November 2, 2015 Jewish Boy Graduates College – At Age 11 Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Jewish Boy Graduates College – At Age 11

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

REPORT: Moshe Kai Cavallin, 11, became the second youngest American to ever graduate college this week, after completing an Associate of Arts degree with full honors to boot. Moshe Kai Cavallin (also known by his Chinese name Kai Hasiao Hu or “obedient tiger”) began his studies at East Los Angeles College at the age of 8. When he was not turning heads at ELAC, he also took time to help his fellow students with their studies. One would be advised not to cross the pint-sized college graduate, as he has won gold medals in 26 martial arts events and is very handy with a broadsword.

According to his Web site, Moshe began studying martial arts at the age of 5 with his father, an ex-special operations commando.

Don’t expect to find the martial-artist and future astrophysicist playing video games this summer, which he avoids “because it’s not helping humanity in any way.”

The youngest American to ever graduate from college was Michael Kearney, who finished the University of South Alabama in 1995 at the age of 10.

As a younger child, Moshe Kai Cavallin was identified with “Attention Deficit Disorder,” but his parents refused to use “Ritalin,” the official drug for ADD.

He spoke his first words while he was just 4 months old. He told his pediatrician, “I have a left ear infection” when he was just 6 months old. At the age of just 10 months, he learned to read. Moshe accomplished a perfect score on the multiple-choice diagnostic tests for the Johns Hopkins precocious math program when he was just 4-years-old and his accomplishment came without studying.

Moshe graduated high school at the age of 6 years. He joined Santa Rosa Junior College when he was just 6-years and 7-months old. He finished his graduation from junior college with Associate of Science in Geology at the age of 8-years.

Moshe Kai Cavallin won $25,000 in the program “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” on Friday, April 25 2008 and April 28, 2008.

He graduated from East Los Angeles College with 4.0 GPA. He became the youngest student in U.S. History with an A.A. Degree, when he finished all the requirements for the degree in Jan, 2009 at the age of 10.

Posted in IQ | Comments Off

The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Amazon.com:

McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War
by Hamilton Gregory (Author)
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were desperate to find additional troops for the Vietnam War, but they feared that they would alienate middle-class voters if they drafted college boys or sent Reservists and National Guardsmen to Vietnam. So, on October 1, 1966, McNamara lowered mental standards and inducted thousands of low-IQ men.
Altogether, 354,000 of these men were taken into the Armed Forces and a large number of them were sent into combat. Many military men, including William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, viewed McNamara’s program as a disaster. Because many of the substandard men were incompetent in combat, they endangered not only themselves but their comrades as well. Their death toll was appallingly high.
In addition to low-IQ men, tens of thousands of other substandard troops were inducted, including criminals, misfits, and men with disabilities.
This book tells the story of the men caught up in McNamara’s folly.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Low-IQ infantrymen as cannon fodder are not new today and weren’t new in the Vietnam war either.

In his superb classic book The Sharp End John Ellis presents a wealth of statistics showing that low-IQ enlistees and conscripts were relegated to the infantry whose units suffered something like 75% of all battle casualties.

Ellis also shows this for British forces as well. The British, much harder pressed for manpower than was the United States, consigned their lowest-IQ personnel to the Pioneer Corps whose members were menial laborers to dig ditches, roll airfields level, fill sandbags, erect fencing, clean latrines, &c. By late 1943 even the United States had run out of intellectually qualified conscripts and had begun to draft men not up to the lowest standards that had applied earlier in the war.

* Once I asked an army veteran of vietnam during the 1970′s if he thought platoon, full metal jacket, etc were very realistic. He said they weren’t, not at all, and neither was every other war movie he’d seen but with one eerily accurate exception. This movie is exactly what being in the army was like, he said. The movie is Stripes.

* Related to this, scholarly studies that look at life expectancy and IQ have found that people with low IQs are far more likely to die in accidents.

Now in an environment like the Vietnam War where you deal with guns and bombs everyday, that effect is magnified. Just think of the ways to accidentally die or kill: getting lost in the jungle, misunderstanding orders, accidentally shooting at fellow Americans, not taking proper precautions to prevent falling victim to friendly fire, mishandling explosives.

* Low IQ troops may not have helped in the Vietnam War but the rot was with the high IQ leaders. Read McMasters’ Dereliction of Duty.

BTW, the flawed U.S. Grand Strategy in Vietnam was essentially based on Maxwell Taylor’s highly influential book, amongst the Democrats, The Uncertain Trumpet. If I remember correctly, Taylor was near top of his class and proficient in several languages. It’s pretty certain that he had a high IQ.

McNamara and his “Whizz Kids” were also pretty bright, but not when it came to fighting a war.

Seriously, Steve, I think you’ve got to get around to reading Keith Stanovich. He is a legitimate cognitive researcher whose specialty is understanding why high IQ sometimes leads to stupid. The Scientific American ran an article by him which you might want to peruse.

“Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss.” Google it up.

* “How do the WW2 soldiers’ IQ compare to Vietnam era soldiers and how do the standards compare?”

They compare identically.

Early in both wars the military took in the best quality human material; later in the wars the military lowered the standards and inducted a lot of far from the best quality human material.

In the two wars the reasons for this shift differ: in WWII the nation(s) simply ran out of the best quality human material – the shortage was actual; while in the Vietnam War the best quality human material was exempted from induction – the shortage was artificial. In both instances the military was compelled to induct lower quality personnel.

The actual WWII & Vietnam War standards for IQ (or AFQT) don’t matter, as in both instances the bar was set high early and later lowered, and in both instances the military inducted from the then-available pool of manpower. The IQ ranges of those two wars’ manpower pools may not have been exactly the same (Flynn effect) but their graphs are parallel as are the graphs of the intelligence of the two wars’ inductees.

* Anecdotally, the stories I have heard from my friends who were officers in the Vietnam war certainly suggest that the troops they had were among the least prepared, least motivated, least trainable and most drug addicted that any US Army has gone to war with. One obvious factor is that in Vietnam inner city blacks made up a significant level of the troops. In WWII blacks generally weren’t allowed in combat units.

* The Iraq War turned out great in this sense: combat deaths were 10% of losses in Vietnam and 1% of losses in WWII. In some years, losses were less than in the peacetime years of the Cold War. A lot of this can be explained by the fact that we had a smaller, smarter army in Iraq.

Posted in Armed Forces, Army, IQ | Comments Off

Academia’s Rejection of Diversity

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

If diversity is such a blessing, why does almost everyone flee it when given a choice? People prefer to live, work, play and worship with their own kind.

Diversity makes people uncomfortable, even afraid, and so they shrink within themselves.

By contrast, when I go back to Australia with its 90% white population, I’m in a land with one dominant culture and a tradition of mateship. High trust, high social capital.

Arthur C. Brooks writes: ONE of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing. It has become conventional wisdom that being around those unlike ourselves makes us better people — and more productive to boot.

Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.

Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity — the diversity of ideas — and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.

Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 82 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

This has consequences well beyond fairness. It damages accuracy and quality. As the authors write, “Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking.”

One of the study’s authors, Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania, put it to me more bluntly. Expecting trustworthy results on politically charged topics from an “ideologically incestuous community,” he explained, is “downright delusional.”

Are untrustworthy academic findings really a problem? In a few high-profile cases, most definitely. Take, for example, Prof. Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who in 2011 faked experiments to show, among other things, that eating meat made people selfish. (He later said that his work was “a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth”).

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Yes, liberal media bias is real, and here’s how it affected the CNBC debate

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Timothy P. Carney writes: The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — the largest media outlets with the exception of Fox News — all slant clearly left. So do a vast majority of other major newspapers and magazines. I’m not talking about their opinion pages, but about their news operations.

I don’t think it’s deliberate, or that any collusion, deception, or bad intentions are at play, except in the rarest circumstances. I also think very highly of many of the journalists whose personal views are significantly to the Left of the American political center. Many of them do an excellent job of reporting the news fairly and trying to understand political viewpoints all around the spectrum.

But the vast majority of journalists at these major outlets are generally liberal, and this ends up slanting their coverage. Cuomo is a perfect example.

Cuomo’s father was Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. His brother is Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is a daytime host and reporter, not an explicitly liberal host, such as Piers Morgan or MSNBC’s evening hosts.

This is the norm in the media: People with distinctively liberal or Democratic pedigrees and resumes are hired as straight news reporters (see Jake Tapper, Nick Confessore, Annie Lowrey, Alex Seitz-Wald, most of whom are excellent and fair journalists). In 2014, the Media Research center counted 30 former reporters as Obama officials. It’s far, far rarer to find the opposite.

While Tapper, Confessore, and Lowrey do a very good job of making sure their coverage is fair, the norm in the major media is slanted coverage — slanted to the Left. For instance, Linda Greenhouse was long the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, and now she’s a liberal columnist about the Supreme Court whose factual errors consistently cut against the Right.

Reporters at the major outlets are almost entirely liberal on cultural issues. See the coverage of the gay marriage ruling, where the Supreme Court stretched the language of the Constitution to find that states couldn’t limit marriage to heterosexual couples. The country seems to be split evenly on gay marriage, but the major media are nearly unanimous. I don’t think this is really a matter of debate. In 2013, the Washington Post’s ombudsman basically admitted as much, with even more revealing comments by anonymous Post reporters placing Christian teaching on marriage on the same level as racism.

You see it with abortion, too, where journalists always ask difficult abortion questions of pro-life politicians, and nearly never ask difficult abortion questions of pro-choice politicians.

But it’s also true on questions of regulation, government spending and taxation. (I should add the media also has a very strong bias, which is neither liberal nor conservative, towards deficit reduction, which most journalists don’t realize is a bias.) I could give a thousand examples, but one good one was from the New York Times reporter, Jonathan Weisman, who spent the most time on the Export-Import Bank at the time, making it clear he was totally unaware about conservatives’ and libertarians’ economic arguments against export subsidies, while he was well versed in the talking points of industry and the liberals.

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Ben Carson’s Church Believes the U.S. Government Will Team Up With the Antichrist

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jay Michaelson writes: Ben Carson’s church believes the United States government will bring about the End Times.

According to mainstream Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ will occur after the U.S. government teams up with the Catholic Church—which Adventists believe is the “Babylon” of the Book of Revelation, with the pope being the Antichrist—to compel Adventists and others to worship on Sunday, rather than Saturday.

That may seem like a small hook on which to hang the fate of the world, but for Adventists, it is a core belief, taught at “prophecy seminars” and elaborated in excruciating geopolitical detail by key Adventist leaders.

Is it awkward for Ben Carson to run for president, if his faith believes the U.S. government will team up with the Antichrist? Will it matter to his evangelical base if he, like his denomination, believes that the government will join forces with the Whore of Babylon, to persecute religious minorities and compel Sunday worship?

So far, no.

We don’t know, though, what Carson personally believes—only what his denomination teaches.

In fact, the one time Carson was asked about the End Times, the media blew it. In an interview with conservative journalist Sharyl Atkisson, Carson first focused on the universal aspects of Adventist theology.

“I’m a Christian,” he said. “I belong to the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. I believe in godly principles, of loving your fellow man, caring about your neighbor, developing your God-give talents to the utmost so you become valuable to the people around you.”

Pressed on his view about the End Times, Carson said, “You could guess that we are getting closer to that. You do have people who have a belief system that sees this apocalyptic phenomenon occurring, and that they’re a part of it, and who would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if they gain them.”

But, he reassured the public, “I think we have a chance to certainly do everything that we can to ameliorate the situation, to prevent—I would always be shooting for peace. You know, I wouldn’t just take a fatalistic view of things.”

The mainstream media howled—Ben Carson believes the End is Nigh!—but missed the real story, as Sarah Posner, a columnist at the online journal Religion Dispatches, noted. Neither Atkisson nor anyone else pressed Carson on the Adventist-specific aspects (if any) of his worldview.

The Seventh-day Adventist sect (and, later, the Jehovah’s Witnesses) emerged out of messianic fervor in the mid-19th century, when the date of the Second Coming was established as October 22, 1844. Unlike the more recent predictions from the likes of Harold Camping, this one, by Baptist preacher William Miller, was not a fringe phenomenon. Tens of thousands of Americans believed the Second Coming was about to happen, and they acted on those beliefs, selling belongings and gathering on hilltops awaiting Christ’s return.

When it didn’t happen, in the words of one believer, “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.”

Quickly, though—precisely as described in Leon Festinger’s classic When Prophecy Fails—many of the faithful regrouped. One of Miller’s followers said that Christ had returned, in a way; He was now in Heaven, commencing the judgment of the world. Judgment Day is more like Judgment Period, and October 22, 1844, is when it began.

To most Christians, all this is heresy, and Adventists have been persecuted for a century and a half. Their peculiar ways—vegetarianism, church on Saturday—mark them as different, which is obviously part of the reason they exist in the first place. And other distinctive beliefs—for example, since death is simply a kind of sleep, there is no such thing as hell—have caused many fundamentalists to reject them. While Seventh-day Adventists may, today, seem like just another Christian denomination, in fact they have long seen themselves as a group apart from the rest of the world.

Posted in Adventist, Ben Carson, Christianity | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: Hungarian PM Viktor Orban Accuses George Soros of Stoking Camp of the Saints; Soros Confirms Orban

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

It’s nice to see Hungary standing up for itself against this horde of Muslim refugees. It seems like Eastern Europeans have a clearer sense of their national interests than does Germany.

Steve Sailer writes:

From Bloomberg Business:

Orban Accuses Soros of Stoking Refugee Wave to Weaken Europe
Andras Gergely
October 30, 2015 — 12:59 AM PDT
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused billionaire investor George Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying to undermine European nations by supporting refugees heading to the continent from the Middle East and beyond.
“His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle,” Orban said in an interview on public radio Kossuth. “These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.” …
Soros said in an e-mailed statement that a six-point plan published by his foundation helps “uphold European values” while Orban’s actions “undermine those values.”
“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” he said in the statement. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national border as the obstacle.”

In other words, Soros is agreeing with Orban.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I don’t believe there is a conspiracy in the usual sense of the word, but Soros and many of his ilk hold views that are hostile to the idea of a blood-and-soil nation state. Offhand, I would guess that the cabal includes Gates, Buffett, Slim, Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Bush family, et al.

They don’t have to conspire in the usual sense, i.e. holding discussions in secret, plotting, planning, etc. etc. They all hold the same beliefs, and they are doing nothing to hide their intentions.

* If that were true, you’d think all their work would go into breaking Japan and Israel. If they’re going by power of the practicioners of blood and soil nationalism, and their degree of blood and soilyness, I mean. If they just want to rack up wins they should start with Liberia, maybe swing by Rwanda.

But, oddly enough, they seem really interested in Europe instead.

* The people-smuggling gangsters are only bit players in the plan drawn up and orchestrated by the likes of Soros and Merkel.

* George Soros is a devotee of Karl Popper, the theorist of the Open Society. TS Eliot criticized Popper for divorcing philosophy from moral imagination and thus severing culture from its religious roots. TS Eliot advocated the recovery of Christian community. There are no Christian thinkers in the West today who criticize the dangers of a liberal democracy and the open society.

* Then there’s the juggernauts of China and India, with their lack of diversity, obviously racist regimes, entrenched cultures of xenophobia, walls against brown people, etc.

* Does Soros ever say anything anywhere about what’s best for European people? Or does he just talk about obstacles and objectives?

* I remember writing to David Limbaugh, in response to a column of his 15 years ago, asking what was wrong with his brother that he did not talk more about immigration. Back then, Rush was still interested, at least somewhat in mainstream respectability.

Then three things happened:

– He got fired from ESPN in 2003 for making the entirely unremarkable comment that the mainstream media was desirous of seeing black NFL quarterbacks do well,

– His subsequent detainment at a general aviation airport upon his return from the Dominican Republic on trumped up drug charges (i.e. prescription ED meds)

– And finally the NFL owners denying his application to be a minority (5-10%) owner of the St. Louis Rams.

I am sure those 3 events caused him to realize that he was never going to be admitted to “the club,” despite his $500M net worth. If that’s what pushed him our direction, all I can say is “welcome Rush.”

* Rush has had ample time to publicly raise many of the issues that other lesser known conservatives who work mainly in print (e.g. Brimelow on immigration or the late Sam Francis on traditional conservatism) have consistently been making. There’s even a strong chance that he’s not entirely familiar with John Derbyshire, this blog, and others. If Pat Buchanan’s name comes up, its more of a disdain along lines of “Oh, yes, Pat. Didn’t he run for something about 20yrs ago….and lose?” In other words, Rush measures success by one thing, and that’s the bottom line.

Forget even thinking he’ll admit that he’s familiar with Jared Taylor’s writings. That last name would definitely take a courageous stance in this day and age to cop to and this man isn’t about to put himself out there for anything that might make him lose any more sponsors.

Rush’s original two conservative heroes by his own admission: Bill Buckley and George Will and both men to a certain extent supported open borders. Not exactly principled paragons of conservatism whether at the time or now.

And that’s the thing. Over the last few decades, the words “patriotic immigration” just don’t come up when you say the name Limbaugh, whereas mistakes in personal life and wanting to become an NFL owner/ESPN co-host do. Pretty much tells you all about him. He sold out years ago.

* Soros, like many old Jews of his generation, is obsessed with saving “retroactively” East European Jewry. National borders were one of the main causes of millions being trapped under genocidal regimes. Of course he wants to soften and open up nationalist, fascist regimes like Mr Orban’s. It is being done on the open, and Orban and Soros acknowledge it. No conspiracy. The use of “inadvertently” by Orban reveals that he is not a conspiracy idiot, but a honest leader doing what he thinks is the best for his people. We should respect Orban and Soros.

* I wonder which “European values” Orban is undermining? Orban’s popularity ratings are skyrocketing, while Merkel’s are tanking. Austria and Poland just moved emphatically to the right, while the nationalist party in Sweden, which has seen its support double in elections every four years for the last two decades, has already seen its support double in the one year since the 2014 elections. I guess “European values” don’t include ideas like, oh, doing what your citizens want you to do.

That, to me, has been one of the more remarkable facts of the migrant crisis. Because it’s affecting numerous countries rather than just one, we get to see how both citizens and the international press treat the way different politicians are reacting. The press and various NGOs continually talk about the obligation of democratically-elected leaders to ignore both the rule of law and the will of their voters. Democracy and rule of law no exist when either manages to serve conservative, national interests.

* We should most definitely not respect Soros or his position. He needs to be thought of as what he is, someone who has self-selected himself to be an enemy of the traditional West and traditional Western nation states.

He may be smart, but he’s not smart enough to have any idea of what a mess he’s unleashing. He’s like someone who spits in the salad and then loudly tells everyone about it. If he thinks this is smart, he might be one of those people as clueless as Merkle about estimating human behaviour.

* Whether or not you think Soros’ plans are part of some Jewish plot against white policies. His policies are objectively bad for real Jews. He covertly supported the anti Israeli Jewish group J Street. Supporting open borders in Europe with the onslaught of young Muslim men will cause Hitler’s dream to come true. Europe will be judenrein in less than 2 generations.

* Soros cleverly claims to be taking the side of people (refugees) vs. abstraction (nation-states).

The answer is that

1) Protection of ‘the refugee’ does not necessitate their mass migration to countries thousands of kilometers away from their homelands (via safe polities).

2) That far from protecting refugees, encourage exoduses inevitably leads to more deaths and more exploitation and

3) That people (citizens of nation-states) want to be protected themselves. That is, the nation-state provides protection, the ‘Open Society Foundation’ not so much.

Posted in Christianity, Europe, George Soros, Hungary | Comments Off

Hispanic-White Test Score Gap on 2015 NAEP

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Average Hispanic performance is just mediocre. Not terrible … just *consistently* mediocre.

There are only a few things of note:
– Florida Hispanics–as expected–are of a slightly different cut and do a bit better.
– New York, despite having more black Hispanics gets bog standard performance.
– The generally high-performing (white) states really do *not* have any capability to move Hispanic scores up. Even Massachusetts Hispanics are just average. The average across a bunch of states with decent white scores–Connecticut, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota–pretty much the Hispanic average.

To me, the lone data point with a real “message” is California–it has the worst Hispanic scores, tied only by Alabama. Enough below the average i’d guess there’s statistical significance.

My take home from that is the more Hispanics you take in, the more they live in a Hispanicized world, in Hispanic cities, with Hispanic norms, Hispanic teachers, administrators, public officials … the more mediocre the Hispanic performance. Essentially it degrades toward their performance in Latin America … because they are now living in a Latin America.

It’s essentially the problem with the Raj Chetty’s bogus “solution” (integration with whites). With fewer and fewer whites around, you simple don’t have enough whites to provide minority “uplift”.

If you want the quality and amenities of a white country … you sorta need white people around to deliver them!

* Despite the billions of tax dollars thrown at this intractable problem, the stats reveal that you cannot educate those who cannot be educated. Now the region formerly known as southern California has been transformed into Mexifornia. In fifty more years no one will believe that this was once the driver of the aerospace and defense industries. But you’ll be able to get a killer taco de lengue on every rincon del calle.

Posted in America, Latino | Comments Off

Bridge Of Spies

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Armond Whites writes: The dark, creepy murk of Steven Spielberg’s 2011 Lincoln also seeps into his new film, Bridge of Spies, an account of the 1957 exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union of captured espionage agents, the Russian Colonel Rudolph Abel and the American pilot Gary Francis Powers. This gloom can be attributed to Spielberg’s suggestion, in both films, of American political anxiety. After the ebullient history of Amistad, he has gone to the shadowy partisan chicanery behind Lincoln’s 14th Amendment to the Constitution and now to this consideration of the United States’ lack of innocence in global matters. Scenes of Abel’s and Powers’s secretive missions, and eventual imprisonment, juxtapose how our government and military matched Russia’s unprincipled subterfuge.

In Lincoln the weird darkness passed for cynical realism, but in Bridge of Spies it conveys disillusionment. When attorney James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) defends Abel before the Supreme Court, the imagery is overcast, somber; when Powers is detained by a Russian court, sunlight shines through the casements. Seem anti-American? In visual terms, Bridge of Spies is an ACLU movie. Through Donovan’s difficult maneuvers (against public disapproval and family discouragement), Spielberg pursues the sanctity of civil-liberties issues. Donovan, an insurance lawyer who served at the Nuremberg trials, must fight Cold War paranoia — presented as an eternal threat to America democracy.

Good guy Donovan (his stern face features Hanks’s twinkling eyes) represents a common man nobly acting against judicial and CIA expediencies; he defends the principles within the Constitution, referred to as “the Rule Book.” Robert De Niro’s overlooked The Good Shepherd (2007) was a more complex history of the social ideas at stake in CIA operations, but Bridge of Spies shows simplistic sentimentality when Donovan exclaims, “American justice is on trial! We’re in a battle for civilization!” Those are Tony Kushnerisms, hangovers from his over-rhetorical Lincoln script, which encouraged an unfortunate sanctimony in Spielberg’s newly politicized vision. After Kushner, the lights have dimmed in Spielberg’s worldview, making Bridge of Spies a glum experience.

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off

20 signs of a broken film culture

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Armand White writes:

Since 2004, the year that film culture split along moral and artistic lines, political and class biases have been exhibited in films that became more and more partisan. This rift was furthered by a compromised media, where critics praised movies that exhibited cynicism along with political bias.

Not just entertainment, the 20 films listed here effectively destroyed art, social unity, and spiritual confidence. They constitute a corrupt, carelessly politicized canon.

1) Good Night and Good Luck (2005) — George Clooney, president of the corrupt canon, directed and acted in a dishonest fantasy biopic of TV-news icon Edward R. Murrow to revive blacklist lore as part of a liberal agenda.

2) The Dark Knight (2008) used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy.

3) Ocean’s Twelve (2004) — Steven Soderbergh salutes land of the greedy and home of the depraved in a reboot franchise sequel, scoffing at the post-War conviction of Sinatra’s Rat Pack original.

4) 12 Years a Slave (2013) distorted the history of slavery while encouraging and continuing Hollywood’s malign neglect of slavery’s contemporary impact.

5) Wall-E (2008) — Nihilism made cute for children of all ages who know nothing about cultural history or how to sustain it.

6) Manderlay (2005) — Lars Von Trier’s Dogville sequel sold American self-hatred back to us, and critics fawned.

7) United 93 (2006) reduced the pain and tragedy of 9/11 to the inanity of a disaster movie.

8) Frost/Nixon (2008) — Political vengeance disguised as a dual biopic that prized showbiz egotism over conflicted public service.

9) Knocked Up (2007) — Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety.

10) The Social Network (2010) — David Fincher’s new Horatio Alger tale glorified technocrat Mark Zuckerberg with chic, digital-era arrogance.

11) Precious (2009) coincided with Obama’s first year in office to revive racial condescension with the audacity of nope.

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The Master Race

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

* It seems like most Australians take Melbourne Cup day off, slackers! East Asians are only 10% of Australia’s population but it seems like they do 50% of the work. My mate down under says bring in another 10% and they can do 100% of the work and keep the whites around for comfort.

* Virtually every important American realist opposed the Vietnam and Iraq 2003 war while almost all important liberal thinkers supported the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Democrats often opposed the 1990 Gulf War, and afterward they feared the political repercussions, so they supported the 2003 Iraq War (out of fear of political repercussions).

* A pathetic girlfriend of a few years back said to me, “You love me because I’m pathetic.” Ouch. She was right. I have this urge to rescue or to be rescued, symptoms of the same emptiness.

* The Jewish way to get wasted is to do mitzvos (transcend the self).

* Uncover to discover to recover.

* Compared to American girls, Israeli girls seem much more fit and better with guns.

Posted in Australia, Personal | Comments Off