I am naked. Chava, the mikveh lady, has said she’ll listen for me to enter the pool. The room contains a shower, sink, and toilet in an alcove. Think spa. In the shower, where I scrub myself clean according to directions on a laminated card, the soap smells of flowers and mint. Chava says she will enter the room only once I’m submerged. I wonder how she can know that only by listening.
Outside the blue door to the mikveh, in a small waiting room with pamphlets and a guestbook, sit Chava, three rabbis, and my husband. Alone in the mikveh, I descend the seven stairs into the pool. Let me rephrase that: I practically jump into the pool and loudly splash in my haste to submerge my nakedness as soon as possible. I’m unsure that this is the holy experience I’d been expecting as the conclusion of my conversion to Judaism.
Miriam Lilian D Or: “Hahaha! Only women can get that into it. I read a blog where a woman said it was so emotional that she went home and cried the rest of the day. Probably from the extra soul she gained at the mikvah.”
Posted inConversion|Comments Off on Can you imagine a man writing something so precious?
* ‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate … I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.’ (Winston Churchill in 1910 to Asquith)
* ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ (Winston Churchill in 1954)
* ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ (Winston Churchill in 1937)
* Churchill wrote of the legitimacy of displacing ‘the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.’
* Churchill’s Zionism coexisted with a fear that the Jews, deprived of a homeland, might make trouble for the world. In an essay that he wrote for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, which the neocons never quote, Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere: ‘This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky [Russia], Bela Kun [Hungary], Rosa Luxemburg [Germany], and Emma Goldman [the United States] … this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.’ If Jews, whom Churchill described as denizens of ‘the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, could have their homeland, perhaps they would not — to use Churchill’s words — conspire ‘for the overthrow of civilisation’.
* As colonial secretary in 1919, Churchill wanted to use gas against the ‘unco-operative Arabs’ in Iraq. He explained, in terms that Saddam might have used to justify his gassing of Iraqi Kurds, ‘I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’
Posted inEngland, Eugenics|Comments Off on The Wit & Wisdom Of Winston Churchill
Popular Arizona State University faculty member Matthew Whitaker has been demoted after the university found “significant issues with the content” of his recent book.
It is the second plagiarism-related incident in four years involving Whitaker, a former full professor who now is an associate professor.
Whitaker, 44, is a well-known speaker and author who focuses on African-American history, civil rights and racial equality. He declined to comment Friday.
In May, he won a $268,800 contract for his consulting company to provide “cultural consciousness training” for the Phoenix Police Department.
Whitaker, an Arizona native, was an ASU Foundation professor of history and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at ASU.
He was demoted June 26 to an associate professor and co-director of the center, according to an e-mail ASU interim University Provost Mark Searle sent to select faculty this week.
Whitaker will also lose at least $20,000 per year as a result of the demotion.
{snip}
His salary will be reduced by $10,000, to $153,530, starting with the new academic year this fall, and moving from director to co-director of the center will reduce his stipend from $20,000 to $10,000, according to ASU.
It is unclear whether he also will lose funding from the ASU Foundation.
“After concerns were raised about his book ‘Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama’ an investigation ensued in keeping with ASU policy. Results of that investigation identified significant issues with the content of the aforementioned book,” Searle wrote in the e-mail.
Searle’s e-mail included a letter from Whitaker in which he admitted to mistakes and apologized to his colleagues.
“My critics have revealed numerous mistakes that I made. It is painful to recognize that I was so careless as to fail to properly paraphrase and cite sources, despite my reverence and respect for the work of others in this field,” Whitaker wrote.
{snip}
Whitaker’s book has received criticism since early 2014, when a blogger began comparing the book to websites and other texts. An Inside Higher Ed article verified the comparisons.
Among the comparisons are a passage on affirmative action taken nearly word for word from Infoplease.com, and full, verbatim sentences about the television show “The Jeffersons” from the Archive of American Television website. The archive is cited, but the passages are not in quotation marks.
{snip}
He was the subject of a similar incident in 2011, when several ASU faculty members accused him of plagiarism. A university investigation determined that Whitaker had not committed “systematic or substantial” plagiarism, but ASU officials said they were concerned about “occasional carelessness.”
{snip}
In 2011, when Whitaker was promoted from associate professor to full professor, 10 ASU faculty members reported concerns about plagiarism to ASU President Michael Crow.
During the subsequent investigation of Whitaker’s work, a committee appointed by the university to examine the matter found paragraphs in a book that had been taken from Wikipedia, and parts of a speech he gave that matched or were similar to several paragraphs in a Washington Post story.
Posted inBlacks, Plagiarism|Comments Off on Popular Black ASU Professor Whitaker Demoted After Plagiarism
Paul Gottfried writes: The most interesting aspect of the war against Confederate symbols is not its predictable backing from black activist groups or the leftist media or members of the Rainbow Coalition. Those are the sources of support one would expect to find in this campaign. Far more striking is the overwhelming, effusive help that is coming from elements of what is imagined to be the conservative movement. Whether we look at the Murdoch media, listen to Republican office-holders throughout the South, or read statements prepared for our capitalist CEOs, the message is hardly different from that of black civil rights activists and organizational heads. Not at all surprising is the evidence of the usual Republican game of triangulating, which takes the form of doing anything to win groups on the left while assuming that what there is of a Right will stay with the GOP. Unfortunately, this game has done very well among Southern whites, who continue to vote overwhelmingly for any so-called moderate the party throws at them, whether McCain, W, or Lindsey Graham.
Among neoconservatives, the repugnance for Southern white society and culture has long been evident, and it seems that one encounters escalating effusions of hate from neoconservative celebrities that were it directed against their own ethnicity would evoke understandable outrage. Just the other day the latest neocon candidate for the title “hating Southerners the most” Jeff Jacoby ranted in all the usual venues of conservatism, inc. that the Battle Flag banner “is the emblem of the most poisonous ideologies in our national history.” Jacoby fulminated against “the hatefulness of the proposition” for which Southern soldiers “were prepared to kill or be killed.” One wonders whether authorized “conservative” sources would publish the invective of a Palestinian whose family had been expelled from their land by Israeli soldiers if he offered a similar rant against the Israeli flag. Just wondering!
Posted inConservatives|Comments Off on The Confederate Flag Controversy
Jonathan Bronitsky writes: I want the ADL to revisit and clarify its mission. “The nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency,” asserts that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry”; not just “all forms of bigotry,” but “anti-Semitism” and then “all forms of bigotry.” Yet as murderous anti-Semitism around the globe has surged in recent years, the ADL has dedicated itself more and more to matters of social justice in America (e.g., immigration, women’s reproductive health, economic “privilege”) that are already being pursued by a plethora of lobbying outlets and activist foundations. This wouldn’t be problematic—or rather, duplicitous—per se. But the ADL loudly and incessantly bemoans the fact that Jews are living in an increasingly dangerous world. “Thirty or forty years ago,” I heard over and over again at the National Leadership Summit, “I couldn’t have imagined that Jews would be getting shot dead in the streets of Europe.”
Well, resources are limited. Is combatting anti-Semitism a “priority” for the ADL? If so, then the organization should put its money where its mouth is. Alas, this outcome seems ever more unlikely as it seeks to enforce group conformity and advance political agendas that have nothing to do with defending the Jewish people.
Posted inADL, Anti-Semitism|Comments Off on Is Fighting Anti-Semitism An ADL Priority?
Let’s take homicide as an example. The GAO estimates “criminal aliens” were arrested, convicted and incarcerated for 25,064 homicides. If non-citizens committed them over seven years, the annual rate would be 14.2 per 100,000 non-citizens. If illegal aliens committed them over four years, the annual rate would be 58.0 per 100,000 illegal aliens. Either way you compute, those are high rates.
By comparison, the FBI reports the murder rates for the entire U.S. from 2003 through 2009 varied from 5.0 to 5.8 per 100,000 inhabitants for an average rate of 5.5. To be clear, 5.5 is much lower than either 14.2 or 58.0.
Or look at the total number of homicides in those years. Per the FBI, there were 67,642 murders in the U.S. from 2005 through 2008, and 115,717 from 2003 through 2009. Per the GAO, criminal aliens committed 25,064 of them. That means they committed 22% to 37% of all murders in the U.S., while being only 3.52% to 8.25% of the population.
Conclusion: criminal and illegal aliens commit murder at much higher rates than all inhabitants of the U.S. – at least 3 to 10 times higher.
And I believe these are low-end estimates. For one, murder is almost always handled at the state and local level, not the federal level. So the GAO’s homicide data are skewed toward the state and local data, which cover fewer years (four) and a smaller population (illegals only). The Washington Post states that “Federal prisoners made up 10 percent of the total incarcerated populations in the United States in 2013.”
OK, let’s assume that 90% of the crimes listed by the GAO (other than immigration itself) were committed by SCAAP persons in state and local institutions. That would mean illegal aliens committed 22,558 murders over four years. That is a rate of 5,639 per year, or over 15 per day. (For reference, Rep. Steve King reported a figure of 12 per day. A sheriffs’ association is reported to estimate it at 25 per day. I don’t know how reliable these values are, but they are not totally out of line with the GAO’s data.)
That would give a murder rate for illegal aliens of 52 per 100,000 (5,639 in a population of 10.8 million) – about 10 times that of U.S. citizens.
Here are the numbers of crimes per day committed by illegal aliens in just a few crime categories, based on those GAO numbers and the 90% figure for SCAAP persons over four years.
Kidnappings: 9
Murders: 15
Sex offenses: 43
Burglaries: 71
Assaults: 131
(You may try to compare those numbers to the FBI’s numbers for all crimes, but the categories do not match except for murder/homicide. That is part of what makes this analysis so frustrating, and ripe for cherry-picking by pro-immigrant groups.)
Also, the criminal alien numbers came from those arrested, convicted and incarcerated for these crimes, and reported as such via SCAAP. Yet the FBI numbers include all crimes, solved or not, convictions or not. How many illegal aliens committed murder or other crimes in the U.S. without getting caught and convicted of them?
Posted inCrime, Immigration|Comments Off on Illegal Immigrants Appear To Murder At 10x Rate Of US Citizens
Part of a nationwide trend, cases of syphilis among women and newborns increased in the last two years in California and Los Angeles County, state officials said Monday.
The annual number of reported early cases of the sexually transmitted disease among women rose from 248 to 594 from 2012 to 2014.
In the same period, cases of congenital syphilis–in which a mother infects her child during pregnancy–surged in the state, with annual cases in newborns rising from 30 to 100…
Most of the congenital cases occurred in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, according to department officials. Stillbirths caused by syphilis also rose from one case in 2012 to six in 2014.
Thirty-one of the state’s 100 cases of congenital syphilis last year were in Los Angeles County, said Dr. Susie Baldwin, head of the health assessment unit of the county’s Department of Public Health.
Baldwin said that most of those women didn’t have adequate access to medical care. Ten of them were foreign nationals who arrived in the county late in their pregnancies, so little is known about their prenatal care, she said…
In 2013, California’s syphilis rate was already second highest in the nation, after Georgia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
Nationally, there was an 11% increase in primary and secondary cases between 2012 and 2013, with 75% of them reported among gay men, according to the CDC.
Posted inCalifornia, STDs|Comments Off on CA’s Syphilis Boom
Jason Richwine writes: Many people take for granted that today’s low-skill immigrants will be just like the Irish and Italians of Ellis Island lore, coming to the U.S. as menial laborers but rising to the middle class within a few generations. But it is a serious mistake to assume that today’s immigrants will assimilate as quickly as others did in the past. In fact, the data from recent immigration waves tell a pessimistic story about upward mobility.
Let’s focus on immigrants from Latin America, since they form the bulk of less-educated immigrants from the past 50 years and are easier to track across generations. The most straightforward evidence on Hispanic assimilation comes from cross-sectional data sets produced by the Census Bureau. All of these data sets reveal that economic and educational progress for Hispanics stalls after the second generation, leaving a substantial gap between white Americans and Hispanic Americans.
Take education. According to the Current Population Survey, about 37 percent of white adults have a four-year college degree, while just 12 percent of Hispanic immigrants do. In the Hispanic second generation (meaning U.S.-born with immigrant parents), the rate of college graduation goes up to 23 percent, but it is just 18 percent in the Hispanic “third-plus” generation (meaning U.S.-born with two U.S.-born parents). The data on income, poverty, and household welfare receipt show a similar generational pattern.
In addition, the norms of hard work and discipline exhibited by Hispanic immigrants appear to slip in subsequent generations. This is sometimes referred to as “downward assimilation” to the American underclass. For example, just 10 percent of Hispanic immigrant men are out of the labor force, but that number goes up to 21 percent in the third-plus generation. As for crime, Hispanic immigrant men are 27 percent more likely than white men to be listed in the American Community Survey as institutionalized (usually meaning in prison), while U.S-born Hispanic men are fully 157 percent more likely.
How might this picture be too pessimistic? One possibility is that cross-sections are misleading, since each of the generations being compared lives in the same era. Maybe we would see more assimilation if we go back in time to an original immigrant cohort, then follow the actual children and grandchildren of those immigrants.
The good news is that this longitudinal approach does show gains in education for Hispanics between the second and third generations. The bad news is that relative wages remain basically stagnant, just as in the cross-sectional analysis. The further bad news is that even the educational improvement may be a mirage–does it reflect real skill gains relative to whites, or just the general mid-20th century trend for working-class people to stay in school longer?
…If we are serious about improving social mobility in the U.S., then importing millions of low-skill immigrants (of any nationality) with uncertain prospects for advancement cannot be the right policy. No one wants the U.S. to be defined by the gated communities and rigid class lines common in Latin America–especially when the class lines are tinged by skin color–but that is the outcome we risk.
Posted inImmigration, IQ, Latino|Comments Off on Latinos Are Not Upwardly Mobile
A tool I use for figuring out the world is the prism of conflicting group interests. It verges on the impossible for groups such as blacks and whites and Jews and Muslims to have identical interests.
The other day, I was talking to a couple of Jewish friends and proposed: “When the goyim are strong, cohesive and united in their racial or religious or national identity, Jews are comparatively weak and vulnerable in that land.”
Jew 1: “Jews and whites can be weakened by same causes, e.g. increasing presence of North Africans in France. But yeah on other hand Jews are stronger when weak white identity allows for Jewish hegemony in media.”
Jew 2: “When Jews are allowed to pretend to be white, this is where white problems begin in earnest.
“One of the important benefits to restricted housing, vacations, quotas, country clubs was that though mild segregation, it reminded WASPs that Jews are a separate tribe.
“Orthodox Jews are obsessive about in-group / out-group rules. The most important thing for the frum is to delineate as much as possible who is in-group and who is out-group. Whites may recognize recognize that some forms of consistent segregation are critical to protect their interests. Yes, the Jews will whine. But as we learned, they will whine anyway. Why not let them whine while you retain your nation and culture? It’s better even for the Jews long-term. Hyperinflation and violent revolt hardly suit Jewish interests. If whites can’t find it in their hearts to exclude the Jews for their own interest, they should exclude the Jews for Jewish interests.”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
