“Belgium, like the United States, suffers because it misunderstands multiculturalism. Multiculturalism doesn’t mean we’re all equal or that we must embrace cultural or moral equivalence. Rather, we should insist—Australia style—that everyone who comes subscribes to certain common values, even as they celebrate any cultural heritage that doesn’t contradict the values of society. Basically, to come to Belgium or America should mean subordinating oneself to a core set of values.
At the moment, neither the Democrats nor Republicans are willing to do this. Democrats are hopelessly in thrall to multiculturalism, and congressional Republicans lack the strength of character and will to oppose them. It is by no means certain that a Trump or even a Cruz presidency would be able to convince congressional Republicans to significantly control immigration, and the idea of requiring fealty to a common moral, cultural code is out of the question. If Americans can’t so much as agree that American citizenship has any value, real assimilation is likely impossible.
Obviously, simply requiring absolute fidelity to the Constitution would be the basis of such assimilation. Isn’t the Constitution the basis for all our liberties and civic obligations? However, the Democrats have so degraded even American’s understanding and appreciation of the Constitution that it may be impossible to walk it back. They see the Constitution as an impediment to their social justice desires, to their utopia. Surely, Democrats absolutely would oppose any requirement that immigrants honor the Constitution, and Barack Obama has set such destructive anti-constitutional precedents, it may be entirely too late to even try.
With any Democrat presidency, there would be absolutely no hope. Even if a Democrat president tried to use the Constitution as the basis for a common cultural heritage, the Supreme Court justices they would surely seat would never allow it when other Democrats inevitably sued their way to that court.
We’re in a slow motion, pre-9/11 train wreck. We all see the problem developing and getting closer to the United States but the government just delays taking action and so we will be hit and hit hard. One problem remains visa waivers. It’s all well and good to take assurances that France, Belgium, and other European states share passenger manifests in advance, but they have very clearly failed to develop the necessary surveillance and intelligence capabilities…
Even the Obama Administration has admitted–grudgingly indeed–that we cannot vet Syrian immigrants, and the truth is, we can’t do it for virtually anyone else either. We will indeed be hit hard, often and endlessly. Unless we drastically change course and very, very soon, Americans will learn to expect to be murdered in the streets and public places by Muslim terrorists, just as Europeans have.
I used to wonder what it would take for the American people to demand military action and retribution: another 9-11? The nuclear destruction of a city? Multiple cities? One death is a tragedy; millions are just a statistic. Under Barack Obama, Americans have become so inured to lawlessness, scandal and outrage, I fear there is nothing that would rouse most Americans to awaken as we did in WWII and utterly destroy those that, as I write these words, are plotting to destroy us.
Posted inIslam|Comments Off on Brussels: Just A Stop On The Jihadist Journey To America
REPORT: A common program to compensate public safety workers for job-related disabilities is to grant them a tax exemption, whereby 50% of their retirement pension is exempt from state and federal taxes. While it is virtually impossible to collect data from pension fund administrators on exactly how many retired public safety workers have retired with this benefit, a 2004 investigative report by the Sacramento Bee found that among retired members of the California Highway Patrol, 66% of the rank and file officers, and 82% of the chiefs retired with service disabilities. Similarly, a 2006 investigative report by the San Jose Mercury found that two-thirds of San Jose Firefighters retired with service disabilities. Neither of these reports remain available online, although a Google search on the term “Chief’s Disease” (a term coined by the Sacramento Bee) will find dozens of secondary references to these studies.
SACRAMENTO – Fifty-five of the 65 high-ranking officers who retired from the California Highway Patrol since 2000 filed workers’ compensation claims within two years, entitling them to lucrative disability settlements and medical pensions with tax-free income.
The practice is so widespread among the roughly 150 CHP chiefs and captains that rank-and-file officers have dubbed it “chief’s disease,” boosting costs in a department that pays the highest rate in state government for injuries and medical pensions.
The payments are in addition to routine pension benefits that let CHP officers retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their pay.
Nearly 70 percent of CHP officers retire on disability, and the department pays among the highest percentage of workplace injury claims, The Sacramento Bee found. The combination cost taxpayers $75 million two years ago.
“It turns out we need to be policing the police,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Government Oversight.
CHP Commissioner D.O. Helmick, who is being nudged into retirement next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has asked the Public Employees’ Retirement System to determine if he, too, should be granted a disability pension because of injuries from vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, said spokesman Tom Marshall.
“Some of these people have pushed the envelope on this and it’s just grown and grown and grown,” Helmick told the Bee. “The system is so lucrative, I’m afraid people are going to take advantage even if they’re 100 percent ethical.”
It’s not unexpected for CHP officers to suffer injuries over the years while patrolling highways and pursuing criminals. And experts say it’s difficult to prove fraud because an officer unable to continue at the CHP may be qualified to work another job.
But then they’re no longer disabled, said Speier.
“If someone has a miraculous recovery, then they’re not eligible for a lifetime tax break. It’s an insult to the taxpayers of the state that they continue to draw a disability pension if they’re not disabled,” she said.
More than 80 percent of the chiefs who retired in the last four years claimed a debilitating injury as they prepared to retire, the Bee found, although many of the alleged medical problems had been building for years and were common for those in any field who are nearing retirement.
In one case, a deputy chief who suffered episodes of racing heart was described by a doctor as a danger to the public. In another, one chief’s skin cancer was attributed to years of patrolling the highways, although he found a new career as a scuba instructor in sun-soaked Hawaii.
One captain was found to be 61 percent disabled from knee injuries, ulcers, high blood pressure and hearing loss and took a medical pension from the CHP, then became assistant sheriff of Yolo County.
“What the Legislature and the courts have said is that the aging process is compensable,” said Frank Floyd of the State Compensation Insurance Fund.
Posted inCalifornia|Comments Off on Working The System
“Has Tyson done any real science? He seems to be a media celebrity, but when I look in the Smithsonian/NASA ADS, I can find no record of scholarly work in science, except for popular books and social commentary. Is he in fact a practicing astrophysicist?”
Response: “Not since graduate school (he did not successfully progress towards a degree at UT/Austin, and convinced Columbia to give him a second try). Aside from the obligatory papers describing his dissertation, he’s got a paper on how to take dome flats, a bizarre paper speculating about an asteroid hitting Uranus, and courtesy mentions *very* late in the author lists of a few big projects in which it is unclear what, if anything, of substance he contributed. No first author papers of any real significance whatsoever. Nor is there any evidence that he has been awarded any telescope time on significant instruments as PI since grad school, despite the incredibly inflated claims in his published CVs. He cozied up to Bush and pushed Bush’s version of man to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond, and now gets appointed to just about every high level political advisory board. To an actual astronomer, this is almost beyond inconceivable. It’s just bizarre. To answer Delong’s question, no: he is not a practicing astrophysicist.” – Don Barry, Ph.D. Dept. of Astronomy, Cornell University
Comment: Remember that Tyson miraculously got into Harvard’s Ph.D. after flunking out of UT-Austin (but still getting a master’s). The Princeton post-doc followed, then the headship of the Hayden.
His daughter got into Harvard because his father was Cyril de Grasse Tyson, a big man in NYC civil rights in the early years (HARYOU, later 100 Black Men). Anybody else who had a son who flunked out of astrophysics at UT would have had to go drive a cab or something.
Posted inScience|Comments Off on Has Neil DeGrasse Tyson Done Any Real Science?
Jason Riley writes for the WSJ: When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The answer may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration.
A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact that the FAA’s own internal reports describe the evidence for changing the hiring process as “weak.”
Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups. In May 2013, the FAA’s civil rights administrator issued “barrier analyses” of the agency’s employment procedures, which recommended “revising how the AT-SAT is used in establishing best-qualified lists.”
By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical questionnaire (BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The questions—“How many sports did you play in high school?”, “What has been the major cause of your failures?”—seem designed to elicit stories of personal disadvantage or family hardship rather than determine success on the job.
“The FAA says it created the BQ to promote diversity among its workforce,” reported Adam Shapiro of Fox Business. “All air traffic control applicants are required to take it. Those who pass are deemed eligible and those who fail are ruled ineligible.”
The FAA would not tell Fox Business what the biographical test is trying to measure and did not return my phone calls. But an FAA report released in October, “Using Biodata to Select Air Traffic Controllers,” concluded that the AT-SAT exam, not the biographical questionnaire, is a much better predictor of performance. “The biodata items assessed did little to improve our ability to select applicants most likely” to complete training successfully, said the study. “If biodata are to be used to select controllers, additional research is required to identify those biodata items that will add to the prediction of controller training performance over and above the effect of AT-SAT score.”
Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than $400,000 on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to complete the process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the FAA’s focus on diversity is not only inefficient but may be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. “The FAA’s jettisoning of merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme Court’s Ricci decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies’ ability to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the criteria are not job-related,” said Mr. Bader.
After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of applicants who were already in the pipeline—people who had obtained an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated “well-qualified” to become air-traffic controllers—were told by the government that they would have to start the process again. “But this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,” reported Fox Business. “They would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires’; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.”
Posted inAffirmative Action|Comments Off on Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower
Steve Sailer writes: Back in 2007, the Bush Administration rewarded the firemen of New York City, 343 of whom died on 9/11, by suing them for disparate impact discrimination in hiring. In 2009 a Democratic judge ruled the test devised by the city of New York was racially/ethnically biased because it presented readings on fire safety and then asked hard questions, such as: what kind of chainsaw should you use to cut through a steel door? You could pass the test either by having strong reading comprehension skills or by studying firefighting intensively.
FDNY candidates will take an entry exam that quizzes them on topics like African killer bees and on math questions such as comparing veggie chips to pretzels, but little on firefighting.
With the city planning to give the first FDNY entry exam in five years in 2017, critics say the test has been dumbed down since a judge ruled a former exam discriminated against minorities.
A recently posted preparation manual asks aspiring Bravest to practice by watching videos produced by Lowe’s hardware store on how to install a toilet, replace a sink, and lay a tile floor.
“It’s great to prepare firemen for their second jobs as plumbers,” an insider quipped. “The FDNY might as well call this the ‘Side Job Preparation Guide.’ ”
To test reading comprehension, the tutorial asks applicants to read a 1998 Tampa Tribune article, “Natural Born Killers,” on African bees migrating to the United States.
On math, it first gives tips on solving word problems, then a sample exercise showing the nutritional labels for vegetable chips, rice cakes, trail mix and pretzel twists.
The first of 10 multiple-choice questions says: “Firefighter Harris ate one cup of Fruit & Nut Trail Mix. What percentage of Saturated Fat did she have (% Daily Value)?” Other questions ask test-takers to compare the snacks for fat, carbohydrates and protein.
In another exercise, applicants read labels on bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen, then answer questions such as: “Which medicine relieves pain from toothaches?”
… The test is apparently meant to level the playing field so those more familiar with firefighting don’t have an advantage.
… In January 2010, Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Giraufis ruled the FDNY exams first given in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against black applicants and halted their use. The city later agreed to pay $98 million in back pay to those minorities passed over, and give some a second chance to join the department.
The city and the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group of black firefighters, devised a new exam that Garaufis approved in 2012. Of 9,400 who scored high enough to be hired, 42.3 percent were minorities — more than ever.
Now, the FDNY has finally learned the lesson that La Griffe du Lion pointed out years ago: If you want to please the feds, you can minimize disparate impact (percentage point differential) of the hiring test by making it extremely easy, then hiring randomly.
The 2012 test approved by Judge Garufis was passed by 97% of test-takers.
COMMENTS:
* Any test that requires study is, ipso facto, racist.
* LA County Sheriff Dept. had a test of basic English. To pass you needed to score over 50%, if you got 51% that was just as good as if you scored 100% in the hiring process.
* I suspect elite judges think a fireman’s job involves no knowledge or smartness. That its just a matter of running into a building with a hose.
In NYC you you have 150 year old rotten wood death traps standing side by side with new sprinklered buildings that compartmentalize to prevent the spread of fire. And all the buildings that come in between with varying degrees of safety. Firefighters need to know all types of building and their particular weaknesses and strengths.
You don’t need to be a genius to figure this stuff out but you need to have a certain level of intelligence and diligence.
* That’s what Emily Bazelon of the Yale Law School asked in 2009 in Slate. I asked in response whether she had any career advantages in law in being the granddaughter of David Bazelon, chief judge of the first district court of appeal and Supreme Court justice William Brennan’s best friend.
* Do you ever experience the sensation of overwhelming despair washing over you after you read news like this? Sometimes it helps to pretend that I’m Alice and have gone through the Looking Glass, but I can only pretend that I’m in a make-believe world for a second or two before reality intrudes.
* I’ve taken firefighting exams before (not FDNY though). From my experience, the tests tend to have these type of sections:
1. Basic math
2. Memorizing tools/knots and their functions
3. Memorizing the layout of a room
4. Memorizing the details of a fire scene
5. Reading a fire-related passage and then later recalling details
You need to have good memorization skills to do well. Especially the ability to recall images.
* If you do well enough on the test, then they’ll call you in for an oral interview. Typically they’ll ask questions about your work experience, teamwork&leadership skills, views on ethnic diversity, etc.
The oral interviewers are under heavy pressure to give generous grades to certain underrepresented minority groups and also women. If you’re black or a woman, expect to be graded very easily at the oral interviews. That’s mostly because of all the law suits involving blacks complaining about racism and women complaining about sexual harassment. FF depts are eager to hire lots of blacks and women to avoid more law suits.
If you do well at the oral interview, usually you proceed to a second round of orals. If you do well there, you are given a background check. If you pass, you get the job. Of course, even after getting the job, you have to pass through basic training.
It helps to be a military veteran too, as veterans are given a large number of preference points. In one fire department I applied to, I was told that 30% of the FFs were veterans.
* Being a large-city firefighter is a good deal.
1. Typically the base salary for large-city staff FFers (attained after a few years) is in the 90-100K range. Very good benefits, strong union, and lots of vacation too.
2. They work a one-day on, two-day off schedule. Some work two-days on, four-days off schedule. So lots of time for hobbies, relaxing, partying, starting your own band, getting a side job, etc. Even when they’re on the job, there’s a lot of downtime and fairly low stress.
3. Very generous pension (50% of peak salary after 20 years on the force). Lots of fire fighters even “double dip” by getting a 50K/yr pension and working a second job.
4. Very strong job security. Rare for there to be layoffs.
5. If you test well, you can test up into senior level positions. Some of the higher-ups in the organizations actually have considerable prestige in their local city govts.
6. For a kid who can’t enter an elite career track (finance, law, medicine, consulting) and doesn’t want to go the entrepreneurship route, climbing the ranks of a FF department can be a good option to attain prestige and power. The competition is less fierce too.
I’d strongly advise any young man to consider a career in firefighting.
* FDNY is under more pressure to hire minorities than other departments. Not only do you see lots of black and Hispanic hires these days, but even Asians and (even more implausibly) Indians/Pakistanis. They want the dept to reflect the city’s diversity. NYPD is even worse.
For a very long time though, the FDNY just hired lots of ethnic Italian/Irish guys. They were able to get away with it too. Much better than the NYPD.
* You need to add a seventh bullet point: You’ll score a hot wife.
There are a number of firefighters in my Orange County neighborhood and all of them have very nice looking (my husband says hot) stay at home wives who have large rocks on their fingers and live in pricier homes than mine.
* My relative has tried out several times for the fire department. He graduated from a ten month long course on firefighting that cost him about 16K. One thing that he told me really struck me. The male testers have to drag a dummy 100 yards weighing 180 pounds. But the female testers only have to drag a dummy weighing 120 pounds. When I asked one of his instructors what would happen in real life if a female firefighter had to drag a 180 pound person out, I was just met with embarrassing silence.
* All standards are racist. Live with it.
* I have read that firemen have far fewer fires to deal with than in times past. Smoke alarms, automatic sprinklers, OSHA regulations, etc, have made fires less common and less destructive. When it’s time to run into the burning building and pull the children out, they have to earn their keep, but you can be a dummy or a weakling and get by for a longer time than was possible decades ago.
* Whether blue collar or white collar, intelligence and work ethic make a huge difference in quality and productivity. When it comes to fighting fires that difference is measured in the number of lives saved.
* About 80% of firefighting calls are EMT-related. Only 20% involve fighting actual fires.
EMT calls still require a high degree of competence. However, firefighting departments get huge numbers of applications and hire the top 1-2%. So even if they hire minorities/women due to AA, they can get fairly competent people. Just not quite as competent as they would if there was no AA.
Firefighting is still 95% white as a profession. As it changes and becomes more diverse due to AA, perhaps competency will fall.
* I’m familiar with a few firefighters that hold two “full-time” firefighter positions in two different cities. They’re able to schedule their 24 hours on/48 hours off to allow them to do this. The earn about $70K at each job, and earn two pensions!
The firefighters have strong unions and media and over the years have been able to bamboozle the public as to how “dangerous” and busy their jobs are. The local city officials are scared of the fire unions and roll over every three years at contract negotiation time. Remember, every firefighter wage and benefit was negotiated by city management and approved by city council.
* I’m a 45-year old NYFD firewhiner with 25 years of “service.” For my dedicated “service” to the good citizens of NYC, I deserve to get paid! I’ve got bills! Alimony & child support to three ex-wives, payments on my Escalade, Harley, and speed boat. I’m juggling three girlfriends, and have some serious gambling debts. I now make close to $200K per year but deserve more! Not too bad for a high school grad who was washing cars before I got on with the NYFD. I did, however, earn my A.S. degree in “Fire Science” on the City’s dime. You wouldn’t believe how easy that was. The “instructors” were my NYFD buddies, so I passed w/ all As w/o opening a book! And that silly degree got me promoted three times to Sr. Deputy Assistant Deputy Big-Cheese Battalion Chief Indian Chief. And I still have lots of free time to work out while on the job. I’m trying to get on next year’s “Hottest Firewhiners of NYFD” calendar.
Last year I “worked” tons of OT to spike my pension and will soon start accumulating my $100K/yr pension, and I’m only 45 years old! In 20 years, I’ll be 65 (the retirement age for most of you stiffs), the 3% COLA will have doubled my pension to $200K per year! My life expectancy is 88 years, so my pension will double again to $400K per year by the time I die. It gets better; my lovely 20-year old mail-order bride will collect my pension long after I die. Her life expectancy is 90 years. She’ll collect my growing pension for another 25 years after my death! The New York City has been very, very good to me. And I know you don’t feel appreciated, but a big thank you to the NYC taxpayers. Now get back to work and pay those taxes! Oh, by the way, F.U. Pay Me!
* I also think the presence of lots of Italians and Irish makes a difference. They tend to be much “meaner” than whites in other parts of the country. They’re not much into the idea of white guilt. They fought neighborhood integration and busing much harder than whites in other parts of the country. As recently as the 80s, the east coast had overwhelmingly white housing projects.
Of course, these days, their ethnic solidarity and clout isn’t quite what it used to be.
* LSAT entrance exam for law schools and the bar exam to practice law also have disparate impact on black and latinos but no judge is striking down those practices.
Presumably because they feel it is justifiable to select for intelligence in practice of law, not justifiable to do so for firefighting.
* That was the way it was originally in the Canadian banking system as well–the late Peter Jennings of ABC News used to tell of how, since he came from a respectable Toronto family but was not himself really college material (in fact he dropped out of the 10th grade), he was encouraged to take an entry-level job with the Royal Bank of Canada, with every expectation that he had an eventual shot at upper management despite his lack of education. Finance, in the Commonwealth countries, historically simply was not seen as an “academic” field.
Oh, and that “dumb” Canadian banking culture, as David Frum would be happy to tell you, was ruthlessly realistic in its mortgage lending standards into this century. As Orwell said, some things are so stupid only an intellectual can believe in them.
* In other countries, you have to take rigorous college entrance exams in order to pass into college in the first place, and also into the major of your choice. Many countries even place students on specific study tracks years before the end of highschool, and not all students qualify to even take the entrance exams for studying law.
We can debate the pros and cons of such a system versus the American one, but I think it goes against the American ethos to tell a student that they can’t choose what they want to study. I wonder if all the Bernie Sanders supporters quite understand the major restrictions that come along with free higher education, as it’s such a different system from the American one. Or do they believe that they can do away with these restrictions and keep the system as it is now, only free?
* I remember the television show Rescue Me. It was mostly Irish and Italian firefighters, with 1 token Puerto Rican and 1 token African American.
Posted inIQ, Race|Comments Off on NYP: FDNY’s new entry exam asks about everything but firefighting
From Haaretz: Recent events at Brown University reflect a frightening new stage to the BDS movement: targeting Jewish students and institutions that don’t explicitly distance themselves from Israel.
Janet Mock was born in Honolulu in 1983 to an African-American father and native Hawaiian mother, and is a soaring star in LGBT circles—almost a pop icon of the transgender community, if you will. As I discovered last week, she’s in high-demand as a speaker on college campuses. “Moral Voices,” a social justice group that operates under the auspices of Brown University’s Hillel, secured her as a speaker for a March 21 seminar entitled “Redefining Realness.” The event was well-publicized, and — as evidence of its expected popularity — was slated to take place in Brown’s largest lecture hall.
But, unbeknownst to the program’s organizers, Hillel’s right to sponsor events had apparently been revoked by a handful of student activists. A group calling itself “Brown Students” published a petition on Change.org urging Mock to disavow Brown/RISD Hillel’s sponsorship, since its umbrella organization—Hillel International—is pro-Israel on most issues.
I take pity on my readers, and will therefore reproduce only the most critical part of the tortured document:
“Hillel as a corporation has consistently defended and even advocated for the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid. Israel’s violent policies center on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians. Further, the Israeli government has been ignoring (and actively perpetuating) waves of anti-African violence in the past few years, recently including the mob shooting and lynching of an African asylum seeker and anti-African state-supported police violence.”
The petition’s authors also coughed up the highly-original pinkwashing charge — that Hillel is exploiting Israel’s positive record on LGBT rights in order to distract people from how evil the Jewish state is.
The students were not protesting anything about Janet Mock; just that Hillel doesn’t have any right to host “one of their own” – a transgender woman of color – if it supports Israel. The petition attracted only 159 supporters — not all of them even Brown students — but as Mercutio said, “‘tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.” Janet Mock cancelled the event. In an email, her representatives explained that “the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event, and her visit was received with controversy and resistance rather than open dialogue and discussion about the issues closest to Janet’s work.”
The fingerprints of Students for Justice in Palestine were all over this from the start, and SJP’s proud confession in Monday’s issue of the Brown Daily Herald leaves no doubt that the petition was its handiwork.
The Janet Mock incident was just one episode of the anti-Israel scourge that has racked Brown this semester. Hillel hosted its highest profile event of the year on January 28, when former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharanksy and Hollywood legend Michael Douglas came to speak about their “Jewish Journeys.” Needless to say, that program didn’t sit too well with the dark forces of anti-Israelism, whose faithful picketed the talk in an attempt to disrupt it. Then came the coup de grâce: Students at the Jewish and LGBT frats discovered anti-Semitic and homophobic vandalism graffitied on their walls last week. There’s no evidence implicating SJP in this, but when punishing the world’s only Jewish country becomes a permanent and obsessive feature of campus life, what happens next cannot be dismissed as an unhappy coincidence.
Posted inIsrael, Jews|Comments Off on Watch Out, Jewish Students: The anti-Israel Movement Will Boycott You Next
Microsoft released an AI chat bot that is currently “verified” on Twitter called @TayandYou that was meant to try to learn the way millennials speak and interact with them.
It’s meant to “test and improve Microsoft’s understanding of conversational language” according to The Verge.
Things did get pretty controversial. There are other types of people in addition to ‘millennials’ who use Twitter that naturally found the bot, and some of them were able to “hack” into Tay’s learning process.
Here are some screen shots of tweets that were deleted once the Internet “taught” Tay some things:
And a Gamer Gate favorite:
Tay’s developers seemed to discover what was happening and began furiously deleting the racist tweets. They also appeared to shut down her learning capabilities and she quickly became a feminist:
Scott Greer writes: The 2016 election’s unprecedented nastiness provided House Speaker Paul Ryan yet another opportunity to pontificate on his “positive” conservative vision.
Lamenting the “disheartening” state of the current election, Ryan offered his alternative Wednesday — a politics focused on ideas.
According to the Republican leader, “America is the only nation founded on an idea — not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. Our rights are natural. They come from God, not government.”
Ryan then decided to give a history lesson on the idea-obsessed founders and how America’s greatest leaders have always come together through compromise and debate.
With that lesson in mind, he called upon America’s modern politicians to return their focus to “ideas” and instead of pandering to their respective bases.
The speech is obviously a rather gooey attempt to bridge the political divide, but there’s one line that stands above the platitudes and cliched allusions — America is a nation founded on an idea, not an identity.
It’s a popular notion to think that our nation was created in a vacuum and created solely to uphold abstract principles. That line of thinking believes there’s no cultural basis to the American proposition, and there’s no real national identity outside of the belief in meritocracy.
That’s pretty quaint — and largely untrue.
If Ryan had probably read the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s indispensable tome “Who Are We?” he’d know that America’s founding ideas are actually an outgrowth of the nation’s Anglo-Protestant identity. Put another way, that unique identity gave birth to the unique ideas that made us the nation we are.
America’s belief in individual rights, liberty and equality of opportunity could only come about from the specific culture and institutions that were brought to the New World by British settlers, as Huntington notes. That culture — which placed a premium on liberty and representative government — was unique to Anglo-Protestants and provided the worldview from which our Founders forged a nation.
If the 13 colonies were primarily settled by another people — such as the French or Spanish — we would almost certainly not be the country we are today.
Our Anglo-Protestant culture also bequeathed the nation’s strong commitment to hard work and the adoption of English as the all but official language of the land. Ryan endorsed that last quality by delivering his speech in that particular language, not French or Spanish.
It is true that our Founding Fathers were very much animated by ideas, but they also didn’t conjure up our country out of thin air. The reason many of them wanted to separate from the British crown and start a new country was over the feeling they were being denied their rights as Englishmen, not that they one day suddenly thought it’d be better to found a country on the idea that “the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.”
And our Founders were keen to emphasize the cultural identity the citizens of the new country would share.
As John Jay wrote in the Federalist No. 2, “With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.”
Sounds like Jay believed America was founded upon a clear identity — one that was shaped by war, history and blood.
The opening line of our Constitution gives credence to the idea that the citizens of this country share an identity which gave us our unique rights as Americans.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The heavy emphasis on “we” and “our” reveals a document that sees its people as more than a random collection of people who believe in meritocracy.
The sentiment expressed by Paul Ryan Wednesday, in contrast, makes it seem like our country was formed out of a void by that random collection of people. The fact is that America, while exceptional in its accomplishments and character, is not so different from other nations. It is based on an identity — one shaped by a shared culture, history and language among its citizens.
To think that a nation can be founded on the sole idea that every person can have a successful job no matter what their station in life is not enough to sustain unified body of citizens. Of course, many Americans do cherish the idea just described, but there is so much more to our country than that.
Assimilation is such an arduous, yet necessary task for immigrants to perform because it requires the new arrivals to imbibe the culture and values of Anglo-Protestantism. If assimilation only required you believe that you can do something different than what you were born into, over half the world could become an American overnight.
No wonder Congressman Ryan is arguably the GOP’s biggest fan of mass immigration.
It’s clear that America is much more than an idea. Without our long-established identity, America would cease to be a unified nation and would instead become devolve into a continental strip mall, populated by people with nothing in common.
Posted inAmerica, WASPs|Comments Off on America Was Founded On Anglo Identity
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A longtime NFL reporter revealed Wednesday the NFL agreed to a deal where the Los Angeles Rams — then St. Louis — didn’t have to do HBO’s “Hard Knocks” series in 2014 if they drafted Michael Sam.
“Sources say NFL agreed not to have Rams on Hard Knocks in 2014 if they drafted Michael Sam,” Howard Balzer tweeted.
Sam was the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team. The Rams selected him in the seventh round of the 2014 NFL Draft.
Sam was not shocked by the report.
“I’m not surprised at all,” Sam tweeted.
Balzer reported the NFL was concerned Sam wouldn’t be drafted, so a deal was made with the Rams.
“Rams didn’t want Hard Knocks even without Sam. League concerned he wouldn’t be drafted. Deal made,” Balzer said.
The Rams, who recently moved to Los Angeles, will be the featured team on “Hard Knocks” this year.
Sam, fhe former University of Missouri defensive end, was cut by the Rams before the beginning of the 2014 regular season. He was then signed to the Dallas Cowboys practice squad, where he only lasted seven weeks.
He signed a deal with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League in 2015 but only played one game after leaving the team for mental health reasons.
“The last 12 months have been very difficult for me, to the point where I became concerned with my mental health. Because of this I am going to step away from the game at this time,” Sam said last August. “I thank the Alouettes for this opportunity and hope to be back on the field soon. Thank you all for your understanding and support.”
Sam told Colin Cowherd in November he wished he wasn’t drafted.
“If I had my way, I really do wish I went undrafted,” Sam said at the time. “I could have actually went to a team who really needed pass rush, and needed a defensive end who could pass rush the quarterback. But the Rams, even though I learned a log from Chris Long and [Robert] Quinn, I think that I could have done better being on an active roster right now if I went to a different team.”
Sam said in January he’s going to give the NFL “one more shot.”
Posted inFootball, Homosexuality|Comments Off on Rams Made Deal With NFL To Draft Michael Sam To Not Film ‘Hard Knocks,’ Report Says
After a lengthy campaign, voters have decided by a margin of more than 10 points to retain the flag with its strong links to the United Kingdom.
Preliminary results announced at 8.30pm local time on Thursday showed that 1,200,003 (56.6%) of voters wanted to keep the Union flag-centred emblem. Only 915,008 (43.2%) opted for the proposed new design by Kyle Lockwood featuring a silver fern.
The results of the referendum, which is estimated to have cost NZ$26m (£12m), are expected be confirmed next Wednesday…
The long-serving and popular Key had strongly supported the flag change but it was not enough to win a majority, with many suspicious of him trying to use the issue to build a legacy.
However, he said after the results were announced that New Zealanders should embrace the current flag and “more importantly, be proud of it”.
“Obviously I’m a bit disappointed there was no change but nearly a million people voted for change,” he said. “Just because it’s not the outcome I wanted doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile process.”
Deputy prime minister Bill English said there had been a “robust democratic process” that allowed New Zealander “to discuss who we are and how we want to be represented on the world stage”.
“I acknowledge there will be those who are disappointed with the outcome, but the majority of New Zealanders have spoken and we should all embrace that decision.
“This process has engaged Kiwis in their homes, in their schools and in their workplaces, here in New Zealand, and right around the world – it is something we’ve all had a point of view on.”
…Prof Paul Moon, a New Zealand historian at the Auckland University of Technology said changing the current flag would have been like “amputating” New Zealand history.
“There was no popular sentiment for a change. Indeed, most people barely considered our national flag as an issue until it was thrust in front of them in the form of an impending referendum.
“Entrusted with a once-in-a-lifetime task to select four alternative contenders for our national flag, the panel delivered options that were insipid and unimaginative. And to make matters worse, for all the talk of inclusivity, serious Indigenous input was largely whitewashed. What we were left with was culturally monochromatic and aesthetically neutered design to go up against the incumbent.”
“We were told a new flag was needed because we were ‘more multicultural, ‘more independent’, and ‘more vibrant’ as a nation. Putting these cliches aside, the premise that we change a flag as our identity evolves is inherently flawed. Flags, like our names, remain with us as we mature and are the sum total of our existence.”
The driving force behind this referendum is the Jewish prime minister.
Jews, while often respectful of Jewish traditions, don’t always have the same attachment to gentile traditions as their gentile neighbors. Jews, even when they vote conservative in Australia, don’t like the white Australian identity and don’t like Australia being part of the British commonwealth.
The lack of Jewish attachment to gentile traditions is not weird nor Satanic. It is basic social identity theory. The more strongly you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups.
On the other hand, the Chinese often live as minorities in the Chinese diaspora and they don’t have the same drive as Jews to change the traditions and attachments of their neighbors.
Jewish gifts, such as a high verbal IQ and emotional intensity, lead them to great success in the media and academia and to pushing social justice themes. There is always blowback to this Jewish pattern, however, including the Holocaust. Gentiles, strangely enough, tend to be attached to each other, to their countries and to their traditions and often don’t take well to Jews trying to change them. Today is Purim, and the Jewish community in that story was almost massacred because of Jewish disrespect for gentile norms (Mordecai wouldn’t bow to Haman, strange, in that there is nothing in Jewish law prohibiting such bowing).
Esther 3:8:
Then Haman said to King Xerxes, “There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of all other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them.”
Speaking as a convert to Orthodox Judaism, it is hard not to have some sympathy for Haman’s point of view. Does diversity make a country stronger or weaker? Is a country stronger or weaker when there is a smart and influential group within that keeps itself separate and practices different customs? I’d say it depends on the overall effect of the group on a particular place. In some countries, this type of group would be disruptive and destructive, and for other countries, this group might well serve as a stimulus for excellence and prosperity and openness. Jews may not be an equally wonderful fit for every country on earth. They may be better suited to some countries rather than others. For instance, Jews have always done best in the individualist Protestant countries as opposed to corporate Catholic and Muslim countries.
Jews are usually minorities in gentile lands, though they may be majorities in certain places such as Beverly Hills, and they will usually align with increasing rights for minorities at the expense of the majority. They will incline to supporting multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance and many other agendas of the left. Strong national, religious and racial identities among the goyim will frighten them. Many Jews will come from places such as Eastern Europe where Jews have long had horrible relations with their neighbors and many Jews will come from places such as Western Europe where Jews found much to admire in their neighbors.
“The Jew is everywhere a stranger and not even angels like strangers,” said Mark Twain.
Posted inJews, New Zealand|Comments Off on New Zealand votes to keep its flag after 56.6% back the status quo
"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)
