Ted Cruz confirms that “New York values” is code for “Jewish.”When Cruz accused Donald Trump of having New York values, there was a debate about whether this was an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik insisted that Cruz’s words were innocent of bigotry against the Jews, arguing, “One thing that is striking is what Cruz did not mean. For decades, centuries, the accusation of being ‘very New York’ or ‘too New York’ or ‘having New York values’ meant, simply and frankly, too Jewish. … For the first time in modern history, a right-wing opportunist has attacked New York values without being even subliminally anti-Semitic.”
Perhaps Gopnik had a point in saying that in the absence of other evidence, Cruz deserved the benefit of the doubt from accusations of using an old anti-Semitic trope. But now Cruz has clarified what New York means in his mind. Again, talking about Trump at recent New Hampshire event, Cruz said, “For him to make this attack, to use a New York term, it’s the height of chutzpah.” Chutzpah is a Yiddish word, so a “New York term” means one inflected by a dialect associated with Jewish immigrants and their descendants. And that can also only mean that Jewish values—sorry, New York values—are inimical to the good conservatives of the American heartland.
About 80% of American Jews vote for the Democratic party, so yeah, I think there’s a disconnect between these particular left-wing Jewish values and the values of white non-Jewish America.
Posted inAnti-Semitism|Comments Off on Is The Phrase ‘New York Values’ Code For ‘Jewish Values’?
It’s a well-known fact that intelligence corresponds to various kinds of life outcomes at the individual level, such as income, education, drug abuse, criminality etc. A little less known is the fact that national average IQs correspond to similar outcomes on the national level. This has been shown by among others psychologists Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, who have found staggering correlations between national IQ and things like health, education, income, crime, corruption, democracy. To give you a rough idea, here are some of the findings,
Educational measures like TIMSS and PISA correlate 0.79-0.92
Number of scientists and engineers correlate 0.61
Measures of per capita national income (GDP, GNP, GNI) correlate 0.51-0.89
Poverty and unemployment: -0.63 and -0.76 respectively
Crime in the form of homicide, assault and rape: -0.21 to -0.82 with distinctly higher correlations for the more accurate measure of homicide
Corruption: -0.27 to -0.68, all but one study above -0.54
Democracy: 20 of 22 measures show correlations around 0.60
Life expectancy: 0.51-0.82, expect for one study that found a negative correlation (possibly a typo)
Anyway, you get the picture. All the basic requirements for modern civilization – democracy, education, wealth, health and (lack of) crime and corruption – are strongly related to national IQs.
IQ 97: The Breaking Point
Seeing these correlations, it’s easy to assume that national IQ averages would correspond to specific degrees of development – that South Korea with an IQ of 107 would be much more civilized than Australia at 98, which in turn would be fairly similar to Russia or some other country at 97. But looking at the stats this is far from the case. Instead it seems like there is a point, somewhere around 97, above which a modern civilization can be maintained and below which things abruptly begin to fall apart. To illustrate this I’ll review some of the correlations mentioned above.
GDP (PPP) Per Capita
You can’t have civilization without money. It pays for education, healthcare, police etc. If we use the national IQs from Photius.com, who appear to have the updated version of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data set (correct me if I’m wrong), and compare them with the GDP/PPP that takes local purchase power into account, we find clear support for the idea of a breaking point at 97 or thereabout. If we exclude oil nations, the top 20 with populations over one million, according to Wikipedia/IMF are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Taiwan, Belgium, Denmark, UK, Finland, Japan, France, Israel and South Korea.
In these top 20, there are nine nations in the 98-99 range, but only two countries below 98 – Israel and Ireland. Both can be partly explained by the fact that they receive plenty of financial aid from USA and the EU respectively. And it’s unlikely that Ireland will stay in the top 20 given its huge public debt and very high unemployment.
And if we look at more “normal” countries with IQs below 98, those without oil or rich friends, we find Slovenia with an IQ of 96 at 24th place, then Cyprus with an IQ of 91 at 26th, and Greece with an IQ of 92 at 27th. And Greece may well have lost this spot as I write this. So at 98 there are plenty of wealthy countries, but at 97 it suddenly seems to evaporate. And this isn’t just about money; if we turn to corruption we find a very similar picture.
Corruption
According to the Corruptions Perceptions Index (CPI), the top 20 countries (again with a population of over one million) most free of corruption are,
Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Hong Kong, Belgium, Japan, UK, US, Chile, Uruguay, France, Austria and Ireland.
Strictly speaking this is 21 nations since Austria and Ireland share the 20th spot and it seemed a bit random to exclude the one or the other. Anyway, we find 10 countries in the 98-99 range – including the top 4 and 6 in the top 10. The only three countries below 98 are Ireland (see above), Chile with an IQ of 90 and Uruguay with an IQ of 96. Again we see how everything is fine at 98, but at 97 and below things go south.
Crime
Turning to crime, so to speak, we find the top 20 countries with the lowest homicide rates (and more than one million inhabitants) according to Wikipedia/UNODC are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Bahrain, Norway, Austria, Oman, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany, Qatar, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, China, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Australia.
This clearly breaks the pattern since we have five nations in the 98-99 range and just as many low-IQ nations, all from the Arab world. However, if we are looking for a point at which modern civilization begins to crumble, then we shouldn’t look at dictatorships at all. They can keep the murder rate low with social control and oppression, but at in doing so they disqualify themselves as candidates for civilized societies. So if we limit our sample to at least somewhat civilized countries we get a different picture. This is of course a rather subjective method but I think we can all agree that the countries above can’t be a part of it. I have included Hong Kong but excluded China so that’s where I draw the admittedly somewhat arbitrary line. The top 20 at least moderately civilized countries with the lowest homicide rates then become,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Poland, France, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Portugal and Serbia (IQ 89).
Again, this became 21 countries because the two last share the 20th place. We find nine nations in the range 98-99 and four countries below that. The anomaly here is Slovenia at 6th place, a country that was also a mild anomaly with 24th on the GDP per capita list. But overall, this confirms the previous findings in that there are plenty nations in the 98-99 range but at 97 or less they are few and nowhere near the top of the list.
Indeed looking at where the sub-98 countries are on these lists we find that they made places 9 and 18 on the GDP list; 17, 18 and 20 on the corruption list and 6, 18, 20, 20 on the homicide list. So they are not only few but mainly at the bottom.
Democracy
Finally, let’s have a look at the Economist Democracy Index for 2012. The top 20 nations with more than a million people are as follows,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Germany, UK, Czech Republic, Uruguay, Mauritius, South Korea, USA, Costa Rica and Japan.
As you might expect by now, around half of these, nine, are in the 98-99 range whereas only four are below that. Again, Ireland is breaking the pattern, as are Uruguay, Mauritius and Costa Rica with IQs of 90 and 89 respectively. We also find that four of the top five have 98 IQs whereas those below this level are at 11, 15, 16 and 19.
An Index of Civilization
So what happens if we add these measures up? I did this by scoring point in reversed rank order starting from 100 for each measure to create an civilization index. A statistician can probably come up with something better, but it will give a rough idea of the overall picture. The chart below shows the result,
As expected, there is a general pattern of higher degrees of civilization as intelligence increases. But the most civilized countries are all in a cluster with IQs between 98 and 101. Below 98 the level drops dramatically as can be seen by the lack of dots in the upper left part of the chart. The only distinct anomaly left is Ireland which scores 360 points for the 12th spot and, less striking, Slovenia at 20th with 335. Or, given what I’ve mentioned about the Irish economy, it may be Slovenia that is the more genuine anomaly here – clearly not as horrible as it’s portrayed in the Hostel movies. At any rate, combining these factors eliminates anomalies and further strengthens the support for an idea of a breaking point at approximately 97.
Posted inHBD, IQ|Comments Off on IQ 97: The Breaking Point
let me point out that with notably few exceptions, so-called “HBD” (or “human biodiversity”) is a movement that exists largely within the confines of the internet. This, of course, has done absolutely no favors to its dispersal within society at large, because if technology has taught us anything, it is that the anonymity of the web tends to bring out the crazy and stupid in everyone, Surely there was a time when people actually tried to research certain topics before launching a slurry of half-baked and inchoate opinions with an audacious (and entirely unwarranted) degree of self-confidence — not so much because people were any better informed in yesteryear than they are today, but because certain structural barriers posed an impediment to the crazy and incompetent expressing their ideas in lofty places. Now that (most of) these have been safely dismantled, we’ve got nutters from Stormfront sparring tête–à–tête with anthropology professors over elementary facts that anybody can look up in a linguistics textbook. How splendid is that.
This is a most sudden and hilarious change of affairs. Thanks to the almighty web, we’ve got “white genocide” nutters, “red pillers”, devotees of Asatru, Sedevacantists, keyboard warriors, “neo-reactionaries”, social justice warriors, 4chan experts, and bedlamites of every stripe and fashion littering the comments section of every blog about human biodiversity. [JayMan: and we sure do!] They’re not only shockingly ill-mannered and coarse, but many of them have yet to absorb all of the facts about “HBD” that have been settled science for several decades — you try explaining to any of these “Dark Enlightenment” lunatics that single mothers are not responsible for adverse outcomes in bastard children, as is proven by a wealth of longitudinal adoption studies.
I can’t decide whether or not I like it at all, for the life of me — but it’s here to stay!
“not responsible” as in single parenting is not responsible for X, Y, etc.
Also, regarding mass immigration, be careful where you draw your lines.
The whole point of Charles Murray’s Human Acccomplishment is not just that Europeans have accomplished a lot more than other races over the past five hundred years, but that certain subgroups within western Europe proper have proven themselves to be vastly more creative than the others. Just what exactly have the Portuguese contributed to physics recently? Average IQ varies considerably among white European populations, roughly 10-12 points from the highest to the lowest, from the highest to the lowest, as does a host of other psychological dimensions such as conscientiousness, social trust, empathy, etc.
There is no such thing as a singular “white” race, and there never has been — selective pressures operate a lot faster than people often imagine, and so there goes Duchesne’s crackpot Indo-European theory. Yes, human races do exist, but selection pressures are different everywhere in the world, not just on opposite sides of a continental divide. The high accomplishments of Brunelleschi, Marconi, and da Vinci are hardly reflective of the creativity of the typical lazzarone in the mezzogiorno, any more than it is possible to extrapolate directly from sharpeis to lhasa apsos.
There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere), but if you seriously want to turn back the clock at this point, why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian, Irishman, or eastern Slav from the United States, considering the poorer intellectual achievement of these European populations. After all, who are they to sap the creative juices of the master race?
Thank you brother!
I don’t know if there’s just something in the air or what, but “misdreavus” managed to get out everything that has been really irking me all day long. (And believe me, I’m not the only one who felt that way, just today even!) We’ve seen “misdreavus” unload on the nutty garbage that percolates in this sphere before. One time recently was against health/obesity rubbish that is largely taken as gospel. Look, I understand that for the reasons stated above, we are going to have crazies and craziness in the HBD-sphere. And many of the more prominent individuals among these do offer quite a bit of insight, at times. Nevertheless, it often feels like I am doing double duty not just counteracting the standard PC dogma, but addressing the right-wing crazy that rails against it (who are emboldened by the wrongness of the PC liberals to believe that all of their fanciful musing is correct). This in addition to the detestable outright White supremacists in this space (or whatever you want to call yourselves – if you feel comfortable in KKK robes or wearing a Nazi uniform, you fit the mold), who, really, aren’t any more desirable to have around than, say Islamic radicals.
If the facts about heritable human differences are to be ever taken seriously, it needs to be extricated from such utter nonsense, as well as from the mean-spirited sentiment.
COMMENTS:
* HBD tells us that British accomplishment is, to a significant degree, the result of British genes. Similarly, Nigerian, Pakistani and Polish accomplishments (or lack there of) are, to a significant degree, the result of their respective genes. (Not knocking the Poles here, just sayin’.)
So, if you want the kind of accomplishments that Britain produced in the past to keep occurring (and most people do), then the ongoing demographic replacement of the British population should strike you as a very, very bad thing.
So, assuming you like technological progress and stuff like that, HBD does basically say “There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere),” misdreavus said it, I believe it.
And if you support a strict moratorium on immigration, your political views on this topic are as extreme or more extreme than the National Front. And let’s not kid ourselves, this is the topic that people are going to judge you by, not your views on petty issues like social welfare or gay marriage.
So, people who believe what misdreavus believes about immigration are already plenty Nazi enough to get a beating from the antifa.
* Telling immoral people to just be more moral without changing the environmental conditions that allow them to produce more children than moral folks simply doesn’t work. The immoral folks will just keep ignoring you. Bill Cosby has been trying this tactic for decades, and it hasn’t worked.
I highly doubt cultural condemnation was ever the driving force preventing large scale single motherhood; rather, the abysmal survival rates for unwanted and unplanned children and high death rates for the poor in general simply prevented these kids from existing and bad planning genes from getting passed on.
If you want to change that, then you have to change the environment in which homeless people feel more confident about bringing children into the world than Harvard grads, not yell at people about how they ought to get married. Even when single mothers do try to get married, they marry the men they find attractive, which doesn’t actually change the genetic situation. Even if you could force them to marry IT guys, or the deadbeats to marry fat women with nice personalities, these still wouldn’t be “stable two parent homes” because the dumb people in the equation are not capable of long-term stability.
* I don’t understand why you think that HBD is needed to justify an ethnostate; to my mind, you merely need an ethnos and a willingness to affirm the principle of national self determination. I don’t recall the Southern Sudanese calling upon HBD to justify their succession; why would the situation be any different for e.g., White nationalists? That said, to some extent, one could draw upon HBD. For example, when arguing against race based immigration policies, you state: “why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian…”.
Your reasoning: since selective immigration must be justified based on capacity, and since many of a given race are less capable than many of another, one can not justify an exclusively race based policy. But, of course, bioethnonationalists don’t draw upon human capital -HBD, for justification, they draw upon ethnic genetic interest –HBD; they, seeing a nation as an extended biological family, propose to discriminate on the basis of overall genetic relatedness. In doing so, when preferring a low capital Sicilian to a high capital Korean, they exhibit no inconsistency.
Now, I don’t recall what the whole-genome pairwise relations were, but I suspect that Europeans tend to form a nested cluster within the Caucasoid race (which includes indigenous Europeans, many Central/South Asians, North Africans, and Middles Easterners) and that this region of genetic space forms the basis of the “white race”, biologically understood. That is, I suspect that one could carve out of multidimensional genetic space a natural population which loosely overlapped with geographically defined indigenous Europe while excluding many other caucasoid populations. Maybe not. To the extent not then either our bioethnonationalists would need to boot the less related European populations, include the more related non-European (Caucasoid) populations, or take into account other considerations such as culture relatedness. Generally, they do the last. Whatever the case, this is a marginal problem for them — like Israeli Jews deciding who precisely qualifies as a Jew.
So, yes, Stormfronters and others can draw upon HBD to some extent when it comes to justifying their proposed ethnostate. Of course HBD can never justify the principle of national self determination. It can just be employed to construct a defense of the idea and ideal of a bioethnos. Now, while I stand in defense of their position, I don’t back it for various, largely selfish, reasons (e.g., I’m a miscegenator). The position is important to defend, though, because it represents a more or less coherent application of genetic interest-HBD, which, itself, represents, more or less, a logical extension of foundational HBD principles (e.g., Hamilton’s rule).
Also, it’s worth defending because it is one of the core types of applied HBD for which anti-HBD was developed to undermine. Some here might see ethnic-genetic interest-HBD and applications thereof as too dangerous or too problematic — just as many elsewhere see IQ-HBD. If so, I think that’s a mistake.
* HBD largely exists outside of conventional moral horizons; and it has not rigorously developed norms. Misdreavus is correct that this situation represents, at very least, a marketing problem; the attempt to draw lines is appreciated — I could use some guidelines myself; the problem is the manner. HBD is politically neutral; the lines need to be politically neutral. Misdreavus seems to section of the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, and Alt-Rightism; yet these positions are not — at least from my perspective — categorically morally problematic, despite being anti-egalitarian; rather, they suffer from the same problem as HBD regarding morales and norms. Generally, lines should be drawn but drawn in the most politically and morally inclusive way palatable; caution should be taken when labeling “nutters”.
* Jayman and Misdreavus are just trying to create the Cathedral for HBD thinkers. You can wrap it up in judicious morality, you can make it about Us and Them, but at the heart of it, misdreavus was saying man, these people over here need to Shut Up, and Jayman was like, preach it, man! We need to clean things up around here! We can’t have people with the wrong opinions! We need *science*, man!
But to the extent *this* exists, this thing, whatever it’s called, whatever I have a node on, it is little other than a stand against the notion of the unspeakable. So once you violate that, there’s nothing left.
* Judith Harris explained this in her book. Parental treatment affects the child’s behavior temporarily (so long as the parents are able to physically overbear in the child’s life), and it affects the relationship between parent and child. That’s one reason it’s wise to not be a dick to your kids: they will remember it.
Posted inHBD, Race|Comments Off on Jayman: The Problem with HBD, the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, Alt-Rightism, and All That Jazz
Chanda Chisala has been producing pile after pile of nonsense for quite some time. At first, I was content with simply leaving comments at his posts refuting his rubbish because it was rather easy to point out where he was full of baloney. Since then, I’ve been banned by him, mostly for my signature flair.
I intended to continue to ignore his nonsense since it was such obvious rubbish that it didn’t seem to be worth my (now very precious) time. But then I realized the value of having nonsense essays picked apart for the nonsense they are. Rebuttals are highly valuable to skeptical readers who doubt nonsense but can’t quite put their finger on the problems themselves. So, in that service, I write this rebuttal to Chisala’s latest piece.
Chisala’s theory is that different human groups differ in the degree of genetic canalization, and that explains the differences in average IQ between groups. It seems he lifted the concept of genetic canalization from Greg Cochran, who I’ll let describe the phenomenon. From Survival of the Flattest | West Hunter :
Genetic canalization is the extent to which an organism is buffered against the effects of mutations. Waddington said “developmental reactions, as they occur in organisms submitted to natural selection…are adjusted so as to bring about one definite end-result regardless of minor variations in conditions during the course of the reaction”. Canalization can act to buffer against environmental perturbations, and selection for resistance to such environmental noise may also produce resistance to genetic noise. But right now I’m thinking about genetic canalization.
Up to some point, the effects of not too many, not too serious mutations would be buffered: those mutations wouldn’t change the phenotype. In the same way, your typical tractor is not designed to nanometer tolerances: parts can be somewhat out of spec – up to some limit – without messing up performance.
…
Canalization is a product of natural selection. There would be stronger selection for efficient canalization in a species with more genetic load
…
It might explain why load doesn’t seem to have much effect on IQ over most of the range, why we haven’t seen general IQ depression in the children of old men.
There are global differences in brain size. Brain size is certainly related to intelligence, both on the individual level (Pietschnig et al 2015) and (even more so) on the group level (though the both the group level and individual level correlations are less than 1.0). In order for Chisala’s idea to work, these environmental insults must also cause certain racial group differences in brain size.
But, as we know, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that environmental insults can affect brain size (see the Zika virus). And sure, sub-Saharan Africa is loaded with pathogens and other environmental insults. But racial differences in brain size are seen between people of European, African, and Asian ancestry in the United States (from Rushton & Jensen, 2010):
(At this point, of course, we cue the sociologist’s fallacy invoking the poorer environments of Blacks even in the U.S.) But, Chisala is claiming Blacks are more susceptable to environmental insults that supposedly affect IQ – insults that (save perhaps iodine deficiency) have not been shown to actually impact IQ in any way. I’ll go into more detail in a future post, but there is little solid evidence for a negative impact of most supposed environmental insults on IQ.
We hear that poverty can sap brainpower, reduce frontal lobe function, induce the fantods, etc. But exactly what do we mean by ‘poverty’? If we’re talking about an absolute, rather than relative, standard of living, most of the world today must be in poverty, as well as almost everyone who lived much before the present. Most Chinese are poorer than the official US poverty level, right? The US had fairly rapid economic growth until the last generation or so, so if you go very far back in time, almost everyone was poor, by modern standards. Even those who were considered rich at the time suffered from zero prenatal care, largely useless medicine, tabletless high schools, and slow Internet connections. They had to ride horses that had lousy acceleration and pooped all over the place.
In particular, if all this poverty-gives-you-emerods stuff is true, scholastic achievement should have collapsed in the Great Depression – and with the miracle of epigenetics, most of us should still be suffering those bad effects.
But somehow none of this seems to have gone through the formality of actually happening.
Of course, it’s also worth mentioning that brain structure differs detectably by race, as previously discussed:
a new paper, Fan et al 2015, that the details of cortical surface structure of the brain is highly predictive of genetic ancestry. Indeed, as Fan et al put it:
Here, we demonstrate that the three-dimensional geometry of cortical surface is highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events. The geometry of the cortical surface contains richer information about ancestry than the areal variability of the cortical surface, independent of total brain volumes. Besides explaining more ancestry variance than other brain imaging measurements, the 3D geometry of the cortical surface further characterizes distinct regional patterns in the folding and gyrification.
Indeed, an earlier paper from this team (Bakken, Dale, and Schork, 2011) found that this works within racial groups as well, as the case with Europeans (see also the section Intraracial Group Variation below):
In our group’s previous study, we found that area measures of cortical surface and total
brain volumes of individuals of European descent in the United States correlate significantly with their ancestral geographic locations in Europe…See also Brain Topography | West Hunter and Psychological comments: Racial brain differences
Then there is the work David Piffer on polygenetic score. Basically, the known genomic hits to IQ vary in frequency between the different populations highly according to average IQ. From Piffer 2015:
Published Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), reporting the presence of alleles exhibiting significant and replicable associations with IQ, are reviewed. The average between-population frequency (polygenic score) of nine alleles positively and significantly associated with intelligence is strongly correlated to country-level IQ (r = .91). Factor analysis of allele frequencies furthermore identified a metagene with a similar correlation to country IQ (r = .86). The majority of the alleles (seven out of nine) loaded positively on this metagene. Allele frequencies varied by continent in a way that corresponds with observed population differences in average phenotypic intelligence.
…Going even beyond this, if we follow Chisala’s logic and assume that somehow adverse reactions to the environment are responsible for the size, structural, and performance differences of African brains relative to other groups, then we have another problem: the performance difference between different human groups isn’t a 20th and 21st century phenomenon only – it goes back for the entirety of recorded history.
We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors of today’s nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today’s national development outcomes. Although our strongest results are for 1500 A.D., we find that even technology as old as 1000 B.C. is associated with today’s outcomes in some plausible specifications.
It’s not like the poor performers and the strong performers of today are a new thing. They’ve been poor performers and strong performers throughout history (by and large). Indeed, in sub-Saharan Africa (emphasis mine):
Why this meandering reminiscence of mine about a random ruin in Turkey? Because sub-Saharan Africa has remarkably few ruins for its immense size.
This fact is not well known. It is so hazy in the contemporary mind that Henry Louis Gates managed to sell PBS on a six episode miniseries about African ruins called The Wonders of Africa without, apparently, anybody in PBS management calling his bluff about the lack of wonders that his camera crew would wind up documenting in one of the most boring documentary series of the 21st Century.
As Staffan put it, “we can’t adjust for their entire history.”
In any case, this recent nonsense idea of Chisala, aside from running afoul Occam’s Razor, is his attempt to undercut the rebuttal to the deprivation argument. That is, it is a common argument of blank slatists that poverty and other forms of deprivation are responsible for differences in average IQ and national performance. Aside from emptiness of the whole deprivation argument, as noted above, there is the fact (as pointed out by me in Welcome Readers from Portugal!) that outliers to this pattern of deprivation and IQ all perform in accordance to their measured IQ, not according to their level of deprivation. Poor rural Chinese perform nearly as well in IQ and scholastically as the other East Asian societies do. Citizens in wealthy Arab oil states perform as badly as those in poorer ones which lack oil. I’m sure Chisala doesn’t like this particular uncomfortable fact, so I suspect he concocted his feeble theory in part to try to nullify this unwelcome reality.
And finally, there is the fundamental problem that Chisala doesn’t understand either evolution or the formula that guides it, the breeder’ s equation. There is no reason to suspect that human groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments would be the same in all their cognitive and behavioral qualities. In fact, a priori we should expect them not to be, since such equivalence after so many generations of separate evolution is nigh impossible.
I expected most of this to be obvious, which is why I haven’t paid too much attention to Chisala’s posts. But, I may have overestimated both his impact and people’s ability to spot the obvious, hence, this writing.
COMMENTS:
* Thank you for dealing with this person’s drivel. I waded through his first two efforts and felt afterwards that it had been an exceptional waste of my time. He really did not seem to understand, among other things, that there are obvious filters operating when migrations occur. I appreciate that you’ve been willing to sacrifice your time to save that of the rest of us. Also your prose is like crystal spring water compared with Chisala’s muck.
* I think a basic understanding of biology would lead one to think that, a priori, populations separated for thousands of generations in widely different environments would develop significant genetic differences in cognition and behavior between the populations. Real world experience would appear to corroborate this to a great extent. If anything I think the differences between races are greater than a dry mathematical model would probably predict.
* Genes matter, as does culture, as does history, as does free will. They all interplay in a manner that makes it very difficult to give the proper diagnosis and prescription to any given social problem. We all have agency but some of us have more agency due to genetic and cultural factors.
Posted inRace|Comments Off on Rebutting Chanda Chisala
“Every man loves to watch documentaries about the Nazis,” says a friend in Australia. “If there’s one on the tele, I can’t help watching it. I’m fascinated. Appalled but fascinated.”
Chaim Amalek writes: “I would prefer to watch documentaries about the lives of the Gedolei Yisroel (Learned Elders of Israel), but the antisemites at the History Channel refuse to provide any.”
TheOnion: “NEW YORK—The History Channel confessed Monday that it used Nazi footage to fatten its coffers. “The time has come to bring our network’s shameful legacy to light,” History Channel president Warren Brabender said. “Over the past 10 years, more than $300 million in ad revenue has been generated through the airing of Nazi documentaries.” The channel will likely be required to pay reparations to Americans who viewed the atrocities.”
For many years, The History Channel has been dubbed “The Hitler Channel” by wags for the seemingly endless programming devoted to Adolf Hitler and World War II.
So, when I received a copy of the DVD version of “The Third Reich” (A & E Home Entertainment) in the mail last week I wasn’t sure if I would bother to watch it.
How many times can I go down that road?, I thought to myself.
But a friend who saw the three-hour special when it debuted on The History Channel last year told me it was extraordinary so I decided to see if I could make it through another account of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler.
“The Third Reich” is indeed a spectacular piece of work, a new take on Hitler and the impact of the Nazi regime on average Germans (who may or may not have been aware of the evil that was being done in their names).
Directors Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick have built the documentary around newly discovered footage, much of it home movies shot by Germans before and during the war.
The home movies are combined with recently unearthed tourist promotional films — for the 1936 Olympics and other supposed glories of the Hitler regime — that now have a ghastly ironic tone for what they were not saying about what was going on under the Nazi regime.
“The Third Reich” also includes new angles on the filming of two of the most famous Hitler-glorifying documentaries — “The Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” both directed by Leni Riefenstahl — showing us the trickery and stage-craft that helped to embellish the Nazi image.
The documentary is especially interesting on the popularity of the Hitler Youth and the insidious way the Nazis tore apart family life and traditional sexual behavior as they brainwashed kids into believing they were part of a “master race” and were duty-bound to reproduce that species as quickly as possible.
We hear tales of parents who were horrified to learn that teen girls and boys were being pushed into sex so that the girls would become pregnant with “perfect Aryan” babies. When one mother went to a Hitler Youth camp to bring her daughter home, she was told to shut up and go home or face being sent to a concentration camp.
I am with the Daily Caller now. Check out my Washington Gadfly column on bottom right.
The mascot is a chimp; that is a strong rebuke to many powerful conservatives in DC. They are still profoundly embarrassed by the whole thing.
I added the purge to former AEI editor Karl Zinsmeister’s wikipedia page and within hours somebody who had edited lots of his entries took it down. If you want to confirm Zinsmeister is kzinsmeister at the Philanthropy Roundtable. But look up the article about how he deceptively edited an article about him on the AEI website. It came out when he joined the Bush White House.
Tucker Carlson called me and offered me a job after a few great hit pieces I did for them last February. He knew all about the Weyrich thing and thought it was disgusting. But he did not know about Karl Rove getting me fired and Chimpstein taking the fall for him. When I explained it he was even more disgusted with what happened.
But anyway, that is water under the bridge. Now, I feel like I am 30 years old and working for the late New York Post editorial page editor Eric Breindel again. I had never met Carlson or even been in the same room with him or communicated via phone or electronically. But when we met we bonded instantly. It reminded me how I bonded with Eric Breindel.
Plus, I finally listened to Weyrich and forgave all the people who harmed me.
Remember Michael Horowitz? The guy who harassed and yelled at and lied to my father to cover up for Hudson, Weyrich and the White House. I was seething with rage towards him for years. Now, we schmooze all the time now about my stories like nothing ever happened. It is just like before the fight when he took me to a steak dinner and offered to get me a White House job.
Posted inEvan Gahr|Comments Off on The Return Of Evan Gahr
Just as it looks good for a vape company to have Leonardo DiCaprio sampling its product, it looks good for Israel to have Leo walking around the streets of Tel Aviv. It’s great marketing, because it implicitly ties Leo’s brand to Israel’s. It telegraphs to the world that our cultural elite sees nothing wrong with Israel — a message that the country desperately needs at a time when artists are increasingly being called upon to boycott it.
While it’s easy to imagine Leo taking Israel up on the offer (even if it’s just to try to find Bar Refaeli 2.0), it’s harder to imagine others jumping on the bandwagon — or El-Al flight. As Haaretz points out, Best Supporting Actor nominee Mark Ruffalo, who tweeted his support for the people of Gaza during the 2014 war, will probably sit this one out. He might even tweet criticism of the swag bags under the hashtag #Oscarwashing.
But the Israeli marketing move may well appeal to some of the fence-sitting nominees whose politics lie somewhere in between those two actors’. Even if it attracts just a couple of them, that will make it “worth it” from Israel’s point of view.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on Here’s Why Oscar Nominees Are Getting Free Luxe Trips to Israel
Steve Sailer writes: “Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism is that the most heartfelt journalistic extrusions will be demands for how society must be re-engineered so that, come the Revolution, the writer herself will be considered hotter-looking. Maybe Professor Tinsley hasn’t quite worked out all the details of how Beyoncé being exempted from criticism over how she chooses to play dress-up rubs off on poor Professor Tinsley in any concrete fashion, but, you know, Hope and Change!”
* Bollywood itself is appropriation. The Indians took concepts from American cinema and transformed them into something appropriate for their own culture – and that’s a good thing! Global culture is richer and more complex for it.
But you can’t paint white men as villains in that situation, so there’s no point in talking about it.
* There is no social engineering possible that would make these wannabe African feminists hot. I wonder if the taxpayers in Texas are aware that some of their money supports these morons.
As another iSteve fan pointed out, ok, you can keep your tacos, and sombreros, and rap music, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Us evil white guys will keep Western Civilization, which by the way we built, and all the good things you a**w**** take for granted. Like clean water, reliable electricity, rule of law, low levels of corruption, the Internet, und so weiter.
* Seriously, it’s b.s. like this that makes me say bring on the 3rd-world ization of the US cause it ain’t gonna be pretty for the increasingly pampered Afro-American black middle class.
Never underestimate the provincialism of US blacks, particularly if they have quasi-African made up names. For people who revel ad-nauseum in their “color” and how vibrant and diverse they are in their rainbowness, as opposed to us pasty sorts, they tend to assume brown equals kinship and sameness. They tend to down-play the very real importance of facial features and body type in determining identity. As one Afghan put it to me, where he grew up everybody had the same complexion so they used facial features to determine who was what.
My wife, of mixed ancestry, but South Asian appearance, gets lots of crap from her “sisters” in Africa. Told to go back to her country, passive aggressive behavior when dealing with bureaucrats. No doubt it’s the lingering affects of the white man’s divide and conquer. Simple sexual jealousy or just plain old fashioned, perfectly natural bigotry are not factors educated people think about when discussing or theorizing black anger or surliness.
Blacks in Eastern and Southern Africa definitely do not like “Asians.” Idi Amin didn’t chase all those Indians out of Uganda by his lonesome.
This is also really interesting considering the Tanzanian student who recently got attacked in Bangalore.
I suspect, though, these women if they actually learned anything about the regions they purport to study, beyond reading some dumbed-down Franz Fanon, they’d blame centuries of indigenous colorism on whitey.
* I’d like to see a feminist intersectional analysis of Yemenite Jewish Israeli transgender pop singer Dana International’s song “Indian Movie”.
Obviously there would be points for being transgendered, and people from Yemen who are not Jewish would definitely be considered “people of color”…
But my guess is that the Jewish and certainly the Israeli part would cancel all that out and this would be seen as terribly appropriative.
* The Democrats may be branded the black party here and at similar blogs, but ultimately they aren’t and can’t be the black party for the simple reason that there aren’t enough blacks to win elections for them. That’s why they have a sizeable number of whites and other nonwhites in their coalition. The Republicans on the other hand, can and do win elections with white voters, which is why they’re the white party, the half assed Hispandering and the like notwithstanding.
* “Ceasing to exist” is a form of racist oppression. It deprives folks like Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Natassja Omidina Gunasena (Someone’s Law: The more absurd a Negro’s name the lower that Negro’s intellectual capacity.) of someone to blame for their many all too obvious inadequacies and failures. If all Whites were to “cease to exist” it would reduce Negroes to a state of savagery. If all non-Negroes were to “cease to exist” it would more than likely lead to the extinction of Negroes.
* Some folks, as these two fierce feminists, have too much time on their hands. Lacking any self-discipline, self-awareness–or any historical and cultural context–engage in fantasy, i.e. how the world should be as they re-imagine by means of social critique. Yet, end up at “woe is me.”
And they certainly lack irony–studying and teaching about Africa(ns) at a Western university. Shouldn’t they practice what they preach: What happens in Africa, stays in Africa?
* I’m sruprised that with your Danny Paddy Moynihan fetish you didn’t use this chance to bring up the Indophilec pop “career” of Daniel Patrick’s daughter (and Caroline “Yunno” Kennedy posse member), Maura Moynihan (Harvard ’80). This viddy HERE makes Coldplay and Ms. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter look like culturo banditos! This is a woman truly in tune with the ethos of the east.
She even has previous experience as Hiberno-Hindi hitmaker! From the August 2, 1996 edition of your NY Daily News:
INDIA HAS MAURA TO GIVE THANKS FOR Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter has changed like a chameleon again. Maura Moynihan is now a pop star in India. She has released “Chakra Chant” and “Injie Party” in the 650-million strong nation, and they have zoomed to the top of the charts. Maura has been a comedian, a singer (Maura and the Mystics), a cable TV producer and, of all things, a gossip columnist. During her divorce from Richard Avedon’s son, John, a follower of the Dalai Lama, rumors surfaced that she was dating George Stephanopoulos (she denied any liaison). Word is she didn’t get much of a settlement. She did get custody of the couple’s son, who is staying with his father while mom is back in India, where she spent her youth when dad was ambassador there. Sen. Moynihan’s office claimed to be unaware of Maura’s newfound success.
¡Madre di Krishna! Can’t a desi catch a break?
Posted inAmerica, Blacks, India, Journalism|Comments Off on Sailer’s 1st Law of Female Journalism: Why It’s Okay for Beyoncé to Culturally Appropriate Bollywood
Hard to believe. Is this some kind of sea change? This is mainstream Hollywood, where the memo is that the various trans/gay/questioning/racial/ethnic/gender groups have been oppressed via reactionary politics and a revolution is needed to throw the yoke of oppression off of the truly meritocratic people of this land who are capable of building a wonderful society once the wrong people are replaced.
Maybe our politics will catch up someday. Meanwhile, I have to listen to Bernie and Hillary try to top each other over who can promise the most free stuff.
* Judging by their films, the Coens tend toward a bleak, pessimistic conservatism. They’re certainly not Hollywood progressives or even neo-liberals. Watch The Ladykillers on Netflix. Probably the least interesting of their films, but no anti-racist progressive would have made that movie.
Amusing article about migrants returning home because they don’t like European food, the chilly weather, and find cigarettes too expensive. Not once did the reporter raise the critical question of whether a legitimate refugee would return home for such reason. Didn’t bother to ask the migrant why did they claim refugee status and did not ask the EU why they granted these people refugee status.
* What really interests me about A Serious Man is how the movie subtly critiques modern Jewish-American treatments of theology and mysticism, especially in contrast to Catholics. A Jewish man goes through immense suffering and his religious leaders basically blow him off and tell him to walk it off and offer nothing about God. This contrasts with a usual Catholic pastor, who would give nice parables about suffering and the problem of evil, which at least give their flock some kind of psychological fat to chew over and help them deal emotionally with their problems.
The key to the movie is the opening scene about the the possibility of a dybbuk (that is murdered) and the Parable of the Goy’s Teeth. In both circumstances (the presence of an evil ghost and the miracle of a message from God written on the back of teeth), the Christian reaction—especially Catholic—would be to investigate them as miracles/supernatural events and make big deals out of both and think about them a lot. Exorcism and miracle investigation are important in Catholicism.
For the Jews in the story, however, such an investigation seems boring and banal; for a people who think a lot about a lot of things, they don’t seem to care when God is literally talking to them. Except the protagonist, of course.
Also noteworthy is how the Jewish religious leaders in the movie make no effort to force morality on the cheating wife/neighbor, and how they take their jobs as sinecures.
All in all, the Cohens are basically wondering what their ethnic religion offers to their people, as it gives them no tools to deal with suffering, miracles, moral failings, or even care for others.
* Miller’s Crossing. Its more of a generic roaring twenties mob movie with a special twist that the mobs in question are seething with homosexual intrigues. I invite you to consider the following: The plot appears to be driven — and in fact is entirely driven — by homosexual liaisons of one sort or another, e.g., Bernie and Mink, Mink and the Dane and, as the astute viewer eventually realizes, Tom’s unrequited fixation on Leo. Is Tom a homosexual? The clues are pretty obvious. He’s connected to every homosexual in the movie and knows all details of the seething homosexual ferment in Millers Crossing to which most of the straights in the movie seem oblivious. He never actually gets it on with Verna except maybe when he’s drunk out of his mind and he certainly never acts from any tenderness towards her. The last scene in the movie is a fade on the crushed Tom as Leo walks away from him and into his new marriage.
BTW, I’m firmly heterosexual and socially conservative but this is perhaps my all-time favorite movie, not least for Carter Burwell’s lush and brilliant musical score. I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times. The first time the homosexual content registered but didn’t seem that important. Subsequent viewings have convinced me that this is an essential – maybe the essential – aspect of the movie that aside from artistic quality makes it a uniquely Coen Brothers movie.
The war between Leo and Johnny Caspar starts because someone is learning what the fix is in Caspar’s boxing matches and betting accordingly thus cutting into Caspar’s profits. (This is the irony behind Caspar’s opening lecture on “ethics”.) We learn much later that Mink and Bernie Bernbaum are homosexual lovers and this is their racket. Mink is the insider in Caspar’s gang and Bernie is making the bets. Mink is also the Dane’s lover. The Dane is Caspar’s enforcer. Bernie kills Mink and, because the Dane is unsure who did this, turns the Dane into a loose cannon. The Dane’s rant about Mink in front of Johnny Caspar is what convinces Caspar that Tom is telling him the truth and Dane is a traitor. This is what causes Caspar to kill his loyal enforcer and ultimate weapon in the war between Caspar and Leo, a war which Tom has instigated to eliminate Caspar and give his boss, Tom, control of Miller’s Crossing. With the Dane out of the way Caspar is doomed. All of this is laid out clearly in various dialogues within the movie. If you’ve missed this I can’t help you.
Tom’s homosexuality and his hopeless infatuation with Leo is more subtle. But it’s Tom’s only reasonable motive for doing what he does. Although Verna is chasing Tom, Tom shows no interest in her. He has to be dead drunk to even share a bed with her. If you missed the other stuff, you’ll never get this.
An amusing wink at the audience is when Albert Finney (not his Leo character) goes in drag for the scene where Tom is beaten by a woman in a women’s bathroom.
* The Coens anti-white? Most of my favorite movies of theirs have working class white people as the heroes. Unless for some reason you were upset at the Coens portraying the KKK as evil goofballs, O Brother Where Art Thou? presented the South in a respectable light. Despite being lower class, most characters spoke wittily with a King James Bible vocabulary. Hell the movie spawned a Grammy winning album full of American Folk music, a true art of Scots-Irish southerners . (Inside Llewyn Davis also has an awesome soundtrack btw). Fargo has one of my favorite heroines and portrays a simple working class white (if you insist of viewing everything critically through a political lens like leftists) middle aged woman as a hero without resorting to making her an Ellen Ripley clone like the rest of modern cinema does with female heroes. Plus, if you have to interpret a meaning out of The Big Lebowski, it seemed to me to be about the ludicrousness of the New World Order (referenced with Bush’s speech in the beginning) of post-modernist feminists (Julianne Moore), posturing plutocrats (old man Lebowski and his little urban achievers), and nihilists (say what you will about National Socialism, but at least its an ethos). The movie instead hopes that we take comfort in the existence of simpletons like the Dude, for like the earth in Ecclesiastes, the dude abides. If the Coens show disdain towards any group consistently, its stuck up intellectuals. In Barton Fink John Goodman dramatically calls out the eponymous pretentious little screenwriter for being a self absorbed asshole the whole movie. Inside Llewyn Davis is the story of a folk singer who never makes it big because, like Barton Fink, he’s a self absorbed asshole who views himself as some grand artist instead of an entertainer. How can any conservative dislike that?
* The consequences of a Nazi victory in Europe would have been quite unpleasant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
As it is, Hitler racked up a highly impressive kill-count during the period 1939-45:
Soviet POWS starved to death by the Nazis during the Winter of 41-42: Approx 3 million
European Jews killed during the Holocaust: 5 million+
European civilians killed in Nazi “reprisal” operations: Approx 700,000
civilians who starved to death during the Nazi siege of Leningrad: 670,000
etc, etc
And American intervention was chiefly important in terms of preventing Stalin from dominating the entire continent. Sans American involvement, Soviet rule would have extended at least to the Rhine….
* In the light of the Bernie Bernbaum character (Tarturro), it’s lucky for the Coens that they’re Jewish, or there’d always be mutterings about anti-Semitism whenever the film is mentioned. You can’t get a much worse form of chutzpah than blackmailing your would-be assassin because he took pity on you and spared your life.
* The Coens’ acknowledged photographic inspiration for Miller’s Crossing is Bertolucci’s 1970 Italian movie The Conformist. That movie’s gay Fascist collaborator protagonist probably served as inspiration for Tom in Miller’s Crossing, right down to his woodsy moral reckoning.
* Recall DeNiro clapping heartily for the heroic Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar while Nick Nolte and many others sat there stone-faced. You can forgive “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and at least one “Fockers” movie after that.
* I saw Hail Caesar! last night. I will not be as respectful and nice as Sailor. The movie sucked donkey balls. It was awful. My wife and I fell asleep at points. At best it might be seen as cleverly amusing if you had a lot of interest in Hollywood during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare, and had read up on it.
I’m so sick of debased schlock. I wish Gentiles would get back into the movie-making business. Not only is money the root of life evil, apparently it’s also the root of the vulgarization of art and literature in Western civilization.
* “The Conformist” is good by itself, and very interesting for it’s obvious influence on 1970s American movies. I’ve never seen an analysis of the role of ethnic pride in 1970s Italian-American directing and acting, but I have to imagine that a lot of Italian-Americans saw Italian films like The Conformist and gained confidence that they could do something that stylish too.
* Don’t forget possible candidate Michael Bloomberg who will be 74 in another 8 days. Of the group, Trump is the only one who appears to be much younger than his actual age of 69. And, as far as I know, he has had pretty good health, unlike, for example, Hillary Clinton who had serious health issues a few years ago. If you recall, Mitt Romney was 65 when he ran in 2012, and he looked 20 years younger. So, it’s not just a matter of chronological age. But it is ironic when we have private corporations with a mandatory retirement age of 65 for their top officers to have a crop of presidential candidates a number of years above that age. On the other hand, we have Rubio at 44 (45 on May 28) or Cruz at 45 to choose from if you want relative youth. Knowing what we know now about JFK and having lived through 7 years of Obama, I would generally opt for age and experience over youth and inexperience.
* The issue isn’t really the composition of the Academy it is the need for blacks to be ‘validated’ by white institutions. Since black institutions, to the extent they even exist, are seen as second rate or copies of the white organizations, only white recognition matters to blacks. Thus we see these peculiar news stories where some black student ( African usually) wins admission to every Ivy League school. The reality is few, if any, white or Asian student is going to apply to every Ivy League school so the real news story is not that the black student was admitted to every Ivy League school but why? Here the answer is that the number of black students actually eligible for admission is so small that these schools fall all over each other to recruit those that do.
This formula applies throughout modern America. Blacks want white recognition, indeed, they now insist upon it, but heap scorn and accusations of racism upon those institutions who knuckle under and give it to them. The dilemma is the larger the role and more recognition blacks achieve from these institutions the less valuable it becomes. Does anyone consider the Nobel Prize in Literature to really matter anymore when 2nd rate Guatemalan or Nigerian writers are awarded it on the basis of ‘diversity’.
* Yeah, the problem here is that 84 year old Angie Dickinson was born and raised in an era where acting and such were judged on performance. She’s not hip to the new trend of social justice uber alles.
* The Oscars are boring and cater mostly to gays and women. The inclusion of more black candidates will still keep the old viewership and may get the academy more NAM viewers. It will then be the ultimate ceremony of smug moral righteousness that crowns its new emperor of the church of universal humanism.
* When I moved to Ohio for a year to look after my dying father I cleaned out a lot of his old books.
Pops had been a member of the NYT book club for many years so there were a fair number of best sellers from 30-40 years ago. I picked one up titled “Indecent Exposure” and started reading. Tossed it in the car and would read whenever I waited for my wife at the market. It was about a financial scandal at Columbia pictures in the 1970s where a high power executive producer named David Begelman forged a check with Cliff Robertson’s name on it. When Cliff got a tax notice on the check from the IRS the fraud began to unravel.
Most of the book centers around the Columbia power struggle between factions aligned with Alan Hirschfield and Herbert Allen, Wall Street players who helped Columbia recover from near bankruptcy to become very profitable. The Allen faction wanted Begelman reinstated and eventually drive out Hirschfield.
It was a good read and a fascinating glimpse into boardroom politics. Was a best seller around 1982. What struck me was not just the dominance of Jews in Hollywood but in American industry in general, as players in the drama assembled to fight from across a spectrum of well-known companies. Another tidbit was when the scandal broke in the media and Rolling Stone penned a hit piece on the affair and was sued by the Allen faction.
Anyway it was an interesting background to this recent Hollywood diversity crisis and the constant complaints about too there being many “white men” in the industry. Cynics might claim that wily Jews are orchestrating this entire controversy.
* I have a hard time sitting through more than about 10 minutes of the Academy Awards straight, but, yeah, Best Director, Best Actor, the Best Cinematographer, the Screenwriting awards, those are all big time male achievement categories, while the technical categories are of interest, too.
A fellow I used to know from the Boy Scouts, one of the other scout fathers, was at the last Academy Awards in his tuxedo as one of the three people who’d get to go on stage at the end of the show to accept the Best Picture trophy just in case their longshot low budget nominee happened to win. (It didn’t, of course, but J.K. Simmons from their movie got his Best Supporting Actor Oscar earlier that night.)
* FDR’s court-packing plan was pretty much of a victory for him even if it’s commonly assumed to be a black eye.
* The barely-disguised envy of so many of the aggrieved parties reminds me of a movie scene.
Doctor Zhivago, with the brilliant Omar Sharif (and the radiant Julie Christie), shows envy in a historical context. That Russian ‘public’ decided that a small family really didn’t need to live in such a big house, so they appropriated it.
Now, the modern ‘public’ wants to appropriate other selected assets, like awards. They’ll never stop to ask how people earned or accomplished, or acknowledge normative standards.
* “We never know how Tessio betrayed the family, and what could have been so big? It’s not like he assassinated the Godfather or Michael.
Similarly, we never learn what Freddo told Johnny Ola or did for Hyman Roth that was so earth-shattering that would require execution.
It’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking that for 40+ years no one has really questioned wtf were the betrayals all about.”
The fact of the betrayal is what matters. It IS big. It’s huge. He broke the circle of absolute trust, obedience and loyalty without which the family cannot function. Only an absolute punishment fits that crime.
I’m going to take a wild guess here that your ethnic background is not Mediterranean or Southern European. I’m Slavic not Sicilian and I understand this concept so well you could say it’s in my blood.
* Most of the ‘WHITES’ in the article are Jews. But that can’t be acknowledged. If the people who overwhelmingly control ‘HOLLYWOOD’ had Italian last names instead of jewish ones, there’d be howls of ‘MAFIA CONTROL’, senate sub-committee hearings and of couse RICO indictments.
But again none of that can be mentioned anymore than can be the singular world view expressed by
‘HOLLYWOOD’. But then of course, nobody ever accused that town of honesty.
* The appeal of the Oscars it that it is a live show. There are always one or more telling moments when celebrities are caught off guard.
Not to mention over the years the Oscars have had more than a few notable “wardrobe” malfunctions. Most memorable was Ashley Judd strutting across the stage as a presenter while not wearing underwear beneath her leg split dress and the annual event of Jennifer Lopez’s almost always too sheer top not holding up under the too intense lighting.
It’s always fun watching the obvious panic on the part of the director & cameramen as they struggle to reframe the live shot.
One has to suspect that such goings on are at least sometimes calculated so as encourage folks, even hetero males, to watch or at least DVR the show.
* At least in my experience, blacks aren’t particularly fond of the talents of any other races. I see of lease cars by the 1000′s and the ones we receive from black customers ONLY have black artists ( always pirated on cd) and ONLY have ‘black’ music stations on the radio presets. Come to think of it, millions of white kids wore Michael Jackson style clothing, millions white kids bought Michael Jordan endorsed products and Hundreds of millions of whites have always bought Motown and now mainstream rap music. It seems every added black member of the Academy Awards will only be a vote for black entertainers.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
But, as we know, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that environmental insults can affect brain size (see the 