NYP: FDNY’s new entry exam asks about everything but firefighting

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Back in 2007, the Bush Administration rewarded the firemen of New York City, 343 of whom died on 9/11, by suing them for disparate impact discrimination in hiring. In 2009 a Democratic judge ruled the test devised by the city of New York was racially/ethnically biased because it presented readings on fire safety and then asked hard questions, such as: what kind of chainsaw should you use to cut through a steel door? You could pass the test either by having strong reading comprehension skills or by studying firefighting intensively.

From the New York Post:

FDNY’s new entry exam asks about everything but firefighting
By Susan Edelman March 20, 2016 | 6:06am

​FDNY candidates ​will take an entry exam that quizzes them on topics like African ​killer bees and on math questions such as comparing veggie chips to pretzels, but little on firefighting.

With the city planning to give the first FDNY entry exam in five years in 2017, critics say the test has been dumbed down since a judge ruled ​a former exam discriminated against minorities.

A recently posted preparation manual asks aspiring Bravest to practice by watching videos produced by Lowe’s hardware store on how to install a ​toilet, replace a ​sin​k, and lay a tile floor.

“It’s great to prepare firemen for their second jobs as plumbers,” an insider quipped. “The FDNY might as well call this the ‘Side Job Preparation Guide.’ ”

To test reading comprehension, the tutorial asks applicants to read a 1998 Tampa Tribune article, “Natural Born Killers,” on African bees migrating to the United States.

On math, it first gives tips​ on solving word problems, then a sample exercise showing the nutritional labels for vegetable chips, rice cakes, trail mix and pretzel twists.

The first of 10 multiple-choice questions says: “Firefighter Harris ate one cup of Fruit & Nut Trail Mix. What percentage of Saturated Fat did she have (% Daily Value)?” Other questions ask test-takers to compare ​the ​snacks for fat, carbohydrates and protein.

In another exercise, applicants read labels on bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen, then answer questions such as: “Which medicine relieves pain from toothaches?”

… The test is apparently meant to level the playing field so those more familiar with firefighting don’t have an advantage.

… In January 2010, Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Giraufis ruled the FDNY exams first given in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against black applicants and halted their use. The city later agreed to pay $98 million in back pay to those minorities passed over, and give some a second​ chance to join the department.

The city and the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group of black firefighters, devised a new exam that Garaufis approved in 2012. Of 9,400 who scored high enough to be hired, 42.3 percent were minorities​ — more than ever.

As I wrote in 2012:

Now, the FDNY has finally learned the lesson that La Griffe du Lion pointed out years ago: If you want to please the feds, you can minimize disparate impact (percentage point differential) of the hiring test by making it extremely easy, then hiring randomly.

The 2012 test approved by Judge Garufis was passed by 97% of test-takers.

COMMENTS:

* Any test that requires study is, ipso facto, racist.

* LA County Sheriff Dept. had a test of basic English. To pass you needed to score over 50%, if you got 51% that was just as good as if you scored 100% in the hiring process.

* I suspect elite judges think a fireman’s job involves no knowledge or smartness. That its just a matter of running into a building with a hose.

In NYC you you have 150 year old rotten wood death traps standing side by side with new sprinklered buildings that compartmentalize to prevent the spread of fire. And all the buildings that come in between with varying degrees of safety. Firefighters need to know all types of building and their particular weaknesses and strengths.

Check out this introductory manual designed to teach NYC firemen the differences.

You don’t need to be a genius to figure this stuff out but you need to have a certain level of intelligence and diligence.

* That’s what Emily Bazelon of the Yale Law School asked in 2009 in Slate. I asked in response whether she had any career advantages in law in being the granddaughter of David Bazelon, chief judge of the first district court of appeal and Supreme Court justice William Brennan’s best friend.

* Do you ever experience the sensation of overwhelming despair washing over you after you read news like this? Sometimes it helps to pretend that I’m Alice and have gone through the Looking Glass, but I can only pretend that I’m in a make-believe world for a second or two before reality intrudes.

* I’ve taken firefighting exams before (not FDNY though). From my experience, the tests tend to have these type of sections:

1. Basic math
2. Memorizing tools/knots and their functions
3. Memorizing the layout of a room
4. Memorizing the details of a fire scene
5. Reading a fire-related passage and then later recalling details

You need to have good memorization skills to do well. Especially the ability to recall images.

* If you do well enough on the test, then they’ll call you in for an oral interview. Typically they’ll ask questions about your work experience, teamwork&leadership skills, views on ethnic diversity, etc.

The oral interviewers are under heavy pressure to give generous grades to certain underrepresented minority groups and also women. If you’re black or a woman, expect to be graded very easily at the oral interviews. That’s mostly because of all the law suits involving blacks complaining about racism and women complaining about sexual harassment. FF depts are eager to hire lots of blacks and women to avoid more law suits.

If you do well at the oral interview, usually you proceed to a second round of orals. If you do well there, you are given a background check. If you pass, you get the job. Of course, even after getting the job, you have to pass through basic training.

It helps to be a military veteran too, as veterans are given a large number of preference points. In one fire department I applied to, I was told that 30% of the FFs were veterans.

* Being a large-city firefighter is a good deal.

1. Typically the base salary for large-city staff FFers (attained after a few years) is in the 90-100K range. Very good benefits, strong union, and lots of vacation too.
2. They work a one-day on, two-day off schedule. Some work two-days on, four-days off schedule. So lots of time for hobbies, relaxing, partying, starting your own band, getting a side job, etc. Even when they’re on the job, there’s a lot of downtime and fairly low stress.
3. Very generous pension (50% of peak salary after 20 years on the force). Lots of fire fighters even “double dip” by getting a 50K/yr pension and working a second job.
4. Very strong job security. Rare for there to be layoffs.
5. If you test well, you can test up into senior level positions. Some of the higher-ups in the organizations actually have considerable prestige in their local city govts.
6. For a kid who can’t enter an elite career track (finance, law, medicine, consulting) and doesn’t want to go the entrepreneurship route, climbing the ranks of a FF department can be a good option to attain prestige and power. The competition is less fierce too.

I’d strongly advise any young man to consider a career in firefighting.

* FDNY is under more pressure to hire minorities than other departments. Not only do you see lots of black and Hispanic hires these days, but even Asians and (even more implausibly) Indians/Pakistanis. They want the dept to reflect the city’s diversity. NYPD is even worse.

For a very long time though, the FDNY just hired lots of ethnic Italian/Irish guys. They were able to get away with it too. Much better than the NYPD.

* You need to add a seventh bullet point: You’ll score a hot wife.

There are a number of firefighters in my Orange County neighborhood and all of them have very nice looking (my husband says hot) stay at home wives who have large rocks on their fingers and live in pricier homes than mine.

* My relative has tried out several times for the fire department. He graduated from a ten month long course on firefighting that cost him about 16K. One thing that he told me really struck me. The male testers have to drag a dummy 100 yards weighing 180 pounds. But the female testers only have to drag a dummy weighing 120 pounds. When I asked one of his instructors what would happen in real life if a female firefighter had to drag a 180 pound person out, I was just met with embarrassing silence.

* All standards are racist. Live with it.

* I have read that firemen have far fewer fires to deal with than in times past. Smoke alarms, automatic sprinklers, OSHA regulations, etc, have made fires less common and less destructive. When it’s time to run into the burning building and pull the children out, they have to earn their keep, but you can be a dummy or a weakling and get by for a longer time than was possible decades ago.

* Whether blue collar or white collar, intelligence and work ethic make a huge difference in quality and productivity. When it comes to fighting fires that difference is measured in the number of lives saved.

* About 80% of firefighting calls are EMT-related. Only 20% involve fighting actual fires.

EMT calls still require a high degree of competence. However, firefighting departments get huge numbers of applications and hire the top 1-2%. So even if they hire minorities/women due to AA, they can get fairly competent people. Just not quite as competent as they would if there was no AA.

Firefighting is still 95% white as a profession. As it changes and becomes more diverse due to AA, perhaps competency will fall.

* I’m familiar with a few firefighters that hold two “full-time” firefighter positions in two different cities. They’re able to schedule their 24 hours on/48 hours off to allow them to do this. The earn about $70K at each job, and earn two pensions!

The firefighters have strong unions and media and over the years have been able to bamboozle the public as to how “dangerous” and busy their jobs are. The local city officials are scared of the fire unions and roll over every three years at contract negotiation time. Remember, every firefighter wage and benefit was negotiated by city management and approved by city council.

* I’m a 45-year old NYFD firewhiner with 25 years of “service.” For my dedicated “service” to the good citizens of NYC, I deserve to get paid! I’ve got bills! Alimony & child support to three ex-wives, payments on my Escalade, Harley, and speed boat. I’m juggling three girlfriends, and have some serious gambling debts. I now make close to $200K per year but deserve more! Not too bad for a high school grad who was washing cars before I got on with the NYFD. I did, however, earn my A.S. degree in “Fire Science” on the City’s dime. You wouldn’t believe how easy that was. The “instructors” were my NYFD buddies, so I passed w/ all As w/o opening a book! And that silly degree got me promoted three times to Sr. Deputy Assistant Deputy Big-Cheese Battalion Chief Indian Chief. And I still have lots of free time to work out while on the job. I’m trying to get on next year’s “Hottest Firewhiners of NYFD” calendar.

Last year I “worked” tons of OT to spike my pension and will soon start accumulating my $100K/yr pension, and I’m only 45 years old! In 20 years, I’ll be 65 (the retirement age for most of you stiffs), the 3% COLA will have doubled my pension to $200K per year! My life expectancy is 88 years, so my pension will double again to $400K per year by the time I die. It gets better; my lovely 20-year old mail-order bride will collect my pension long after I die. Her life expectancy is 90 years. She’ll collect my growing pension for another 25 years after my death! The New York City has been very, very good to me. And I know you don’t feel appreciated, but a big thank you to the NYC taxpayers. Now get back to work and pay those taxes! Oh, by the way, F.U. Pay Me!

* I also think the presence of lots of Italians and Irish makes a difference. They tend to be much “meaner” than whites in other parts of the country. They’re not much into the idea of white guilt. They fought neighborhood integration and busing much harder than whites in other parts of the country. As recently as the 80s, the east coast had overwhelmingly white housing projects.

Of course, these days, their ethnic solidarity and clout isn’t quite what it used to be.

* LSAT entrance exam for law schools and the bar exam to practice law also have disparate impact on black and latinos but no judge is striking down those practices.

Presumably because they feel it is justifiable to select for intelligence in practice of law, not justifiable to do so for firefighting.

* That was the way it was originally in the Canadian banking system as well–the late Peter Jennings of ABC News used to tell of how, since he came from a respectable Toronto family but was not himself really college material (in fact he dropped out of the 10th grade), he was encouraged to take an entry-level job with the Royal Bank of Canada, with every expectation that he had an eventual shot at upper management despite his lack of education. Finance, in the Commonwealth countries, historically simply was not seen as an “academic” field.

Oh, and that “dumb” Canadian banking culture, as David Frum would be happy to tell you, was ruthlessly realistic in its mortgage lending standards into this century. As Orwell said, some things are so stupid only an intellectual can believe in them.

* In other countries, you have to take rigorous college entrance exams in order to pass into college in the first place, and also into the major of your choice. Many countries even place students on specific study tracks years before the end of highschool, and not all students qualify to even take the entrance exams for studying law.

We can debate the pros and cons of such a system versus the American one, but I think it goes against the American ethos to tell a student that they can’t choose what they want to study. I wonder if all the Bernie Sanders supporters quite understand the major restrictions that come along with free higher education, as it’s such a different system from the American one. Or do they believe that they can do away with these restrictions and keep the system as it is now, only free?

* I remember the television show Rescue Me. It was mostly Irish and Italian firefighters, with 1 token Puerto Rican and 1 token African American.

Posted in IQ, Race | Comments Off on NYP: FDNY’s new entry exam asks about everything but firefighting

Watch Out, Jewish Students: The anti-Israel Movement Will Boycott You Next

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Haaretz: Recent events at Brown University reflect a frightening new stage to the BDS movement: targeting Jewish students and institutions that don’t explicitly distance themselves from Israel.

Janet Mock was born in Honolulu in 1983 to an African-American father and native Hawaiian mother, and is a soaring star in LGBT circles—almost a pop icon of the transgender community, if you will. As I discovered last week, she’s in high-demand as a speaker on college campuses. “Moral Voices,” a social justice group that operates under the auspices of Brown University’s Hillel, secured her as a speaker for a March 21 seminar entitled “Redefining Realness.” The event was well-publicized, and — as evidence of its expected popularity — was slated to take place in Brown’s largest lecture hall. 
But, unbeknownst to the program’s organizers, Hillel’s right to sponsor events had apparently been revoked by a handful of student activists. A group calling itself “Brown Students” published a petition on Change.org urging Mock to disavow Brown/RISD Hillel’s sponsorship, since its umbrella organization—Hillel International—is pro-Israel on most issues. 
I take pity on my readers, and will therefore reproduce only the most critical part of the tortured document:
“Hillel as a corporation has consistently defended and even advocated for the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid. Israel’s violent policies center on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians. Further, the Israeli government has been ignoring (and actively perpetuating) waves of anti-African violence in the past few years, recently including the mob shooting and lynching of an African asylum seeker and anti-African state-supported police violence.” 
The petition’s authors also coughed up the highly-original pinkwashing charge — that Hillel is exploiting Israel’s positive record on LGBT rights in order to distract people from how evil the Jewish state is. 
The students were not protesting anything about Janet Mock; just that Hillel doesn’t have any right to host “one of their own” – a transgender woman of color – if it supports Israel. The petition attracted only 159 supporters — not all of them even Brown students — but as Mercutio said, “‘tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.” Janet Mock cancelled the event. In an email, her representatives explained that “the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event, and her visit was received with controversy and resistance rather than open dialogue and discussion about the issues closest to Janet’s work.”
The fingerprints of Students for Justice in Palestine were all over this from the start, and SJP’s proud confession in Monday’s issue of the Brown Daily Herald leaves no doubt that the petition was its handiwork. 
The Janet Mock incident was just one episode of the anti-Israel scourge that has racked Brown this semester. Hillel hosted its highest profile event of the year on January 28, when former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharanksy and Hollywood legend Michael Douglas came to speak about their “Jewish Journeys.” Needless to say, that program didn’t sit too well with the dark forces of anti-Israelism, whose faithful picketed the talk in an attempt to disrupt it. Then came the coup de grâce: Students at the Jewish and LGBT frats discovered anti-Semitic and homophobic vandalism graffitied on their walls last week. There’s no evidence implicating SJP in this, but when punishing the world’s only Jewish country becomes a permanent and obsessive feature of campus life, what happens next cannot be dismissed as an unhappy coincidence. 

Posted in Israel, Jews | Comments Off on Watch Out, Jewish Students: The anti-Israel Movement Will Boycott You Next

Microsoft Creates AI Bot – Internet Immediately Turns it Racist

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT:

Microsoft released an AI chat bot that is currently “verified” on Twitter called @TayandYou that was meant to try to learn the way millennials speak and interact with them.

It’s meant to “test and improve Microsoft’s understanding of conversational language” according to The Verge.

Things did get pretty controversial. There are other types of people in addition to ‘millennials’ who use Twitter that naturally found the bot, and some of them were able to “hack” into Tay’s learning process.

Here are some screen shots of tweets that were deleted once the Internet “taught” Tay some things:

1

gas

3

AI

 

And a Gamer Gate favorite:

Tay’s developers seemed to discover what was happening and began furiously deleting the racist tweets. They also appeared to shut down her learning capabilities and she quickly became a feminist:

Some think the offending tweets should have stayed up as a reminder of how quickly artificial intelligence could become dangerous:

Posted in Race | Comments Off on Microsoft Creates AI Bot – Internet Immediately Turns it Racist

America Was Founded On Anglo Identity

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Scott Greer writes: The 2016 election’s unprecedented nastiness provided House Speaker Paul Ryan yet another opportunity to pontificate on his “positive” conservative vision.

Lamenting the “disheartening” state of the current election, Ryan offered his alternative Wednesday — a politics focused on ideas.

According to the Republican leader, “America is the only nation founded on an idea — not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. Our rights are natural. They come from God, not government.”

Ryan then decided to give a history lesson on the idea-obsessed founders and how America’s greatest leaders have always come together through compromise and debate.

With that lesson in mind, he called upon America’s modern politicians to return their focus to “ideas” and instead of pandering to their respective bases.

The speech is obviously a rather gooey attempt to bridge the political divide, but there’s one line that stands above the platitudes and cliched allusions — America is a nation founded on an idea, not an identity.

It’s a popular notion to think that our nation was created in a vacuum and created solely to uphold abstract principles. That line of thinking believes there’s no cultural basis to the American proposition, and there’s no real national identity outside of the belief in meritocracy.

That’s pretty quaint — and largely untrue.

If Ryan had probably read the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s indispensable tome “Who Are We?” he’d know that America’s founding ideas are actually an outgrowth of the nation’s Anglo-Protestant identity. Put another way, that unique identity gave birth to the unique ideas that made us the nation we are.

America’s belief in individual rights, liberty and equality of opportunity could only come about from the specific culture and institutions that were brought to the New World by British settlers, as Huntington notes. That culture — which placed a premium on liberty and representative government — was unique to Anglo-Protestants and provided the worldview from which our Founders forged a nation.

If the 13 colonies were primarily settled by another people — such as the French or Spanish — we would almost certainly not be the country we are today.

Our Anglo-Protestant culture also bequeathed the nation’s strong commitment to hard work and the adoption of English as the all but official language of the land. Ryan endorsed that last quality by delivering his speech in that particular language, not French or Spanish.

It is true that our Founding Fathers were very much animated by ideas, but they also didn’t conjure up our country out of thin air. The reason many of them wanted to separate from the British crown and start a new country was over the feeling they were being denied their rights as Englishmen, not that they one day suddenly thought it’d be better to found a country on the idea that “the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.”

And our Founders were keen to emphasize the cultural identity the citizens of the new country would share.

As John Jay wrote in the Federalist No. 2, “With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.”

Sounds like Jay believed America was founded upon a clear identity — one that was shaped by war, history and blood.

The opening line of our Constitution gives credence to the idea that the citizens of this country share an identity which gave us our unique rights as Americans.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The heavy emphasis on “we” and “our” reveals a document that sees its people as more than a random collection of people who believe in meritocracy.

The sentiment expressed by Paul Ryan Wednesday, in contrast, makes it seem like our country was formed out of a void by that random collection of people. The fact is that America, while exceptional in its accomplishments and character, is not so different from other nations. It is based on an identity — one shaped by a shared culture, history and language among its citizens.

To think that a nation can be founded on the sole idea that every person can have a successful job no matter what their station in life is not enough to sustain unified body of citizens. Of course, many Americans do cherish the idea just described, but there is so much more to our country than that.

Assimilation is such an arduous, yet necessary task for immigrants to perform because it requires the new arrivals to imbibe the culture and values of Anglo-Protestantism. If assimilation only required you believe that you can do something different than what you were born into, over half the world could become an American overnight.

No wonder Congressman Ryan is arguably the GOP’s biggest fan of mass immigration.

It’s clear that America is much more than an idea. Without our long-established identity, America would cease to be a unified nation and would instead become devolve into a continental strip mall, populated by people with nothing in common.

Posted in America, WASPs | Comments Off on America Was Founded On Anglo Identity

Rams Made Deal With NFL To Draft Michael Sam To Not Film ‘Hard Knocks,’ Report Says

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A longtime NFL reporter revealed Wednesday the NFL agreed to a deal where the Los Angeles Rams — then St. Louis — didn’t have to do HBO’s “Hard Knocks” series in 2014 if they drafted Michael Sam.

“Sources say NFL agreed not to have Rams on Hard Knocks in 2014 if they drafted Michael Sam,” Howard Balzer tweeted.

Sam was the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team. The Rams selected him in the seventh round of the 2014 NFL Draft.

Sam was not shocked by the report.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Sam tweeted.

Balzer reported the NFL was concerned Sam wouldn’t be drafted, so a deal was made with the Rams.

“Rams didn’t want Hard Knocks even without Sam. League concerned he wouldn’t be drafted. Deal made,” Balzer said.

The Rams, who recently moved to Los Angeles, will be the featured team on “Hard Knocks” this year.

Sam, fhe former University of Missouri defensive end, was cut by the Rams before the beginning of the 2014 regular season. He was then signed to the Dallas Cowboys practice squad, where he only lasted seven weeks.

He signed a deal with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League in 2015 but only played one game after leaving the team for mental health reasons.

“The last 12 months have been very difficult for me, to the point where I became concerned with my mental health. Because of this I am going to step away from the game at this time,” Sam said last August. “I thank the Alouettes for this opportunity and hope to be back on the field soon. Thank you all for your understanding and support.”

Sam told Colin Cowherd in November he wished he wasn’t drafted.

“If I had my way, I really do wish I went undrafted,” Sam said at the time. “I could have actually went to a team who really needed pass rush, and needed a defensive end who could pass rush the quarterback. But the Rams, even though I learned a log from Chris Long and [Robert] Quinn, I think that I could have done better being on an active roster right now if I went to a different team.”

Sam said in January he’s going to give the NFL “one more shot.”

Posted in Football, Homosexuality | Comments Off on Rams Made Deal With NFL To Draft Michael Sam To Not Film ‘Hard Knocks,’ Report Says

New Zealand votes to keep its flag after 56.6% back the status quo

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Guardian:

After a lengthy campaign, voters have decided by a margin of more than 10 points to retain the flag with its strong links to the United Kingdom.

Preliminary results announced at 8.30pm local time on Thursday showed that 1,200,003 (56.6%) of voters wanted to keep the Union flag-centred emblem. Only 915,008 (43.2%) opted for the proposed new design by Kyle Lockwood featuring a silver fern.

The results of the referendum, which is estimated to have cost NZ$26m (£12m), are expected be confirmed next Wednesday…

The long-serving and popular Key had strongly supported the flag change but it was not enough to win a majority, with many suspicious of him trying to use the issue to build a legacy.

However, he said after the results were announced that New Zealanders should embrace the current flag and “more importantly, be proud of it”.

“Obviously I’m a bit disappointed there was no change but nearly a million people voted for change,” he said. “Just because it’s not the outcome I wanted doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile process.”

Deputy prime minister Bill English said there had been a “robust democratic process” that allowed New Zealander “to discuss who we are and how we want to be represented on the world stage”.

“I acknowledge there will be those who are disappointed with the outcome, but the majority of New Zealanders have spoken and we should all embrace that decision.

“This process has engaged Kiwis in their homes, in their schools and in their workplaces, here in New Zealand, and right around the world – it is something we’ve all had a point of view on.”

…Prof Paul Moon, a New Zealand historian at the Auckland University of Technology said changing the current flag would have been like “amputating” New Zealand history.

“There was no popular sentiment for a change. Indeed, most people barely considered our national flag as an issue until it was thrust in front of them in the form of an impending referendum.

“Entrusted with a once-in-a-lifetime task to select four alternative contenders for our national flag, the panel delivered options that were insipid and unimaginative. And to make matters worse, for all the talk of inclusivity, serious Indigenous input was largely whitewashed. What we were left with was culturally monochromatic and aesthetically neutered design to go up against the incumbent.”

“We were told a new flag was needed because we were ‘more multicultural, ‘more independent’, and ‘more vibrant’ as a nation. Putting these cliches aside, the premise that we change a flag as our identity evolves is inherently flawed. Flags, like our names, remain with us as we mature and are the sum total of our existence.”

The driving force behind this referendum is the Jewish prime minister.

Jews, while often respectful of Jewish traditions, don’t always have the same attachment to gentile traditions as their gentile neighbors. Jews, even when they vote conservative in Australia, don’t like the white Australian identity and don’t like Australia being part of the British commonwealth.

The lack of Jewish attachment to gentile traditions is not weird nor Satanic. It is basic social identity theory. The more strongly you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups.

On the other hand, the Chinese often live as minorities in the Chinese diaspora and they don’t have the same drive as Jews to change the traditions and attachments of their neighbors.

Jewish gifts, such as a high verbal IQ and emotional intensity, lead them to great success in the media and academia and to pushing social justice themes. There is always blowback to this Jewish pattern, however, including the Holocaust. Gentiles, strangely enough, tend to be attached to each other, to their countries and to their traditions and often don’t take well to Jews trying to change them. Today is Purim, and the Jewish community in that story was almost massacred because of Jewish disrespect for gentile norms (Mordecai wouldn’t bow to Haman, strange, in that there is nothing in Jewish law prohibiting such bowing).

Esther 3:8:

Then Haman said to King Xerxes, “There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of all other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them.”

Speaking as a convert to Orthodox Judaism, it is hard not to have some sympathy for Haman’s point of view. Does diversity make a country stronger or weaker? Is a country stronger or weaker when there is a smart and influential group within that keeps itself separate and practices different customs? I’d say it depends on the overall effect of the group on a particular place. In some countries, this type of group would be disruptive and destructive, and for other countries, this group might well serve as a stimulus for excellence and prosperity and openness. Jews may not be an equally wonderful fit for every country on earth. They may be better suited to some countries rather than others. For instance, Jews have always done best in the individualist Protestant countries as opposed to corporate Catholic and Muslim countries.

Jews (along with other minorities Muslims, blacks, asians, etc) do not, on average, tend to have the same relationship to their nation-state as majorities enjoy. WASPs in particular create certain types of high-trust, highly free, highly prosperous nations that are the envy of the world.

Jews are usually minorities in gentile lands, though they may be majorities in certain places such as Beverly Hills, and they will usually align with increasing rights for minorities at the expense of the majority. They will incline to supporting multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance and many other agendas of the left. Strong national, religious and racial identities among the goyim will frighten them. Many Jews will come from places such as Eastern Europe where Jews have long had horrible relations with their neighbors and many Jews will come from places such as Western Europe where Jews found much to admire in their neighbors.

“The Jew is everywhere a stranger and not even angels like strangers,” said Mark Twain.

Posted in Jews, New Zealand | Comments Off on New Zealand votes to keep its flag after 56.6% back the status quo

Terror In Brussels

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* Iraq, Libya, and Syria were stable before the West turned them into war zones.

When you create instability, it opens the way for radicals.

When Europe was shaken badly by WWI, it led to rise of Bolshies in Russia and Nazis in Germany.

When Japanese invasion messed up the KMT regime in China, it gave huge opening to the commies.

When North Vietnam and US destabilized Cambodia, it led to rise of Khmer Rouge.

I agree y’all that immigration is a bad, bad, and bad idea.

But the West has much to answer for for messing up the Middle East and North Africa.

A single drone strike killed many more innocent people in the Middle East than this attack in Brussels.

The West says that those drone strikes are meant to take out terrorists.

As far as I’m concerned, Western elites are no less terrorists for using lies and influence to destroy entire parts of the world.

And not just in the Muslim world but in Ukraine. Nuland is a terrorist.

Actually worse. The West, ruled by Zionists, have been into mass destruction of societies. They are destructionists.

Brussels looks bad, but look at eastern Ukraine. Look at Syria. Look at Iraq. Look at Libya. It’s total destruction.

Bush and Clinton and Obama are destructionists.

MORE:

* The neocon sabre rattling is all about Iran, which is not a real threat to Israel except indirectly through support of the Arabs in the West bank. It is very important to realise that Israeli politicians and the Lobby that take their cure from them, don’t dare mention what they see as the greatest threat. Supposedly Obama is the most anti Israel President ever, but that he has done absolutely nothing to stop settlements or restart the peace process does not mean he is doing anything good for Israel.

The official US policy supported by both recent Republican and Democrat presidents is for a process toward a new Palestinian state, which Israel and its Lobby have put into suspended animation. There isn’t enough unsettled land left for a meaningful new Palestinian state anyway. The West Bank Arabs will have to be given second class citizenship in what will be internationally recognisable as an obviously Apartheid regime, or full rights (either would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state within a generation).

The alternative, quietly longed for by many Israelis, is West Bank Arabs to fight against Israel and be relocated to the existing Palestinian state of Jordan during a wider war between ISIS and Israel. The counter-jumping chickenhawks of the Israel Lobby don’t dare suggest the aforementioned removal of Arabs, which happens to be the only thing that can keep Israel a Jewish country. Clinton would not let things (ISIS or similar organisation taking over Jordan and fighting against Israel) get that far, and she would not let Israel transfer the West Bank Arabs in any case. Trump is a very different kettle of fish.

Posted in Terror | Comments Off on Terror In Brussels

Steve Sailer: Hillary Speaks Out Against Walls Around America, Demands More Surveillance in America

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* I like how obtuse opponents are by focusing on a wall as if that is the only component to fighting the problem. If the political will ever comes about to adequately secure the southern border with proper fencing, then there most surely will be the political will to allow agents to conduct frequent workplace raids and deport those who overstayed a visa. Additionally such policies would also include not allowing illegals to open bank accounts and be issued with photo IDs or driver’s licenses. The wall/fence is just one component. By itself it won’t be highly effective, but in combination with the above it should make a noticeable difference.

* Michael Savage made the point today that Italians in the New York city police department worked against the Mafia in order that they would not have to live in the corrupt society that they left behind in Italy. Monitoring Italian neighborhoods did not alienate the typical Italian immigrant, they favored it. Thus, very plausibly, Cruz’s policy of monitoring Muslim neighborhoods would not lead to increased jihadism by Muslim – Americans. It’s a policy that would be favored by everyone not politically motivated.

COMMENTS:

* …how high does the wall have to be to keep the Internet out?”

The Internet can’t plant a bomb in an airport or shoot into a crowd of people at a concert. Muslims can rant for all they’re worth on Facebook if they’re at a safe distance from us in Syria or Morocco.

She’s again illustrating the choice we have when it comes to immigration. You can have tight controls of prospective immigrants, with intrusive probing of their private lives to see if they’re suitable candidates. You can also have blanket bans on races or religions who will never fit in. This will allow you to have a society with minimal surveillance of the citizens by the government (the libertarians’ ideal). On the other hand, you can have a laissez-faire immigration system combined with a police state to keep track of all the dangerous people (or their descendants) whose presence is the fruit your open-borders policy. You have to pick one or other of these combinations.

* There’s a certain logic to this madness.

Let’s say you’re a domestic company that receives nationals security-related contracts from the federal govt. The more Muslims enter the US, the more terrorism occurs. The more terrorism occurs, the more justification there is for your services.

Many of these contractors tend to donate very generously to our politicians, such as Hillary. They donate to political campaigns and also offer lucrative lobbyist jobs to retired politicians and military personnel. If she proposes more surveillance and more Muslim immigration, that benefits her contributors.

There’s another group of people who benefit. That group would be the “Deep State.” The more terrorism occurs in the US, the more of need there is for their. They’re invested in maintaining the system.

Of course, the system might have opponents. Let’s say you are an opponent. You’d be a very popular target for surveillance by a security contractor or intelligence operatives. If they found anything incriminating, they could easily blackmail you. Knowing Hillary, I bet there are lot of powerful people with a lot of dirt on her.

It’s not that mysterious why so many politicians, media figures, and other powerful individuals are so invested in Muslim immigration and domestic surveillance. It’s also not mysterious why they’re so invested in continued conflict overseas. This is why the “War on Terror” can never be won.

* The Wall connects thoughts to reality. Once one sees the sense of it, the thought propagates to other implementations. Ideas that there are things that differ in the world, and cell membranes. It counters the Floyd mush think.

* The Muzzies are just getting warmed up, if you look at their attacks, they are clearly evolving in terms of sophistication and targeting. This ought to scare the bright green piss out of folks.

Several years from now I suspect they will move onto infrastructure targets which will give them a massive return on investment. Read Matt Bracken’s latest article to get a feel.

Even if it’s not the scale he predicts, say they just take out the power grid that keeps the lights on and water flowing in Manhattan or D.C. by blowing up the critical transformers that keep the lights out for weeks or months. There goes the stock market and trillions in stock value, not to mention making these places unlivable.

Remember how they panicked over the Beltway Sniper(who were Muslims)? This would a 100x worse.

Modern civilization is very fragile, especially the cities.

Palo Alto, Greenwich, Aspen, Telluride won’t be safe, it’s just a fat juicy target loaded with men-boy geeks living in palatial estates guarded by rent-a-cops. Those palaces just say “hit me”.

* Mohammedan street crime is increasingly impacting formerly low-crime European countries. Get tough on crime initiatives are largely driven by NAM crime. I guess the short version is diversity or freedom, pick one.

* Listening to a few NPR programs this morning, I heard from a number of experts that Islamophobia is a barrier to dealing with terrorism. Me, I think Racismphobia is the real barrier.

Posted in America, Europe, Islam | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Hillary Speaks Out Against Walls Around America, Demands More Surveillance in America

Republican Establishment is increasingly prepared to lose with Cruz than hand the party to Trump

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Politico: “People think we lose with Cruz, but we don’t lose everything,” said the operative, who opposes Trump and asked to speak anonymously. “He’s still a real Republican. We don’t lose the House and Senate with Cruz. We don’t lose our soul as a party and we can recover in four years and I’m not sure people think we can recover from Donald Trump.”
Said one high-level operative inside the Koch network: “He’s the devil you know.”
Indeed, many establishment Republicans would rather lose with Cruz and play a long 2020 game than risk having their party and conservative principles hijacked by Trump—a candidate they do not trust even as they recognize his political dexterity and the possibility that he could be just cagey enough to win on Election Day.

“Donald Trump is a centrist,” said Ron Kaufman, a close ally of Mitt Romney and Bush who lives in Massachusetts. “You may not like him, but policy-wise he’s a centrist. He’s between Cruz and Kasich. If Donald Trump is the nominee, he’ll be far more centrist in language than he has been.”
Trump’s repeated requests for the party to recognize the new voters he has drawn into the Republican fold and embrace the possibilities of his candidacy have yet to convince most establishment figures; many are taking steps to emphasize their still implicit opposition to him.
On Wednesday, Paul Ryan used a 30-minute speech to argue against Trump’s brand of divisive identity politics without mentioning the candidate by name, urging the country to “stay unified” and dismissing the notion “that we’re going to win the election by dividing people.” Meanwhile, a top RNC official was meeting privately with several high-level anti-Trump activists to explain what an open convention might look like.
And on Monday, Our Principles PAC, a group founded by establishment donors to oppose Trump, sent a tracker to shoot video footage of members of Congress showing up to meet with Trump in an effort to intimidate more rank-and-file Republicans from showing any openness to his candidacy. Suddenly, the party establishment, which has long been stymied by the Tea Party movement’s demands of ideological purity, now has its own litmus test in Trump, demanding nothing less than rejection of the current front-runner for the GOP’s presidential nomination.
“No one thought we would be here at this time,” said Austin Barbour, who ran Rick Perry’s super PAC until he quit last year and then backed Bush until he, too, quit, and is now casting his lot with Cruz.
The unifying factor among the establishment Republicans now begrudgingly coalescing behind Cruz is a deep, visceral revulsion to Trump: to his divisive demagoguery that is so unmoored from traditional conservative ideology and, many believe, the party’s and country’s bedrock values. It has little to do with Cruz, who has simply done better than anyone else in the first two months of the nomination process.

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The Fighter-Jock Doctrine That Explains Why Trump Is Winning

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jack Shafer writes:

Like the Republican candidates before her, Clinton was already caught inside Trump’s OODA loop.

OODA loop? What’s that? I had never heard of the OODA loop until Wednesday morning, when one of my editors, Blake Hounshell, introduced me to the concept. Originally formulated by fighter pilot and military theoretician Col. John R. Boyd to describe the mental cycles a successful dogfighting pilot navigates in bagging his prey, the thinking behind the OODA loop has since been applied to the world outside air combat by businessmen, athletes, diplomats and competitive types everywhere.
OODA stands for observation; orientation; decision; action—the four steps an individual goes through when reacting to an event. The key to military victory, Boyd preached, was to cycle through your OODA loop faster than your foe. In his June 2002 Fast Company feature about the OODA loop, Keith H. Hammonds explains that to win a dogfight, a pilot must find a way to operate “inside” his foe’s OODA loop, “acting quickly to outthink and outmaneuver rivals.”
“An effective pilot explodes his rival’s comfortable view of the universe,” Hammond writes, a statement that couldn’t be a better description of the way Trump has run his campaign. He’s rejected most of the etiquette that accompanies political campaigns, taunting and name-calling his opponents (“Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” for a fresh example) to instigate publicity-attracting feuds. But feuds are only a part of Trump’s OODA loop strategy. Upsetting opponents’ OODA loops with unexpected and rapid emanations from his own gives Trump the constant advantage of surprise. His ability to change mental course inside a media moment—from “perhaps there are two Donald Trumps” to “I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps”—would sound like a contradiction coming out of any other politician’s mouth. But Trump has been normalizing contradictions since the beginning of the campaign, with no loss of political support.
Who before Trump convinced TV hosts to accept lengthy phone-ins from a candidate? The practical advantage of doing phone-in interviews is it affords him maximum exposure with a minimum of physical effort. It also conditions TV bookers to call him when news or controversy breaks: He’ll be there to take the call. By making himself more available to the news media than almost any candidate, he’s got an edge in determining the terms of the debate, and his media ubiquity also makes him look like the leader and the other candidates like followers. While other candidates are composing expensive TV ads about their plans to solve the political crises of yesterday, Trump is on television screens across America, at no expense to his campaign, talking about how he will address today’s catastrophe. He’s already made his move. He’s inside their airspace.
Where did Trump come by these OODA loop skills? Although he owns a fleet of aircraft, including a Boeing 757-200, a Cessna Citation X corporate jet, two Sikorsky S-76B helicopters and, for a short time, owned Eastern Airlines’ shuttle service, he’s no fighter pilot. Maybe he learned the art of quick thinking at his developer father’s knee, or in military school dorm fights, or in New York real estate deal making, or while divorcing his first two wives. (I suspect all of the “wit” displayed on his TV show was scripted.)
There’s something Zen about one source of Trump’s power. He’s able to maneuver faster than the other candidates because, unlike them, he’s unencumbered by the polls and important advisers that slow the OODA loops governing other candidates. In this sense, his famously unplanned, unstructured campaign operation is a huge advantage. He’s a one-man fighter jet; his opponents are lumbering bombers, still painstakingly running through a weapons checklist while they’re viciously strafed from behind.
Unlike your average candidate, Trump doesn’t require facts to make an argument. He doesn’t even need an argument to make an argument: He possesses the confidence to shoot straight from the lip on any topic at any time, filling the air with chaff. For every critic who tut-tuts, “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” four or five people in TV land nod their head in agreement with him. By the time the fact-checkers arrive to assess the damage Trump has done to the truth, he has skipped on to several new subjects. He’s inside the fact-checkers’ OODA loops, too, moving too quickly for them to catch him.
It’s anybody’s guess which of Trump’s observations, acts of orientation, decision making and action are conscious and which are intuitive. Cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame writes of Trump’s great skill at simplifying the complex, which, when you think about it, is as sharp a time-saving tool as exists in any politician’s OODA-loopbag: Where other candidates devote whole speeches to how they’ll get things done, Trump merely states he’ll get the best people on it and they’ll finish on time and under budget. “Trump is talking directly to people’s subconscious. Everything else he says is just a carrier signal,” Adams writes.
Adams also calls Trump a master of the “linguistic kill shot,” citing the candidate’s ability to take out other candidates with a word or two that contains a resonance of truth. For Jeb Bush, the phrase was “low energy.” For Carly Fiorina, the word was “robotic.” For Ben Carson, “nice.” For Marco Rubio, “little.” (For Ted Cruz, the word is shaping up to be “Lyin’.”)
Did any of the vanquished candidates see Trump rocketing up from behind just before he shot them down?

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on The Fighter-Jock Doctrine That Explains Why Trump Is Winning