Journos, Trump & Hillary

Comments:

* I also suspect that journalists know that a big downsizing is fast approaching for the entire journalist/media landscape. If Trump wins, how many billionaires decide that their discount propaganda outlets aren’t worth keeping afloat? The journalists have to announce their virtue to each other, but I suspect, they’re also advertising their loyalty as good thinking hacks to their de facto paymasters.

Or if Hillary wins, they’ll have served their purpose and there’ll be no need to keep them on staff anymore. I doubt Jeff Bezos or Carlos Slim care about the career prospects of the journalism grads in their employ.

A lot will end up unemployed so there’s an incentive to signal that you’re the most rabid attack dog against your sugar daddy’s corporate enemy. There’s no money in being reasonable or middle of the road if you know you’re dancing for your supper.

* Funniest part of the op-ed was this:

“Through his online writings and YouTube channel, Mr. Spencer is a key player in the social-media universe where this core group of Trump supporters get their “news,” from sources with which most people aren’t familiar”

Oh, no! Sources with which ‘most people aren’t familiar’! Mayday, mayday! Scare quotes around “news” – if only those idiotic Trump supporters weren’t so sub-literate and raaaaacist, they’d be tattooing Charles Blow’s prose on their body and awaiting the columns of our controlled opposition, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, like manna from heaven!

Blast the NPR and don’t you dare change the channel from PBS – the NYT editorial board’s mandatory re-education awaits!

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Hasids Busted for Plan to Murder Husband Who Wouldn’t Divorce Wife

Forward: Federal prosecutors announced the arrest Wednesday evening of two members of the Satmar Hasidic group accused of planning to kidnap and murder a man who had refused to grant his wife a religious divorce.

Shimen Liebowitz, 25, and Aharon Goldberg, 55, planned to pay $55,000 to a private investigator to arrange the kidnapping, according to prosecutors.

Liebowitz is a member of the Satmar Hasidic community in Kiryas Joel, New York, according to court documents. Goldberg, a rabbi who lives in Israel, is also a prominent member of the Kiryas Joel community. Their intended victim, apparently an Orthodox Jew, drives a taxi, according to court papers.

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60th Drug-Related Death In Orthodox New York Over Past Year

Forward: The granddaughter of one of Brooklyn’s most influential Hasidic rebbes, or rabbis, died of a reported drug overdose early this week, according to an Israeli newspaper, sending the tight-knit ultra-Orthodox community into mourning and raising alarms among advocates who warn of a crisis among young people on its margins.

Feige Greenwald’s death, first reported in English yesterday by the Israeli website Arutz Sheva, was the 60th drug-related death in the New York-area Orthodox community over the past year, according to the Orthodox social service group Amudim.

A spokesperson for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner told the Forward that the cause and manner of Greenwald’s death are still under investigation.

Greenwald was the granddaughter of Grand Rabbi Yaakov Chizkiah Greenwald, who leads the Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based Puppa Hasidic group. Her father, Rabbi Pinchas Greenwald, leads the Puppa community in Monsey, New York. According to social media reports, Feige Greenwald, 22, had lived outside of the Hasidic community in the time before her death.

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Math Is Racist

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Essentially, evidence is racist.

* Everyone knows that math was invented by black Africans in Egypt, who used it to build pyramids and airplanes. But then jealous whites took the math from these people, and turned it against them to do great evil.

* As a headline, it sounds ludicrous but there is a germ of truth to the claim that math is racist. The broader issue is that there is a war on stupid people (see the July/August edition of the Atlantic).

As proficiency in math becomes more important to the ability to function successfully in society, stupid people become more and more disadvantaged. So math is discriminatory in its effect. But it’s not kind to imply that one particular race is bad at math or plain stupid.

* This really goes to show the two sides to the great ideological divide in America. Algorithms that give good credit card offers to people in nice neighborhoods with good credit scores do not discriminate against anyone by race who has a good credit score and lives in a nice neighborhood. Most Americans would not call a computer that puts a few numbers together to determine if you get a credit card racist.

But believers of “desperate impact” theory have a much wider definition of racism that logically includes pretty much every American business and many other institutions.

Desperate impact, however, has now fully taken over the national Democratic party, universities, and liberal newspapers. This, in turn, means that white-run corporations that favor or need to stay in the good graces of Democrats must continuously apologize for their racism and promise a plan to stop in the future. Since you can’t run a private business in the United States without desperate impact, the plans must be insincere or ineffective.

Since this whole process is humiliating, akin to a more comfortable version of a Maoist self-criticism session, I think that Democrats may soon fall below the 36% of the white vote they need to win the presidency. Trump may not be the man to do this, as voting for an erratic reality TV show character for President of the United States involves a certain humiliation of its own.

* Her website is “mathbabe.com” – some might consider that an overly generous self-assessment.

* How could math be Eurocentric when its best practitioners are East Asians?

Once you could accuse banks of being racist for not giving loans to dark skinned persons. Now banks, using math, judge the creditworthiness of a person without having to looking at his face. The math they use is racist. Math in general is racist.

* I know about Terence Tao, and see a fair number of East Asian names in the faculty listings of Math departments at our best universities, but have East Asians largely displaced Whites in the extreme reaches of the right-tail of working mathematicians?

The high school level Math Olympiads are certainly dominated by ̶E̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶s̶ ̶ Chinese of late, but I don’t see similar effects in the Fields Medal list or the Abel Prize list yet. Of course, it is logical to expect a latency of two or more decades between the leading and lagging indicators of who the “best” practitioners are.

* I watch too much TV and too many movies. Blacks, especially, already matriculate at Stanford and MIT and occupy a lot of STEM and senior IT positions. Otherwise, they could not come up with the “save the day” orbital mechanics and other technical solutions that brought Mark Whitney (The Martian) home safely from Mars.

Also, from TV commercials, I notice the large number of Black professionals that live in very comfortable “McMansions” in the suburbs (let’s say, 50% of the people featured in the adds). Their life styles are stunning. I can’t afford to live in those homes on my $200k+ income.

I wonder if this counter-factual hype isn’t partially responsible for “Blacks behaving badly” in places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee. You see, Blacks allegedly watch more TV than White folks. From TV, they know how many highly-educated Blacks have already made it to the big time in the upper middle class. They want to know why they failed the measure. It’s clear: WHITE RACISM again … someone is holding them back and taking their share. They do the only reasonable thing. They RIOT in the hope that major, community-wide tantrums will finally get someone’s attention and get them their share of the good life that they see on TV and in the movies.

* I just happened to catch a minute or two of this woman being interviewed on CNBC yesterday. Her hair was dyed social justice pink for the occasion. So there’s that.

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Trump – Hillary Townhall

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Lauer helped Hillary up the podium in the guise of a handshake, all pre planned no doubt.

She forgot her scripted answer to the commander in chief quality question, and answered first with, “Steadiness” then Lauer helped her by suggesting, “judgment” which was the word she forgot to use, as seen when Lauer used that word to frame his next question to her.

I noticed her swallowing hard a few times but only one throat clearing. Her medical team must have worked for hours prepping her for the half hour viewing.

She had a sort of glazed or wild look occasionally and had a slight brain freeze in response when Lauer suggested at the onset that she refrain from attacking Trump and speak about herself.

Lauer acted the part of hard nosed journalist with her with his somber demeanor but especially by what he didn’t ask her, he betrayed his loyalty to Hillary. She seemed ready for the questions, so they were pre known certainly.

Her sitting then standing mode was mostly for her body’s benefit. She couldn’t have her pillow, so she couldn’t get comfy sitting, and standing and moving helped her perhaps in controlling her cough reflex. Something was odd there, in any case. She appeared fake, at times annoyed and nearing shrill and strident, in order words, regular Hillary mode.

Trump was calm, super relaxed and knew he was entering a hostile reception with Lauer’s completely changed demeanor towards him being evident immediately. Trumps answers were fine and he didn’t allow himself to be baited though I wish he would have directly tailored his replies to the questions from the audience instead of using his regular broad brush strokes method or attacking Obama/Hillary. The question about military rapes was meant to spoil Trump and Lauer was ready with an old Trump quote that related, but Trump brushed it off easily.

Trump looked like a president.

Hillary looked like a chemo patient readied for visiting hours.

* Hillary did surprisingly well given her ailments. She seemed collected and had every point memorized ready for delivery, though she didn’t say anything of any substance. I did notice a light bobbing motion in her head that she was trying hard to synchronize with normal nods of the head as in asserting or making a point in order to conceal the involuntary movements. She came across as an elderly recovering alcoholic with a sore voice and empty gaze. She clearly needed a drink.

Trump looked presidential and slightly annoyed with an openly hostile Matt Lauer. He was winging it for the most part, I guess. It was brilliant of him to stress the importance of diplomacy, of getting along with countries different from the USA instead of trying to turn the whole world a mirror image of the US, neocon style.

* I was surprised there was no coughing!
Matt seemed to favor Clinton and allowed her to say her pieces, but with Trump he interjected and disagreed.
Crowd clapped louder when Clinton walked on, so the NBC set up seemed to favor Clinton. Trump surely did not see the questions ahead of time, but I feel Clinton did.

* – Hillary looked pretty healthy. She wasn’t wearing a collar, and her neck looked normal; I didn’t see her cough; and she stood without trouble.

– Hillary might be the Elizabeth Holmes of politics: smart, female, loved by Silicon Valley, good with scripted presentations, good at raising money, but bad with technology and bad at accomplishing anything substantive.

– Hillary has a talent for answering questions. Even when she’s asked about some disaster she caused, she can rattle off a prepared 400 word response. And by the end of it you’re so bored, you forgot what the question was.

* For any Jewish commenter: How does this type of stuff play in the Jewish community? Do Jews seriously believe this stuff especially given Trump’s daughter? Clearly this piece was written for a Jewish audience. And it definitely seems quite desperate and reaches for straws.

Does this mean Trump is actually attracting Jewish voters and mainstream Jews are worried, thus they are trying to scare people and keep them in Hillary’s camp?

* Don’t forget that NBC did the lighting exactly Hillary’s people wanted it. To make her look the best possible. And only head shots and from the waist up! No full body shots showing how portly she has gotten in the last six months!

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