June 8, 2014 Australia’s Cost Of Living Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Australia’s Cost Of Living

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Luke Ford

While it seems that the cost of living in Australia is about twice that of America (with the cost of gas and food and lodging for example), in fact Australia’s cost of living is only about 60% higher. Only Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Venezuela, Iceland and Luxembourg have a higher cost of living than Australia (in that descending order). To keep up the standard of living I have in California, I’d have to earn about $35 an hour Australian.

Michael Fumento posts to FB: My friend Mary Jo Joyce uses a term called “smart, smart, stupid,” which doesn’t really translate into anything else, but the general point is that very smart people can make mistakes others wouldn’t BECAUSE they’re smart. “Hubris” is the closest you come, but it’s more than that and it’s something I admit to suffering from.

For example, why didn’t I back out of Colombia after the first signs of trouble? In part because I thought that whatever Colombia threw at me I could overcome with enough persistence and intelligence. NO! The best race car driver in the world can make a Model T do laps faster than other drivers, but a Model T will always be just that. My belief that with enough mastery of the language, customs, experience overall, etc. that I could make Colombia were wrong. Fact is, in most ways I’m worse off than I was seven months ago!

Here’s another interesting example, which forces me to admit I suffer depression but with half of all Americans on anti-depressants, so what.

There are two types of depression: clinical and situational. Clinical has no clear outside cause while situational is just that. It’s my theory that situational depression is often nature’s way of saying “Change SOMETHING!” If Colombians weren’t so damned happy with so damned little, they might have a better country. They quite literally need more depression.

Here’s where stupid comes in. I resisted anti-depressants BECAUSE my depression is clearly situational. To be in my position and be happy would be INSANE! Finally it occurred to me that situational or no, perhaps ADs could still reduce the pain level and even help me think better so as to IMPROVE my situation.

SO, knowing that the traditional SSRIs have lots of side effects I don’t want, I went on something called Mirtazapine and generically Remeron. After about two weeks a curious thing happened in that I began dreaming. Only at that point did I realize I had STOPPED dreaming. Except I knew that couldn’t be true; if you stop dreaming you go insane. Some people have compared dreams to nature’s way of organizing your hard drive while you sleep. It’s a little-known horrific aspect of Michael Jackson’s death that the anesthetic he was on was NOT sleeping medicine! It prevented REM sleep, that part in which you can dream!

So as I explained it to the doctor a couple of days ago, “I know I’ve been dreaming all along, but now I can remember the dreams. And the dreams are always nice, so I wake up feeling good — although once I realize they’re only dreams it does put me in a funk. Whereupon she doubled my dosage! Obviously she thought that a good thing.

Unfortunately, while most drugs here are dirt cheap this one is outrageously expensive! Ouch! So while price-shopping I let my usage lapse for two days.

Here’s where stupid comes in. Since ADs always take weeks to kick in, I assumed no big harm from skipping two days. WRONG! Today I felt awful! More depressed than the US economy in 1933. But why? Colombia didn’t suck any more today than yesterday!

MEANWHILE, last night I watched part of the new Robocop movies and in one scene the doctor (a good guy forced by Michael Keaton to do bad stuff) said of Robocop, “Let’s give him some good dreams; give him anti-depressants.” Now I know, as stated above, that’s not possible. But today while shopping it hit me that one factor HAD changed. I’d stopped the Remeron! THEN it hit me! REMeron! Holy Toledo, researchers had dubbed it that because it affected REM sleep! I WAS having more dreams, and now quite suddenly my REM phase of sleep had been cut short! I was in dream withdrawal!

So I added a nice chocolate bar to my basket, because there’s evidence that chocolate is a temporary mood elevator. I had just finished an aerobic workout, which also has been shown to help, but it didn’t. Anyway, that’s all I needed was temporary. Then I bought the Remerol. I feel better, but only because I figured out the problem and finally got through the huge line at the store. Hopefully as soon as tonight I will have improved REM sleep and feel better tomorrow.

So you can see how the combination of high intelligence both helped and hurt me. What somebody like me needs is what another friend of mine referred to as a “wing-man,” somebody to help me better channel the intelligence and avoid the pitfalls. I used to have this thing called a “wife,” who often acted in that capacity. I had hoped that in Colombia I could find another such person. But it never occurred to me, and probably wouldn’t have occurred to YOU either so don’t get smarmy, to check out international marriage rates whereupon I would have discovered Colombia ranks LAST in the whole world! Nor do they even cohabitate much, as some have suggested. Women here just don’t like men.

So yeah, I still have to fix the SITUATION. Find a less insane country where women don’t hate you or see you just as an ATM because your chromosomes contain an X.

And a country like the US USED to be where my talents at finding and processing information can actually be used to help large numbers of people and be a source of income, as opposed to a mere FB posting.

My guess is I’d love a place like Sydney. But something Americans just can’t understand is you don’t get to pick and choose countries, they pick and choose you. That concerns jobs, visas, and naturalization. It’s not like deciding “I want to live in California!”

Thus, “For anyone wanting to apply through the Australian General Skilled Migration program, there are some basic requirements that you must meet before continuing with your application.

Age

You must be 50 years old or under when you apply.”

Whoops! I’m 54!

But without looking, I know I wasn’t on the list anyway because it’s going to be almost identical to the kiwi list.

I’m considering NZ in great part because I know people there. I know people in very few countries outside the US. But again, NZ is going to be a tough nut to crack. ANY country will accept you if you have a ton to invest; scratch that. And many will accept you just if you’re a pensioner; scratch that for me and indeed NZ and Australia don’t care about those anyway.

So I suspect that with Oz as well as NZ it’s a matter of getting somebody to sponsor you for a special talent waiver.

But I really regret posting on FB that I’m looking for ideas because Americans DO think it’s like moving from one state to another and there seems to a myth floating around that I’m independently wealthy.

No. It’s a matter of getting a work visa, work, and often a matter of language. I had people tell me to “just” move to place with impossibly difficult languages. It’s not like VISITING where you have an English-speaking hotel concierge. In Colombia, outside Bogota NOBODY speaks English. And dialects change by the city. So if you don’t speak VERY good Spanish, keep out!

I don’t give a hoot what those “10 Great Places to Retire To!” articles say. They’re always written by people who have never visited ANY of the countries, nor have either moved to or retired to another country. They’re clueless; all of them.

Posted in Australia, Michael Fumento | Comments Off

No Good Result From Australia’s Draconian Gun Laws

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Luke Ford

Since I was last in Australia in 2000, it has virtually become impossible to own a gun legally unless you are in law enforcement. This is thanks to the efforts of conservative prime minister John Howard.

Time magazine reported in 2008:

On the afternoon of April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant snapped. A striking figure with his long blond hair and milky skin, he had just eaten lunch at a café within the historic site of Port Arthur, a former prison in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Described later by his sentencing judge as a “pathetic social misfit,” the 28-year-old then reached into his sports bag and, in the manner that others might pull out a sweater, withdrew two military-style semi-automatic rifles, which he used over the next eight horrifying minutes to kill 35 people — men, women and children — in what remains Australia’s worst mass murder.
Sharing the shock of his people, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard — just two months into his eleven-and-a-half years in power — seized the chance to overhaul Australia’s gun laws, trampling all opposition to make them among the strictest in the developed world. “I hate guns,” he said at the time. “One of the things I don’t admire about America is their slavish love of guns … We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.” Howard argued the tougher laws would make Australia safer. But 12 years on, new research suggests the government response to Port Arthur was a waste of public money and has made no difference to the country’s gun-related death rates.
Though he’d acquired them illegally, Bryant used guns at Port Arthur that were lawful in Tasmania at the time. Howard argued there was no reason civilians should be allowed to own assault weapons — and under the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) these were all but banned. At huge cost, the government bought from their owners some 650,000 of the newly prohibited guns, which police destroyed. It also implemented mandatory gun licenses and registration of all firearms, helping to restrict to 5% of the population the number of Australian adults who owned or used guns last year, down from 7% in 1996.

On his radio show May 27, 2014, Dennis Prager said: “There is another factor. Australia is overwhelmingly homogenous in race, in ethnicity, religion, and it is also a country of only 22 million people.”

There is nothing in homogeneity that automatically yields good results, only in white or asian homogeneity. Black homogeneity predicts massive social dysfunction in first world terms with huge rates of criminal activity (black behavior suits evolution’s purposes in Africa). There’s also nothing about the number of people in a country that is relevant here. Countries with small populations can have massive rates of gun crime and countries with large populations, such as Japan, can have low rates. Race is much more important here than pure homogeneity and the number of a population.

From American Thinker:

Why is it that Vermont, with approximately the same rate of gun ownership as Louisiana, has less than one-eighth the murder rate? Even more strikingly, why does New Hampshire have both a far higher gun ownership rate and a lower murder rate than England, Piers Morgan’s favorite poster-boy nation for gun control?

Professor Thomas Sowell provided more of these seeming contradictions in 2012, writing:

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks.
… [There are also] countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.
You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

So what’s the answer we don’t want to hear? The critical difference among these regions and nations is explained right in Sowell’s title: it’s “not guns.”

“It's people.”

What “people” differences are relevant? Let’s start with race and ethnicity. In the cases of homicide in 2012 in which the races of the perpetrators were known, 55 percent were committed by blacks, 62 percent of whom were under 30 years of age. Black youths are 16 percent of the youth population, but constitute 52 percent of those arrested for juvenile violent crime.

The statistics for Hispanics are more difficult to ferret out because, unbeknownst to many, law enforcement agencies tend to lump them in with whites in crime statistics (the FBI has announced that it will finally categorize Hispanic crime — in its report on 2013). However, there is some information available. Examiner’s Ken LaRive tells us that “Hispanics commit three times more violent crimes than whites,” but that the disparity could be even greater because of their often being classified as white.

The National Youth Gang Survey Analysis reports that gang members are approximately 49 percent Hispanic, 35 percent black and 10 percent white. And while whites are 35 percent of NYC’s population, blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crime in the Big Apple and 98 percent of all gun crime.

Another good indicator is international crime statistics. Hispanic countries dominate the homicide-rate rankings, with Honduras topping the list with a rate eight times as high as that of our worst state, Louisiana. Also note that there are no European/European descent nations in the top 20 and not one Western-tradition nation in the top 30 (Russia and Moldova are 24 and 28, respectively).

And what can we say about these “people” differences? It’s much as with the question of why men are more likely to be drunkards than women. You could explore whether the differences were attributable to nature, nurture or both. But it would be silly to wonder if the answer lay in men having greater access to bars, alcohol or shot glasses.

Posted in Australia, Guns | Comments Off

We Don’t Get More Of Something When We Make It Illegal, We Get Less Of Something

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Luke Ford

On his radio show June 6, 2014, Dennis Prager said: “If we legalize prostitution, do you think we would have more or less?”

“We are getting more pot use in Colorado [since it has been legalised]. We would get more prostitution… Far more people got liquor before prohibition than after it.”

“I don’t know what we have gained in the legalization of pot. If it had been legal our whole lives, I don’t know that I would be for making it illegal… Tobacco doesn’t make you stupid. The effects are ill health, many years hence. We save money because people smoke and die early.”

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My First Five Years

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Luke Ford

I’ve been asking family about my first five years, because I hardly remember them. I’m told I was an anxious needy child who sought constant reassurance. I loved to play games, particularly anything to do with killing. I drew a lot of stick figures fighting out scenes from the Bible. My favorite gift in my first few years were toy soldiers from my brother, oh, how I loved to maneuver them around in the dirt and go to war. My brother did much of the looking after of me and because of the eight-year age gap, I wasn’t much fun. I cried easily when I got hurt and he got blamed. We used to play conkers and soccer in England. I identify today with my early love of things military, with my love of games and competition, and with my easily hurt feelings. On this vacation, I’m peering into the mists of time and seeing how the child prefaced the man, and how my ancestors prefigured my life.

* Since I was four, I’ve spent less than four years of my life with my sister nearby, and less than eight years with my brother. Until my 20s, I struggled with the meaning of terms such as “uncle”, “aunt”, “cousin”, “niece” etc because I had so little contact with my extended family.

* I’m meeting all these friends I haven’t seen in 30 plus years and they’ve all done better than me in the important respects of marriage, children, and providing for retirement. I find this a tad embarrassing. I try to answer their questions honestly and admit I’ve stuffed up and I’m not sure where I’m headed and then there are these awkward pauses where they try to cheer me up.

* I wasn’t ready to go all Elliot Rodger Sunday afternoon, but I did feel a twinge looking at all the happy couples on Brisbane’s South Bank.

* I used to look forward to going to shul because all of my friends were there, but then all of my friends got married, had kids and moved ahead with their careers. Now going to shul is a constant reminder that I am a loser. Not so much fun anymore.
It was easier to fool people in my 20s and 30s that I belonged.
I used to be charming and outgoing. I could be the life of the party. My world has shrunk over the past decade. I now enjoy the company of less than 1% of the people I see regularly.
The more confidence and joy I have, the more money I have, the more I enjoy other people and want to reach out to them. The more broke I am, the more defeated, the less I feel like reaching out.
Purely on the basis of my disposition, I’m evenly placed between introverted and extroverted. The better I’m doing in life, the more outgoing I am.

Dan emails:

Hey Luke! It’s been great reading your blog lately. I really do empathize with your dismay over your lack of success compared to your friends. I, of course, had a very rocky start compared to many of my friends and find myself without the success many of them have had.
But I have also avoided so many of the pitfalls that others among them fell into (student debt, bad mortgages, divorce after having children) and do actually have a bit in the way of skills to show for myself. The Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and a couple others have been shielded from the economic collapse by gas/oil discoveries and a largely non-government-dependent population.
I think a couple other people have given you this advice, as well: Don’t get down on yourself for not having as much as some do. In many ways, you excel your peers (self-knowledge, intelligence, etc) and there is a strong foundation in place for future economic success. I know about myself that after resolving the emotional issues resulting from my childhood, my economic frontiers began to open.

A friend says: “There is a sorting out that happens as you age. In your twenties you can all sort of be in the same place, but then people who make wise choices race ahead.”

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The One Jewish Bushranger!

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Luke Ford

I’ve been learning about Edward the Jew Boy Davis. “Davis seems to have been the only Jewish bushranger on record. A misguided and tormented youth, he had yet preserved a certain dignity, and a moral code which might have been inspired by the Jewish teachings of his early life.”

Australia was largely founded by convicts and criminals, particularly bushrangers, play a treasured role in the country’s culture.

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Advice For A Black Transgender Convert To Judaism

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Luke Ford

Gavriel emails: Good Afternoon Luke,
I was looking at your youtube video regarding Judaism and conversion and I wanted to ask you a few questions. What is the best way for someone to go about converting? I am a FTM and I am from a Baptist background. I have been trying to slowly study Judaism and the torah and how it relates to someone like myself. I am also African American so I think that adds a little more challenge to it as well. Do you have any insights to share perhaps?

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Aussie Rap Star Iggy Azalea

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Luke Ford

Barry emails:

Have you heard about Australia’s latest pop sensation – a blonde female rapper called Iggy Azalea.

Apparently she was born and raised in a tiny NSW town called Mullumbimby and at the age tender of 15 she decided to take herself off to the hip hop scene in Florida where she was – ahem – taken under the wing of the black rap guys there.

Apparently the first her parents knew of it was when she phoned them from Florida. It has all turned out well though.

The black dudes saw gold in this pretty blonde teenager and so it has come to pass.

What has Iggy Azalea got that you don’t Luke?

More on white degeneration news. Here is the latest white pop/ rap sensation from South Africa. Die Antwoord. The female is Afrikaaner. The male is white English and was privately educated.

The only other South African pop star I’ve ever heard of is Manfred Mann.

Also someone you might want to look up is a Brisbane youtuber called Paul Pluta or Archieluxury who produces videos about luxury watches while he and family fall out of the middle class and into bankruptcy. He is utterly deranged and very entertaining.

He is very good on the employment situation – or lack of it – in Australia.

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Relies Are Beaut, Mate

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Luke Ford

I don’t have any relies (relatives) in America, not close ones anyway, but I have relies all over Queensland and it’s beaut, mate.

I don’t often run into people in America who look like me and think like me and have my childhood experiences. I am most likely to find such people among refugees from the British commonwealth. I get on particularly well with South Africans, Australians, Kiwis and even bloody whinging Poms.

I love the language in Australia. A ten-minute break at work is called a “smoko.” A mandarin is a “mandy.” Breakfast is “brecky.”

Races are simply extended families, partly inbred (to use Steve Sailer’s definition). I love walking around a land where a high percentage of people feel like family. I’ve enjoyed learning more about my ancestors and I see many of their traits in myself (anxiety, bookishness, emotional coldness, etc).

* I supplemented dinner and breakfast by simply picking fruit off my sister’s trees at Mango Hill Farm and eating it on the spot. My sister said it was fine, I was all concerned with washing the fruit.

* I like coming to a place rarely enough that you get spoiled for simply showing up. So far I’ve racked up $150 cash for simply living to my 48th year. I guess this is reparations for being stolen from my aboriginal parents and raised by white people.

* I spent 90 minutes last night reading a beaut book — Beyond Azaria: Black Light White Light” by Lowell Tarling and Michael Chamberlain. It reminds me of my upbringing at Avondale College in Australia.

On September 18, 1980 the Seventh-Day Adventist world church withdrew the credentials of Australian, Dr Desmond Ford, its leading theologian. Never before or since has Time magazine recorded such a sacking from a seemingly unimportant denomination.
What followed was the systematic purging of young Seventh-Day Adventist ministers and ministerial interns, so that within a few years some 130 Ford supporters were terminated in Australia alone, with a corresponding mass exit of church members. As a student in his classes, the core of Ford’s teachings affected Michael Chamberlain deeply, as it affected everyone who attended Ford’s lectures.
We cannot guess whether or not Pastor Michael Chamberlain might have been caught up in this controversy, even though — like many of his fellow students at Avondale College — Chamberlain ranks Ford as his greatest teacher. Chamberlain didn’t have time to consider the implications of Ford’s sacking. He had troubles enough of his own. Just one month before, on 17 August, 1980, his daughter Azaria had been killed by a dingo a Uluru [Ayers Rock], an event that became the biggest news story in the country…
Seventh-Day Adventism was seven generations old and growing up… Earlier, the Seventh-Day Adventist church had emphasised its differences from other faiths. In the 1970s (partly because of Ford) it began to emphasise points held in common with other faiths…
To have even a whisper of a court case, let alone a charge, is liable to frighten the daylights out of someone culturally inculcated with Seventh-Day Adventism…

I notice that is not always the same in Judaism. In some parts, sure, even the whiff of a scandal will end a rabbi’s career, but in other parts of Jewish life, it’s not a big deal. Perhaps it is a religion vs tribe difference. You are always a member of a tribe, no matter what you do, while a religion depends on assent to certain beliefs and practices. No matter what, if you were born a Jew or born black or born Chinese, you will always be part of that group, while if you go off as an Adventist, you are out.

“Within that conservative domain you’re not even supposed to get angry.” Well, there’s no such demand in Jewish life. Jews are much more open with their emotions than SDAs.

“You’re supposed to be ‘meek and mild’, even smiling, always victorious and basically always a winner. There is no place in the Adventist ministry for people who look like losers. And there is certainly no place for alleged criminals, not even innocent ones.”

Thus, to Jews, SDAs look fake.

In the midst of all his “A dingo took my baby” controversy, Michael had his ministerial credentials revoked by the SDA church.

“I would never talk about ‘lust’ for my wife, I’d use the word ‘desire’ because to me it sounds more decent.”

“Seventh-Day Adventists are traditionally much more conservative voters…”

I don’t think that is true in the United States, but SDAs in Australia tend to be much more conservative in their religion and I guess their politics. I remember what a joy it was to move to California at age 11 because SDAs in California tend to be much more easy going than the SDAs I knew at Avondale College in Australia. California has a higher proportion of lifestyle Adventists while the Australian Adventists I knew were more fire-breathing believers.

Over the past 34 years, Michael has become more concerned with the plight of the Aboriginees, not something that tends to worry conservatives, who take it for granted that the abos are primitives.

At age 21, Michael had a bad motorcycle accident. Right after, a SDA minister knocked on his door. Michael was vulnerable and he ended up converting to the church. I remember when I was standing in line for pain medication in 1998 after surgery to fix my broken wrist and this psychic said she had a special feeling about me and I ended up visiting her several times and spending about $800. She got me when I was vulnerable.

Michael writes on page 65:

I especially remember Dr Desmond Ford, an exceptional lecturer with two PhDs…
Ford put Christ at the center of everything and in so doing, influenced a whole generation of ministers who were my peers. He sure influenced me. Unfortunately, he was also feared and hated by an unhealthy number of the ‘old school’ because they recognized that Ford was taking away their distinctive sectarian traditional belief and transforming it into a credible Protestant denominational model, capable of holding dialogue and being less exclusive in its dealing with other faiths.

Orthodox Jews, by contrast, are fundamentalist. They believe in fundamental truths that cannot be questioned and because of this, they do not dialogue — in general — on religious matters with non-Jews and with non-Orthodox Jews.

I admired Ford. You felt you were almost sitting at the feet of Jesus, sitting at the feet of Des Ford. You wouldn’t go down the back of the classroom to hear him, you’d sit right in the front seats. His Christ-centered approach to theology lectures was refreshing, exciting, and in the context of Seventh-Day Adventism — tended to be revolutionary. People started taking sides. To a Seventh-Day Adventist college student, theology is the core issue… In my time at college a high percentage of students supported Ford.
Desmond Ford was a Christian gentleman and, in my eyes, he has no guile. He was a marvellous role model for ministers. He was a man of grace, a man of hope, and that’s what the church needed so desperately, and still needs.
I remember Ford driving around in an old Volkswagon, not an up-market car like many other lecturers. Perhaps because Ford has two doctorates, he doesn’t know a thing about cars. One time, he couldn’t start his Volkswagon so he simply left it, and swam across Dora Creek, from the college back to his house, in Currans Road. Another time, he was invited to preach at a Chapel Service, where it is conventional for all students to sit and listen for 45 minutes. Instead of preaching, at the age of 45, he invited the students to join him in a 45-minute job, and he led the pack. Ford lived a healthy lifestyle and an impeccable Christian life. He led by example. And he too has had his share of personal tragedy.
I consider Ford to be the Martin Luther of Australian Seventh-Day Adventism and Australia’s most influential Seventh-Day Adventist theologian in the 20th Century. In 1980, when the church administrators in America gave him the chop, it was a very severe blow to my spirit…
[At Avondale College] there were rules about everything — dress lengths for the women, hair length for the men. There was a rule against owning a car, a rule against seeing your girlfriend outside daylight hours, and even a rule prohibiting students leaving the campus without permission…
Music, chess, theology, the college gym all interested me, whereas when I was at Avondale College I had absolutely no interest in politics, and very little interest in the outside world. To me the political world was fluff. Here today, gone tomorrow. I was much more interested in Eternity.

It’s funny reading Michael talk about the importance of studying the Bible at Avondale College when only a few folks had any skills in Biblical languages. I can’t imagine a Jew getting away with lecturing in synagogue on the meaning of texts he can’t read in the original but the goyim are gullible.

To attract new members, Seventh-Day Adventist ministers were expected to hold public programs about Biblical archeology without needing to hold any expertise in the subject. Michael writes he was uncomfortable doing this, preferring to talk “about topics I understood and had researched in my color-coded Bible.” An English-language Bible.

“I felt the Billy Graham-style approach was the ethical way to go.”

“Seventh-Day Adventist ministers tend to be thought of as jacks-of-all-trades — a bit counseling, a bit of preaching, a bit of outreach…” I expect the average Seventh-day Adventist IQ is about 25 points below that of the average Ashkenazi Jew, or, in other words, Adventists are probably average for their IQ when divided by race.

“The demands on a Seventh-Day Adventist minister are such that many ministers’ children walk away from it. They hate the self-sacrifice they have experienced as a family.”

Yet rabbi’s children don’t tend to walk away from Judaism as often as preacher’s kids do. I wonder why that is? The rabbinate is every bit as demanding as the ministry but the Judaic way of life is inherently balanced and structured around family, so I think it is more sane and sustainable.

“Seventh-Day Adventism has been very quiet on social issues, with the exception of drinking, smoking, and gambling.”

Orthodox Jews tend to be quiet on social issues.

Anybody else who didn’t understand our cultural background felt strangely offended by the way we were expressing our grief. And more to the point, what we were expressing was offensive to them. The focus on Jesus Christ, our beliefs about the resurrection of the dead, and the status of Azaria tended to be foreign to them…
I think that was part of the problem because if I had been a Catholic, showing grief like a Catholic, I probably would have had 45% acceptance in Australia. But because I was acculturated in to Seventh-Day Adventism, expressing Seventh-Day Adventist grief, I probably only got 5% acceptance.

Jewish and Adventist ways of expressing grief are opposite. Adventists deny grief and talk about the resurrection while Jews express grief and talk little if at all about the next world. Jews in general are at ease with the natural passions, including grief, and expressing them loudly while Protestants are the most repressed people I know well because their religion is all about faith.

Up to the 1960s and 1970s, Seventh-Day Adventist ministers accepted a very high behavioral standard to fulfil as part of their ministry. They have loosened up a bit since. Consider this for a list when I was a minister: pro-vegetarianism, no alcohol, no smoking, no gambling, no dancing, no card playing, no theater attendance…
Then there’s the Sabbath day when you shouldn’t swim. You shouldn’t go to pubs or clubs. No watching football on telly on Saturday afternoons… There’s very little in the culture of the land that a Seventh-Day Adventist minister can be involved in.

I remember when I moved to Tannum Sands, Queensland after graduating high school in Auburn, California in June of 1984. For a few months, I went to the Seventh-Day Adventist church in Gladstone on Saturday mornings, often after going to discos the nights before. I’d have ink on my arm for the admittance. The people my age understood. When I got a job that required me to work Saturday mornings, I stopped going to church (with a couple of exceptions in June of 1985). I remember the Gladstone Adventist pastor, a student of my dad’s, hunting me down at my new workplace (the Boyne Island Shopping Center) to express his concern about my dropping out. After I let him pray with me, he left me alone.

Posted in Adventist, Australia, Personal | Comments Off

I Get Mail

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Luke Ford

John writes:

Luke,
I’m a 56 year old Texas boy goy with no religious affiiliation, I just wanted to write a few lines of encouragement – your site is thought provoking in many ways,
I have a Ph,D, in Industrial Organizational psychology, so your comments on race differences in IQ, etc. were no shock to me at all – and I am aware of how much of a “live wire” that topic is to touch professionally,
I’ve read THE BELL CURVE, and pondered the issue, but I haven’t read deeply enough beyond that to offer cogent thoughts, Probably the most brilliant guy I knew in my Ph.D, program was a black Nigerian, and I asked him his opinion once, He replied that he considered the relationship between race and IQ to be hopelessly confounded by other variables. I think that may be true. Too much research these days is correlatonal. We forget the great Lewin and his systems theory, and we take “snapshots” instead of conducting longitudinal research. Professors need to publish to get tenure, and a publication at the end of a 50 year study isn’t going to do them much good,
The article you referenced talked about the backwardness of Africa in relation to other parts of the world. In addition to psychology, I have a deep interest in history. Based on my reading of history, I give very little weight to that argument. Remember that the Celts of England had primitive technology, and they certainly lived in unhygenic conditions. It’s also been reported that Himmler was constantly on the lookout for archaelogical proof of an advanced Aryan civilization in areas of Germany. Supposedly, Hitler scoffed at this and told him it was a waste of time – because inhabitants of the German regions had been living in mud huts at the time of the Roman Empire. As far as Africans go – they were living a certain way – then they were subjected to colonialism and the robbing of their resources – and then many of them were speedily coerced into becoming totalitarian states ruled by brutal and politically corrupt regimes.
The article you referenced also emphasizes “climate” as having a great impact on behavior. No doubt this is true – particularly at the extremes. Eskimo culture has barely advanced beyond simple survival because of the bleak, challenging environment they live in. However, “access to resources” also seems to be critical. American Indians, for example, were able to live a nomadic hunter/gatherer existence due to the wide territory they could range across. Contrary to popular belief, they were NOT akin to modern environmentalists, because they didn’t have to be,. The continent was thinly populated, and teeming with wildlife. They did in fact kill buffalo and remove only the tongue if they were craving buffalo tongue that day, and they did that with as little compunction as we would have about buying a Diet Coke at the convenience store. It just didn’t matter – because when those buffalo migrated seasonally, they moved in herds that were as wide as 50 miles across. Indians also set vast wildfires for various reasons – hunting, warfare, or as an easy method for clearing land.
Just as necessity is the mother of invention, I believe that LACK of necessity may be the cause of lack of cultural innovation. Additionally, lack of advancement at one point in history does not determine the fate of a people for all time. Spurred by changing conditions or “outside influences” such as contact with another culture or climate change, a group can advance (or decline) rapidly.
These observations also are relevant to the conservative argument against creating a cradle-to-grave welfare state, as it stifles innovativeness and initiative.
Keep up the good work, Luke. As to your personal happiness, I offer the following personal philosophy: Considering everything, you are doing quite well, Most people in this world are living in the mud. But also remember this – “considering everything” is the cause of much grief.

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Is It OK To Defraud Outsiders?

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Luke Ford

Growing up in white Australia, the idea of lying to defraud outsiders was considered a terrible thing. Now that I know more about tribal life, I see that it is frequently regarded as OK.

The New York Times writes about a new novel where the grandson helps the grandfather write a fraudulent letter about non-existent Holocaust suffering to defraud the goyim. It is based on real life. “In 2009, New York employees of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany were found to have expedited some 5,000 fraudulent applications, to the tune of $57 million.”

This kind of behaviour was regarded as beneath contempt in my white Protestant upbringing but I now see it as widespread in tribal life.

There’s more stress on getting ahead socially and economically in Jewish life than in goyisha life and sometimes the moral boundaries that constrain the goyim do not constrain those in a tribe (just as there are Jewish constrains that don’t constrain non-Jews). When you live in a homogenous white society like Australia used to be or in a homogenous society like Japan today, you see much less of this kind of cheating and it shocks and revolts you.

When people do business in Tannum Sands, it is usually conducted on trust. If someone says he took 47 items or brought you 23 items, you are expected to accept that number. If you stop to verify somebody’s claim, you are insulting him. If a person ever cheats, he is widely regarded as a cheater and is shunned. The consequences are immense and so it rarely happens in country Australia (or in country America, I suspect).

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