Williams College cancels “Uncomfortable Learning” talk by controversial author John Derbyshire

REPORT:

WILLIAMSTOWN — The president of Williams College has ordered the cancellation of a student-organized speaking engagement by an author characterized by many as a white supremacist.

In a letter to the college community on Thursday, Adam Falk said the views espoused in the writings of John Derbyshire have no place in the school’s discourse.

“We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances,” Falk wrote. “In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it. We’ve found the line.

“Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it,” he wrote. “Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community.”

Derbyshire is a former columnist for National Review magazine whose writings have been condemned by some as racist.

The move raised protests from the leader of the student group, Uncomfortable Learning, which had arranged for the appearance scheduled for Monday night.

In an interview with The Eagle, Derbyshire said he reacted to the cancellation with “a shrug.”

“The colleges today are dreadful,” he said. “Nothing surprises me anymore. Hence the shrug.”

He characterized Falk’s statement as full of “empty phrases.”

Here is an excerpt of the column that got John Derbyshire fired from National Review in April of 2012:

There is much talk about “the talk.”

“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.

Yes, talk about the talk is all over.

There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

(1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks.

“There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too.”

(2) American blacks are descended from West African populations, with some white and aboriginal-American admixture. The overall average of non-African admixture is 20-25 percent. The admixture distribution is nonlinear, though: “It seems that around 10 percent of the African American population is more than half European in ancestry.” (Same link.)

(3) Your own ancestry is mixed north-European and northeast-Asian, but blacks will take you to be white.

(4) The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship. In some unusual circumstances, however—e.g., paragraph (10h) below—this default principle should be overridden by considerations of personal safety.

(5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.

(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

(7) Of most importance to your personal safety are the very different means for antisocial behavior, which you will see reflected in, for instance, school disciplinary measures, political corruption, and criminal convictions.

(8) These differences are magnified by the hostility many blacks feel toward whites. Thus, while black-on-black behavior is more antisocial in the average than is white-on-white behavior, average black-on-white behavior is a degree more antisocial yet.

(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* From the way the VDARE post was written, it sounds like Derb was informed of the cancellation by being sent a link to a public notice by a third party. Did Falk even bother contacting him? I wonder. I suspect not–what a jerk!!

In the old days, they used to let mobs try to intimidate people (viz, John O’Sullivan at Yale). I think they have lost courage in their positions now. Falk is, I believe, a physicist, so should be facile enough with numbers and research to know what’s up. A cancellation is an implicit admission not that Derb has unhinged views that can be easily countered but that anyone like him is potentially going to wake students up to the fact that reality goes against the narrative.

* Hate speech? He’s never called for violence. I’ve never seen him use a slur. This would outrage me if anything outraged me anymore.

* * In the Free Speech era (ca. 1960-1970) colleges invited George Lincoln Rockwell (the head of the American Nazi Party) to give speeches so they could see what all the fuss was about.

It was a more confident and inquiring culture back then.

* Yes, back then they were confident George Lincoln Rockwell would sound foolish to the students, so no harm done. Today’s college administrators are afraid John Derbyshire would make a great deal of sense to their students, and he would. That’s the problem.

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Should We Lower Lending Standards For Blacks, Hispanics?

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I feel bad for that 24 year old Hispanic. I remember graduating from high school and getting from the principal that deed for my first home along with my high school diploma… what a happy moment for me… It’s so unfair that the minorities in my high school did not share in this time-honored American tradition.

* “QUESTION: I actually purchased a home six months ago and I can relate because the amount of hoops that I had to jump as a 24-year-old Hispanic were just unprecedented. So thank you for that.”

Probably not even 10% of white 24-year-olds own a home, but a 24-year-old Hispanic buys a home and complains that he had to ‘jump through hoops.’

Welcome to adulthood, pal. We’re on our second home and we had to jump through hoops both times. My parents are aged, reasonably well off white folk in their late sixties and they’re still jumping through hoops.

Incidentally, on our last mortgage application – filled out on-line – my wife and I marked that we were black and ethnically Hispanic (we didn’t want to put anything, but the form said the loan officer would have to enter her best guess if we didn’t mark anything). They still had no problem pre-approving us.

* A 24 year old who could afford a house in Las Vegas probably has a lot of “irregular” income that wouldn’t be reported on a W-2. Don’t ask any questions about that though, or you’re a racist.

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The Decline Of Anti-Semitism

Guy Sorman writes this ridiculous essay at City Journal:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Does anyone care? We hear nothing about it in the campaign; voters seem uninterested. Things would have been different a generation ago: remember that, up to the 1960s, American universities imposed a de facto quota on Jews. In France, Laurent Fabius, the new president of the Constitutional Council, the nation’s highest court, is of Jewish origin, a fact that has escaped notice. The new Minister of Culture is Jewish—could this have been imagined in the country of the Dreyfus affair and of Marshall Pétain, the Nazis’ most enthusiastic collaborator? In Spain, the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 can now have their original nationality restored, if they request it. It is true that, especially in France, in places where the Jewish community is mostly of North African origin, Jews are victims of violent criminal acts. But these remain quite rare, committed by young Arabs who reenact the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their sections of Paris or Marseille. And anti-Zionism shouldn’t be confused with anti-Semitism.

Anti-Zionism is based on a real situation: the Palestinians are not a mythical people, nor are their demands mythical, however difficult they may be to satisfy. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is entirely mythical: the Jew was not a real person but a mystical and political construction. The extermination of Jewish communities, which began in France and Germany around A.D. 1000, and continued in the wake of the Crusades, was almost always set off by an accusation of ritual crime: a Christian child supposedly had his throat slit in order to mix his blood in with the ingredients of bread for the Jewish paschal feast. The pogroms in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century similarly took off from this myth. For 1,000 years in the West, the Jew was the standard scapegoat for explaining bad harvests, economic crises, and bank failures. Jews, thought to be rich when almost all lived in poverty, were expelled, massacred, and stripped of their possessions.

Anti-Semitism was also based on the accusation of “deicide,” until Vatican II erased this reference from the Easter liturgy. The mythic character of anti-Semitism is demonstrated by the lack of correlation between the number of Jews and the virulence of anti-Semitic feelings. When the Dreyfus affair broke out, less than 60,000 Jews lived in France, and they held mediocre ranks in society. Dreyfus himself was only a modest colonel. Germany was home to fewer than 100,000 Jews when Hitler seized power in 1933. In Poland, where one still finds anti-Semitic currents on certain radio stations and in certain newspapers, Jews themselves have disappeared. Jews are not necessary for anti-Semitism to flourish—as shown by its persistence in Poland, as it persisted in Stalinist Russia and even in France in the immediate aftermath of the war. Some of my lycée professors (high school teachers) were openly anti-Semitic.

The emigration of 7,000 French Jews each year, some argue, proves that being a Jew in France is unbearable. But this figure, representing about 1 percent of France’s Jewish population, is misleading, since it mixes together economic exiles (who are not only Jews) with those who, for religious reasons, wish to pursue their life in Israel, and perhaps some who fear the hostility of young Arabs.

It is time to admit that Jews are no longer scapegoats—in fact, they are hardly distinguishable from the non-Jewish population. Is this because Jews have assimilated? Jews have always shown a surprising patriotism wherever they lived: in 1914, my ancestors, Austrian Jews, fought in the Austrian army, and my Russian ancestors in the Army of the Czar. I did not yet have French ancestors, but they likely would have rushed to the front just as Dreyfus did. It is not Jews who have changed but Western society. Of course, the discovery of the Shoah in 1945 made it forever clear that anti-Semitism is diabolical, but I would date the end of anti-Semitism to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. This “banality of evil,” according to Hannah Arendt, made it so that after this trial no bureaucrat (“I am a bureaucrat who obeyed orders,” Eichmann said in his defense) and no intellectual could call himself an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism, which had been an elegant position in Europe among Christian intellectuals on the right and anti-capitalists on the left, became grotesque after Eichmann. Then, in 1962, came Vatican II, whose influence remains fundamental. The church became sincerely philo-Semitic.

Because of the persistence of attacks that mix old-fashioned anti-Semitism with contemporary anti-Zionism, some in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands will consider me too optimistic. But I remember that in 1940, the French police deported my family. Today, they protect us. It’s a very different world, and we need to keep that truth in view.

Guy Sorman apparently has never heard of Leon Blum or Pierre Mendes-France. Blum was imprisoned in Buchenwald and survived WWII even though he was a Jew. And Mendes-France was important in the French involvement in the Suez campaign of 1956.

France has had Jews in positions of power for many decades.

Since Guy Sorman obviously knows little of France, why would anything else he writes be more accurate?

COMMENTS:

* There is certainly unreasoning, libelous hatred of Jews out there (often channeled through anti-Zionism), but, as we seem to agree, there is much reasonable resentment of behavior which it is within the power of Jews to change. Since we need to talk openly about Islam, and Muslims as a group, we open the door for similar discussions about Jews–discussions we can’t, and should’t, try to shut down by reflexive charges of anti-semitism. This is easier for me than for others, I admit, because I recognize that leftism, especially the the current “victimary” or “politically correct” version of leftism to which most Jews remain addicted is deadlier to Jews than any ideology since Nazism. We should bail out while there is time.

* [Re: Spotlight] Nothing like a crusading Jewish editor taking it on himself to bring low the cabal of papist pederasts to show those urban Catholic knuckle-draggers how a true fighter for justice acts! What? These priest-ridden ingrates somehow don’t come to love us Jews more and more for rescuing them from their oppressors?

* I wouldn’t call Sailer and Derbyshire philo-semites, even “semi,” but they’re not anti-semites either and we Jews should listen to what they and others on the alt-right have to say about that “bizarrely oblivious” Jewish behavior Hanoi Paris Hilton refers to. For starters, stop insisting that an open borders policy is some Jewish “Tikkun Olam” imperative, or a prophylactic against barriers to entry of some future wave of Jewish refugees, to be imposed on the rest of society.

* Certainly Mr. Sorman is familiar with the accession of Leon Blum as the Prime Minister of France for three terms beginning in the late 1930s, and the ultimate failure of his Popular Front. (Blum was far more engaged in specifically Jewish issues than Senators Sanders ever was or will be.) Didn’t turn out so great for French Jewry after all, ehhh?

Sorman’s thesis that anti semitism is dead or dying is whistling past the graveyard, as anybody who follows the excellent writings of conservative semi-philosemites like Steve Sailer or John Derbyshire (or of actual Jews like Robert Weissberg) who’ve been crowbarred from the more PC quarters of the right, and now are accessible mostly through much dodgier venues like Unz and Taki, where the comments threads are very thinly moderated.

Luke Ford is a special case: originally an evangelical Christian, thence a convert to Reform and more lately to Orthodox Judaism, whose little-read blog often has much to say —both about and from— that wide swath of the gentile intelligentsia who are neither paleo- nor neo-Nazis, but who cut very little slack for bizarrely oblivious Jews who continue undermining the national self-confidence and cultural identity of majority populations.

Posted in Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on The Decline Of Anti-Semitism

The Donald

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Since he entered the race, I’ve heard people talk about The Donald as a bumbler, a clown, a fool, an idiot. Well, he’s no idiot, and that should have been obvious from the start. As to the rest, for some reason I’m reminded a bit of Casablanca where Strosser and Renault are discussing the blundering Americans.

Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.

Captain Renault: We musn’t underestimate “American blundering”. I was with them when they “blundered” into Berlin in 1918.

* Hey iSteve, doesn’t the whole migrant invasion sound like a Gremlins movie? A few Gremlins show up and the Chancellor adopts them, but then they start mysteriously growing in numbers.

* I wonder why the communist Pope Francis didn’t take the opportunity when he was in Mexico, a country that is nominally 80+% Roman Catholic, to criticize Mexico for its restrictive immigration laws, which I understand are much more restrictive than those of the U.S. His words might have had much more effect in a country which is more than 3X Catholic than the U.S. (percentage-wise) and thus more inclined to follow the wisdom of their Holy Pontiff and more likely to accept his criticism that such restrictive immigration policies are not “Christian.” Where did the Church find this left-wing buffoon who insists in intruding into political matters that have little connection to the Church’s mission?

* An old line in politics is that some candidates are blessed to have great enemies. Clinton was the last guy who fit this role. Newt Gingrich was a great foil for Clinton and probably saved his presidency. A Speaker who was smart and restrained could have made Clinton’s life hell. Instead, the ridiculous Newt made Clinton look like Churchill and reminded everyone that you could do worse than the soft-core Caligula.

Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies. Jeb was a great a foil. Cruz, surprisingly, has been a great enemy of Trump because Cruz is the one guy everyone agrees is a s-bag, even if you like him. His friends say he is a d-bag. When the charge against Trump is that he is aesthetically unacceptable, having that charge made by a guy who reminds everyone of a young Montgomery Burns is manna from heaven.

Of course, big personalities attract a lot of crazies so maybe the the law of averages just kicks in for guys like Trump.

* FNC is claiming that a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows Cruz leading Trump in SC.

Funny how a poll commissioned by both the Globalist Sociopaths at the WSJ and the Cultural Marxists at NBC could be so wrong.

Trump keeps gaining momentum not to mention millions in free advertising with these bogus polls. FNC not to mention CNN and the rest of the dinosaur news networks have no other choice but to quote Trump telling the world that they are full of it.

In response to Pope’s latest idiocy I would love to have Trump sit down for a one on one with Bill Warner the retired college professor who runs the website Political Islam. Almost single handedly Warner has stopped the construction of several Saudi financed mega mosques across middle America.

The Cultural Marxist Media would have the vapors over the lastest antics of our soon to be “President Sh*tlord”.

* Pope Francis is warning of a surge of drug trafficking in Argentina, saying he hoped his native country could stave off “Mexicanization,” in a letter he sent to an Argentine lawmaker.

“Hopefully we are in time to avoid Mexicanization. I was speaking to some Mexican bishops, and it is a thing of terror,” the pope wrote in an email to lawmaker Gustavo Vera, in response to a letter Vera had written to him expressing concern about drug trafficking in Argentina.

* Maybe this is good that we can have a discussion on the history of Arabs/muslims and Europeans. Too many people think it is about the French colonizing North Africa. Too few realize that for the past 1300 years the muslims have had the upper hand over the Europeans more often than not. I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.

* Donald Trump may not regard Muslim immigrants as invaders but I sure do. That opening of minds and hearts you refer to is a very one-way business. The penalty for apostasy to Islam, to the best of my knowledge, remains death. “Extremist” Muslims are the Muslims most faithful to the dictates of their religion. They’re free to practice it in Islamic countries, and I wish them the best, but it is increasingly obvious that they cannot mix peacefully in Western countries.

Insofar as the division of authority between popes, kings and emperors, this was a constant struggle in the Middle Ages (e.g., the Investiture Controversy). Early popes acknowledged the spiritual as well as the secular authority of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. The Church was a huge landowner and bishops had considerable secular authority.

* It’s not so much Trump’s Luck, it’s that he picks his enemies so well.

During his initial entry, he made Jeb his #1 enemy, and had a battle plan laid out on how to attack him. He could have spent his time taking on Cruz (the presumptive intellectual candidate), Christie (the former lobbyist with the quick tongue) or Rubio (the minority with the mostest—sorry Ben), but instead concentrated his fire on Jeb, the awkward, inept, weak beta male next to whom Trump looked golden. Then he hammered Jeb with hilarious lines and got big by beating him up. He could have ignored Jeb and concentrated on clearing the field, but he picked Jeb to highlight his own strengths and make himself look strong.

Similarly, Trump could have ignored this sally by Pope Francis (the “pope’s opinion is religious, not political” or some other meaningless pablum) but realized (1) the pope isn’t popular amongst traditionalist and conservative Catholics, as he’s basically a liberation theologist; (2) the pope is setting himself up for YUGE hypocrisy (both with the Vatican walls and the Mexican wall between it and Guatemala) that Trump’s own followers would notice; (3) the pope was inadvertently propping up the old American Protestant fears of Catholics being less loyal to the U.S than Protestants—which carries more weight in evangelical states like, say, SOUTH CAROLINA WHERE THE PRIMARY IS.

And, most importantly, just like with !Jeb!, Trump knew he could win this battle.

So he pounced and made Francis his enemy-of-the-moment, and slaughtered him politically.

Make no mistake that Trump picks his battles to make himself look like a winner. He ignores others that are losers. He picked it with Megyn Kelly to make himself look independent of Fox News and prop himself up with male, anti-pc voters. He picked it with Jeb to make himself look tall, strong, and alpha. And he picked it with Francis to make himself seem loyal, American, and consistent, while the pope looks hypocritical.

* Scott Adams has this amusing take on the Francis-Donald dispute on his dilbert blog:

“I could write a long essay about this Pope versus Trump situation, but I think it will be funnier to summarize it instead. What follows is – as far as I can tell – an accurate description of what happened.

1. The Pope criticized Donald Trump.

2. The Pope’s credibility declined.

If this were fiction, no one would believe it.

I predict that the Pope will issue a public apology to Trump for questioning his faith, as opposed to his policies. [Update: And here it is, sort of.]”

* Brilliant headline in the Telegraph today: “Trump forces pope to climb down”. Turns out it was just an opinion piece, but good God! Donald Trump is Victory!

* It is of course the height of hypocrisy for the pope to go to Mexico and criticize Trump’s proposed immigration policies, when Mexico’s actual policies are many times more racist, xenophobic, brutal, and harsh. And of course, the Pope himself allows zero muslim refugees to wander into the Vatican.

However, buffoon? Perhaps not. How about whore. Remember, the Catholic church needs donations from reach people. And rich people love cheap labor. If the pope was not carrying water for the people making all that money from cheap foreign labor (I hear that Merkel is proposing to force the refugees to work for big German companies for a euro an hour!!!! How profitable is that!), then donations to the Catholic church would like decrease significantly.

It’s hard to go too wrong in analyzing politics, than by following the money.

* British America dates back to around 1607. That’s 400 years of history of which we’ve only been a nation for 240 of those years. There were parts of Spain that were occupied for 700 years! Parts of Greece and the Balkans for 450 years! That’s longer than the entire English experience in the New World. Throw in a couple million European slaves and suddenly the narrative loses its power to all who are not already insane.

* Good thing His Holiness is protected by infallibility in regard to faith and morals. That allows him to be right about something.

* To my knowledge the instructions contained in Deuteronomy haven’t been enforced recently. Donald Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism–I haven’t noted his call for her execution for apostasy. I have read of sentences of death for apostasy in Afghanistan. Yes Muslims are a continuum, but enough of them are at the extreme end to constitute a genuine menace. Even “moderate” Muslims support the ultimate goals of Islam: the Ummah of the One True Faith, in which non-believers are tolerated only so long as they remain in dhimmi status. Moderate Muslims just disagree with more energetic Muslims about how to get there. I can see why moderate Muslims are frustrated; in a few generations they will be so numerous in the west that they can use the existing political process to impose the sharia–the more energetic faction alerts the dhimmis to their eventual fate.

You distinguish the United States from Western countries–upon what basis? The U.S., it is true is slipping into Latin America status, but the tradition of the United States is rooted firmly in the West–representative government, the common law, etc. As for terrorist incidents in the U.S., you should check with the relatives of the almost 3,000 people killed on September 11. Or how about Major Hassan, Soldier of Allah, gunning down fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar?” Or that business in San Bernardino? Or the recent attack by a machete-wielding Somali in Ohio? What does it take to convince you these people are a threat, As Kipling put it, you just never know “When the gods of his far-off land, shall repossess his blood.” We have a colossal surveillance state and are stripped of our dignity every time we board a commercial aircraft, largely to avoid terrorism by Muslims.

And what do they bring us? How many couscous cooks and rug merchants do we need? They come from a culture that peaked around 900 A.D. and hasn’t amounted to much since. If we really need immigrants (which I very much doubt) there are better choices than the results of recurring counsin marriages since the Bronze Age.

There are numerous Muslim majority countries. If you find these people so noble and interesting, by all means go and live with them. You have my sincere best wishes. But they are little but trouble when they try to mix in Western (and I include the U.S.) countries.

* And if anyone doubts the power of “game”, the dark arts, learned charisma, etc., or still thinks of it as some gimmick for socially awkward losers, watch and learn from Senor Trump, the true MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD. After blows and controversies that would have folded most candidacies, Trump looks like he actually will wrap-up the GOP nomination.

And in true Trump alpha fashion I hope he uses this little dust-up with His Holiness to keep pushing farther, harder, deeper. Don’t apologize. Don’t back-down. Reframe. OWN IT.

CNN Anchor Erin POZette: “How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
TRUMP: “I’m not hated. And look, I’m doing so well in the polls, and I have such a good message, that all the world’s leaders are talking about me. President Obama talks about me. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in their debates talk about me. The British Parliament holds a special session to talk about me. And now the Pope talks about me. When was the last time you had all the leaders of the world talking about someone who isn’t even out the primaries yet? They talk about me imore than the guy currently in the White House [tin laugh].”

Yeah, like a lot of you and our gentilious host I too would prefer a Presidential style less down the road to Idiocracy, but that horse has long left the barn. If Trump is a blowhard or buffoon what does that make the other candidates?:

Yeb: Invasion is an act of love.
Kasich: Single moms are the real heroes of our society.
Rubio: And Obama knows exactly what he’s doing…
Christie: Since we can’t not let Muslims in, let’s pretend to do something by attacking Russia so we can start pretending we’re doing something by attacking Syria.
Clinton & Sanders: Mmmm… refugees good, smugglers BAD!
Sanders: My first act as President will be to smash the Syrian refugee for-profit smuggler industry and then organize the refugees into employee-owned, LGBT-friendly, migration co-ops so that these poor Syrian families can get to Europe and America in a carbon-neutral manner…
Clinton: My first act as President will be to send Navy ships into the Mediterranean. My second act will be to give the State Dept. nuclear weapons to destroy those Navy ships, so that State Dept. personnel can unimpeded begin issuing green cards.

* Massive European immigration was a disaster for the first natives. Massive African immigration was a disaster for the recent European immigrants. And even the newer waves of European immigration had major negative consequences (introduction of ethnic voting blocks and continental preferences for leftist politics, flooded industries with massive supply of labor to kill wages and set off union/capital wars, gave us the Mafia, etc.) despite a shared Western heritage.

* Muslims deserve to have their own countries, where they ought to remain, or who ought to help there fellow religionists.

Western countries should refrain from dropping bombs on them. They need to be contained in those nations.

* We agree that:

1) There can be substantial negative consequences to large-scale immigration,

2) Kosovo is an example of very negative consequences natives from large-scale immigration, and immigration by Europeans to the New World is another,

3) It is sometimes possible to assimilate small numbers of Muslim immigrants without large negative consequences,

4) It is difficult or impossible to come up with examples of non-harmful large-scale Muslim immigration.

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on The Donald

WP: The so-called ‘Islamic rape of Europe’ is part of a long and racist history

I guess Muslims don’t rape European women at a high rate? Or is it that we should not notice?

Ishaan Tharoor writes in the Washington Post:

A popular right-wing Polish newsweekly, wSieci or “The Network,” published a deeply provocative magazine cover this week. It shows a young blonde woman, garbed loosely in the flag of the European Union, being groped by three men. Only the six swarthy arms and hands of the assailants are in view, but the message is clear and barely needs the brutal cover line: “The Islamic rape of Europe.”

According to the Daily Mail, the Polish magazine said it was focusing on “what the media and the Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of Europe.” An editorial in its pages, entitled “Hell Europe,” inveighed against a culture of “tolerance and political correctness” that supposedly led to the grim scenes on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne and other northern European town centers.

Groups of men, many apparently of Arab or North African descent, went on a shocking criminal rampage that led to hundreds of complaints to the police of rape, sexual harassment and other abuse. The incidents fed into an already growing backlash against European policies welcoming migrants and refugees, particularly an influx from war-torn Syria.

Breitbart, the far-right American news website, picked up on wSieci’s cover story and detailed its message of a clash of civilizations:

Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress” — the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”. This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”, as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.

The narrative of an Islamic or Arab takeover of Europe, though hardly new, has gained real traction in recent months, propagated by both xenophobic activist groups as well as populist political leaders and parties.

To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns posed both by the surge in new arrivals as well as the continuing instability and conflicts in the Middle East. The attacks in Cologne, writes the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, were a reminder to the West of the Muslim world’s “sick relationship with women” — a product both of patriarchal and religious norms as well as the stifling legacy of authoritarian rule.

But perverse, misogynist behavior is not the province of just one culture or society. And much of Europe’s anti-refugee hysteria, as my colleague Adam Taylor charted this week, has been overblown and fueled by often misleading innuendo and rumor circulating on social media.

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on WP: The so-called ‘Islamic rape of Europe’ is part of a long and racist history

May A Jew Pray On His Knees?

Is it OK for a Jew to pray to God spontaneously while on his knees? Or is that too goyish? Asking for a friend who grew up a goy and got used to praying on his knees.

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NYT: Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor

For the past 300 years in the West, Jews have often had incentives to side with the fringe against the core. Now that the fringe (including blacks, latinos, and Muslims) is more anti-Jewish than the white core, that might change. Jews, like blacks, respond to incentives. If Jews in Europe keep getting slaughtered by Muslims, Jews will increasingly side with the anti-Muslim nationalist core (National Front in France, etc).

If people are rewarded for pointing out all the flaws in the majority, they’ll keep doing it. If they are punished, they’ll stop.

In strongly Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, there’s no incentive for Muslims to criticize Muslims. That’s not tolerated.

Every functioning society has to have taboos. The flag was a sacred object in America, for instance. The more Jewish Israel gets, the less permissible it will be to trash Jews and Judaism there. The more Jewish the Jew, the less interested he is in hearing criticism of Jews. Orthodox Jews tend to be more Jewishly nationalistic and chauvinist than Reform and secular Jews. If you want to get along in Orthodox life, you don’t trash Jews and Judaism.

The main reason blacks love Obama is that they see him as black. The main reason many non-blacks hate Obama is because they see him as black.

New York Times:

CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court.

“They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.”

When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters.

After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.

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Are Palestinians Getting Smarter?

The average Palestinian IQ is about 85, the same as American blacks.

The average Ashkenazi IQ is between 105-120, the average Sephardi IQ is 97 and the average Mizrahi Jew has an IQ of 92.

A friend tells me that it seems Palestinians have gotten a lot smarter. They attack police, military, border guards rather than civilians.

It is sort of like the BDS. The Israelis wanted the Palestinians to practice non violence and then when they started the boycott movement, the Israelis have gone all out to try to defeat it.

When the initial stabbing attacks were on random civilians it helped Israelis say the Palestinians were irrational and didn’t care about civilian life. But by switching to the military, it is more like a war and it becomes difficult to label the Palestinians as targeting civilians. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Debka: Sunday, Feb. 14, will go down as a landmark day in the terror campaign the Palestinians have been waging against Israel for five months. It marked the latest, deliberately ramped up phase. After advancing from rocks, stabbings, car rammings and teen attacks, through the stage of loners to gangs of two and three, it moved up this week to shooting and explosive devices. Four Palestinian shooting attacks took place in 12 hours, most using knock-off Carl Gustav submachine guns turned out by illegal foundries in Nablus.
The latest attacks were deliberately planned to maximize casualties amomg Israeli police officers and soldiers. In Jenin it started with an ambush: Two 15-year old boys threw rocks at a group of Israeli reservists, who gave chase. One of the fleeing boys then pulled out a submachine gun, turned round and sprayed the pursuers, who returned the fire, killing the boys.
Using another tactic, at almost the same time, a Palestinian drew a submachine gun during a search at a checkpoint between the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa and Bethlehem. Before the Border Guards police manning the checkpoint were harmed, they shot the gunman dead.
That evening, gunfire from the Palestinian village of Jilazon struck buildings at the Jewish community of Beit El near Ramallah. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
This new terror trend played out shortly before midnight Sunday at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. A 20-year old Palestinian approached a group of Border Guards as they were changing shifts, He carried a suspicious looking bag. When ordered to halt for a search, he pulled a Karl Gustav submarine gun out of the bag and started shooting. The police were faster and shot him dead. But during the melee, a second Palestinian positioned unnoticeably 100 meters away opened fire on the police He too was shot dead before causing harm.
He was later discovered to be a Palestinian policeman, a member of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus. He was the third Palestinian cop known to have taken part in a terrorist operation.
For the past three weeks, ever since the combined shooting and explosives attack on Jan. 25 in Beit Horon next to Route 443, in which Shlomit Kirgman was murdered, it has been clear that the Palestinians have shifted from loners to teams of two or three terrorists and upgraded their weapons from knives to guns and explosives.
The current stage holds even greater menace because, even though a guiding hand is evident, Israel’s intelligence and security services are still unable to provide an advance alert of imminent attacks.
The IDF chief of staff, Lieut. Gen. Gady Eisenkot, admitted on Jan. 19 that the intelligence networks had not provided a single advance warning of any attack. On Feb. 9, he offered an explanation: “The situation today is very complex with no central direction. Terrorists don’t have to depend on accomplices and don’t need an organizer, a planner or a laboratory for making explosives. All they need to do is snatch a knife from their kitchen.
Five days later, it is obvious that this theory no longer washes. Not every Palestinian can pick up a Karl Gustav in his kitchen. Someone is handing them out with ammo to specific addresses. The recipients are also undergoing some sort of training in their use. In that case, how are the preparations for imminent attacks being missed by the Shin Bet?

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The Indispensable Sex

Martin Van Creveld writes: Last week a female Israeli soldier, Hadar (meaning, roughly, “Splendor,” or “Glory,”) Cohen, was killed in the course of duty. Two months into the Israel Defense Force, just two days after she had completed her basic training and taken the military oath of allegiance, she found herself standing guard at Old Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. With her were another female soldier and some male comrades. Three terrorists (some would call them Palestinian freedom fighters) armed with knives, submachine guns which they concealed under their coats emerged. One terrorist stabbed and was able to wound the other female soldier before Hadar gunned him down, probably saving her comrade’s life. Thereupon a second terrorist turned on her and stabbed her to death before he and the third terrorist present were “wasted”—this is standard language—by her fellow soldiers. She was nineteen years old.

I did not know Hadar personally. Ere she was killed, I had never heard of her. By all accounts. she was what her name proclaimed her to be: namely, a splendid young woman with her entire future in front of her. Idealistic and determined to prove herself by serving her country as best she could, she volunteered to do a man’s job; i.e was trained to become what both the IDF and the media call a lohemet, meaning either “fighter” or “warrior.”

But do not allow yourself to be misled. The term does not mean she went through anything like a full infantryman’s course. No Israeli woman does, and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly. All it means is that she was taught how to use her weapon, apparently a shortened version of the M-16 rifle (the real thing would have been too long for her to operate efficiently), and put into a bulletproof vest. So equipped, she was made to stand guard at what is currently one of the most dangerous spots in Israel; dangerous in the sense that, over the last few weeks, it has been the scene of several more or less similar attacks.

Even in Israel, the only country in history which (to its shame, some would say) has conscripted women into its military, a dead or injured female soldier is no ordinary event. That explains the media circus that has been going on around the deceased girl. Hadar’s own funeral was attended by the minister of home security. Accompanied by his retinue, the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Eisenkot, came to visit the female injured soldier in hospital and saluted her in front of the cameras. Not to be outdone Prime Minister Netanyahu, normally not the most sensitive of men, did the same. Had the dead and injured soldiers been male, almost certainly none of them would have bothered. All three may have felt that there was something deeply wrong, morally speaking, in making Hadar stand guard as she did. Or else, which in Netanyahu’s case seems more likely, that doing so would provide yet another photo-op.

Ultimately the reason why there is something deeply wrong with having women guard men and sacrifice themselves for them, instead of the other way around, is rooted in our mammalian biology. As everyone knows, the mammalian female’s investment in conceiving the young, bearing them, and bringing them into the world is huge. Not so that of the male who takes just a few minutes to do what has to be done and withdraws. Females can only have so and so many offspring during their lifetime; for males, so large is the number as to be practically unlimited.

The mathematics of reproduction explain why, among many mammalian species, the lives of males count for much less than those of females. When there is a threat it is the males which defend the females, never the other way around. Among us humans, the dangers surrounding delivery—at one time, one woman in four used to die in or soon after childbirth—provide another reason why women should not be heedlessly sacrificed. Briefly, nature itself has made women the indispensable sex. Compared with men, in any society they are a biological treasure and must be preserved. Even if doing so costs the lives of men.

Elementary, my dear Watson, Sherlock Holmes would have said. Yet the members of that peculiar species, modern feminists, seem unable to grasp even the most elementary biological facts. Half a century after Betty Friedan raised the standard of revolt, their real motives in claiming the kind of equality that cost Hadar her life remain no less mysterious than the famous feminist mystique itself. Unless, of course, Freud was right and penis envy makes the world go round.

Poor Hadar. I am aware that some people on the other side would say that she got just what she deserved. Be that as it may, and putting politics aside, all she herself wanted was to “contribute” to her country. But apparently she could find no better way to do so than to do what men normally do and what nature, by giving them stronger bodies, has made them more fit to do. Now she is dead, and my heart goes out to her and her family. Yet I cannot help wondering whether, by getting married, giving birth to a couple of children, and raising them properly as a mother should her contribution would not have been greater than it was.

May her soul rest in peace.

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Break Up The Banks?

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that bring John Lennon back? Would it cure asthma? Would it cure AIDS? Etc.

Little kids formulate more intelligent arguments than this when they’re trying to get out of being punished.

* The game is as old as time. Divide and conquer.

It works on even the people that see it. Steve is an intellectual so he hates businessman. He wants a strong white culture but where is any power supposed to come from if a group gives up trying to win? Almost every win at some point derives from strong businessmen.

* That’s unreal. Of course it could really be used as a retort for any policy under deliberation. For example, would raising the tax rates end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?

* In my hopeful moments I wonder whether the last 8 years (I’m including the election season) has soured a majority of the American electorate on identity politics to a degree that Hillary would be rejected. It’s been so downright exhausting, and I have to wonder whether continuing the grinding (this time with sex in place of race) would be enough of a turn off to people to preclude a Hillary administration.

* Before thrifts were allowed to “grow their way out of their problems” with “reforms” during the Carter and especially the Reagan administrations, regulation was as simple as pie or maybe you forgot all those jokes about bankers hours.

Back then all a thrift could do was make residential real estate loans which were single family houses and housing blocks with under 4 units. That is why you see so many 4 blocks in the older parts of a city. You tend to see them as the duplex on the bottom floor and the duplexes on the top or the 4 townhouse unit like the Monopoly game apartments.

The thrifts took in deposits and made safe well documented home loans. They paid out more in interest than banks and charged less for home loans. That was their niche and the commercial banks got the rest.

As long as interest rates stayed constant and low everything was fine. They started offering assumable mortgages just before interest rates went haywire and money market funds started sucking away their deposits.

Unless the bank is involved in criminal activity, how difficult is it to determine if the bank is solvent when you only have a few main variables in a linear equation? You have your depositors accounts and the interest rate. You have the home loans and the interest rate. You have your costs and the amount of money you have set aside for loan losses. You have the number of problem loans and a reasonable determination of what the default rate will be and the percentage of the loan recoverable in foreclosure. There isn’t much more than that.

The problem was that the House of Representatives biggest source of campaign cash was S&Ls which were usually smallish 1-3 branch office operations. Carter was supposedly given a report that it would cost 15 billion to wind down all the bad thrifts and roll the whole industry up. The FSLIC would have had more money for that operation but the deposit insurance rate had been reduced at the behest of the industry many years before. The roll-up wasn’t popular with the thrift owners, many who would be wiped out if they were insolvent beyond all reasonable help.

As is usual they turn to the “experts” from the industry who deduce that the way out is to allow thrifts to branch out and make new loans so that the old assumable mortgages would be a much smaller percentage of their whole portfolio. When Carter’s deregulation didn’t fix the problem they do what they always do and dig the hole deeper. This also makes regulation a lot tougher since the mix of loans is more complex. Now add in a gutted regulatory agency, the ability to accept deposits from anywhere in the country, and sleazy developers buying thrifts so they can have their own private piggy bank and you get the mess it became.

* “Made her” take her clothes off?

If the late 20th Century taught me anything, it’s that girls will take off all their clothes, outside, in public, for photos (or just casual delectation), for damn near anything: art, civil rights, slut walks, peace rallies, rock concerts, anything.

All they need is some authority figure to tell them it’s OK, and they’ll get nekkid as a jaybird.

Posted in Banks | Comments Off on Break Up The Banks?