January 18, 2016 My Year of Terror and Abuse Teaching at a NYC High School Luke Ford No sacred cows.

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.

“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public school teacher, and it’s riveting.

There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.

The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.

What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.

Names and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of International Studies on the Lower East Side. [Editor’s Note: The school is 54 percent Hispanic, 29 percent black, 14 percent Asian, and 2 percent white.]

Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.

A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.

“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work–now!” Boland says.

A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”

Chantay is the one who aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.

“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”

The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it . . . She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”

It was Boland’s first week.

At the time, Boland’s new school was considered a bold experiment–not a charter but an “autonomous” one, given freedom in both management and curriculum. It was endowed in part by the Gates Foundation, and the principal hired only teachers who had once lived abroad.

Boland had taught English in China. This was his favored school–advertised as the last, best hope for kids who had fallen far behind–and he was thrilled to be hired. He went home to his then-boyfriend (now-husband) and celebrated over takeout pad Thai and an expensive bottle of red wine.

“I was ready to change lives as a teacher,” he writes.

How wrong he was.

There were 30 kids in his ninth-grade class, some as old as 17. One student, Jamal, was living in a homeless shelter with his mother; most of the other students lived in public housing. There was one white kid in the whole school.

{snip}

Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.” {snip}

{snip}

Here among the kids who couldn’t name continents or oceans, who scrawled, “Mr. Boland is a f*****t” on chalkboards, who listed porn among their hobbies, were a few who had a shot.

There was Nee-cole, who wore thick glasses and pigtails. She was quiet, smart, much more childlike than her peers, and Boland felt for her. He was also intrigued by a tough girl named Yvette, who showed flashes of insight and intelligence yet did all she could to hide it. “PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THIS,” she scrawled on one report.

{snip}

Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He resented “their poverty, their ignorance, their arrogance. Everything I was hoping, at first, to change.”

{snip}

A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough upbringing,” he argued back. “It doesn’t do them–or us–any good.”

{snip}

Boland didn’t know what to believe anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit.

Boland ends his book with familiar suggestions for reform: Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty. But there’s no public policy for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or saving kids who can’t, or won’t, be saved.

Posted in Blacks, Education | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: Baltimore’s Homicide Record in 2015: a Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Baltimore’s homicide numbers were trending up before Freddie Gray (great article from 2013), while the population of the city was decreasing each year.

Indianapolis has has no serious problems with the BLM movement, and yet the blacks there are working overtime to ensure the city becomes more violent each year.

If there were no cops in Baltimore, and white people suddenly disappeared, you’d have probably 2 to 3 times the homicides (as of 12/26/2015, there had been 626 nonfatal shootings in the city, representing a 72 percent increase from 2014).

And I wouldn’t call 2015′s spike in homicides courtesy of Black Lives Matter. I’d call it a combination of Marilyn Mosby’s affirmative action incompetence as the states attorney and the Baltimore Police Department finding refuge in the few coffee shops left in the city.

Meanwhile, all six of the indicted officers will be acquitted in 2016, meaning we could conceivably see President Obama have to deal with more black riots toward the middle of the year.

Someone hit Trump’s music.

* “Experts have not pointed to a single, dominant reason…”

No dominant reasons, but they think they might have a few submissive ones. Seriously, what kind of ridiculous, high-handed writing is this? Topic aside, this article is so stylistically snooty, it makes satire beside the point. If this article could take on a human form, it would be Mrs. Howell from “Gilligan’s Island.”

I guess the moral here is when you’re trying to obscure something obvious, go highbrow and dazzle ‘em with “smart word choices.” Reading this is like watching a sitcom where a character gets caught doing something bad, then tries to get out of it by spouting pseudo-intellectual word salad: “Well, mom, the single, dominant reason I ate all of the pie was because…”

* Experts can’t explain why I have a hurt leg. I woke up yesterday feeling fine and went about my day. It was one of my better days. Today started out like any other day except in the morning someone broke in my house and bashed my leg with a baseball bat. My leg really hurts today. Nobody can figure out why.

* What’s interesting is the degree to which everything seems to all be coming to a head towards the end of Obama’s presidency.

Massive increases in murder rates, set off by the actions of Holder and Obama.

The invasion of Europe, set off by Obama’s failed policy in the Middle East.

The Dow falling by over 10%, and a wealth of dire economic data..

Temper tantrums on college campuses all over the US.

A symphony composer or screenplay writer could not have timed these things more perfectly.

* “Experts have not pointed to a single, dominant reason for this rise in homicides in Baltimore, nor have they definitively established any kind of causal link between the unrest in April after Freddie Gray’s death and the increase in killings……Freddie Gray’s death touched off protests and civil unrest.”

Unrest and protests! Love the dishonest, neutral terms for black violence and maniacal hatred in the NY Times.

Meanwhile Trump and his supporters are described by the Times as nothing but the embodiment of hatefearhatefearevilevilphobicracistetcetc…..sputter and drool!!!!!!!!!!

We, the non experts, actually know EXACTLY what caused the increase in black males murdering each other in Baltimore.

Black thugs looted as many CVS type drug stores as possible and got hold of drugs they then retailed on the street. Other black male thugs wanted in on the action and robbed and killed dealers of their drugs and money.

Then a cycle of revenge and retaliation among friends and associates of the dead and wounded led to more murders.

It’s as simple as that.

Now, pretend not to notice.

* I Googled the term ‘Ferguson effect’. What amazed me was how many articles there were insisting there was absolutely, positively, definitively, totally and completely no such thing as a “Ferguson effect’. There was an almost desperate, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” tone to them. Finally I found one article that admitted that there might, maybe, possibly, BE such a thing as a “Ferguson effect” but that it was somehow wrong to speak of or acknowledge such a thing. Finally I found an explanation for the term. It seems to just be the old “FIDO” policy (F*** it, drive on) that cops would resort to after a period of black “activism”. I.E. turn a blind eye to black criminal activity for fear of being called a “racist”. Just another version of the law of unintended consequences really.

* Fittingly enough, Dee Snyder gave Trump his blessing to use “We’re Not Gonna Take It” at his campaign rallies. Trump should make full use of it. It is a powerful anthem of pissed-off dissatisfaction.

* Trump uses “Rocket Man” and “Phantom of the Opera” at his rallies because Sir Elton and Sir Andrew own apartments in Trump Tower.

* It’s a good thing we have experts to explain these things to us. Where would society be without them?

* Lets keep in mind that this is an all black affair. There’s no jump in white homicide rates or anything like that. Whites and everyone else are the ones trying to make sense of what’s going on, what the causes might be and are expected to pick up the pieces afterward, paying the tax money for police, courts, jails, hospital treatment, physical rehab, various programs in hopes of dissuading black youth from lives of crime and so on. It goes up, it goes down, mostly the reasons given are hardly more than surmise, the good sounding guesses of the moment are later superseded by other guesses pushed by academics. One can’t go to the source and get a coherent answer out of any blacks because they themselves don’t know or care. The only thing one can get out of them is blame someone else-white, that is-or the standard formula of send more money.
It all seems cyclical; Chicago had big blowout years in ’74 and ’92. In the first ten days of this new year we had close to one hundred shootings, starting off the year with a bang. The public firing of the police chief doesn’t seem to have accomplished much in appeasing the black population. Blacks are inherently a violent breed and large numbers are always ‘going off’ for some reason. That’s just the reality. They require greater control and various barriers between them and everyone else have to be erected to prevent spillover. The ‘why’ of what they do isn’t as relevant as the fact they’re doing it. As an old timer put it to me a long time ago, ‘they is what they is, they does what they does’.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

Study: Libs Really Do Suffer From A Case Of “My Feels”

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

From the Chateau:

The stereotype of liberals as emotionally underdeveloped children who feel first and think later now has support from the very entity liberals have raised to divine status: SCIENCE!

Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli. […]
These ideological differences between political partisans have been attributed to logical, psychological, and social constraints and past scholarship has focused primarily on institutional political processes or individual policy preferences, rather than biological differences in evaluative processes. But recent work has revealed physiological correlates of the differential responses to risk and conflict by liberals and conservatives. Consistent with the previously identified attitudinal divergence, conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals. Conversely, liberals had stronger physiological responses to situations of cognitive conflict than conservatives.

The insula (shitlib predominant) and the amygdala (shitlord predominant) serve different roles in the brain, affecting human response behavior.

The insula and amygdala often function together in processing situations of risk and uncertainty [30]. The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting of attention to external cues [31] and fear conditioning [32]; however, this structure is also important for other emotional information processing and behavior [33]. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown amygdala activation in reward related processing [34], encoding of emotionally salient information [35], risk-taking [36], processing positively-valenced stimuli [37], and appetitive/aversive olfactory learning [38]. In comparison, neuroimaging studies of insular cortex have observed critical involvement of this neural structure in pain [39], interoceptive [40], emotion-related [41], cognitive [42], and social processing [43]. In particular, the insular cortex is important for representation of internal bodily cues crucial for subjective feeling states and interoceptive awareness[40], [44]. That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.

In layman’s terms, liberal brains give preference to their own feelings before any externally-generated, real world hatefacts have a chance to make an impression on them. Shitlibs are literally slaves to their FEELS. They see the world through a gauze of their emotions, like a toddler might make sense of the alien adult world that swirls around him.

Shitlibs analyze the world, and all its threats, as if refracted through a prism of their subjective feelings. Hordes of invading, antagonistic third worlders eroding civilization in White homelands? After passing through the shitlib antiWhite Feels Filter, (they can’t help themselves), this clear as day observation gets mutated into a rationale for the shitlib’s yearning need to believe all people and all races are equal in worth and compatibility with White European societies. So the shitlib sees [unassimilable orc hordes], feels [I am an antiracist GoodWhite], then thinks [White privilege prevents orc hordes from assimilating].

If shitlibs suffer from a genetically imprinted brain structuring that renders them helpless to defend their nations from invading nonWhites, then the only solution, and only escape from this intraWhite quagmire, is expulsion of shitlibs from positions of power in times of crisis. When demographic survival is at stake, shitlibs who are cognitively unable to resist throwing their White nations under the bus must receive the HARD NEXT from shitlords, like one would do to a drunk chubby girl coming onto you during 2AM garbage hour.

COMMENTS:

* So basically Libs think like women.

Posted in Biology, Brain, Politics | Comments Off

To Succeed In Talk Radio

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Reddit: “I am a news reporter at a conservative radio station. This is part of a document my boss asked me to read.”

The Lund Talk Radio Stylebook Page 4 of 50
To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.
The enemy can be a politician — either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough. It can be the cold cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media…”
Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences.

This excerpt seems to come from a longer essay reprinted on Alternet:

To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.
To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.
This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.
Sometimes, it can even be their own station’s news director. One year, Charlie targeted me because I had instructed my midday news anchor to report the Wimbledon tennis results, even though the matches wouldn’t be telecast until much later in the day. Charlie gave out my phone number and e-mail address on the air. I was flooded with hate mail, nasty messages, and even one death threat from a federal law enforcement agent whom I knew to be a big Charlie fan.
In the talk radio business, this concept, which must be mastered to be successful, is called “differentiating” yourself from the rest of the media. It is a brilliant marketing tactic that has also helped Fox News Channel thrive. “We report, you decide” and “Fair and Balanced” are more than just savvy slogans. They are code words signaling that only Fox will report the news in a way conservatives see as objective and truthful.
Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences. That’s why Kathleen Dunn was forced out at WTMJ in the early ’90s and why Jim and Andee were replaced in the mid-’90s by Dr. Laura. Pointed and provocative are what win.
There is no way to win a disagreement with Charlie Sykes. Calls from listeners who disagree with him don’t get on the air if the show’s producer, who generally does the screening, fears they might make Charlie look bad…
One entire group that rarely gets on the air are the elderly callers – unless they have something extraordinary to say. Sadly, that doesn’t happen often. The theory is that old-sounding callers help produce old-skewing audiences. The target demo is 25 to 54, not 65 and older…
The stereotyped liberal view of the talk radio audience is that it’s a lot of angry, uneducated white men. In fact, the audience is far more diverse. Many are businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, or soccer moms and dads. Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.
Yet while talk show audiences aren’t being led like lemmings to a certain conclusion, they can be carefully prodded into agreement with the Republican views of the day.
Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They’re not called talking points, but that’s what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day.
Charlie and Jeff would also check what other conservative talk show hosts around the country were saying. Rush Limbaugh’s Web site was checked at least once daily. Atlanta-based nationally syndicated talker Neal Boortz was another popular choice. Select conservative blogs were also perused.
A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.
One of the things that makes a talk show host good – especially hosts of the caliber of Sykes – is that his or her arguments seem so solid. You fundamentally disagree with the host, yet can’t refute the argument because it sounds so airtight. The host has built a strong case with lots of supporting facts.
Generally speaking, though, those facts have been selectively chosen because they support the host’s preconceived opinion, or can be interpreted to seem as if they do. In their frustration, some talk show critics accuse hosts of fabricating facts. Wrong. Hosts do gather evidence, but in a way that modifies the old Joe Friday maxim: “Just the facts that I can use to make my case, ma’am.”
Hint: The more talk show hosts squawk about something – the louder their voice, the greater their emotion, the more effusive their arguments – the more they’re worried about the issue. For example, talk show hosts eagerly participated in the 2004 Swift Boating of John Kerry because they really feared he was going to win. This is a common talk show tactic: If you lack compelling arguments in favor of your candidate or point of view, attack the other side. These attacks often rely on two key rhetorical devices, which I call You Know What Would Happen If and The Preemptive Strike.
Using the first strategy, a host will describe something a liberal has said or done that conservatives disagree with, but for which the liberal has not been widely criticized, and then say, “You know what would happen if a conservative had said (or done) that? He (or she) would have been filleted by the ‘liberal media.’ ” This is particularly effective because it’s a two-fer, simultaneously reinforcing the notion that conservatives are victims and that “liberals” are the enemy.
The second strategy, The Preemptive Strike, is used when a host knows that news reflecting poorly on conservative dogma is about to break or become more widespread. When news of the alleged massacre at Haditha first trickled out in the summer of 2006, not even Iraq War chest-thumper Charlie Sykes would defend the U.S. Marines accused of killing innocent civilians in the Iraqi village. So he spent lots of air time criticizing how the “mainstream media” was sure to sensationalize the story in the coming weeks. Charlie would kill the messengers before any message had even been delivered.
Good talk show hosts can get their listeners so lathered up that they truly can change public policy. They can inspire like-minded folks to flood the phone lines and e-mail inboxes of aldermen, county supervisors, legislators and federal lawmakers. They can inspire their followers to vote for candidates the hosts prefer. How? By pounding away on an issue or candidate, hour after hour, day after day. Hosts will extol the virtues of the favored candidate or, more likely, exploit whatever Achilles heel the other candidate might have. Influencing elections is more likely to occur at the local rather than national level, but that still gives talk radio power.
By the way, here’s a way to prognosticate elections just by listening to talk shows: Except in presidential elections, when they will always carry water for the Republican nominee, conservative hosts won’t hurt their credibility by backing candidates they think can’t win. So if they’re uncharacteristically tepid, or even silent, about a particular race, that means the Democrat has a good chance of winning. Nor will hosts spend their credibility on an issue where they know they disagree with listeners. Charlie, for example, told me just before I left TMJ that Wisconsin’s 2006 anti-gay marriage amendment was misguided. But he knew his followers would likely vote for it in droves. So he declined to speak out directly against it.
This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
One day during a very bad snowstorm, I walked into the studio during a commercial break and suggested to Charlie that he start talking about it rather than whatever conservative topic he’d been discussing. Charlie assumed, as he usually did in such situations, that I was being critical of his topic. In reaction, he unplugged his head phones, stood up and told me that I might as well take over the show because he wasn’t going to change his topic. I was able to quickly strike a bargain before the end of the break. He agreed to take a few calls about the storm, but if it didn’t a strike a nerve with callers, he could return to his original topic.
The snowstorm was the topic of the rest of his show that day. And afterward, Charlie came to my office and admitted I’d been right. But we would go through scenarios such as this many times through the years.
Another tense moment arose when the Harley-Davidson 100th anniversary was captivating the community – and our on-air coverage – in 2003, but Charlie wanted to talk about school choice for seemingly the 100,000th time. He literally threw a fit, off the air and on, belittling other hosts, the news department and station management for devoting resources to Harley’s 100th coverage. “The Green House” newsman Phil Cianciola countered that afternoon with a joke about Charlie riding a Harley wearing loafers. Charlie complained to management about Phil and wouldn’t speak civilly about him in my presence again.
Hosts are most dangerous when someone they’ve targeted for criticism tries to return the fire. It is foolish to enter into a dispute with someone who has a 50,000-watt radio transmitter at his or her disposal and feels cornered. Oh, and calling a host names – “right-winger,” “fascist,” “radio squawker,” etc. – merely plays into his or her hands. This allows a host like Sykes to portray himself as a victim of the “left-wing spin machine,” and will leave his listeners, who also feel victimized, dying to support him. In essence, the host will mount a Hillary Rodham Clinton “vast right-wing conspiracy” attack in reverse.
A conservative emulating Hillary? Yep. A great talk show host is like a great college debater, capable of arguing either side of any issue in a logical, thorough and convincing manner. This skill ensures their continuing success regardless of which political party is in power. For example:
• In the talk show world, the line-item veto was the most effective way to control government spending when Ronald Reagan was president; it was a violation of the separation of powers after President Clinton took office.
• Perjury was a heinous crime when Clinton was accused of lying under oath about his extramarital activities. But when Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, was charged with lying under oath, it was the prosecutor who had committed an egregious act by charging Libby with perjury.
• “Activist judges” are the scourge of the earth when they rule it is unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples the rights heterosexuals receive. But judicial activism is needed to stop the husband of a woman in a persistent vegetative state – say Terri Schiavo – from removing her feeding tube to end her suffering.
To amuse myself while listening to a talk show, I would ask myself what the host would say if the situation were reversed. What if alleged D.C. Madam client Sen. David Vitter had been a Democrat? Would the reaction of talk show hosts have been so quiet you could hear crickets chirping? Hardly.
Or what if former Rep. Mark Foley had been a Democrat? Would his pedophile-like tendencies have been excused as a “prank” or mere “overfriendly e-mails?” Not on the life of your teenage son.
Suppose Al Gore was president and ordered an invasion of Iraq without an exit strategy. Suppose this had led to the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. troops and actually made that part of the world less stable. Would talk show hosts have dismissed criticism of that war as unpatriotic? No chance.
Or imagine that John Kerry had been president during Hurricane Katrina and that his administration’s rescue and rebuilding effort had been horribly botched. Would talk show hosts have branded him a great president? Of course not.
It was Katrina, finally, that made me truly see the light. Until then, 10 years into my time at TMJ, while I might have disagreed with some stands the hosts took, I did think there were grounds for their constant criticism of the media. I had convinced myself that the national media had an intrinsic bias that was, at the very least, geographical if not ideological, to which talk radio could provide an alternative.
Then along came the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Journalists risked their lives to save others as the storm hit the Gulf Coast. Afterward, journalists endured the stench and the filth to chronicle the events for a stunned world. Then they documented the monumental government incompetence for an outraged nation. These journalists became voices for the voiceless victims, pressing government officials to get help to those who needed it.
Yet, while New Orleans residents were still screaming for help from the rooftops of their flooded homes, journalists were targeted by talk show hosts, Charlie and Wagner among them. Not the government, but journalists. Stories detailing the federal government’s obvious slowness and inefficiency were part of an “angry left” conspiracy, they said. Talk show hosts who used e-mailed talking points from the conservative spin machine proclaimed the Katrina stories were part of a liberal “media template.” The irony would have been laughable if the story wasn’t so serious.
…I had seen and helped foster the transformation of AM radio and the rise of conservative hosts. They have a power that is unlikely to decline.
Their rise was also helped by liberals whose ideology, after all, emphasizes tolerance. Their friendly toleration of talk radio merely gave the hosts more credibility. Yet an attitude of intolerance was probably worse: It made the liberals look hypocritical, giving ammunition to talk show hosts who used it with great skill.
But the key reason talk radio succeeds is because its hosts can exploit the fears and perceived victimization of a large swath of conservative-leaning listeners. And they feel victimized because many liberals and moderates have ignored or trivialized their concerns and have stereotyped these Americans as uncaring curmudgeons.
Because of that, there will always be listeners who believe that Charlie Sykes, Jeff Wagner and their compatriots are the only members of the media who truly care about them.

Posted in Conservatives, Radio | Comments Off

JSwipe

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek: “Is there an app like this for racially conscious white people?”

Posted in Dating | Comments Off

‘A key Thatcher adviser was Alfred Sherman’

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: A key Thatcher adviser was Alfred Sherman – another interesting guy who went as far as iSteve and then well beyond.

“As for the lumpen proletariat, coloured people and the Irish, let’s face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well-armed and properly trained police.”

According to Wikipedia:

Sir Alfred Sherman, KBE, (10 November 1919 – 26 August 2006) was a writer, journalist, and political analyst. Described by a long-time associate as “a brilliant polymath, a consummate homo politicus, and one of the last true witnesses to the 20th century”,[1] he was a Communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War but later changed his views completely and became an adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

Sherman was born in Hackney, London, to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Jacob Vladimir and Eva Sherman.

Alfred Sherman joined the Communist Party as a teenager and abandoned his studies at Chelsea Polytechnic at the age of 17, later explaining, “to be a Jew in 1930s Britain was to be alienated. The world proletariat offered us a home.” He then volunteered to fight for the Major Attlee Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, 1937–38, where he was taken prisoner and repatriated to Britain.[3] After returning home, he worked in a London electrical factory.

Between 1939 and 1945 he served in the Middle East in the Field Security and Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. After the war, in the summer of 1948 he was expelled from the Communist Party for “Titoist deviationism” and subsequently spent some time in Yugoslavia as a volunteer in a “youth work brigade”.

After graduating from the LSE in 1950, he returned to Belgrade as a correspondent for The Observer. Already fluent in the language known as Serbo-Croatian at that time, he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history, culture and politics of the South Slavs. He also developed a lifelong affinity for the Serbs, comparable to that of Dame Rebecca West. That affinity was rekindled in the 1990s, when Sherman became a leading critic of the Western policy in the Balkans.

During a subsequent protracted stay in Israel in the late 1950s Sherman was a member of the economic advisory staff of the Israeli government and had a close relationship with David Ben-Gurion. After returning to London, in 1963, he joined the Jewish Chronicle as a leader writer, later writing for the Daily Telegraph from 1965 (leader writer from 1977). About 1970 he joined the Conservatives and the following year was elected as a councillor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (1971–78).

Sherman was critical of Ted Heath’s Conservative government because of its public spending and its failure to implement free market policies. In 1974 he co-founded the Centre for Policy Studies with Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Sherman was subsequently Director of the CPS and a member of the Conservative Philosophy Group.[4] The CPS was the real launching pad for Margaret Thatcher, gradually transforming her from the untried party leader of 1974 into a prime-minister-in-waiting. More than any one man, Sherman provided her with the strategy for capturing the leadership of the Party and winning the general election of 1979. However he was a loose cannon when it came to the media and an early display of his outspoken racism was when he told the Soviet newspaper Pravda, in 1974: “As for the lumpen proletariat, coloured people and the Irish, let’s face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well-armed and properly trained police.”[5] Eventually he upset so many people at the CPS that its Chairman, Hugh Thomas, stating Sherman as “impossible to work with: he has to go” expelled him in 1983.[6]

In her memoirs, Lady Thatcher herself paid tribute to Sherman’s “brilliance”, the “force and clarity of his mind”, his “breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist”. She credits him with a central role in her achievements, especially as Leader of the Opposition but also after she became Prime Minister: in July 2005 she declared, “We could have never defeated socialism if it hadn’t been for Sir Alfred”.[7] But his unwillingness to make compromises with the establishmentarian consensus never enabled him to fit into the clubbable world of British politics. Sherman’s star shone briefly after Thatcher became prime minister. His breadth and depth of vision and willingness to say the unsayable provided a vital stimulus to her, giving her the intellectual confidence to proclaim her radical free-market vision in her early years at the helm.

By 1982, the latent strains in his relationship with Mrs Thatcher became fully apparent. She complained that he was dismissive of the obstacles she was encountering in dismantling the legacy of decades of socialism, while he berated her for betraying the promise of her early years.[8] After his exclusion from her inner circle she nevertheless continued to regard him with “exasperated affection”, and rewarded him with a knighthood in 1983. Yet in the 1990s he said of her, “Lady Thatcher is great theatre as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn’t got a clue”. In July 2005 they were reunited at a reception marking the publication of Sherman’s last book with a revealing title, Paradoxes of Power: Reflections on the Thatcher Interlude.

In the last 15 years of his life, Sherman was an outspoken critic of western policy in the former Yugoslavia. In 1994 he co-founded The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies as a research institute.[12] In Sherman’s words, it was “designed to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to facilitate the involvement of outside powers”.

In 1992, writing in London’s Jewish Chronicle, Sherman warned against “the lapse of logic” in confusing the Bosnian Muslims with the European Jewry under Hitler.

“It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict be equating it with the Holocaust”, he wrote, “or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat. … Since 1990, the independent Croatian leadership—with its extreme chauvinist and clericalist colouring—and the Bosnian Muslim leadership—seeking, in its Islamic fundamentalist programme, to put the clock back to Ottoman days—have threatened to turn the Serbs back into persecuted minorities”.[13]

By the end of the decade Sherman saw the U.S. policy in the Balkans as inseparable from the drive for global hegemony. In 1997, he noted that the American century began with the Spanish–American War, and that it was ending with American penetration of the Balkans. But in contrast to the Spanish–American War, he argued, U.S. intervention in the Balkans has no clear strategic aim, but is allegedly a moral crusade on behalf of the “international community”:

“This begs many questions. First, is there such a thing as ‘the international community’? Do people in China, which accounts for a fifth of the world’s population, and the Buddhists, who account for another fifth—among others—really want the U.S. and its client states to bomb the Serbs or Iraqis? And who exactly, and when, deputed the U.S. to act on behalf of this ‘world community’? … Secondly, can the blunt weapon of force, of whose use U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted, balance conflicting and competing ethnic, religious, economic and political interactions over this wide and conflictive region? Can the U.S. raise the expectations of the Albanians and Slav Moslems without affronting Macedonians, Greeks, Italians, Bulgars and Croats, as well as Serbs? … Thirdly, can force be a substitute for policy? It was a wise German who said that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. The same goes for gunships, the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Bomb and rocket once, and it has an effect. But if the victim survives, the second bout is less effective, because the victim is learning to cope.”

Well before the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War, Sherman argued that Washington had “set up the cornerstone of a European Islamistan in Bosnia and a Greater Albania, thus paving the way for further three-sided conflict between Moslems, Serbs and Croats in a bellum omnium contra omnes. … Far from creating a new status quo it has simply intensified instability.” The U.S. may succeed in establishing its hegemony, in the Balkans-Danubia-Carpathia and elsewhere, “but it will also inherit long-standing ethno-religious conflicts and border disputes without the means for settling them.” As he wrote in May 2000,

“The power and prestige of America is in the hands of people who will not resist the temptation to invent new missions, lay down new embargoes, throw new bombs, and fabricate new courts. For the time being, they control the United Nations, the World Bank, most of the world’s high-tech weapons, and the vast majority of the satellites that watch us from every quadrant of the skies. This is the opportunity they sense, and we must ask what ambitions they will declare next. … Instead of rediscovering the virtues of traditionally defined, enlightened self-interest in the aftermath of its hands down cold war victory, America’s foreign policy elites are more intoxicated than ever by their own concoction of benevolent global hegemony and indispensable power.[14]

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Honoring Martin Luther King

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

All national parks are open today for free in honor of Martin Luther King because, as we all know, the good reverend and the black community in general are huge users of our national parks. There’s nothing that black folks enjoy more than camping in the woods.

Friend: “I’m thinking of hiring a hooker today. In honor of MLK. But she’s gotta be white.”

The first time you meet them on CL they’re looking for a boyfriend. The second time round, they’re looking for a sugar daddy. The third time round, they’re looking for a fix.

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My Favorite Part Of The Obama Presidency Is All The Racial Healing

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

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Georgia doctor arrested after 36 patients die, at least 12 from overdose on prescribed meds

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

He looks like your typical Southern gentleman.

New York Daily News: A Georgia doctor has been arrested after 36 of his patients died, with at least 12 killed by overdose on prescription medication.

Psychiatrist Narendra Nagareddy was held at his office Thursday following a raid by DEA agents.

Nearly 40 federal and local agents raided the offices in Jonesboro, before they seized more assets at Nagareddy’s house.

“He’s a psychiatrist in Jonesboro who has been overprescribing opiates and benzodiazepine and the last several years has had a multitude of overdoses and overdose deaths,” Clayton County Police Chief Mike Register told WSB-TV Channel 2 News.

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The White Death

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

More on the White Death:

Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites
NYT
By GINA KOLATA and SARAH COHEN JAN. 16, 2016 538 COMMENTS
Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.
The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.
The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.
The analysis shows that the rise in white mortality extends well beyond the 45- to 54-year-old age group documented by a pair of Princeton economists in a research paper that startled policy makers and politicians two months ago.
While the death rate among young whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23 percent for those without a high school education, compared with only 4 percent for those with a college degree or more.
The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35- to 44-year-old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs. …
There is a reason that blacks appear to have been spared the worst of the narcotic epidemic, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a drug abuse expert. Studies have found that doctors are much more reluctant to prescribe painkillers to minority patients, worrying that they might sell them or become addicted.
“The answer is that racial stereotypes are protecting these patients from the addiction epidemic,” said Dr. Kolodny, a senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and chief medical officer for Phoenix House Foundation, a national drug and alcohol treatment company. …
Researchers are struggling to come up with an answer to the question of why whites in particular are doing so poorly. No one has a clear answer, but researchers repeatedly speculate that the nation is seeing a cohort of whites who are isolated and left out of the economy and society and who have gotten ready access to cheap heroin and to prescription narcotic drugs.
“There are large numbers of people who never get established in the economy, who live outside family relationships and are on the edge of poverty,” Dr. Hayward said. Many end up taking prescription narcotics, he added.
“Poverty and stress, for example, are risk factors for misuse of prescription narcotics,” Dr. Hayward said.
Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, said the causes of death in these younger people were largely social — “violence and drinking and taking drugs.” Her research shows that social problems are concentrated in the lower education group.
“For too many, and especially for too many women,” she said, “they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.”

Comments:

* Just what I needed on a Monday morning! Spiritual death leading to physical death. Without some kind of “white pride,” or “white identitarian” movement (preferably religious in nature), coupled with trade and immigration policies that emphasize creating good-paying domestic job (mostly in manufacturing) the United States can just kiss large portions of its previously-core population good-bye.

I remember Robert Neville’s lines in The Omega Man: “Build coffins; it’s all you’ll need.”

* Geez. Doctors are racist. Ironic he could see that with it his institution being named after Helen Keller.

* Being hated by your own people, by your own society seems to increase morbidity and mortality. Merely to be hated by your own kind reduces life expectancy.

* Is this at all similar to what we saw in Russia in the 90s, when lifespans collapsed, especially for men?

Religion is dead, and what it traditionally meant to be an American is dead. The people who finished school only a few years after me seem to have graduated with a completely different (and entirely vacuous) notion of what it means to be American. They’re paying for it. We’re all paying for it.

* Thanks liberals. All those social structures that you work to tear down are the framework which provided structure and meaning to the lives of many people. This idea of people who are atomized in society and stripped of all social support except for Mother Government isn’t working. Churches, family, stable jobs, social pressure to get married, social pressure to have kids within marriage, social pressure to stay in your marriage, these all build a web of meaning and support around people.

* When I was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 1996, I looked into the subject of painkillers. There seemed to be a general elite consensus at the time that painkiller access should be liberalized in America. My impression is that it was, although I don’t know exactly when or how.

You started seeing an upsurge in non-counterculture celebrities — Rush Limbaugh, Chandler on “Friends,” etc. — with pain pill problems in the early 2000s.

I can recall reviewing a movie around 2002 starring Chandler in which it was pretty clear that the director was having him physically treated with kid gloves in the action scenes so he wouldn’t hurt his back and wind up on pills again. About a decade later he was in a sitcom as a radio host trying to put his life back together after rehab. It wasn’t bad, although they downplayed the Limbaugh links, which made it a little more generic.

Subsequently, they (and I’m not exactly sure who they are or when they did it) apparently tightened up on the pain pills and that made cheap Mexican heroin more popular as a substitute.

* Upon reading the post more closely, it appears that the death rate is up among women as well as men; unlike the older age cohorts, where the increased death rates are among men but not women. This is even more troubling; young men have always been more “disposable,” in the sense that they are natural risk-takers. But when young women start dying at higher rates, your people are in for a rough ride.

Since this phenomenon appears confined to the United States, I suspect that much of it is an artifact of greater availability of both prescription and illegal drugs. I don’t think that greater availability of legal cannabis is going to make the situation one wit better.

* Moral torpor and political infantilization are ugly phrases. Still, I think they describe a large population in today’s America who’ve still got good jobs, enough discretionary income for consumer goodies, homes in the self-segregated ‘burbs, a tunnel vision about their situation that’s beyond belief. They have no desire (and no economic incentive) to look at the world around them in critical terms, and they’ll play ball with the political Zeitgeist, because the costs of dissent are too high and the rewards too vague and distant.

Back in the 1980s, I had a lengthy conversation with a former executive of a bankrupt area steel mill that had once employed about 50,000 in several states, and maybe 20,000 locally. He really didn’t know of the decision to liquidate until a few days before the decision was announced. He was a tough-guy industrialist with a technical background, so he must have had an inkling that our local mills were obsolete on price, but, a steady paycheck, the business-as-usual routine at work, a disinclination to tell his bosses bad news, etc. had him blind-sided.

My point, I guess, is the obvious. More people will have to hurt before a “constituency of the dispossessed” will sway political decisions. I don’t like thinking like that, but our political caste likes to portray big decisions as having been forced on them.

* It may be that white elites will have to start feeling the effects of the dispossession before there can be a change. I think Steve Sailer said that the British might have kept their American colonies if only they had given George Washington the British regular army commission that he craved. If elites start seeing themselves dispossessed by blacks, Hispanics, East and South Asians, etc., than they might develop an identitarian perspective–they may never do it on behalf of the white “underclass.” I suppose a large cohort of well-educated white men and women between their mid-30′s and early 50′s who find themselves unemployed or working survival jobs (“Do you want fries with that?”) while watching minorities doing well might become a force for revolution. But not until.

* I am now wiser for being a better Catholic, but I once was young and dumb and frequently intoxicated. We stole so much Robitussin that they moved it behind the counter. Primmer people have no idea how fucked up Dextromethorphan can get you, when instead of taking two you take thirty. The brothers call it sippin on sizzurp.

Prescription painkillers presumably are the bane of lost souls and main factor in addictions that lead to death, but I will say this: by my sight the loose ends in the system are doctors flat corrupt, because you can’t go shopping from one to the next the way the way pharmacies are electronically universalized, so that every single one knows when you last got prescribed anything, and thus when you’re refills legit. A bunch of folks are getting drugs who need them so they can sell them, it would seem.

I don’t say this lightly, because it’s terribly sad and I regret knowing it, but a whole bunch of the heroin enters this country on Navy boats. That, such that if you were going to make a guess about heroin overdoses after a decade of our boys in Afghanistan, well more than less would’ve been the obvious guess. I myself knew one who went that way. RIP.

* You destroy their faith by telling them there is nothing but stuff.
You destroy their morality by telling them they are sexual animals with a right to satisfy their lusts.
You shame them by foisting filth and violent entertainment on them to pervert their children.
You destroy their independence by taking their money and throwing a few coins back in welfare
You destroy their families by allowing marriage as an institution to be destroyed.
You allow some families to earn double incomes while others see their jobs destroyed and shipped overseas.
You allow the easy passage of drugs and do everything you can to decriminalize it.
You allow wealthy powerful people to remarry and break up poorer families.
You allow depraved bastards to declare children are sexual beings and watch as predators stalk them.
You allow drug companies to foist their drugs on children.
You allow the food industry to sell utter crap which they know is unhealthy.

Yeah I know it is an unbalanced list, and everyone would disagree with some of my statements.

But the fact is that smart powerful people have for a long time now had no motivation except making more money for themselves and they have preyed on poorer less intelligent people, all the while saying let’s give them what they want. And they have made millions by corrupting others and bleeding people morally dry and destroying them with false images and destructive ideas.

Unfortunately the best have become the worst, and it is a curse.

* When I looked into the dataset that Case and Deaton used and mixed it with Census Data, it appeared that there were three main predictors of county-level death rates for middle aged whites:
1) Median income
2) Obesity
3) SSI-Disability

It can’t be all economic, since income isn’t fully predictive by itself. And while rural counties have higher death rates overall, when you control for obesity and disability rates, population size of the county is no longer predictive. Marriage rates, and employment rates (controlling for income) aren’t strongly predictive, either.

My guess is that while the broader social changes may set the stage, uncontrolled pain management, perhaps worsened by obesity, isolation and sedentary lifestyles, and the ready availability of guns, liquor, and opioids to end the pain, are giving us this increase in mortality.

There’s a meta/methodological point here, that Steve has made a few times in different ways, but I think is worth drawing out. That is, the reason the NYTimes is doing this analysis of young adult white death rates is because Case & Deaton found the remarkable rise in middle-aged white death rates a few months ago, and the reason that the finding made such a stir was that Deaton had won the economics quasi-Nobel a few days before. But the data was just sitting around on the CDC’s web-site (and their article was rejected several times before being accepted by PNAS) largely unmentioned, not just because it was about white people’s problems (and who cares about them) but because social science is increasingly oriented towards what you might call “doing rather than knowing.” As Steve quoted in his article about the fraudulent UCLA Meet-a-Gay-Person-for-Twenty-Minutes-and-You’ll-Support-Gay-Marriage-for-Life study, “the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”

The UCLA study made a big stir because it was a massive (if imaginary) randomized controlled trial that appeared to show an Effective Way of Reducing Homophobia. The penchant towards RCTs goes beyond what is published in academic journals: an increasing fraction of federal spending in domestic policy and international development is targeted towards directing funds towards programs and policies which have evidence of success from randomized controlled trials. There are strong reasons for RCTs to be used– and in fact RCTs tend to have a rather conservative bias and indicate, when well-run, that most government programs are of null or negative use– but as a central or sole support for social science, they are deeply flawed. Before you can figure out how to change the world, you need to understand something about it, and part of that is just looking at the damn statistics all the agencies are collecting and trying to see the patterns. Focusing only on what can be done– on what rich people can do to poor people to make them different, as Deaton put it in a recent interview, is not only paternalistic but makes paternalism our only way of seeing the world. It also lessens our ability of conceiving a coherent picture of the world– there are merely random effects from one program or another, to be replaced ever onward with the next big thing.

As Steve often points out, the patterns of social phenomena are often clear, and interesting, and important for figuring out the kinds of things that might work or might make things worse. But you have to observe those patterns first, before trying to make them different.

* “People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

* You can bet that the proposed solution to this problem will involve making it harder than ever for me to get sudafed.

I do think this is something of a no brainer. People live because they feel like they need to be here: usually for their families, their kids, and so on. Sometimes other things, but unless you feel a strong need to get something done, the temptation to do nothing is strong. And doing nothing leads to sloth and boredom and anything that alleviates that, including anything from “drugs”, cough syrup, booze, you name it. Not to mention unemployment, obesity, disability, and on and on. I see this every day. There’s a certain segment of the population that doesn’t see any need to take care of itself, so it doesn’t, they blimp out and the next thing you know they’re dead at the age of 30. I can think of several cases just off the top of my head.

There aren’t a lot of jobs out there. For the less educated, little more than service jobs, which frankly isn’t normal for a lot of people. Unemployment, disability, and living in Mom’s attic is the result. Fewer marriages, fewer children, fewer homes, and no sense of community to keep you up to speed.

In my ’60′s I would prefer not having to jump through hoops to get allergy meds or mild opioids (at my age something is always hurting.) But that’s what the focus will be on, I guarantee it.

As per Durkheim (or Masaryk, or the sort of thing Jack London described in England), it was the rising suicide rate among the emerging working class that helped fuel “progressivism” 100-120 years ago. The same thing that fueled the drug laws in 1913, talk about eugenics, birth control, and of course prohibition. Most of that was a waste of time, too, because it’s really about having a social cohort that has no future, no hope, and few opportunities to meet basic social dignity requirements.

Fact is, most people aren’t going to be happy greeting shoppers at a department store, or asking people if they want fries with that, or working in a Dilbert type cubicle. Especially if they can’t have a home and a family on their salaries. We need to create a society where average and below average people can have those things. Otherwise, they will get the message and check out.

The cultural pessimism today is actually pretty intense. You reap what you sow.

* Of course a lot of working class people thought Reagan was great too. Reagan and Thatcher were both very charismatic people. They’ve remained popular in some groups because they were effective advocates to a wider audience for a certain ideology of business friendly conservatism. Did either of them ultimately do anything though that helped the native working classes in their countries in terms of immigration, trade, positive discrimination/affirmative action, unions or social cohesion? For all their talk about morals was it any harder to get an abortion by the end of their terms? Because I’d put forward that they were both disasters who weakened their people and did nothing to stop or reverse the erosion of the culture or identity within their countries. I can maybe understand why conservatives of a certain age are nostalgic about them, but defending or advocating for them seems like a wrongheaded waste of time.

* Why not both?

Conservative deregulation of the banks and liberal housing loan ‘affirmative action’ both helped create the banking crisis.

Conservative defunding of state universities and liberals encouraging everyone to go to college both helped create a generation of indebted kids.

Conservative desire for cheap labor (NOT UNZ READERS) and liberal desire for nonwhite votes both helped create millions of illegal immigrants.

Why can’t conservative destruction of unions and liberal destruction of families both kill blue-collar whites?

We tend to form tribes and go ‘Blue Team, Red Team’ and pick one as the good one and one as the bad one, but really, there are two coalitions of pressure groups that go after what they want, and it’s entirely possible for a group of people with nobody speaking for them to get screwed by both sides.

* Wife and Mother posts: Anecdotally, my younger sister, who is naturally beautiful, smart, and talented, has chosen drugs and social isolation. She is no longer beautiful, unless you’re into meth chic, and her brain is addled, but she can still create really interesting artwork. Someone mentioned SSI/disability. My mom got her on that years ago, for bipolar disorder. She also paid for an abortion my sister had, years ago.

My parents met as Socialists and raised us atheist and contemptuous of America and Western civilization. My dad even became a Muslim, not joking. Funnily enough, they used to really get into the Democratic presidential candidate every four years. I even got to shake Clinton’s hand as a teenager. My mom told me he was really eyeing me, ha.

I rescued myself through luck and grace. Luck because I lack a propensity for alcohol and drug addiction. Grace through suddenly being ‘struck by gratitude’ and realizing how amazingly lucky I was to enjoy health, freedom, security, and prosperity through so little effort of my own.

I glommed on to the NeoCon con but wised up while serving in Iraq. In response to my NCO offering career goodies, I told him, “The Army is not my priority. Serving my country is my priority, and I can best do that by having and raising children.”

Religion is problematic. I lack faith in Christianity, though I’m sentimentally attached out of ancestral loyalty, and it really is beautiful (the works of J.S. Bach….). Hippy-dippy spiritual stuff (e.g., Eckhart Tolle) is helpful and explanatory, though its practitioners err in assuming all peoples are equally evolved, IMO.

Does the West need to believe in Christianity in order to thrive? Aren’t the Northeast Asians doing fine, don’t they maintain ethnic loyalty and pride, without believing in some universalist religion?

* So a bunch of losers couldn’t hack it? Cry me a river.
This stuff doesn’t happen to the winners and beautiful people.
I’m not trying to be mean. Just stating facts.
Winners win. Losers lose.
Everyone on my social level is married with children and has a stable career.

* From what I’ve seen in my own circle, it seems being on SSD/SSI/railroad disability itself is the kiss of early death, even without obesity, drugs or booze. I don’t get it, but suspect a lot of people with marginal disability (no real disease or handicap) trend downward more quickly than those out working and learning new things all the time.

From the outside, though, they look like they “have it made,” to us worker drones.

* I never tire of pointing out how aggressively the medical field pushed increased access to painkillers in the 1990s. Don’t blame it on the drug companies — they were very happy to profit off selling the stuff but it really did spring first from academic medicine (perhaps we could blame the drug companies for aggressively spreading the trend out to community physicians, but it was going to happen anyway).

It strikes me that perhaps this is something like what Charles Murray identified with our elites not preaching what they practice and/or pushing things that work for the elite but not for normal folks. Having under-treated pain is horrible and if you’re in the elite the prospect of prescription drug abuse is small so there is only upside to more liberal prescription policies. It makes you less likely to ever suffer untreated pain. But that same trend reaches working class folks and causes as much destruction as benefit.

Another point is that pain relief and reduced suffering isn’t captured in mortality statistics so there is no way to know what the balance of costs and benefits is — the costs are dead people, the benefits are fewer and less miserable people that aren’t measured in any systematic way. I doubt that the benefit here outweighs the cost but it’s still an angle worth considering.

* The new morality is no match for the old we’ve destroyed.

Pot-smoking is just ubiquitous. People get their little 215 card, then start selling and sharing all around. They can even order it off the internet and get instant home delivery. I’ve got neighbors on both sides that are complete stoners (and I’m NOT sympathetic about whatever ailment they may have).

I wonder if the progress made on reducing tobacco smoking will be undone by all the pot smoking.

* People who were just high school grads, or less, used to be able to find jobs doing something and get a fair income. Not anymore, that’s all gone. Now it’s all service jobs that are low paid. A person can’t save anything on those wages and there’s no pensions so they’ll end up trying to live on perhaps $1200 p/mo Social Security when they get old. Poverty now, poverty later. Not everyone can be a yuppie. Half the population is either average or below average so for them there’s no going to law school or becoming CEOs. Having to continually smile and dance in a service job for every jerk who walks in for the next 30-40 years can be a depressing thought. That there’s so many who see applying for a once-a-month disability check as a survival strategy is telling enough. No present, no future, people just see getting high as a good way to get through the day.

* I live in a upper-middle class area – household incomes ~$140k to ~$200k – and I’ve never heard one person mention the plight of working-class whites. Never. And these are generally conservative, tech-job/management whites, with a few liberals sprinkled in.

Middle-aged, upper-middle class white men – at least in my area – with very good analytical skills have an amazing tunnel vision, as you called it. They seem completely oblivious to the larger consequences of having their lawns mowed by Hispanics, their meals cleaned up by Hispanics, their house worked on by a white foreman with Hispanics for lower-skill work, etc.

If it doesn’t impact their world, they don’t see it. They have no loyalty beyond their family. Heck, the concept that they should worry about their fellow whites seems as foreign to them as the concept that other ethnic groups do worry about members of their tribe.

I just don’t see how a racial/ethnic group like that will survive in a world of instant communication and cheap travel costs. No matter how talented a group may be (and whites are pretty damned talented), you can’t win a fight if you don’t show up. Heck, we don’t even know that we’re in a fight.

Maybe my friends and neighbors do harbor the same concerns as I do, but simply keep quiet about them. However, they know how I feel, and not one has ever told my, even in private, that they agree.

As the Derb says, We are Doomed!

* A couple of observations:

1. Black people HAVE a social network, its called GANGS. Hence less suicide. Even by drugs. There is also far less tendency among Blacks for suicide than Whites and Asians, well documented. A racial difference.

2. White women would prefer the tingles than beta male support. Or as Heartiste/Roissy noted, five minutes of Alpha beats five years of beta. Even among depressed working class areas, there are beta males who can provide beta male support. And why are not the prettiest of the young women in West Virginia and Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee in White working class areas not migrating en-masse to Silicon Valley and landing themselves a nice, beta male provider engineer?

Women, and yes HBD’ers this includes pedastalized White women, would risk death for tingles than have security and safety. The only force known to man or woman that counteracts that is slut-shaming by other women. See Austen, Jane.

3. This situation seems eerily similar to the Yeltsin era disaster, where the Russian nation just drifted until Putin came in and restored nationalism and religion, including BTW a very Multiculturalist approach to religion. Which means jailing not only Pussy Riot for insulting Orthodox worshipers, but also anyone who insults Islam or Muslims.

The LAT today has a front page story on “Activists Stoke Homophobia in St. Petersburg.” The jist of the story is that a “homophobic wolf” as he he calls himself, Timur Bulatov, uses the St. Petersburg law banning promotion of homosexuality among minors to get gays and lesbians fired from their jobs. The law is rarely enforced but employers don’t like to take chances.

Buried lede — Bulatov is a devout … MUSLIM. Also the law in St. Petersburg served as the model for the law nationally.

4. Religion IS dead. What does the Catholic Church offer? Rapefugee Immavasion and Muslim worship. What does the Protestant church(es) offer? Rick Warren style weepy worship of Blacks and Third Worlders as sacred objects of racial redemption and White original sin, with variations found among mainline and evangelical Protestant groups. So too is nationalism, with NFL football and MLB a poor substitute for regional identity.

This is of course not set in stone, Putin’s example of reviving Russian nationalism with a very Multicultural Identity, requiring MUTUAL respect and enforcement, not just a one-way street, is instructive.

But that is how things stand now.

* Those people have thrown in the towel and have just given up on life. They’ve reached the point where waiting for a lousy disability check to arrive just one time each month is pretty much all they can look forward to from here on in. People die psychologically first and then later on physically.

* Whites have a belief that “kindness to strangers” will be rewarded with a higher place in heaven. Thus the young and able are off with NGOs to third world countries, or agitating for more Somali immigrants, or cheering on more affirmative action, etc.

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