Shoah Director Accused Of Sexual Harassment

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Luke Ford

Put this article through Google Translate and you get:

I was 29, as for NRC to interview Claude Lanzmann in Paris, the documentary maker who with his phenomenal film Shoah (1985) penetrated to the essence of the Nazi death camps. A hero so, a big artist.

The conversation took place at him, he went into detail on each question. And while he was talking about Auschwitz and the way he attacked campbells with a hidden camera, he was setting me up. I polished him politely. I knew my place. He was the big movies, I was no one. In addition, I had to make that interview, returning unjustified business was impossible. The interesting thing is that he neither said anything about his behavior.

When he was too angry, I got up and told me to leave. He was giving me a lift and I got into his car too. Why? I could not say it. Eventually I came to my positives. At a traffic light I walked out.

I wrote the article and told nobody something. I refused to respect art. Later I heard I was not the only one. That helped.

Hat tip to comments on Steve Sailer’s blog:

* Claude Lanzmann, director of the Holocaust documentary Shoah – no business like Shoah Business – seems to be another Weinstein… I can’t work out if there is a pattern going on with all these revelations.

* Weinstein, Toback, Ratner, Wieseltier, Halperin, Hoffman, Piven, Polanski. white male patriarchy at its worst.

* And now Dustin Hoffman!

The 800 pound gorilla in the room are the men and women who actually partook in surrendering the pink for a plumb role. You might be able to identify them by their deafening silence about now.

To be absolutely fair, I strongly doubt Harvey’s boldness was all self-generated. Quite a few girls took him up on his offer, and a few benefitted tremendously for it.

To get on the right track for speculation, think of the guys and gals who seemed to come out of nowhere, and get plumb roles, featured, and especially leading. To make picking easier, who won an Oscar that left you scratching your head? Cough-cough-marisa-tomei-cough! Cough-dufus-jennifer-cough—lawrence-sniff! Whew! I think I’m allergic to something.

Anyway, are these folks active facilitators of Harvey’s and other’s “P for Play” marketing plans? Should these “play by the secret rules” kids be urged to “come out” or be outed? Do they get a “get out of National Shame free” card? Should they?

Seems as long as those types keep playing, we’ll always be sprouting more Harvey’s.

* Too many Jewish men have major issues with pretty women, especially shiksas. They like to defeat them. Some kind of mom issue? A cultural carry-over of Eastern European Jewish orthodoxy from generations ago, and old habits die hard? Someone here might have far better insight than me as to why. It’s just something I’ve noticed enough in the past to regard it as “a Jewish thing.”

It’s a pattern that’s certainly on display now. It’s just that nobody wants to say it, for some reason.

I guess doing that is when the gloves really come off.

* Obviously, Dame Judy Dench or Vanessa Redgrave would have been better in My Cousin Vinny as the Jersey Shore girl who knows all about American cars.

Doesn’t compute, since those women aren’t in the age bracket appropriate for the role, but a ton of other better known actresses were. As far as her other achievements at the time, she’s probably the only actress who’s Oscar win merited an entry regarding it’s legitimacy on Snopes:

https://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/tomei.asp

Her first significant role was with Harvey’s company. That said, she is speaking up on her twitter feed, and that’s a good sign.

* Why are the Kardashians not speaking out about this sex for fame thing? What are they hiding?

* Jezebel, Huff Po etc are not ignoring the revelations, but they are careful not to join the dots – ie point out that many perpetrators are Jews and signalling Leftists etc. It makes a change from the ‘Bye Goy’ headlines after Bannon left. Could you imagine ‘Bye Jews’?

* It’s ironic for a defenseless good looking females (some are very young) seeking to meet such repulsive pigs to anticipate platonic encounters or any sincere help to go places in Hollywood. No way in hell, most of these girls (women) are well aware that they must trade in their bodies & human dignity for movie roles that may materialize, and still more sexual servitude to get up and become Hollywood stars (i.e. glorified whores). Frankly, 99% of trashy Hollywood guys (women too) wouldn’t hesitate to mount their own mothers or kids, because they’re Godless waste of humanity, they’re bound by no human norms or morals. Most of those pigs claim to be Jews, but Judaism is neither a gene nor a chromosome to be inherited from parentages, but divine instruction-sets for humans to follow and live by, but those pigs are far from that Nobel concept.

They use the Jew label to shields them from public scrutiny when they commit their deliberate crimes. Their crimes are routine occurrences in Wall street (Ponzi schemes, Banking frauds, insider trading, leverage takeovers & outsourcing schemes), in DC as well, as almost all big soviet spies were from that breed and the same is true for corrupt Hollywood which produces disgusting filth, pornography, twisted crime glorification, homosexuality and prostitution as natural human under the pretext of freedom of expression or the first amendment.

Those parasites contradict the whole teachings of the Jewish faith from A to Z, but whenever their hardcore crooks commit crimes, it’s rear to see any serious effort to expose these crooks as a breed of new Mongol-hordes bent on destroying America and milk its population to the last cent.
Law enforcement officials or the media in pursuit of such criminals could become targets for intimidation and threats of civil-rights violations and ANTI-SEMITISM almost instantly, and even the ones that get convicted end up in minimum security detention with all amenities provided thru US tax payer’s money.

For example, Mike Milken defrauded Americans for a huge sum of a billion Dollar plus, yet he spent only few years in Jail, and then got sanitized as a brand new individual, now recognized as an outstanding expert of sort, he’s lecturing people about finance and money management since his release. Only in America lunacy such as this could take place, then the real hilarious part; now he is labeled a philanthropist, as well (aren’t they all). There are hundreds of cooks worse than Milken, but time and space prevents going forever, because it does.

Consequently, we are afflicted with a malevolent cancer destroying our existence from within, but no remedy has been formulated, at least not yet.

* Virtually everyone who appears in a Hollywood film, male or female, put out to get where they are.

* Jews have, on average, much more sexual perversion than non-Jews. People commented on this freely for a very long time, and then Jews decided that they were the normal ones and everyone else was “repressed” and needed to be “liberated” from their repression, and made up some unsupported “psychoanalysis” nonsense to justify why everyone needed to be pegged and have multiple sex partners.

That sexual “liberation” has made a lot of goyim quite miserable, but nobody in mainstream culture says so, because who controls the megaphone?

* Freethinking white people promoted sexual freedom before Jews got into the act, starting in the Enlightenment. You can’t blame Jews for the Oneida cult in the 19th Century, for example.

* I don’t understand why everybody keeps going back to Marisa Tomei’s 1992 Best Supporting Actress Oscar in My Cousin Vinny as a mistake.

First, she’s great in My Cousin Vinny.

Second, she’s earned two more Oscar nominations since, including for playing a stripper in 2008 in The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke.

Third, she’s almost impervious to aging. She is working steadily in giant budget movies in her 50s. They recently wrote her into the Marvel movies as Spider-Man’s suddenly-sexy Aunt May to flirt with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. They have a lot of chemistry together. I’m sure she is planning on graduating from sexy aunt to sexy grandma to sexy great-grandma roles.

Fourth, I can think of other young actresses who won Oscars in her era who haven’t had her career.

* Jews are certainly heavily implicated in pornography. I also get the sense today that there are a disproportionate number of Jewish homosexuals when compared to other groups. On the other hand, I remember a friend sending me some survey that showed that of all the groups surveyed, Jews had the highest percentage of those who had never partaken in the solitary vice, which surprised me.

The impression I get is that, say, in fin de siècle western Europe and into the early 20th century, Jews were associated more with heterosexual vice and lechery, while Northwestern European gentiles were more associated with homosexual vice, although in the pagan milieu that had become fashionable at the time, this wasn’t necessarily considered a vice, but something virile and manly.

For example, Paul Johnson in Modern Times writes that the nudist sunbathing movement that arose in Germany in the early 20th century came to be regarded as having a good kind and bad kind: the ‘good’ kind of nudism was Aryan and either non-sexual or homosexual in contrast to the bad ‘Jewish’ type of nudism, which was considered heterosexual and erotic.

German gentiles like Adolf Brand and Hans Blüher advocated for pederastic relationships as being highly masculine and ideal. They opposed the Jew Magnus Hirschfeld because they regarded his brand of homosexuality as being effeminate.

* I’m not in the movie industry but I have spent a lot of my life involved in Opera. It is not unusual for young women to acquire a role in opera through their sexual charms. I suspect that this sort of thing has gone on in Italian Opera for centuries. There are some parts that almost no one can sing (e.g. The Queen of the Night) and there are others that Mozart wrote such that almost any girl with any kind of voice could handle (e.g. Susana or Cherubino in Le Nozze). How is an impresario to choose among the hundreds of young women who show up at the auditions? You know the answer to that question.

Weinstein didn’t invent the practice of taking advantage of girls who want to play dress up and go on the stage.

Now for something a little more controversial. Girls like to be abused. Not all and not in all cases, but in human beings many females long for a ‘strong’ man to control them. This is the unspoken secret – that women like men who take advantage of them. Read Richard Feynman’s books. He discovered that he was more successful with women at bars when he treated them badly. Or you could just look at the ads on the Web. Hundreds of thousands of women advertise that they want to be tied up and beaten by a ‘strong’ man. Contrary to the notions of accepted society, a taste for BDSM is far more common than either homosexuality or transgenderism.

Females who sexually respond to being abused are probably acting out patterns laid down before humans were human. Chimpanzees (our closest relatives) behave this way. The female chimps usually get beaten up by the male chimp as part of their mating rituals. Not all females get beaten by their male but those that do seem to become more fertile. They have more baby chimps. If you know anything of Darwin you can see where that leads. Females who are beaten, out-breed those who escaped that fate, and come to dominate the gene pool. This does not seem to be the pattern among bonobos – but we descend from chimps not bonobos.

Most of the girls who have been victimized by Hollywood producers knew exactly what they were getting in to. Those that didn’t were possibly not the smartest ones. As Henry Kissinger discovered – power is sexy. A fat ugly middle aged Jew can get young girls – ever was it so.

* First, with absolutely no doubt, Judy Davis could play Marisa Tomei’s role better than Marisa Tomei played that role, and Judy Davis’ complex role in Woody’s movie was out of Ms. Tomei’s ability to comprehend. Tomei is just as dumb as she seems. Go to her twitter page. She posts retweets almost exclusively, and parrots SJW silliness. She hasn’t a thought of her own. Never has. Never will.

Second, being able to pick your shots, which winning an Oscar, or having sex with a person in power, allows an actress and her advisors to do, helps loads in further fast-tracking a career. Also, as any major actress will tell you, showing your tits is a prerequisite for an actress’ career longevity, so getting that out of the way as soon as she could might have been a goal of hers. Ms. Tomei also has a history of “dating” people who could help her. Not the other way around. She was very career-driven, and single-minded from early on.

Third, I don’t know if you’ve seen her in person, but she’s an odd looking duck in real life. She’s very small, petite, as if her body stopped developing when she hit 13. To me, she looks slightly deformed. She’s just very weird lookin, in that she has the body of a barely post-pubescent teen, and that helps more than any plastic surgery regimen alone, and some would say it added to her attraction to people who could help her. In Hollywood, looking barely post-pubescent while being legal is literally awesome.

As a sidenote to one of the posters who wondered why pop-bitch Julia Roberts got plumb roles so fast… that’s up for conjecture, but another big plus in hollywood is if your lips closely resemble an engorged vagina. Kim Basinger did very well by hers. She won an Oscar, even though her acting chops were remedial on a good day.

In any case, I’ve personally known well-known actresses, and the things they had to do as a rule to get where they wanted is comical/heart-breaking. One of the bigger “feminist/intellectual” voices amongst actresses whom I’ve known, got on all fours to service a person who absolutely repulsed her, again and again over a period of time, to secure the movie roles she couldn’t have secured without his direct intervention. Her performance was adequate, but he was responsible for her career.

Nobody was ever the wiser, aside from her closest friends-with big mouths who gave me the play-by-play. If I told you who it was, you would be aghast.

And finally, just because you have acting ability, doesn’t mean you didn’t serve numerous penis’ or vagina’s in power (yep, there’s a casting couch run by lesbians and straight women in power also) to leapfrog past a ton of unfortunate acting roles to get where you want to go 10 years earlier.

The acting profession is very, very difficult, for men and women. If you think compromising your morals to service a penis or vagina when you’re a woman is soul-sucking, try doing it as a straight man.

* Int the wake of the Cosby Scandal, Bill’s high-powered entertainment industry enablers and pimps were glossed over, and the industry bosses without skeletons of their own are largely getting a pass this time around as well. My wife were discussing which of the Miramax girls developed powerhouse careers in the 1990′s-2010′s and are now conspicuously silent. The curious one’s will be those with sustained movie and TV careers in the absence of big box office/ratings or critical praise. A trip down IMDB lane could shed some light on this.

BTW, I’ve wondered for years why Natasha Henstridge’s career stalled despite being among the hottest actresses of her generation. Her verbal acumen and demeanor belied a girl raised by a biker in an Alberta trailer park, although the favors she admitted to providing to Brett Ratner happen to fit that stereotype. I suspect she was black-balled by Ratner after things got awkward.

* Before hitting it big, Marisa Tomei did a stint on As the World Turns.

Her character falsely accused another character – a doctor – of sexual harassment, then recanted the accusation and admitted that the whole thing had been a scam set up by the show’s main villain (another doctor at the same hospital).

A few years later, she tried to make it as a fashion model. During the shoot, the photographer raped her. She suffered a near-total mental breakdown, but later recovered and married a British aristocrat.

In the mid-’80s, the ATWT cast included such names as Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Steven Weber, William Fichtner, and John Wesley Shipp.

* Also, let’s not forget those who bent over again and again, who don’t care what you think. Marilyn Monroe is well documented, as well as Sharon Stone. Heather Graham has quite the track record, ironically featured in Steve Martin’s “Bowfinger,” doing what she allegedly does best.

Sidenote: ever notice Steve casts women with fantastic breasts, then has his character fondle them? Heather Graham, that horse-faced girl in LA Story, and Bernadette Peters… am I missing anyone? Kinda weird, isn’t it? Like Woody Allen casting barely legals as romantic leads. I notice things sometimes. Speaking of Woody… Harvey Weinstein Mira Sorvino.. hmmm.

One last note to Steve… sometimes an early oscar winning gal drops out of the repetitive success loop because doing what she had to do works… on her–or him. At night. When she’s/he’s alone in bed, crying. They just don’t have the belly for a career in the fast track. They thought they did, but they discover they were wrong. Their parents ultimately did too good a job, I guess.

Ironically, you have to pick wisely when you aim to have sex with someone to further your career, and don’t do it with too many different partners of wildly different powers to help you, or you get left on the side of the road as overused goods, Sarah Silverman. Just kidding. Sarah would never do that.

* Anyway, instead of looking at highly successful movies like My Cousin Vinny, why not look for movies sunk by terrible performances from beautiful but obscure (before and after) actresses cast as leading ladies?

For example, the 1983 movie “Breathless” had a number of good things going for it, including one of the livelier performances by Richard Gere (he was usually cast back then in flat affect roles that would go to Ryan Gosling today). But the leading lady, some pretty French girl, was completely amateurish.

* My Cousin Vinny has been consistently lauded by lawyer bigwigs as one of the best movies for showing young lawyers about the realities and skills needed for real-world courtroom cases. Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia both praised the film, and its commonly placed in the top 10 of legal movies by lawyers, and bits are even shown to law school classes by professors. Vinny’s cross-examination skills, his qualification of his gf as an expert, and his sowing the seeds of doubt in eye witness testimony are held up as the most realistic and admirable aspects of his legal abilities.

Much like how Barney Miller was for many years voted by cops as the most realistic of police shows.

* This perpetual rediscovering of what our great-grandparents all knew is getting tiresome. Jews are sexually depraved, actresses are whores, theater is where they meet up. These ideas have saturated literature for centuries, the further back the more explicit. Then after WWII they mysteriously disappear.

* Isn’t it curious how women are infatuated with the kind of men who beat their women with relish (muslims, blacks), and despise those who genuinely believe in “nonviolence” and “equality” (nerdy white men)?

* Weinstein didn’t invent the practice of taking advantage of girls who want to play dress up and go on the stage.

* In Ancient Rome actresses were regarded as equal in social status to prostitutes. This was no accident. They have always been society’s whores and will always be society’s whores.

Posted in Abuse, Hollywood, Holocaust, Jews | Comments Off on Shoah Director Accused Of Sexual Harassment

Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this 2016 book:

Although chiropractors often tell patients that long-term treatment is essential, there is no evidence that ongoing chiropractic care of back pain (or any other symptom or disorder) is effective. The Cochrane Collaboration makes it very clear that the only evidence for chiropractic in the treatment of back pain is in cases where the pain is of a very recent onset…

I never thought to ask about those subluxations, but if I had, I would have learned that they were unidentifiable on X-rays, in hands-on examination, or by any other methods. The premise that the spinal joints can freely slip into and out of position is false; such dislocations do occur, but only in the event of serious trauma, the kind that takes you to a hospital’s emergency department rather than a chiropractor’s office. One study showed that, even when they were presented with identical copies of a patient’s X-rays, a group of experienced chiropractors could not muster consensus about where in the spine the subluxations occurred or what the proper course of treatment should be…

Like most people, I assumed that chiropractic treatment was safe. But most of the troubles that send patients to a chiropractor in the first place are included on the World Health Organization’s list of contraindications to chiropractic adjustment: disc herniation, severe or painful disc pathology, leg pain, dislocation of a vertebra, the presence of spinal hardware from fusion surgery, hypermobile joints, vertebral instability, inflammatory arthritis, osteoporosis, or a history of long-term glucocorticoid treatment, which can make bones fragile, especially in older people…

Studies show that, at any age, roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse side effects after treatment, including pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness, and headaches. But these are minor in comparison with a more serious threat: the possibility that a cervical (neck) adjustment may result in a chiropractic stroke. Here’s how it happens: The vertebral arteries, which run roughly parallel to the cervical spine, make a sharp turn around the uppermost cervical vertebrae, just before those arteries travel into the brain. At the top cervical vertebrae, they form a harmless kink—until a chiropractor performs a “tug and twist” adjustment that violently rotates the neck. That movement can tear the delicate walls of one or more arteries, producing a blood clot or swelling that cuts off the blood supply to the brain. The resulting stroke may lead to permanent brain damage or death…

In 1963, after many years of seeking to contain chiropractic’s expansion, the American Medical Association established the Committee on Quackery. In a meeting of the Michigan State Medical Society, chairman and physician Joseph Sabatier observed that “rabid dogs and chiropractors fit into about the same category.” The AMA asked physicians to lobby to end federal recognition of chiropractic education and to recommend that health care plans and Medicare stop their reimbursement for chiropractic care. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announced that chiropractic professionals would need to adhere to the standards of modern medicine, and stop discussing subluxations, if they were to be allowed to continue to practice. The government’s antipathy should have checked chiropractic’s popularity, but in the early 1970s, under intense pressure from chiropractic lobbying organizations, Congress ordered Medicare to pay for spinal manipulation. To be reimbursed by Medicare, the chiropractor needed to show that a subluxation existed on an X-ray. That should have imposed an impossible hurdle, because as we’ve established, subluxations are not visible on X-rays or, for that matter, in any form of imaging. Undeterred by that detail, chiropractors installed X-ray machines in their clinics and adopted the now-standard practice of taking a complete series of spinal images, and doing so repeatedly over the course of treatment, thus exposing patients to unnecessary radiation. Financially, this was a boon, allowing chiropractors to collect payments for both X-rays and treatment…

In 1990, the British Medical Journal described spinal manipulative therapy as “seven percent more effective” than standard hospital physical therapy, without acknowledging that physical therapy was notoriously ineffective as a treatment for low back pain patients. Some viewed the sampling as unreliable: Bewilderingly, even before outcomes were established, three-quarters of the chiropractic participants had dropped out of the study. Saying that chiropractic was 7 percent better than an ineffective protocol was faint praise, indeed…

The British Chiropractic Association ordered members to take down their websites in self-preservation, before their businesses and reputations were damaged. Within months, one in four British chiropractors was under investigation for profiteering, misleading marketing, and advertising excesses. In the United States, in light of this news and amid increased concern that chiropractors were taking patients for a ride on the government’s dime, Medicare altered its confusing stance—“show subluxations in an X-ray, and then we’ll pay for treatment”—instead ordering chiropractors to restrict their Medicare billings to “active therapy” rather than “maintenance services.” Quickly, chiropractors altered the way they described their treatments so that they could code every session as “active therapy.” Medicare inspectors didn’t take notice, but eventually the U.S. Office of the Inspector General did, estimating that, in 2001, Medicare had paid chiropractors some $285 million for improperly billed (and mostly unnecessary) chiropractic services.

In recent decades, chiropractors have divided over philosophical issues. Those who cling to Palmer’s metaphysical and nonscientific theories are known as “straights.” Others, called “mixers,” acknowledge the existence of bacteria, viruses, and other scientific nuts and bolts, but still adhere to most of Palmer’s tenets. Although they call themselves “chiropractic physicians” and employ the honorific “Dr.,” practitioners who entered chiropractic college before 1974, when the rules changed, may have gone directly from high school to practice after only eighteen months of training…

I spent a training weekend with Craig Liebenson, DC, who is the director of the International Society of Clinical Rehab Specialists,7 which retrains chiropractors, physical therapists, physicians, and sports medicine specialists. Liebenson practices what he preaches at L.A. Sports and Spine, a West Los Angeles clinic… Instead of being made to feel good, said Liebenson, back pain patients needed “graded exposure to feared stimuli,” which translated as intensive exercise meant to build ability, strength, and confidence. “We need to focus on function, not on pain and scans and symptoms, because all these poison the minds of patients,” he told his audience…

Unsurprisingly, Livingston didn’t realize that in the presence of a herniated disc, chiropractic treatment is contraindicated. Nor was he aware that in the acute phase—within a couple of weeks after the injury—the McKenzie Method of Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT), also known as the McKenzie Method, could have put him back on his feet. The late Robin McKenzie, a Wellington, New Zealand, physiotherapist who died in 2013, loved to tell the story of how, quite by accident, he developed his technique. Because he was occupied with another patient at that moment, he sent his next appointment, a patient who suffered from a disc herniation—and associated back and leg pain—into a room, to wait. He told him to lie on his stomach on the examination table, in preparation for the standard ultrasound and heat therapy. But McKenzie did not know that his colleague, who used that room last, had left one end of the table elevated like the backrest of a chair, at nearly a ninety-degree angle. Given the awkward configuration, the patient evidently did his best, configuring his spine in an awkward backbend. Upon entering the room, McKenzie was horrified—until, the patient explained that the pain had finally relented. McKenzie realized that he had placed the patient’s spine in “extension,” thus eliminating the disc herniation’s pressure on the spinal nerve root. But spinal extension, he would learn, did not always end acute pain. Depending on how the protruding disc made contact with the spinal nerve root, a forward bend that put the spine in “flexion” could be just the ticket. When treatment was appropriately delivered, recovery from an acute episode could take only a few days. (Note, yet again, that many people recover from an acute episode without any professional assistance.) Once a patient knew what worked, he could rescue himself if he was in a crisis…

[PTs] order the same “cookie-cutter” routine for most low-back-pain patients, ensuring that many won’t get better. Patients who “fail physical therapy,” especially several times in succession, often use that information as evidence that the obvious next step is surgery. “They don’t recognize that cookie-cutter physical therapy is a pseudo-intervention,” said John D. Childs, director of the physical therapy program at U.S. Army–Baylor University, “or that PT serves as a holding tank for patients who are not quite ready to get on the gravy train of scans and tests and injections and surgery and pain management.”

You may have wondered why it’s often necessary to get a physician’s “prescription” for PT, when that’s not required for chiropractic or for other interventions like therapeutic massage or biofeedback or exercise. The answer lies in the hierarchical relationship between physicians and PTs. The latter have traditionally served as support staff rather than independent operators. “At the end of the day, physician lobbying groups don’t want PTs to gain direct access,” said John Childs, the Baylor therapist. “If you talk to a physician over a few beers, he will tell you that if you go to an excellent PT to treat a musculoskeletal condition, you will not need drugs, or imaging. You will not need a surgeon.” Therefore, remarked Childs, physicians have a vested interest in keeping patients under their own care…

Certified personal trainers, he explained, could get their “degrees” after a weekend online course. And recently, some had begun to abbreviate the CPT to “PT,” in this case standing for “personal trainer.” This suggested expertise and education that they did not possess…

…in a 2015 review of the medical literature, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality had found no evidence that epidural steroid injections were effective in treating symptoms of spinal stenosis or typical low back pain. Even in the presence of a recent disc herniation and ensuing sciatica, the benefits of injections were small…

Posted in Alexander Technique, Back, Chiropractic | Comments Off on Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery

Smart People Live In The Future

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Luke Ford

Justin Murphy writes:

Human intelligence is one of the most well understood human traits. It varies significantly across humans. It is partially genetic. What does it mean that human beings have different problem-solving power? Following from above, one implication is that humans live on different time scales. In some non-trivial sense, high-IQ people are living farther in the future than low-IQ people. This is why speaking with someone significantly smarter than you is quite literally speaking with an alien who has come from the future. And speaking with someone less smart than you is like speaking with someone from the past. You can think about this even in a minute-by-minute sense. As a highly intelligent person speaks, a less intelligent person is still inhabiting the first words of the sentence while the speaker is finishing the last words, whereas an even more intelligent listener is correctly predicting a speaker’s second sentence before they are even finished with their first sentence.
But we all live together, so society is basically a kind of inter-temporal zone. With the rise of mass media, the reality that receives sponsorship will be a weighted average of the audience’s time-slice. Smarter people will always be ahead, dumber people will always be behind, but most of the people with average intelligence will converge on a quotidian reality, all the more reinforced by a shared, external, socio-political legitimation. One of the key problems with a mass-media culture in a capitalist society is that any ideas overly contradicting or offending mass sensibilities will be selected out of the mass-media model of reality, as a simple outcome of supply and demand. Unsurprisingly, one of the key planks of contemporary ideology is that there do not exist significant, genetic psychological and behavioral differences between individuals and groups.
Marx thought that ideology protected the status quo by reflecting the interests of the bourgeoisie, and it does, but not by giving the bourgeoisie disproportionate power to project their ideas. Ideology operates by promoting the stupid ideas, especially those preferred by the weak and the poor. This is how left-wing compassion can be a kind of vicious commitment to the weak and poor remaining weak and poor. By treating less intelligent people as equally intelligent, you are actively conspiring to ensure your advantage remains stable. With ideology, it is not that the ideas of the ruling class are favored, but the opposite: the stupid ideas of the stupid are respected, for the economic gains of the smart. Nowhere do you see this more clearly than with a company such as Google, which will fire an employee for writing about psychological differences between the sexes, while actively leveraging the reality of those differences in advertising market segmentation.
So the social taboo on human psychological differences is itself a piece of stupidity, that ensures subjects continue to follow routines that do not work, like trying to solve a rubik’s cube by spinning one slice over and over. On the other hand, the unfettered play of intelligenic differences is no doubt catastrophic. That is what’s happening today, in the rise of inequality and mass cultural confusion. The problem is that intelligence is precisely that which escapes constraints designed by the less intelligent. Tax evasion, for instance. We cannot tax the rich even if we wanted to, they are too smart relative to bureacratic governmental institutions.

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ADL: White Supremacist Infighting Escalates After Shelbyville Event

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Luke Ford

From the ADL:

White supremacists have been fighting among themselves ever since the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That infighting escalated following last weekend’s White Lives Matter (WLM) rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
About 200 white supremacists around the country attended the WLM rally. The main organization behind the rally was the Nationalist Front, which includes groups such as League of the South, a Southern nationalist group, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and two other neo-Nazi groups, Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrott’s Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), and Vanguard America. A number of Klan groups were also represented at the rally, including the Global Crusader Knights and the International Keystone Knights.
There is a major point of contention among various white supremacist factions: divergent opinions about acceptable ways to act and dress – and how to best promote their cause. In one camp, are white supremacists who promote “American Nationalism” and advocate for a racist ideology that appeals to conservatives with the use of ostensibly unifying symbols like the American flag, They also use more subtle language to promote their white supremacist ideas and events. They are in conflict with those whom Occidental Dissent’s Brad Griffin, aka Hunter Wallace, identifies as the “hard right” who prefer to highlight their racist and anti-Semitic ideology through their militant dress, explicit language, and hardcore beliefs such as National Socialism.
A number of the attendees in Tennessee openly displayed neo-Nazi symbols such as SS bolts and Klan patches. Some also gave Nazi salutes and wore black helmets reminiscent of fascist forces during World War II. Griffin, one of the organizers of the event, stressed in his “post-mortem” analysis of the event that “there were no swastika flags in Shelbyville.” The Nationalist Front was trying to contain the display of the most blatant Nazi imagery at the rally so that the attendees could appear less hardcore than they actually are, but the effort fell flat. The “optics” of neo-Nazis giving “Sieg heil” salutes and Klan members wearing Klan symbols on their jackets irked a number of activists on the alt right.
A number of alt right activists had harsh words for the WLM rally, including Andrew Anglin, who runs The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site. Nathan Damigo, the former head of Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group active in the campaign to post fliers on campuses, and Nicholas Fuentes and Jack Allsup, two college students who present themselves as “conservatives” but have their feet planted firmly in the worlds of white nationalism and the alt right, were angry at the WLM rally attendees for displaying signs and symbols associated with the hardcore white supremacist movement.
In a column for The Daily Stormer, Anglin, who recently disavowed his neo-Nazi persona, disparaged the “1980s style neo-Nazism” on display in Tennessee, and wrote that the rally was “not at all close to the vision I have for the movement I have contributed to.” He went on to encourage fellow white supremacists to make an attempt to look like “something normal people can get behind.”
Damigo, Fuentes and Allsup also attacked the rally on Twitter, with Damigo saying it was “cringe” and “self-indulgent extremism.” Allsup made fun of the march in a tweet, telling Griffin that he “can go celebrate ‘victory’ with your twenty KKK buddies,” and adding, “RAHOWA [Racial Holy War, a common white supremacist refrain] is definitely coming any day now, buddy!” In his tweet, Fuentes disparaged the “card carrying KKK & Nazis, Roman salutes, not a single decent recording and underwhelming attendance.”
Both Griffin and TWP’s Matt Parrott (who did not attend the rally in Shelbyville) reacted with anger to the attacks from alt right figures. Griffin called them “a bunch of childless homosexuals” and wrote on his blog, Occidental Dissent, that the rally was a “success” because it changed the narrative around Charlottesville by demonstrating that white supremacists could hold an event without violence.
Parrott was likewise on the defensive, saying he believed the WLM rally was a success. He chided the white supremacists who want to dress up “like frat boys with American flags” and described members of his own group as “street nationalists” who put themselves in the line of fire against groups like antifa. He attacked American Nationalism, saying, “Identifying ourselves with this prolapsing empire is a bad idea that we will not sign off on.” He also said that he and his cohorts “realize that the American federal government can’t be and won’t be a vehicle for White Nationalism.”
Ultimately, the alt right and white supremacists like Parrott share the same ideology. Both groups promote racism and anti-Semitism and want whites to live separately from non-whites, but they disagree on how to achieve that goal. It seems unlikely that they will reconcile their differences anytime soon.

Posted in ADL, Alt Right | Comments Off on ADL: White Supremacist Infighting Escalates After Shelbyville Event

Steve Sailer: A Debate Over the Dodgers’ Iranian-Japanese Pitcher Yu Darvish

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: First fan: Darvish should do the honorable thing and remove himself from the game by committing seppuku on the mound.

Second fan: Or at least he could flog himself Shi’ite style on his way to the showers.

Japanese athletes had a lot of pressure on them in the 20th Century in international competitions, such as the Japanese marathoner who was supposed to win the golf in Tokyo in 1964 but committed suicide.

The Japanese underachieved for awhile in the Olympics, quite possibly due to the stifling pressure of representing the nation.

But in the 21st Century, Japanese have done pretty well in the Olympics, so maybe they’ve learned better how to deal with the pressure.

I don’t know about Kershaw and his post-season problems, but here’s an analogy.

Bill James wrote about how Craig Biggio was a Hall of Famer during the regular season, but was pretty mediocre in the postseason. He speculated that Biggio, a smallish man for a big time athlete, may have feasted on #5 starters but got outgunned by all the aces he had to face in the postseason.

Unfortunately, Baseball References splits page don’t let you check that. What I did notice about Biggio was that his regular season hitting fell off pretty badly in September, the sixth and last month of the regular season. My guess would be that he worked out very hard in the offseason, started the season in great shape, and then started to wear down from minor injuries (second basemen get beat up a lot by runners trying to break up the double play) and fatigue in the last month of the season and this carried through into the postseason.

Another possibility is that the Astros are just a historically strong hitting team. No they are probably not as good as the 1927 Yankees other than the Yankees didn’t have a DH. But if the OPS+ figure is correct, they are considerably stronger hitters than, say, the famous 1982 Milwaukee Brewers or the zillion dollar Yankee teams of the Rodriguez-Jeter-Cano era.

COMMENTS:

* Has an Asian athlete ever had a Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Tom Brady moment. It seems that they always crumble in high stakes moments where there is not a lot of time for preparation. Just asking?

* Tony Castro: Sadaharu Oh. Hideki Matsui was the 2009 World Series MVP for the Yankees hitting .615 (8 for 13) with 3 home runs and 8 RBI. Hideo Nomo Nomo is one of only five players that have ever pitched a no-hitter game in both the National League and American League in Major League Baseball history. He has pitched the only no-hitters at Coors Field and Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Ichiro Suzuki was MVP and Rookie of the Year in 2001, 10 time All Star, had 10 200 hit season and holds the record for most hits in a season, joined the 3,000-Hit Club… all this after playing his first nine season in the Japanese leagues.

I wonder if the real question about the Dodgers’ loss that you should be asking has nothing to do with Darvish and more to do with the person making the decision to have him pitch that game when the team’s best pitcher was healthy enough to start. Or, if you wanted to make a point about an Asian heritage athlete NOT having a Magic-Bird-Brady moment when the stakes were high, you more accurately could have singled out Dodger Manager Dave Roberts, who clearly showed himself to be a small-time manager with a big-time team in a major league moment — and failing.
If the only reason Dave Roberts is manager of the Dodgers is his role in the 2004 Boston World Series championship, then perhaps the Dodgers should have hired Terry Francona, who was the manager of that team and of the 2007 World Series champs as well.

* The Yakuza way is to cut off the finger. In this case, cut off his entire hand.

* Hideki Masui was 2009 World Series MVP batting in 6 runs in the decisive 6th game.

* Maybe, Yu Darvish was too traumatized by Yuli Gurriel’s micro-aggressions to pitch effectively.

* True enough, Darvish was just horrible. He was scared to death, as he was his first start of the WS.

But in fact, it was Dodger manager Roberts who really hurt the Dodgers.

– 1. By starting Darvish a second time. He had the previously very effective lefty Alex Wood ready to go.

– 2. Not only did Roberts start Darvish twice, but Roberts made blunder after blunder throughout the series.

Astros manager Hinch clearly out managed Roberts in every way.

I’m a Dodgers fan and it was embarrassing.

* Even though Kershaw is a multimillionaire superstar, I sometimes can’t help but feel a bit sorry for him. There may be something about his pitching style that doesn’t translate that well to the postseason, but he’s been pretty unlucky as well.

This year, for example, no one is going to remember his postseason performance as being dominant, because the Dodgers didn’t win the World Series, and because he got shelled in the infamous WS Game 5.

But if you look at his overall stats for this postseason, they’re (almost) uniformly excellent.

He went 3-0, to please the saber-hater traditionalists.

He gave up just 21 hits in 33 innings, and his opponents hit just .179 against him, as compared with .212 in the regular season.

His WHIP in the postseason — 0.94 — was actually lower than in the regular season, when it was 0.95.

He had 33 strikeouts in those 33 innings, an excellent one-per-inning average. Admittedly, this is not quite as good as he was in the regular season, but it’s close enough to be statistically meaningless, and again, it’s against better competition, including one of the best-hitting teams of all time in the Astros.

The problem, as you say, was the home run. Kershaw gave up 8 in the 2017 postseason, leading very directly to an ERA of 3.82, compared to 2.21 in the regular season.

He had some problems with the long ball in the regular season this year as well, as he gave up 23, which is his worst season in this regard by quite a margin. But 8 in 33 innings is really bad compared with 23 in 175 regular-season innings — much less the 11 in 236 innings he gave up back in 2013.

So this again makes one think. All things considered, Kershaw seems better than ever — except for the gopher balls. So either he’s held steady or even improved in all aspects of his pitching except for suddenly and inexplicably grooving occasional pitches in a way he didn’t in the past, or else we’re back to wondering about the ball again.

* According to some guys on sportsball radio this morning, the Astros picked up a tell in Darvish’s pitching. When he held the ball still in his glove, a fastball was coming. If his pitching hand was moving around getting a grip on the ball, a slider was coming. So they hitters knew just what to expect.

The radio guys also noted that the Dodgers pitching coach should have picked this up as well and warned Darvish, but apparently that didn’t happen.

* His slider was a cement mixer as well, for Houston it was like hitting the ball from a T.

Even Fox broadcaster hall of famer Smoltz stated that this is what happens when a pitcher is nervous and cannot bring his nerves under control. He get’s under the ball, he aims, is tight with his breaking pitches, etc, etc.

Darvish was not ready for the big moments and it clearly showed. His eyes even had the look of fear.

Yet the not too smart Dave Roberts started him a 2nd time with the same results as the 1st when he had the previously effective Alex Woods ready to go.

Posted in Asians, Baseball, Los Angeles Dodgers | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: A Debate Over the Dodgers’ Iranian-Japanese Pitcher Yu Darvish