“Calling Sweden, you will soon be connected to a random Swede.”
Those are the first words one hears when dialing the “Swedish Number,” a new hotline created to connect callers with local residents. A few flat tones later and the caller is patched through to, well, a random Swede.
One such call late Thursday morning connected with David Lamm, a product designer from the nation’s second most-populous city, Gothenburg. Lamm, who speaks English, volunteered to field calls on Wednesday, which was both the day the service launched and his 31st birthday.
“We were sort of invited to answer the phone for Sweden and I thought I had to sign up,” he said.
The conversation on Thursday was Lamm’s seventh through the service. His first was with a pleasant man from Istanbul, who, like this reporter, first asked about the weather. (It was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and raining when we spoke.) Lamm also spoke with two Americans, he said.
“The interesting thing with both of those guys is that they were sort of calling with a Donald Trump-ish agenda,” he said. “They wanted to hear sort of ‘What the hell are you doing over there in Sweden, taking all those immigrants, all those Muslims.'”
(The nation welcomed more refugees per capita than much of Europe last year, though that openness has not come without its problems. Authorities have been accused of covering up crime allegedly committed by migrants, resulting in a sometimes-violent backlash.)
Lamm’s conversations were facilitated by the Swedish Number—46-771-793-336, or 46-771-SWEDEN—debuted on Wednesday and was conceived by the Swedish Tourist Association, a nonprofit that runs more than 350 accommodations including hostels, hotels, mountain stations and cabins.
It was launched to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the passage of what many say was the world’s firstpress freedom law. The hotline itself appears to mark another first: It is the world’s only national phone number connecting callers to local residents, the association said in a statement.
“We want to show the real Sweden – a unique country worth visiting with the right of public access, sustainable tourism, and a rich cultural heritage,” Magnus Ling, general secretary and chief executive officer of the association, said in a statement.
Just after 11 a.m. on Thursday, that meant Lamm, who, for what it’s worth, defended the refugees his country has welcomed.
“We’ve had problems in Sweden, of course, but it’s mostly due to us being bad at integration projects, he said. “I wouldn’t blame anything on the people coming here, I mean they’re fleeing for their lives.”
Lamm shared his experience growing up with refugees from the Bosnian conflict: “I grew up with a lot of those that came then and that worked out really good,” he said.
Blacks in the United States have the highest prostate cancer rate in the world and nearly twice that of whites in the United States. The 2:1 black-to-white ratio in prostate cancer rates is already apparent at age 45 years, the age at which the earliest prostate cancer cases occur. This finding suggests that the factor(s) responsible for the difference in rates occurs, or first occurs, early in life. Testosterone has been hypothesized to play a role in the etiology of prostate cancer, because testosterone and its metabolite, dihydrotestosterone, are the principal trophic hormones that regulate growth and function of epithelial prostate tissue. This report gives the results of assays of circulating steroid hormone levels in white and black college students in Los Angeles, CA. Mean testosterone levels in blacks were 19% higher than in whites, and free testosterone levels were 21% higher. Both these differences were statistically significant. Adjustment by analysis of covariance for time of sampling, age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs somewhat reduced the differences. After these adjustments were made, blacks had a 15% higher testosterone level and a 13% higher free testosterone level. A 15% difference in circulating testosterone levels could readily explain a twofold difference in prostate cancer risk.
High testosterone is linked to aggression and correlates with violent crime rates. Just as men have higher testosterone levels than women and commit about ten times as much violent crime as women, so too do blacks have more testosterone than whites and commit more violent crimes than whites, while whites have higher testosterone levels than asians and commit more violent crime than asians.
High testosterone levels accounts for why blacks add more muscular definition more quickly and easily than whites who in turn bulk up more impressively than asians.
High testosterone levels probably don’t make for family stability, which may be part of the reason why east-asians enjoy more family stability than whites and whites more than blacks.
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* Assuming that he did follow through with his economic proposals, which are still relatively vague, Trump’s policies would be good for deadbeats. Trump plans to greatly devalue the dollar while simultaneously running huge budget deficits in the first year or two of his presidency. Deportation of illegal aliens along with some measured reduction in the trade deficit will cause wage growth to accelerate. NGDP – nominal GDP – will go through the roof. The high inflation will reduce the value of debts and make them easier to pay off.
* According to his own account, Obama was a poor custodian of his own personal finances right up through his election to the Senate.
* You can’t sell cigarettes without getting people hooked, and you can’t make money as a bank unless some sucker takes out a loan from you.
There’s a fundamental problem with low interest rates. If you’re a bank and you’re being paid back at an interest rate of 4%, which is closer to what people had to pay in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s easier to make money than getting paid back at 1% interest rates. Mathematically speaking, if a bank needs X amount of income to survive as a business, they need 4 times the amount of loans out at 1% interest than at 4% interest.
The problem is, there aren’t necessarily 4 times the amount of people out there who are a good idea to lend to. If someone has to pay you back at 4%, a banker is more inclined to be judgmental about who that money is going to and whether they can be trusted to repay it. Low interest rates encourage stupid loans, because banks think even stupid people should be able to pay back at 1%, which isn’t always the case.
If a whole sector of the economy happens to go belly-up at once, banks will be destroyed. Case in point that I’ve been researching: Currently, a lot of banks have massive loans out to fracking and other associated oil industry companies that aren’t going to be paid back. I’ve seen an estimate that between now and September, over 140 companies will start missing payments to banks, and then those companies will begin to go bankrupt. Supposedly, banks have been telling these companies to sell off all their assets down to their office chairs before declaring bankruptcy, because when that happens, it’ll take our banking system down with it. A lot of banks didn’t bother to put aside cash reserves in case these big loans go bad because they never realized the whole fracking sector was going to die at once, and banks haven’t have enough time to build up emergency cash reserves of any significance since the price of gas began to drop.
This will mean another TARP-style bailout is going be necessary to save our banking system, and we’ll almost certainly have a big stock market crash like the one in 2008. Depending on the timing, this is going to be our October Surprise before the election.
Though I sort of relish the thought of all this blowing up in Obama’s face and staining his legacy, I’m not looking forward to the chaos. A stock market crash will deplete the value of pension funds, IRAs, etc., that many middle-class baby boomers are depending on for retirement, and their old age is going to be poorer than they expected. The collapse in gas prices is mostly Obama’s fault in the first place because of his Mideast antics with the Saudis. I hope he gets tarred, feathered, and wacked like a pinata on his way out the White House door.
* I’m a director of a community bank. For years we included in our written lending policy a reference to the “5 C’s of Credit,” which are:
Banks undergo two types of examinations from the regulatory authorities – one for safety and soundness, and the other for compliance with the numerous anti-discrimination and social engineering regulations such as the Community Reinvestment Act. The two types of exams often work at cross purposes, because safety and soundness require discrimination against people with bad credit, while the category of people with bad credit includes a disproportionate number of certified victim groups.
At one of our recent compliance exams the examiners criticized our lending policy because it included the word “character.” Why? Because it was “too subjective.” They wouldn’t say it, but I suspect that they felt it enabled some sort of invidious discrimination. So, we had to amend the policy and remove the reference to character.
That the Obama administration now wants lenders to “use more subjective judgment” is a perfect illustration of the conflict between safety and soundness on one hand, and egalitarian social engineering on the other. Creditworthiness, as reflected by any one of the “5 C’s,” is not equally distributed across all demographics – underwriting loans is an inherently discriminatory activity. Any attempt to deny this is going to end in tears.
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On Monday, students at Indiana University Bloomington mistook a priest for a Ku Klux Klan member, taking to social media to express their fear of the alleged Klansman, who they claimed was carrying a whip, and dressed in “white robes.”
Residential hall advisor Ethan Gill quickly wrote an email to his students, warning them of the “threat” on campus: “There has been a person reported walking around campus in a KKK outfit holding a whip. Because the person is protected under first amendment rights, IUPD cannot remove this person from campus unless an act of violence is committed. Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight, always be with someone and if you have no dire reason to be out of the building, I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.”
* From his LinkedIn profile: “This past semester I’ve built a community, help support fellow students academically and emotionally, and I’m there to help around the hall whether it be planning and hosting events, participating in meetings, running the center desk, or adding decorations to the hallways or bulletin boards.”
Now he can add, “or warning students to stay indoors and stay safe when white-robed KKK Klansmembers, whether real or imaginary, are freely roaming the campus. “
* Tough shit for all the wussie boys and girls on campus. The nuns who taught me in grammar school were as fearsome as the KKK, and they threatened you with eternal damnation. The Sisters of St. Joseph, my Patron Saint, wore black from head to toe, a head piece that covered all but their face, a knotted rope around their waist and a mile of rosary beads, the rattle of which acted as an early warning system that Sister Whomever was swooping down on you. Heaven help these frightened babies.
* A priest walking through campus, with his hate-beads and his hate-prayer-book? Triggering.
* When you live by the iPad you die by the iPad. Young people today spend so much time and energy engaged in social media that unfounded rumors spread like wildfire. Notice the RA advised against going out of the dorm. Stay inside, it’s dangerous out there!
How else can these hot-house flowers get a reality check if they just cluster indoors and don’t venture out to explore and find out for themselves what’s really going on? You know, NEGATIVE feedback. Which most people think must be BAD because it includes the term NEGATIVE. As in, “don’t be so negative all the time”.
Sometimes negative is a GOOD THING. It prevents systems from oscillating to the point of self destruction.
We’re doomed.
* Isn’t there a throw away line in just about every Woody Allen movie of the last 50 years where Woody’s character is certain that Staten Island, Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Boston, UpState Ny….. are full of Nazis, Rednecks and Cossacks?
For example:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Manhattan_(film)
Isaac: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Ya know? I read it in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, ya know, get some bricks and baseball bats, and really explain things to ‘em.
In the movies this paranoia becomes Woody’s excuse for never leaving Manhattan. In real life it pretty much explains the “Pauline Kael world view” effect.
It also explains the Jewish elites obsession with with destroying the Boy Scouts of America through legal actions, first for the BSA’s stand against gay scoutmasters, next for decades old highly dubious allegations of child molestations by Gay scoutmasters.
Because we all know that the BSA is just a neo-nazi front and besides if young Jews go camping with the goyim they will only be ritually sodomized instead of perhaps being merely red pilled as to their family’s yenta’s paranoid delusions.
Best make sure that Jewish children be raised as hot house flowers and attend only kosher & or “progressive” youth programs and summer camps like the ones Sabrina Rubin Erdely of UVA rape hoax fame so widely touts for her precious kids.
Microaggressions are simply “Yentaism” runamuck for POC and the more feeble minded among the goyim.
* Speaking of disco groups like K.C. and the Sunshine Band, I was just now reading up on Chic (Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards), who were huge right after K.C. in the late 1970s (“Le Freak” and “Good Times”). Chic was very influential on the first generation of rappers (e.g., the first Top 40 rap hit in the 1970s, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” lifts Chic’s “Good Times” riff; and the 1980 #1 rap hit by Blondie, “Rapture,” also uses “Good Times,” while Queen’s 1980 #1 quasi-rap hit “Another One Bites the Dust” lifts the bassline).
But back in the late 1970s I always thought Chic sounded kind of New Wave as well sounding disco. Listening to the KC (two white guys and a bunch of black session musicians) from the mid-1970s, I can hear that Chic was doing something similar to KC in the late 1970s, but their guitar sound was janglier and more alien, kind of like what Johnny Rotten’s PIL was doing in the late 1970s and that U2 perfected in 1981.
And sure enough, it turns out that the first time Rodgers ever heard anybody rapping, in late 1978, it was at a NYC show that he had been invited to by … Deborah Harry and Chris Stein, the wife-husband leaders of the New Wave band Blondie. So the fact that Blondie had the first #1 rap hit turns out to make all sorts of sense.
Soon after Chic played in a show with Blondie and the Clash, who were living in New York in the second half of 1979, and the Clash released their own rap song in late 1980, “Magnificent Seven.” (I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some direct connection to Talking Heads, who released their own rap song in 1980, “Crosseyed & Painless.”)
Reading up on Nile Rodgers, I see that his stepfather was a Jewish beatnik drug addict in NYC. So it’s not surprising that black rap and white new wave were closely linked 35 years ago.
Here’s a 1981 bootleg recording of a concert with Blondie / Chic / Fab Five doing a version of Good Times / Rapture / Rapper’s Delight.
So it turns out that 35 years ago, people got the joke, but now it all sounds like Verboten Cultural Appropriation.
From Wikipedia:
“In late 1978, Debbie Harry suggested that Chic’s Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to. Rodgers experienced this event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx. On September 20, 1979, and September 21, 1979, Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with The Clash in New York at The Palladium. When Chic started playing “Good Times”, rapper Fab Five Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang (“Big Bank Hank” Jackson, Mike Wright, and “Master Gee” O’Brien), jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band. A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards’ bass line from Chic’s “Good Times”. Rodgers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of “Rapper’s Delight”, which also included a scratched version of the song’s string section. Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers.[5] Rodgers admitted that he was originally upset with the song, but later declared it to be “one of his favorite songs of all time” and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled (or in this instance interpolated) Chic[6][better source needed]. He also stated: “As innovative and important as ‘Good Times’ was, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was just as much, if not more so.”[7] “Rapper’s Delight” is said to be the song that popularized rap music and put it into the mainstream.[citation needed].”
* According to Rogers, it was Disco’s increasing elitism and overt gayness that killed the genre, not necessarily racism, homophobia or even Steve Dahl. Early rappers simply learned to cater to young people who could not afford, or were not stylish enough, to get into the hottest clubs.
Meanwhile Mutt Lange helped AC/DC to a huge hit with “You Shook Me All Night Long” by giving it a beat even uncoordinated white guys who thought disco was for fags could manage enough liquid courage to ask a girl to dance to.
Chic’s repertoire, especially “Good Times” along with Tony Thompson’s beats are pretty much rap sampling staples to this day.
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Martin van Creveld writes: Women’s inferiority to men in respect to physical strength, aerobic capacity, endurance and, above all, robustness, is obvious to all. The price is paid by their male colleagues; when a female trainee in a mixed unit breaks down, as often happens, guess who is going to carry her and/or her weapons and pack? But the price women have paid for serving in “combat” units has been much higher. Many of the documents in question are classified so as to avoid angering Israeli feminists, an aggressive and often obnoxious lot, by presenting them with the facts. Some, however, have been published by a former student of mine, Colonel (ret.) Raz Sagi.
The picture that emerges is not pretty. Less than 3 percent of IDF “combat troops” are female. However, over the last few years they, or the lawyers acting in their name, have served 10-15 percent of the suits concerning compensation for injuries suffered while on “operational activity” (whatever that may mean). In proportion to their numbers, women sue three to five times more often than men. Sagi’s book bristles with interviews with young women who served as, or trained for, “combat” MOS and were seriously injured, sometimes for life. Such cases are brought before the courts almost every day.
Now let’s take a closer look at what “combat” actually entails. The largest group, 442 out of 1,593, serve in three mixed battalions named “Caracal,” “Leopard,” and “Lions of the Jordan” respectively. In each of these they form 60 percent of the total. What all three have in common is that they are permanently deployed along the borders with Egypt and Jordan. Those in turn have this in common that, over the last forty years, they have seen hardly a shot fired in anger. The remaining women are divided between “combat intelligence collection” (meaning that they look for all kinds of interesting things after the battle is over), border police (meaning that they stand guard against terrorists, as Hadar Cohen, who was mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago, did), civil defense, and artillery.
It so happened that, a day after I completed this article, I watched a clip of artillery troops on a route march. The men, heavily loaded with equipment of all kinds, sweated, grunted and did their best to keep up. One or two female soldiers were marching along, carrying a much smaller pack and looking as if they were on a lark. Whatever they may have been doing there, clearly they were not being tested as the men were.
Neither the infantry, nor the armored corps, nor the engineers, nor the special units, which between them form the bulk of the IDF’s “teeth,” have any women at all. Scant wonder that, during Operation Protective Edge back in the summer of 2014, out of 66 Israeli troops who died not one was female.
Meanwhile the terminology has been changing. Having just celebrated my seventieth birthday, I can remember the time when the term lohem, meaning fighter or warrior, used to be the highest compliment anyone in Israel could receive. Nine cases out of ten, it referred to a soldier, a male one of course, who actually fired at, and was fired on by, the enemy. Now its female form, lohemet, also refers to all the above units, not one of which are meant to face an armed and trained enemy soldier able to fire back. Scant wonder that, in popular slang, the plural form of lohemet, lohamot, is often explained as meaning lo-hamot, “not-hot.”
Why does all this matter? For four reasons. First, as the term “not hot” implies, in Israel as in all other modern countries armed forces the presence of women has contributed to the decline in the prestige of those forces and, with it, their ability to attract high-quality male manpower. Presumably that is why the “Lions” (arayot, in Hebrew) battalion, in spite of being made up mostly of women, is not called leviot “Lionesses.” Or else surely any proper man would have shot himself rather than serve in it.
Second, in Israel as in all other modern countries that presence has led to “gender norming” and, with it, falling standards which, in case of war, could be dangerous. Third, as the above figures show, too many women who, whether out of idealism or sheer penis envy, volunteer to serve in “combat” units are injured, with bad consequences both for themselves and, since they have to be paid pensions, the defense budget. Fourth, outside Israel quite some people, being misinformed about the true state of affairs, still take the IDF as an example to follow.
Posted inFeminism, Israel|Comments Off on Women In Combat
"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)
