head real fast so he’d know where to be when the ball arrives.

Another way is to supply a handful of general rules: A lob doesn’t have much spin…Hit it where they ain’t…Low ball, low backswing…Don’t over-run the ball…etc.

Coates wants his kids to play ballistics tennis:

When you start getting down to particular neighborhoods the advice gets even more specific—don`t cut through the woods to get to school, stay away from Jermaine Wilks, don`t got to Mondawmin on the first hot day of the year, etc.

Yo, Ta-Nehisi: Life’s too short! For much of it your kids just need a few easily-internalized rules, not AP calculus. Like: stay well clear of crowds of unfamiliar blacks.

Might application of those rules leave someone with hurt feelings? Probably. So in this pan we have some stranger’s hurt feelings. In the other pan, we have our kids’ safety. What’s the beam doing, Ta-Nehisi?

Coates wraps up with a swipe at National Review. He mentions their cashiering of me and Bob Weissberg. (For a transcript of Bob’s “noxious” talk, see here.) Then:

I`m not quite sure why they bothered with the kabuki. You are what your record says you are and at some point one must conclude that these are not one-offs, that the magazine which once blamed the Birmingham bombing on “a crazed Negro,” is dealing with something more systemic, something bone-deep.

That had me, as the kids tweet, ROFLMAO. That the staff at National Review nurse “bone-deep” ill will towards blacks is about as probable as that a Stockbridge, Mass. ladies’ quilting circle is secretly practicing cannibalism.

It is true, of course, that NR folk personally avoid blacks as much as they can. But since that is true of middle-class American non-blacks in general, they are not thus remarkable in any way.

It is also true that in my twelve years’ of association with the place, NR employed, to the best of my recollection, just one black person…in the mail room.

I’d cut them some slack there, too, though. Any black intelligent and well-educated enough to do useful work for NR will be Affirmative-Actioned up into far more interesting and remunerative work at a bigger organization—the Wall Street Journal, perhaps, or one of the cable TV operations. This also was foretold in my April 2012 column:

(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs [i.e. intelligent and well-socialized blacks] are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous.

NR falls into the “less prosperous” category.

The practical choice for a small “conservative” outfit like NR is to hire in substandard blacks for the sake of appearances, or to resign itself to an all-white workforce. It speaks well of the magazine’s honesty that they choose the latter course.

During my own spell there, National Review was as race-shy as an NPR staff cafeteria. Around the editorial table, the subject of race rarely came up.

That was the general tenor of the place, at least. Across the years there were some minor variations worth recording. They were driven from outside, though, not by editorial policy aforethought.

Generally speaking, National Review scurried along obediently, perhaps unconsciously, with the zeitgeist.

Let me try to explain that. Under systems of strict ideological control there are always alternating spells of greater or lesser strictness. Citizens of totalitarian countries develop exquisite sensitivity to these fluctuations.

To keep your feet in a totalitarian system you need to sense the ideological temperature to a fraction of a degree. Your career—in the worst of times, your actual life—depends on being able to do so.

“Shall there be a student dance this year?” I asked the college students I was teaching in post-Mao China. “No, not this year,” I was told. “Fengr bu hao.” [The wind is not right.]

So it is for the editors of a conservative magazine in Jim Snow America. Here you can apply our (mine and Peter Brimelow’s) theory of an “interglacial” period of comparatively frank talk about race, lasting from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s.

Thus I was able, as late as 2005, to publish a piece in the print National Review about Bruce Lahn’s findings on the geographic distribution of gene variants affecting brain ontogeny. I doubt the piece would have passed muster at any much later date. (Lahn himself, feeling the cold wind rising, changed his field of research shortly afterwards. So far as I can discover he has published nothing on brain evolution since 2008.)

By the beginning of this decade the glaciers had come rumbling back with a vengeance.

For example: Since January 2002 I had been submitting a monthly diary of random short comments to National Review Online. At the end of February 2011 I duly sent in my diary for that month. It included a segment on the destruction of Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference that month by the mayor of Charlotte, NC—an exceptionally nasty case of political bullying.

You can read the segment in my archives here. I had some measured words to say about the shameful, cowardly silence on the incident among conservative outlets, without any particular reference to NR. In fact, of course, I was hoping to break that shameful silence on NR’s behalf.

(There was silence among liberal outlets too, but that was to be expected. The only news coverage I could find was local. The Charlotte Observer, for example, did a story; but the story has since disappeared from their archives.)

When my diary was published on NRO, that entire segment was omitted. This rather made my point about the pusillanimity of official conservatism. But of course it only made it to me.

The notion that National Review is a hotbed of barely-disguised race realism is, therefore, beyond preposterous. Jared Taylor is more likely to be elected President of Equatorial Guinea than he is to be invited to address a National Review editorial dinner.

More’s the pity, say I. But the main point here: Ta-Nehisi Coates is a gibbering idiot.

Hey, Ta-Nehisi—we need that trench dug over here. Jump to it!

Next up was Andrew Sullivan. [It’s Not Racist … , DailyDish, July 23 2013]

He agreed with Coates that the Hanson piece was “stupid”…but wanted to top Coates’ judgment. It was, Sullivan declared, “spectacularly stupid.”

Nyah nyah, he’s stupid! No, he’s real stupid!

While I’ve been writing this and getting it posted, no doubt several other lefty bloggers have put their oar in. What are we up to now, I wonder? Sensationally stupid? World-shakingly stupid? Cosmically stupid?

Hey—who wrote that on my locker?

Sullivan also took the ballistics tennis approach to the next level:

It puts the race/gender/age category before all other obvious contexts: neighborhood, street, school, college, inner city, distant suburb, daytime, night, crowded places, dark streets, and the actual observed behavior of the young black man.

How about the young black man’s horoscope sign? Sullivan’s a Leo—according to his famous self-advertisement on a homosexuals’ pick-up site.

That same page also listed “black guys” among Sullivan’s “turn-ons.” Nothing race-prejudiced about ol’ Andy!…although (judging by the “turn-offs” he lists on the pick-up site) the Fat Acceptance crowd may have a beef with him. As it were.

Just how much objectivity about the race issue should we expect from a guy who sits at home evenings hoping for strange black men to come round and bugger him?

Sullivan goes on to compare my April 2012 column unfavorably with Hanson’s. The comparison is weakened considerably by his opening with a lie.

The difference is that Derbyshire tells his children to avoid all “blacks,” while Hanson focuses on advising his children solely about young black men. Any young black men they don’t know.

Leaving aside the sarcasm quotes around “blacks”—unaccountably absent in the “turn-ons” section of that self-advertisement—the thing first stated there is false. Not only did I not advise that, I advised the opposite:

(13)…You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

There is not much point arguing with Sullivan, though. Who reads him, anyway? Other, I mean, than “uncut guys with over 8 inches.” In the matter of Sullivan, at least, I agree with the late Larry Auster: the man is mentally diseased.

There is more commentary demanding counter-commentary, but my eyes are growing heavy. I am weary—after all these months, very weary. I am weary of:

instructing people in the difference between the words “some” and “all”;
listening to people who think they can function in the world for 24 hours without committing an act of stereotyping;
trying to explain the meaning of “average”;
reading the effusions of plump (or in Sullivan’s case, buff) metropolitan elite types who have no clue what it is like to live in a downwardly-mobile lower-middle-class estate like The Retreat At Twin Lakes in Sanford, FL;
responding on matters of race to people who won’t bother to acquaint themselves with the most elementary facts of biology and paleoanthropology;
hearing that “more whites than blacks are on welfare” (in related news, an astonishingly small amount of welfare payments go to ambidextrous red-heads!) (and the thing is not even true as stated!!);
or that blacks and nonblacks use drugs at the same rate but blacks get arrested at higher rates;
taking lectures about racial diversity from celebrities who live in 99 percent-nonblack towns.

I’m weary of it all.

Posted in Blacks, John Derbyshire, National Review | Comments Off

BLM Disrupt Milo Yiannopoulos at DePaul University 5-24-2016

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Started streaming 2 hours ago: There is only one “World’s Most Fabulous Super-villain”, and he is at DePaul for One Night – LIVE! His Topic: Feminism is Cancer!
For all of the social justice warriors/feminists who have nothing better to do than talk about their feelings in their gender studies classes:
We will be providing safe spaces, coloring books/materials, pacifiers, and diapers for those who get too triggered at our event. DEAL WITH IT DARLINGS!
Hosted by The DePaul College Republicans, See you there!

TWITTER:

* This is what happens to universities when they spot Blacks +250 points on admission scores & dock Asians -50 points

* The two Blacks just walked up on stage. The girl took the interviewer’s mic and twerked. Black guy blew a whistle.

* Dear Black People,
The rest of us are really getting sick of your shit.

Here’s the moment the Black Chick took the Young Republican interviewer’s mic.

* By not escorting the #BlackLivesMatter morons out, @DePaulU just showed other protestors at other schools their tactics work.

* The Black Guy announced he was shutting it down.
Nero said security would come and arrest him.
Black Guy was right.

* .@nero walked into crowd to continue talk, but Black Guy just blew a whistle into the other mic to drown him out.

* And the Left successfully no-platforms another right-winger. This time from Catholic college @DePaulU.

* Apparently when you hire security and black racists make violent threats, protocol is do nothing.

* Nero’s shtick is camp, but it takes courage to hold your ground while some angry dude paces & screams in your face.

* @DePaulU demanded the College Republicans pay $1000 for security then refused to remove the protesters.

* The Black Dude threatened to punch Nero so @DePaulU … did nothing for 10 minutes then shut down Nero’s talk.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

Only One Columbine Shooter Was Jewish

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Half of the Columbine shooters were gentile but nobody talks about that!

Oy, when will the goyim leave us alone?

Denver Post: April 24, 1999 – Friends say 17-year-old Dylan Klebold was more follower than leader, less fascinated by German culture than 18-year-old Eric Harris, his partner in Tuesday’s suicidal rampage at Columbine High School.
But one Klebold relative said Friday that neo-Nazi overtones surrounding the massacre – committed, by coincidence or design, on Hitler’s birthday – must have been additionally devastating for the boy’s mother, Susan Klebold, who was raised in the Jewish faith.
“It must’ve been very difficult for her, for any average American parent – but particularly for someone brought up Jewish,” said Skip Yassenoff, a cousin of the former Susan Yassenoff who attended the same confirmation class at Temple Israel in Columbus, Ohio. Klebold’s mother, now 50, is the granddaughter of Leo Yassenoff, the late, prominent philanthropist in Columbus’ Jewish community. Yassenoff went into the commercial construction business with little financial backing, made his fortune and left his mark on the area by erecting buildings that include a Jewish Community Center that now bears his name, a Jewish student center at Ohio State University and a local synagogue.
Skip Yassenoff said he has had only sporadic contact with his cousin in recent years. He knew that Susan’s husband, Tom, was not Jewish but did not know how they raised their children. The Klebolds briefly attended St. Philip Lutheran Church in Littleton about five years ago.
“Most mainstream parents, whether they’re Jewish or not, I think would be appalled by neo-Nazi actions by their grown-up children,” said Yassenoff, who has two teenage kids of his own. “I think sometimes you don’t know why your kids are the way they are, especially when they get to the age Dylan was. I think a lot has to do with the kids they hang around with.”
Lisa Simon, a spokeswoman for the Klebolds family’s lawyer, said Dylan’s parents were not ready to talk about their son.
“There’s a lot of facts to come and obviously with the investigation going on they can’t talk right now,” said Simon. “They’ve got to concentrate on their loss and dealing with the enormity of this whole thing. I think they want to take it one day at a time.”
The lawyer for Harris’ parents did not return calls.
The two teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded almost two dozen other students before turning their guns on themselves Tuesday. A precise motive for the worst school shooting in U.S. history remains unknown. But many students say the two outcasts were lashing back at student athletes and others who Harris and Klebold felt persecuted them.
Some Columbine students said Klebold and Harris, who were enrolled in an early morning bowling class, would give the Nazi salute and shout “Heil Hitler!” whenever they rolled a good ball.
But other students who knew them said Klebold did not share Harris’ fascination for the German language, culture and history.
“I don’t think he was that racist,” said Chad Laughlin, a senior who ran a fantasy baseball league in which Klebold participated. “I think Eric was more racist.”
“Eric was the stronger personality,” added Dan Holsey, another senior. “Eric kind of let his feelings be known, his hatreds or dislikes. He never acted them out, but let it be known to me and some friends. If Dylan had any hatred, he never told me or anyone I knew.”
“I’d seen Eric wear shirts with German sayings, but I never saw Dylan wear them. He just wore a Boston Red Sox hat.”
Harris’ Internet site, which contained violent rants and bombmaking tips, recently was taken down off the World Wide Web by host America Online – but it had attracted national attention six months earlier.
Researchers for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, an Internet watchdog group that flags hateful Web sites, discovered Harris’ Trench Coat Mafia site while tracking anarchist and bomb-making sites, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center.
The site did not warrant a call to police, Cooper said, but the center did continue to monitor it.
“There were no explicit threats against an individual or organization,” he said.
But after hearing of the shootings on Tuesday, the center’s researchers scrambled to download several files posted on the Web site. Cooper said AOL and the FBI have confirmed that the files, which included “first-person, friendly advice on bomb-making,” came from Harris’ computer – though it remains unknown whether Harris personally wrote the bomb-making recipes.
Some of the files detailed precise measurements for gunpowder in pipe bombs, which the writer called “the easiest and deadliest ways to kill a group of people.”
One paragraph tells of the need to lay down newspaper before playing with gunpowder “because accidents do happen and if you have a big black stain on your carpet, mom and dad might ask some questions.”
subhed here
Also found were directions for creating napalm. One section of the files grabbed from the site before it was shut down by AOL included different types of shrapnel that could be used in pipe bombs. The writer pondered the deadliness of taping nails to the outside of the pipe.
Homemade bombs found inside Columbine included CO2 cartridges with nails taped to them, authorities said.
“You might try asking the survivors if they got a good look at the bomb before it went off and then the remains,” read the notes from the Web site.
Cooper said the information on the site provides a glimpse into the mind of a socially maligned teenager and hinted at the subculture of hate online.
“These kids may not be necessarily celebrating Hitler,” said Cooper, “but a lot of these sites are closely linked to hate music and traditional hate sites. It doesn’t take very much effort to end up surfing some of the more than 1,500 hate sites out there. For people who are ready to cross the line, it’s literally a click away to learn how to be a terrorist.”

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Our Vibrant Future

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Posted in Islam | Comments Off

Some Hollywood Jews Tried To Molest Shirley Temple

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

When Catholic priests molest kids, it is always pointed out that they are Catholic priests. When Hollywood Jews and rabbis molest, their identities should be pointed out too.

Shirley Temple writes in her book Child Star: An Autobiography of multiple incidents in which Hollywood Jews tried to molest her.

At 11 years old, Shirley met with with the Jewish producer, Arthur Freed, at MGM. He pulled his putz out:

“I have something made for just you,” he continued, fumbling in his lap. “You’ll be my new star!” That phrase had last been used when I was three years old in “Kid in Hollywood.”
Obviously, Freed did not believe in preliminaries. With his face gaped in a smile, he stood up abruptly and executed a bizarre flourish of clothing. Having thought of him as a producer rather than exhibitor, I sat bolt upright. Guarded personal exposure by both brothers and Father had maintained me in relatively pristine innocence. Not twelve years old, I still had little appreciation for masculine versatility and so dramatic was the leap between schoolgirl speculation and Freed’s bedazzling exposure that I reacted with nervous laughter.
Disdain or terror he might have expected, but not the insult of humor.
“Get out!” he shouted, unmindful of his disarray, imperiously pointing to the closed door. “Go on, get out!”

Shirley’s mother got similar treatment from Louis B. Mayer in the other room:

Mother and I were en route home before I spilled my executive-suite saga. Expecting her to be startled or angry on my behalf, I was surprised when she had her own tale to tell. Not only had Freed cut a figure, so had Mayer.
Ushering Mother to an overstuffed couch, Mayer returned behind his desk and mounted a long-legged chair, a vanity which gave him increased stature while seated. Wiping his eyeglasses on a silk handkerchief, he recounted how admiringly he regarded her. Every child should be so lucky to have such a mother, he purred, a real mother, yet someone sexy and refined. Usually solemn, his eyes glinted. Surely she could recognize real sincerity when she saw it. Never forget, he continued, at MGM we are a family. We take care of our own.
Slipping down off his chair, he approached the sofa and sank down beside her, uttering a contented sigh.
Surely she was the most unique mother in the world, he said. Someone who should be a star in her own right. He grasped her hand, pulling her toward him.
Mayer’s opinion of his personal prowess was rumored to be overblown, but not the power of his office. Reluctant to test either, Mother picked up her purse and retreated out the door, walking backwards.

Her autobiography contains many such stories.

Hardly the mogul he aspired to be or sometimes chose to pose, Wizard shoveled compliments in my direction, covering everything from appealing looks to yet-unrealized dramatic potential. Toward midnight the group thinned out and he offered to walk me to my own compartment. Only two ways to go on this train, he laughed, and I’m going yours.
As I turned in my opened doorway to say good night, he roughly shoved me back inside and slammed the door shut. In one hulking maneuver he toppled me onto the bunk previously made up by the car porter. The swiftness of his attack shocked me from my head to my high-heeled pumps, one of which fell off. his breath was heavy with a sickly aroma of whiskey, and with his free hand he was fumbling at his clothing.
Good God! I thought. I’m going to be raped!
“Look, I’m going to be a big executive,” he said. “We’re going to have to get along.” He held up both palms in a gesture of inevitability. “What I had in mind was just a workplace formality.”
“It may be in your contract, but not mine.”
“Sex is like a glass of water,” he went on, using the clinical tones of a doctor diagnosing an affliction. “You get thirsty, you drink. You want sex, you have it.”
…After dinner, as we prepared to depart, I went upstairs alone to retrieve my coat from his wife’s bedroom. The Wizard followed, stepping softly. Just as I was lifting my wrap from her bed, he suddenly seized me from behind. With a quick twist, he spun me around and backwards on top of the piled fur coats.
For a second time I found myself an unwilling entry in a wrestling match. Exasperating and abusive though it was to me, his actions disgraced his charming wife, only steps away with her guests, and was a gross effrontery to my husband. Yelling “Murder” would have further inflamed a dangerous situation. Pushing up on his chin with both hands, I flexed a knee and struck with all my might, a blow which proved that microsecond lust can be switched off as quickly as on.

Her encounter with George Jessel:

We were standing a pace apart, eyeball to eyeball. In one swift movement he opened his trousers and, with a sudden reach, encircled me with one arm, his face, droopy and baggy-eyed, looming directly into mine. I could feel his other hand groping to lift my shirt. Hard on the heels of the Wizard, this new assault seemed unreal, but little could I do but thrust my right knee upward into his groin. A blow enthusiastically pointed for his chin, it effectively knocked us apart. Pain, disgust, and hate flickered across his face, but I felt no mercy. More and more the adult movie business seemed populated with a bunch of copulating tomcats.

Gawker:

There are three ingredients needed to make a perfect obituary: a peculiar life, an anticipated death (hence: ample time to write the thing), and at least one story about tap dancing. So you knew going in that the New York Times obituary of Shirley Temple Black, who many people were sad to learn had died Monday night (but also, briefly, happy and surprised to learn had been alive up to that point), was going to be sensational.
Like a precocious Depression-era child dancing with a black man on down the stairs of a pretend house, it did not disappoint.
There were details you might expect, like a brief survey of the various horrible ways in which the parents of Shirley’s characters were killed in her films, so that she could emerge a plucky orphan (suicide, plane crash, shipwreck, hit by a car while carrying her birthday cake, etc.), and a funny anecdote about how Shirley’s 12th birthday party was marked by her discovery of the fact she was actually 13 (her mother realized early on that while a 6 year old who can do the rumba is really something, a 7 year old who can do the rumba is just kind of blah).
But, like all of the greatest obituaries, there were also a few surprises. For instance, even if you already knew that, the year she turned 4, Shirley appeared as a cutie sexy adorable sensual baby in what the Times describes as "a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts" titled "Baby Burlesks" (like this one), you might be surprised to learn that Shirley and her fellow professional toddlers were disciplined by being forced to sit on a block of ice in a windowless box:
When any of the two dozen children in “Baby Burlesks” misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche,” Mrs. Black wrote in “Child Star.” “Its lesson of life, however, was profound and unforgettable. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.”
Then there was the time the novelist Graham Greene was sued by her studio for libel, after he decried Shirley’s “mature suggestiveness” and “well-shaped and desirable little body” in a negative review of her film “Wee Willie Winkie.” (Greene had previously speculated that the actress was a 50-year-old dwarf pretending to be a child.)
Years later, a meeting with an MGM producer culminated in his exposing his genitals to a 12-year-old Shirley (and then banishing her from his sight).
On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office.
Temple became engaged to her second husband, Charles Alden Black, 12 days after meeting him, the same year she officially retired from showbusiness (at age 22). She said that J. Edgar Hoover’s lap was the most comfortable she ever sat on. In later life, she served as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslovakia. Her first real film contract (two weeks; $150 per; with Fox) stipulated that she provide her own tap shoes.

By Shalom Goldman, Duke University, May 24, 2013:

But Catholics are not the only American religious minority beset by clergy sexual scandals and by conflicts between hierarchy and laity. As Mark Oppenheimer noted in a New York Times article last month, no American religious group seems free of sexual scandal.
A group that has been particularly hard hit with scandals this past year is the Orthodox Jewish community in its many forms. Just as ninety percent of American Catholics reject Church teachings on birth control, over ninety percent of American Jews (who either belong to Conservative or Reform congregations or are unaffiliated) reject Rabbinic Judaism’s teachings about the regulation of sexual behavior, especially when it comes to “family purity.” This euphemism refers to abstinence from sexual activity during a woman’s period—and at least a week beyond it. In Orthodox Jewish law men are forbidden all physical contact with their wives during a woman’s extended period of “menstrual impurity.” Thus many Orthodox households, and all Ultra-Orthodox households, have “separate beds” in the bedroom—so that the couple can sleep together, or apart, as the woman’s menstrual cycle determines.
It is within these same Jewish communities that consider themselves bound by such laws that sexual abuse scandals have recently come to light. The variety and magnitude of these scandals, though on a scale far smaller than those in the Catholic Church, have sent shockwaves through the Jewish world. What the results will be is hard to predict. For, unlike Roman Catholics, Jewish religious communities are not unified in their religious rules, behaviors, or attitudes. Rather, they are divided, contentious and famously argumentative. Behind the headlines of recent sexual scandals there have been some strange synchronicities between the Catholic and Jewish incidents.
On the same day in late 2012 that the charges against Bishop Mahoney were detailed in a lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles archdiocese, a State Supreme Court Judge in New York sentenced Nechemya Weberman, a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, to the attention-getting sentence of 103 years in prison. Weberman’s victim, an eighteen-year-old Hasidic woman whom he had been abusing for six years (under the pretext of being her “therapist”) had implored the judge to impose the maximum sentence. He fulfilled her request.
In the six years that she was abused, this Hasidic young woman did not remain silent about her situation; she complained to family members and school authorities. But she could not break through the wall of silence imposed by her ultra-Orthodox family, school, synagogue, and community. State Supreme Court Justice John C. Ingram praised the victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.” Sadly, though, the perpetrator’s and victim’s own community, the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Kiryat Yoel, New York, have not displayed the same courage and bravery in confronting abusers in their midst. To the contrary, like their Catholic clerical counterparts, they have tried to keep the lid on news of this and other emerging scandals.
That sexual abuse could be hidden, and news of it suppressed, within the Satmar Hasidim (American Judaism’s most separatist community) is not that surprising, since most of its members have little contact with the outside world.
A much greater scandal erupted when – a few months after the revelations about Weberman the Ultra-Orthodox “therapist” – a pattern of sexual abuse, deception and cover-up at Yeshiva University was revealed. YU is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Reports of abuse were revealed to the press by an intrepid journalist and activist, Mordechai Twersky. Now living in Israel, Twersky was himself abused while at the Yeshiva high school—and he had been petitioning YU’s leaders to address the issue for over a decade. It seems that his patience finally ran out.
In contrast to the separatist and anti-modern tendencies of the Satmar Hasidim, the Orthodox Jews affiliated with Yeshiva University pride themselves on their openness to modernity. YU’s motto is Torah Umada—Torah and Science—an explicit embrace of both tradition and modernity. One would expect that a community that fully embraced modernity would be able to face such revelations in a direct and rational manner.
The revelations about Yeshiva University concern rabbis and male students at Manhattan Talmudic Academy, the boys’ high school affiliated with Yeshiva University.
These young men (close to forty cases have emerged to date) had been abused by their teachers in the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
The Y.U. case came to public attention in December 2012 when the New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, broke the story. In that same period, stories about covered-up cases of sexual abuse at prep schools—Horace Mann and Deerfield, among others—appeared in the press. Forward journalist Paul Berger reported that “Yeshiva University for years ignored students who claimed that they were sexually abused by two former staff members at Y.U.’s high school for boys in Manhattan.”
While many American Catholics now seem open to criticism of their own communities, and of their clergy, no matter how elevated the status of the clergyman, spokespersons for Jewish communities, reluctant to wash their laundry in public, have been fiercely protective of clergy and teachers.
The Forward has been descrying the reluctance of Y.U. faculty and students to demand action by their university. This past month a graduate of Y.U. called on the school chancellor, Rabbi Norman Lamm, to resign. But Lamm is not only the university’s chancellor, he is also its Rosh Yeshiva, the institution’s spiritual leader. Voices calling for Lamm’s resignation, though, are few; for the most part, the Modern Orthodox Jewish community has been silent. Of the thousands of Y.U. graduates appealed to in an email petition, only 250 were willing to hold the university leadership accountable.
Both Catholics and Jews are minorities within the United States (Catholics forming one-quarter of the U.S. population, and Jews two percent). Members of both religious communities have confronted religious prejudice in Protestant America. Yet it seems that the smaller the minority, the more protective its reputation and leadership.

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Russian Programmers Are Pretty Good

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Anatoly Karlin:

* On the contrary, programming competitions (as with programming in general) are extremely g-loaded. They’re basically really difficult IQ tests for programmers. Anyone with a bachelor-equivalent computer science background (probably less) would be able to grasp the problems and the classes they belong to, but you need to be a high IQ savant in order to win these competitions, as they are 100% about abstract problem solving.

I was pondering this question not so long ago when I was looking at past results for the Google Code Jam programming competition and noticing the over representation from Slavic countries, especially relative to population sizes and quality of higher education. I wonder if it might be a case of higher IQ variance, whereby Slavic countries tend to have more individuals in the super-smart and super-dumb range and therefore have a larger pool of geniuses to choose from, similar to how men and women are distributed on the bell curve. This could also partially explain bydlo culture and high violent crime rates relative to other white countries. Of course, I have nothing solid to back this hypothesis.

* Russians are incredible at lateral thinking. Machine logic, especially objective-based programming, requires certain degrees of lateral thinking.

* The late Soviet educational system was better, on average, than Western educational systems. The top US universities and Oxbridge are the best in the world, and in the late Soviet period Moscow State University would have probably lagged behind several of them on objective measures like the number of hard science Nobels per decade, but everywhere outside of the extreme top range the Soviet system was better. Early childhood education, secondary education, the average college, the above-average-but-not-top-tier college – all of that was obviously better, and by a lot.

The quality of Western education declined for lefty ideological reasons in the 1960s. Rote memorization was deemphasized, standards dropped, there was a move from hard subjects to soft ones. The USSR missed that trend. Post-Soviet states must have cought up to that trend starting in the 1990s, but I don’t know to what extent. Maybe these results are trying to tell me that the destruction of the 1990s wasn’t as complete as I thought, at least in this sphere.

There are other possibilities. It’s important to consider where the best brains in a society are going. There are so many choices – business, the arts, the sciences, engineering, scholarship, laying about doing nothing. Maybe in post-Communist societies a larger percentage of the big brains are going into programming?

* It isn’t just programming skill.

Russia was always ahead in a very wide spectrum of production and design technologies during the Cold War since the 1960s (including optoelectronics, crystal growth techniques and semiconductor heterostructures (see the Nobel Prize for Alferov), spatial light modulators, photonics, neural nets used for automatic piloting of spacecraft, titanium alloys, metal matrix composites, reusable large heavy-lift vehicles like “Energia” that was capable of manned missions to Mars, large coated Beryllium mirrors (one of the hardest materials to machine properly, due to surface cracks) for SDI-type large battlestations, controlled thermonuclear fusion, aerohydrodynamics and designs of vehicles like ground effect vehicles (the “Caspian Sea Monster”), new devices like “plasma” stealth coating, Pamir-3U energy cores), that had more long-term physical potential than microelectronics. Most American leads (e.g., computer-controlled adaptive optics, the Nike-X series of ABM systems with the “Sprint” missile and later, some (not other) versions of SDI, certain kinds of strategic radar) were based on the traditional American leads: microelectronics, surface coatings (like for the “Sprint” missile, possibly the fastest accelerating object in the Earth’s atmosphere), chemical fertilizers and propellants, complex systems engineering (as used in Apollo and Azorian, or in Bell Labs) and some kinds of general purpose machine tools. But mostly, virtually all American “leads” over Soviets were based on a single lead that was microelectronics production based on traditional wafer fabrication and surface chemistry: but Soviets were ahead in a wider range of devices, and were also ahead in techniques related to nanolithography (which is currently taking off), eventually closing that gap. American submarines were “quieter” (at least before the mid 1980s) mostly because Americans imported high-end Japanese milling machines for producing the propellers (to minimize mechanical noise). Soviets were ahead in high-end computing and especially coherent optical computers, which had less physical limitations than microelectronics had (but less miniaturization).

Soviet neural nets and associated mathematics were so advanced that they were literally decades ahead (see the book by Galushkin and the comments on it by Lofti Zadeh (founder of fuzzy logic) and others). American RAM coating used in stealth aircraft was originally derived from Ufimtsev’s method of calculating radar cross section, in a Soviet journal that was read by the CIA — see the account of this by Alfred Price (in “War in the Fourth Dimension”).

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Neo-Nazis worship Taylor Swift as an ‘Aryan Goddess’ who’s turning America on to fascism — here’s why

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

LINK: The rise of Donald Trump has been a major boost to the so-called “alt-right” faction of American conservatism that is basically a reheated form of neo-Nazism that happens to include a lot of anime memes. But while Trump is the alt-right’s father figure, its mother figure might be none other than Taylor Swift.

Wait, what? Is the woman who has won America’s heart with hits like “Shake It Off” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a secret fascist? Not at all — but as this Broadly article explains, she’s nonetheless been claimed as a symbol by the alt-right as an “Aryan Goddess” who is helping to spread their worldview.

“Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn. That’s the most important thing,” Andre Anglin, author of the white supremacist blog the Daily Stormer, tells Broadly. “It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and they will be crowned American royalty.”

How can a secret be an established fact, you ask? It’s not really important because Anglin’s creepy fantasies about Swift being married off to a Trumpspawn shouldn’t be at all dissected logically.

This isn’t just an American alt-right thing either, as there’s an entire Facebook group dedicated to Taylor Swift bringing about the resurgence of a fascist Europe.

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Jewish groups: Austrian far-right pol’s narrow presidential loss is wake-up call

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

I wonder if the leaders of these Jewish groups know anything about Judaism, a religion that contains thousands of teachings that would seem to outsiders as far out, extreme, bizarre and even evil.

If European Jewish groups are united against what they call the “far right,” when this Right comes to power, Jews will likely suffer.

According to Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, hate and fear politics are not the way to go. I wonder if he has ever studied Torah? If you love something, you naturally hate that which threatens it. Judaism has no problem with hate. The Psalms say that if you love God, you hate evil.

JTA: We’re happy with the result, says European Jewish leader, but wide support for someone with such extremist views is no cause for celebration

European Jewish groups reacted with relief to the victory by a left-wing politician over a far-right candidate in Austria’s presidential elections.

Alexander van der Bellen, an environmentalist with a pro-refugee agenda, won with 50.3 percent of the vote on Sunday, despite early reports predicting victory for Norbert Hofer of the Austrian Freedom Party party, or FPO, in the runoff, the BBC reported. Hofer had 49.7 percent of the vote.

“While we are certainly satisfied with the result, there is little room to celebrate the high level of support for someone with such extremist views as Norbert Hofer,” European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, the dissatisfaction with the moderate mainstream parties is providing oxygen to those like Hofer” and the Austrian Freedom Party.

“We are seeing signs of these trends across Europe, so it is incumbent on the more centrist parties to use this as a wake-up call and listen to the grievances of the people,” he said.

The Jewish Community of Vienna has shunned the Freedom Party, which it regards as having problematic ties to neo-Nazis. Party Chairman Heinz-Christian Strache has denied the allegations and recently visited Israel, where he met with Likud arty officials. In 2012, Strache apologized for posting on Facebook a caricature depicting an obese, hook-nosed banker wearing star-shaped cufflinks.

Striking a more optimistic note, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said the result is “a clear sign that Europe is beginning to realize that hate and fear politics are not the answer to the many challenges we are facing as a continent.”

The Freedom Party has campaigned hard against the admittance of migrants from the Middle East, including refugees, citing their religion, Islam, which the party says is irreconcilable with European values. Austria has taken in 100,000 migrants from the Middle East over the past year — action that commentators say has generated a backlash of discontent that is helping the far right.

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America’s Declining Social Capital

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

As America becomes more diverse, Americans have less trust in each other.

New York Times: One of the more intriguing findings was the role of declining social trust and what is known as social capital — the web of family, friends and professional contacts. For example, the proportion of people who agree with the statement, “Most people can be trusted,” has been shrinking for more than three decades. Researchers found that states with larger declines in social trust also had larger declines in labor market fluidity. The lack of trust may increase the cost of job-hunting and make both employees and employers more risk-averse.

Ms. Wozniak added that the benefits of LinkedIn and Facebook friends may not replace the personal connections that still remain the best way to find a job.

For some, the information revolution has a decided downside. Employers can use easily accessible information about criminal records and credit histories, not to mention embarrassing tweets, photos, social media postings and more to screen out a wider range of candidates.

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