Lavar Ball Blames White People for His Son Lonzo Getting Torched

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I welcome more statements like this.

More HBD.

Because whites are slower than blacks, they will be easier prey to black thugs and crime.

Apply truth in sports to the streets.

Yes, I welcome blacks putting down white athletes.

* Ken Pomeroy has UCLA as the #2 Adjusted Offense in the NCAA, so draw your own conclusion.

That said, perhaps Lavar has an algorithm from which he drew his conclusion.

* Perhaps Whites deserve some credit for the fact UCLA exists — and UCLA credit for bending admissions standards to admit his son.

* When you have a real outlet in which to pour your tribal instincts, sports pale in comparison.

* Yeah, realistically having White team-mates lost the game for Ball; and realistically having a Black President has been a disaster for White people in America. So there’s that. Lesson: let Black people do things they are good at — dunking basketballs over other Black people; and let White people do what they are good at: leading the nation, math, science, building Western Civilization.

Posted in Basketball, Blacks | Comments Off on Lavar Ball Blames White People for His Son Lonzo Getting Torched

Torah Talk: Passover 2017

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Every nation has a victimology and every victimology has a nationalism and every nationalism has the capacity for genocide.

John Mearsheimer’s classic work, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, also applies to the Passover.

John Mearsheimer writes:

In contrast to liberals, realists are pessimists when it comes to international politics. Realists agree that creating a peaceful world would be desirable, but they see no easy way to escape the harsh world of security competition and war. Creating a peaceful world is surely an attractive idea, but it is not a practical one. “Realism,” as Carr notes, “tends to emphasize the irresistible strength of existing forces and the inevitable character of existing tendencies, and to insist that the highest wisdom lies in accepting, and adapting oneself to these forces and these tendencies.”26

This gloomy view of international relations is based on three core beliefs. First, realists, like liberals, treat states as the principal actors in world politics. Realists focus mainly on great
powers, however, because these states dominate and shape international politics and they also cause the deadliest wars. Second, realists believe that the behavior of great powers is influenced mainly by their external environment, not by their internal characteristics. The structure of the international system, which all states must deal with, largely shapes their foreign policies. Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between “good” and “bad” states, because all great powers act according to the same logic regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government.27 It is therefore difficult to discriminate among states, save for differences in relative power. In essence, great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in
size.28

Third, realists hold that calculations about power dominate states’ thinking, and that states compete for power among themselves. That competition sometimes necessitates going to war, which is considered an acceptable instrument of statecraft. To quote Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century military strategist, war is a continuation of politics by other means.29 Finally, a zero-sum quality characterizes that competition, sometimes making it intense and unforgiving.

States may cooperate with each other on occasion, but at root they have conflicting interests. Although there are many realist theories dealing with different aspects of power, two of them
stand above the others: human nature realism, which is laid out in Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, and defensive realism, which is presented mainly in Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. What sets these works apart from those of other realists and makes them both important and controversial is that they provide answers to the two foundational questions described above. Specifically, they explain why states pursue power—that is, they have a story
to tell about the causes of security competition—and each offers an argument about how much power a state is likely to want.

Some other famous realist thinkers concentrate on making the case that great powers care deeply about power, but they do not attempt to explain why states compete for power or what level of power states deem satisfactory. In essence, they provide a general defense of the realist approach, but they do not offer their own theory of international politics. The works of Carr and American diplomat George Kennan fit this description. In his seminal realist tract, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr criticizes liberalism at length and argues that states are motivated principally by power considerations. Nevertheless, he says little about why states care about power or how much power they want.30 Bluntly put, there is no theory in his book. The same basic pattern obtains in Kennan’s well-known book American Diplomacy, 1900-1950. 31

Morgenthau and Waltz, on the other hand, offer their own theories of international relations, which is why they have dominated the discourse about world politics for the past fifty years.

Human nature realism, which is sometimes called “classical realism,” dominated the study of international relations from the late 1940s, when Morgenthau’s writings began attracting a large
audience, until the early 1970s.32 It is based on the simple assumption that states are led by human beings who have a “will to power” hardwired into them at birth.33 That is, states have an
insatiable appetite for power, or what Morgenthau calls “a limitless lust for power,” which means that they constantly look for opportunities to take the offensive and dominate other states.34 All states come with an “animus dominandi,” so there is no basis for discriminating among more aggressive and less aggressive states, and there certainly should be no room in the theory for status quo states.35 Human nature realists recognize that international anarchy—the absence of a governing authority over the great powers—causes states to worry about the balance of
power. But that structural constraint is treated as a second-order cause of state behavior. The principal driving force in international politics is the will to power inherent in every state in the system, and it pushes each of them to strive for supremacy.

From Wikipedia:

Anarchy and the struggle for power[edit]
Mearsheimer posits that states are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals. He argues that states pursue power because of the anarchic system in which they operate. In international politics, there is no hierarchy, no “night watchman” to turn to when one state attacks another so states are forced to rely only on themselves for security. Thus, states seek to expand their power both militarily, geographically and economically in order to increase their security.

Primacy of land power[edit]
A state’s power in international politics, Mearsheimer argues, derives from the strength of its military for two reasons: because land force is the dominant military power in the modern era, and because large bodies of water limit the power projection capabilities of land armies.

The stopping power of water[edit]
Mearsheimer argues that the presence of oceans in the world prevents any state from reaching world hegemony. He posits that large bodies of water limit the power projection abilities of militaries and thus naturally divide up powers in the globe.

He uses the example of the isolation provided to Britain by the English Channel, which allowed it to act as an offshore balancer on mainland Europe. Britain, he argues, never had ambitions to control or dominate continental Europe. Instead it aimed only to maintain the balance of power and ensure that no state could become so powerful as to achieve regional hegemony on the continent. For much of the 19th century, Britain had an industrial capacity that would have allowed it to easily invade and dominate much of Europe.

However, Britain chose not to attempt domination of the continent, in part because it calculated that its aims of achieving security could be more cheaply achieved if the European powers could be played off against each other. By doing so, it would be occupied on the European continent and unable to challenge Britain across the English Channel or interfere with Britain’s economic interests in Asia and Africa.

Therefore, the central aim of American foreign policy is to be the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere only, and to prevent the rise of a similar hegemon in the Eastern Hemisphere. In turn, the proper role for the United States is as an offshore balancer, balancing against the rise of a Eurasian hegemon and going to war only as a last resort to thwart it.

State strategies for survival[edit]
Objective 1 – Regional hegemony[edit]
In addition to their principal goal, which is survival, great powers seek to achieve three main objectives. Their highest aim is to achieve regional hegemony. Mearsheimer argues although achieving global hegemony would provide maximum security to a state, it is not feasible because the world has too many oceans which inhibit the projection of military power. Thus, the difficulty of projecting military power across large bodies of water makes it impossible for great powers to dominate the world. Regional hegemons try strongly to prevent other states from achieving regional hegemony.

Instead, they try to maintain an even balance among of power in regions and act to ensure the existence of multiple powers so as to keep those multiple powers occupied among themselves rather than being able to challenge the regional hegemon’s interests, which they would be free to do if they were not occupied by their neighboring competitors. Mearsheimer uses the example of the United States, which achieved regional hegemony in the late 1800s and then sought to intervene wherever it looked as though another state might achieve hegemony in a region:

Imperial Germany during World War I
Nazi Germany during World War II
Imperial Japan during World War II
Soviet Union during the Cold War
Objective 2 – Maximum wealth[edit]
Great powers seek to maximize their share of the world’s wealth because economic strength is the foundation of military strength. Great powers seek to prevent rival powers from dominating wealth-producing regions of the world. The United States, for example, sought to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Western Europe and the Middle East. Had the Soviets gained control of these areas, the balance of power would have been altered significantly against the United States.

Objective 3 – Nuclear superiority[edit]
Mearsheimer asserts that great powers seek nuclear superiority over their rivals. Great powers exist in a world of multiple nuclear powers with the assured capacity to destroy their enemies called mutually assured destruction (MAD). Mearsheimer disagrees with the assertions that states are content to live in a MAD world and that they would avoid developing defenses against nuclear weapons. Instead, he argues that great powers would not be content to live in a MAD world and would try to search for ways to gain superiority over their nuclear rivals.

Rise of American power; 1800–1900[edit]
The United States was a strongly expansionist power in the Americas. Mearsheimer points to the comment made by Henry Cabot Lodge that the United States had a “record of conquest, colonization and territorial expansion unequaled by any people in the 19th century.” In the 1840s, Europeans began speaking about the need to preserve a balance of power in America and contain further American expansion.

By 1900, however, the United States had achieved regional hegemony and in 1895 its Secretary of State Richard Olney told Britain’s Lord Salisbury that “today the U.S. is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects within its interposition…its infinite resources and isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable against all other powers.”

Future of American power[edit]
On the penultimate page of Tragedy, Mearsheimer warns:

Neither Wilhelmine Germany, nor imperial Japan, nor Nazi Germany, nor the Soviet Union had nearly as much latent power as the United States had during their confrontations … But if China were to become a giant Hong Kong, it would probably have somewhere on the order of four times as much latent power as the United States does, allowing China to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States.

Amazon.com reviews:

* This hardheaded book about international relations contains no comforting bromides about “peace dividends” or “the family of nations.” Instead, University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer posits an almost Darwinian state of affairs: “The great powers seek to maximize their share of world power” because “having dominant power is the best means to ensure one’s own survival.” Mearsheimer comes from the realist school of statecraft–he calls his own brand of thinking “offensive realism”–and he warns repeatedly against putting too much faith in the goodwill of other countries. “The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business,” he writes. Much of the book is an attempt to show how the diplomatic and military history of the last two centuries supports his ideas. Toward the end of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he applies his theories to the current scene: “I believe that the existing power structures in Europe in Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.” Mearsheimer is especially critical of America’s policy of engagement with China; he thinks that trying to make China wealthy and democratic will only make it a stronger rival. This is a controversial idea, but it is ably argued and difficult to ignore.

* The central tenet of the political theory called “offensive realism” is that each state seeks to ensure its survival by maximizing its share of world power. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, sets out to explain, defend and validate offensive realism as the only theory to account for how states actually behave. He proceeds by laying out the theory and its assumptions, then extensively tests the theory against the historical record since the Age of Napoleon. He finds plenty of evidence of what the theory predicts that states seek regional dominance through military strength. Further, whenever a condition of “unbalanced multipolarity” exists (i.e., when three or more states compete in a region, and one of them has the potential to dominate the others), the likelihood of war rises dramatically. If history validates offensive realism, then the theory should yield predictions about the future of world politics and the chances of renewed global conflict. Here Mearsheimer ventures into controversial terrain. Far from seeing the end of the Cold War as ushering in an age of peace and cooperation, the author believes the next 20 years have a high potential for war. China emerges as the most destabilizing force, and the author urges the U.S. to do all it can to retard China’s economic growth. Since offensive realism is an academic movement, readers will expect some jargon (“buckpassing,” “hegemon”), but the terms are defined and the language is accessible. This book will appeal to all devotees of political science, and especially to partisans of the “tough-minded” (in William James’s sense) approach to history.

* I am working Step One in one of my 12-step programs dealing with emotional addiction.

My work starts with reading the beginning of AA’s Big Book:

Doctor’s Opinion:

* “phenomenon of craving” aka thirsty aka beyond our control. Instincts out of whack.
* We do things because we like their effect.
* We are restless, irritable and discontented until we can experience the temporary ease of our addictions.
* Cycle: craving, spree, remorse
* Without a psychic change, there is little hope of recovery.
* Once a psychic change occurs, we can effortlessly handle our cravings.
* Something more than human power is needed. We need God.
* Many addicts do not recover from the normal psychological approach.
* Addicts have this symptom in common: We cannot start on our addiction without craving.

Bill’s Story:

* Feeling part of life at last, after previously feeling isolated and apart from others. When lonely, we turn to our addictions. A coping mechanism for dealing with our loneliness is fantasy, particularly fantasy that we are grand. We wanted to prove to the world that we were important. This leads to us falling out with people, idea deflection, and isolating.
Our addiction begins as a coping mechanism for loneliness and then becomes maladaptive aka a necessity that isolates us more deeply.
* Our resolve is inadequate to the task of managing our life.
* As an addict, our will can be strong in some areas and weak in others.
* Addictions tend to be progressive and fatal. My addiction wants to kill me but it will settle for making me miserable.
* Where human will has failed, God has done for people what they could not do for themselves.
* In the hospital, Bill had a vital spiritual experience and did not drink again.
* Without enlarging my spiritual life and working with others, I won’t be able to stay sober.

Define:

* Powerlessness: “If, when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or you have little control over the amount you take…”

Honesty: “Honesty refers to a facet of moral character and connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct, along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, etc. Honestly also includes being trustworthy, loyal, fair, and sincere”

Admittance: “admission of guilt. n. a statement by someone accused of a crime that he/she committed the offense.”

Unmanagability: “Difficult or impossible to manage or control: unmanageable traffic congestion. 2. Difficult to carry or maneuver; unwieldy: unmanageable bundles.”

Surrender: “to stop resisting”

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Ryan Howes:

…insanity is a legal term pertaining to a defendant’s ability to determine right from wrong when a crimeis committed. Here’s the first sentence of law.com’s lengthy definition:

Insanity. n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.

Insanity is a concept discussed in court to help distinguish guilt from innocence. It’s informed by mental health professionals, but the term today is primarily legal, not psychological. There’s no “insane” diagnosis listed in the DSM. There’s no “nervous breakdown” either, but that’s another blog.

* Unfinished business from previous Torah talks.

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Rabbi Stephen Wise Was No Stranger At The Party

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Henry Makow writes:

Rabbi Stephen Wise was the most prominent American Zionist and Jewish leader from the 1920’s until his death in 1949. On the Rockefeller-PBS website he is commemorated as “one of the greatest fighters for democracy and human rights of our generation.”

In her book, “Stranger at the Party ” Helen Lawrenson describes how, as a 23-year-old reporter for the Syracuse Journal in 1930, she was sent to interview “the most famous rabbi in America.”

She made the mistake of saying she admired him: “The next thing I knew he had toppled me backward on the sofa and was making love to me…Before I knew what had hit me, it was over and not a split second too soon either as someone was knocking at the door and calling his name. “My God!” cried Rabbi Wise, “it’s Rabbi Bienenfeld,” leaping up and buttoning his fly. And so it was, not only the leading Syracuse rabbi , but with him was Mrs. Wise who fortunately didn’t have her hotel key.” (p.44)

Later, Wise lured her back to his room and forced her to her knees before him saying, “Kneel before me in prayerful attitude, my darling.”

Her worship did not include un-zippering him “at that time” but she assumed “he acted in the same way in every city he visited” and she wondered if he wasn’t afraid of scandal. He replied that “every dynamic man had a powerful sex drive and should make the most of it.”

Three years later, they crossed paths in the course of her work for Vanity Fair and she found herself “on my back again, this time on the long table in his office, with Wise reciting in Hebrew,”Lift up your heads oh ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.” Psalm 24:7-10 (45)

Apparently this is a Sabbatean (Illuminati) prayer after sex. The “King of Glory” is obviously the penis. The Sabbateans were a heretical Jewish Satanic cult that morphed into Illuminism, Communism, Freemasonry, Feminism, Zionism and “sexual liberation.” They were ostracized by Torah Jews for sex orgies and other forms of adultery in the 17th and 18th Century. The rulers of the world –Jewish and non-Jewish- belong to this pagan sex cult, and in the name of “progress,” inducted society into it. They were responsible for WWII and for the Jewish holocaust. Rabbi Wise was feckless in rescuing his fellow Jews from this calamity but better at thwarting the efforts of others.

Helen Lawrenson (1907-1982) was a good-hearted, literate, Leftist dupe of the kind the Illuminati liked to have around. The point is she is completely credible. She became the Managing Editor of Vanity Fair, and the lover and lifelong friend of both Conde Naste and Bernard Baruch. She and her husband, labor organizer Jack Lawrenson, were regular house guests of Clare and Henry Luce. Her book was published by Random House in 1975.

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Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* THEY ARE HAVING A HARD TIME GETTING MUSLIM WOMEN TO PARTICIPATE

A few months ago, their executive director Sheryl Olitzky approached some Muslim women leaders to convince Muslim women to join this organization because she was having a hard time getting Muslim women to show up, despite what you see in this video. Sheryl said she keeps calling and emailing mosques but gets zero response from them; for people like me who are Muslim – not responding to calls/emails is the polite Muslim way of saying “no” without insulting you by saying an actual “no”. Heba Macksoud a known face in the Muslim community even requested, through a facebook post, Muslim women to join this organization. Sister of Salaam Shalom is a jewish funded and jewish run organization.

Here is a post on the facebook page of Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom on April 5:
” Hi Sisters, Yael Ridberg and Lallia Allali and I are excitedly preparing this event (see link). We have a bit of a conundrum that may open larger questions about Muslim-Jewish interfaith collaboration/dialogue: We have sold out all 18 tickets designated for Jewish women, but we have sold only 1 ticket designated for Muslim Women. This is mirrored by the fact that of the 10-12 people who signed up to show interest in a San Diego SoSS chapter, only 1 is Muslim while the others are all Jewish. Sheryl Olitzky, you mentioned that this is not uncommon. Do you have any suggestions (other than the obvious: posting the link in Muslim FB groups, attending Jummah,…) as to how to involve more Muslim women? (We have a San Diego Muslim-Jewish FB group with 200+ members, all women, roughly 1/3 Muslim, 2/3 Jewish.) Clearly this is partially due to the fact that I (a Jewish woman) started the group partly to address the fact that I know very few Muslims while I know (or am acquainted with) many more Jews…. Thoughts? Thank you in advance!”

Why do Muslim women don’t want to involve themselves? Well, most of them are busy with their careers and families. But in addition to that, 1. we are tired of constant Jewish interference in our communities. Most of the feminist, liberal and progressive organizations in the Muslim community are funded by Jewish people, which means they talk about everything except what is important to Muslims – Palestine, Democracy in the Middle East, Freedom from all oppressors (both Arab autocrats, and US/Israeli aggression). Steven SAiler, if you are genuine about understanding things, then you must do research on Jewish interference in Christian and Muslim communities, find out what are the commonalities etc. 2. Mainstream Jewish organizations have promoted Islamophobia in the US to drive a wedge between Christians and Muslims, and to make Muslim Americans pariahs in their own country. I doubt SSS will allow any kind of honest discussion of that. If you want to know the truth of this point, simply look up who is funding Islamophobia materials, individuals, think tanks, churches etc – Hint:it aint Christians.

* What happened to Tupperware parties?

The disappeared with our culture. The elimination of Tupperware parties was part of the conspiracy to destroy us and change our country!

Tupperware parties gave our women something to be proud of as homemakers. The parties promoted good sanitation and organization, traits associated with our civilization. Can’t have that in a vibrant world. Gotta let Third World diseases run rampant and force women to go to market every day for fresh food.

My mother had a Tupperware party in Orange County when California was still American. As a boy, I particularly liked the way the containers snapped closed and locked the air out.

Bring back Tupperware parties! Bring back America!

* Funny how it is wrong to judge Muslims by ongoing Islamic terrorist activity but it is perfectly acceptable to judge white gentiles by the Holocaust that was committed by Nazi Germany.

* Ultra orthodox women don’t wear skullcaps. They wear $7,000 wigs and have at least 5 or 6 of them. It’s mandatory that they buy the wigs from a shop owned by their Rabbi’s brother. They don’t soil their hands with the manual labor of washing the wigs. The wigs are washed and styled once a month for about $800.00 at the hairdresser’s owned by their Rabbi’s nieces.

I skim the Los Angeles Jewish Journal and other Jewish publications weekly. First my neighborhood is littered with them. Second I like to keep an eye on the enemy. The articles are divided into 2 groups.

Half the articles are “muslims and Jews have so much in common and the evil White goyim of America must let everyone of them in so as to further dilute the White European Christian heritage that has persecuted and discriminated against Jews for 2,000 years.

The other half are send money, lobby politicians so the Israelis can kill every Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqui, Iranian etc so as to make Israel a safe place for Jews. Over the years the Arabs to be killed change. At times it has been Lebanese, Egyptians and others.

* Threats come in different forms.

He’s still a Muslim and hence a Jihadist. He may not be the sort that shoots up a mall, but he is still a soldier of Islam and will do everything to facilitate it’s spread into the U.S.

Remember our society has no real defenses against these creatures. Our judicial system now works against us and doubly so for Christians for whom it has nothing but sheer hatred for.

We can’t prevent them from joining the military, police or any government organ by law. And once they fully inserted themselves , we’re truly screwed.

We dare not publicly condemn and their filthy religion lest we bring down on our head the Left and legal sanction from the Feds.

Go ahead and openly try to dip a Koran in pigs piss in a public locale and see what response you get. You’ll probably be killed for it.

The bottom line for, is that Muslims are now part of the protected class much like Blacks, Gays and other sexual deviants.

Trump can’t change it because the elites want to eradicate whites and Western civ.

* They study “sacred texts” together? Wouldn’t most of these well-off attendees in practice actually be agnostics/atheists? Their religion is just a fashion statement at this point. Outside the castle walls are the true believers, sharpening their swords for the beheadings and plunder to follow. Perhaps the sisterhood should check out converting to Buddhism which sounds like a nice, safe alternative, group rates available.

* I read the Forward and I knew some of these people, or at least their type, growing up. They think any vaguely nationalistic group could be the next coming of the NSDAP. They are completely oblivious, likely willfully so, to any suffering caused by their actions, and think they are going to build the country into some multicultural happyland.

* Women’s intelligence is intuitive, sometimes almost eerily so. Women recognize patterns by remembering emotions linked to congruent observations, instead of hypothetical calculations. Women are great at guessing someone’s weight or age, or jellybeans in a jar. They can be good at sniffing out liars and frauds just by tiny elements not “adding up.”

For instance, back in the 90s my mom worked for an insurance defense law firm. A hospital was being sued because a male nurse alleged he contracted HIV from a hospital needle left carelessly on the floor in the E.R. He reported the “incident” at work right after it happened. He was straight and married, and had no other reason he should suddenly contract the disease. Except in discovery my mom saw he paid a bill with a personalized Winnie The Pooh cheque. She immediately spoke up and said the dude was a fraud, a homosexual with a phony cover story. Her superiors basically called her a bigot and a fool but said keep digging if she wanted to. She was right. The dude was a promiscuous homo who got HIV from gay orgies, then bribed a friend to marry him and sue his employer for millions.

The male attorneys saw the cheque as an irrelevant anomaly, and wanted to focus on the statutory duty of the hospital. They were missing the forest for the trees. My mom knew that 1) man with AIDS 2) man with ridiculously feminine personal tastes – is highly improbable to be a coincidence.

Women’s intuitive pattern recognition makes them great diagnostic doctors, but lousy chess players.

I find the 3 cushion carom billiards to be the most fascinating to watch.

* Of course I haven’t given up; I’m astounded by how many posters here are suddenly buying into the “Trump is a vain/shallow/opportunistic/idiotic/incoherent blunderer” story that’s been sold by the media ever since he announced his run for the Presidency. Most of the posts seem to take it for granted that Trump has no mind or will of his own, and that he’s a sort of Pinocchio being pulled back and forth between Jiminy Cricket (Bannon) and Foulfellow the Fox (Kushner). Trump was talking about his signature trade and immigration issues as far back as the 1980s, long before he ever met Bannon; Bannon also didn’t come on board in his campaign until fairly late in the game. I definitely wish Trump hadn’t stuck his foot into the Syrian mess, but, unless he makes a more definite move (which God forbid), it seems to me that he’s almost certainly made this token strike merely to (1) silence the “Russian puppet” accusation, (2) forestall his enemies in both parties from claiming that his quasi-approval of Assad emboldened Assad’s alleged gas attack, and (3) throw a little scare into China, North Korea, and Iran. I don’t think he did it simply because Kushner suggested it to him, or because Ivanka started crying over pictures of gassed babies; to believe that, I’d have have to believe that he’s the mindless empty vessel that his enemies have painted him as, and he’s come too far for me to ever believe that.

If Trump’s improbable political career has shown anything, it’s that he’s not just the sum of the people around him. I remember hearing the doomsayers proclaiming that it was all over when Lewandowski was dumped for the slicker and shadier Manafort, or when Kellyanne Conway (with her dubious record on illegal immigration) came on board the campaign, and the doom didn’t come to pass. Also, Bannon hasn’t even been dumped yet; he went with Trump on Air Force One to the meeting with the Chinese, for goodness sake. In the meantime, we have Gorsuch on the Supreme Court (instead of Garland, or–gag–Obama, who might well have been put there by Hillary), we have Sessions as AG cracking down on sanctuary cities instead of Loretta Lynch strapping racism-detecting body-cams to Ferguson policemen, and we have bids being taken on the Great Border Wall. Until I see boots on the ground in Syria, I’ll continue to be far more pleased than disappointed by the outcome of the election.

* Another conspiracy theory is that there really is a Trump-Putin connection, except it goes through Kushner to his Chabad rabbi to Putin’s favorite Chabad rabbi to Putin, so nobody talks about it.

* I wasn’t happy about Syria but then again iSteve has been blackpill from top to bottom with the weirdest strain of masochism since Aug 2015.

* Santa Monica school district allows any child whose parent works in the city to attend Santa Monica City schools

The biggest industry of Santa Monica is medicine. There are 2 huge hospitals and thousands of medical offices.

There are also thousands of entertainment industry attorneys, agents, managers and studios. SM school district wants the Hispanic poor kids so as to rake in the state and federal money for under achievers and the Drs, nurses, attorneys etc kids to raise text scores.

Because there are more medical and attorney offices than restaurants and hotels the schools are reasonably civilized.

* I remember back in the ’60s when Santa Monica,
though already affluent, was a sleepy little village. RAND
near the beach, however, part of SoCal’s vast defense
industry, was already there. The Beach Boys were from
Hawthorne, i.e., the sticks, and so they looked with envy
toward Santa Monica. The Doors were just getting started,
and actually lived in the Ocean Park section of SM, a couple
of blocks from the beach, but it was cooler to say they
were from Venice Beach so that’s how they advertised themselves
on Sunset Strip. Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek would
catch a bus to UCLA on Main Street (near the Ocean Park
library that still exists). Right on the corner near the bus
stop was a well-known eatery that became immortalized as
the Soul Kitchen.

Today People’s Republic of Santa Monica (and why not?
It has its own foreign policy) is hopelessly overbuilt.
A one-bedroom apartment south of Wilshire will run you
$2200/month. North of Wilshire? Forget it. You can tell
it’s still very liberal. In a city that’s perhaps 90% white(read:
heavily Jewish), almost all employees at Von’s markets are
proudly black. Not that they can afford to live in Santa Monica,
of course.

Santa Monica nowadays is also a retirement community so
it’s full of hospitals and nursing homes. Who works in the
nursing homes? Mostly Filipinos and young African women,
very few whites.

* In a Zora Neale Hurston novel, a black character tells his employer, “Boss, if you could be colored for just one Saturday night, you’d never want to turn back.”

I think everybody would want to be white for brunch, however. Brunch is the whitest time of the week.

* Last night I watched a PBS/BBC science documentary focusing on recent discoveries about differences between male and female brains. Recent studies have shown that male and female brains are wired very differently and in ways that comport with common observations about how different male and female thought processes seem to be. Female brains are wired in ways that connect the right and left cerebral hemispheres. This type of wiring favors multitasking and the processing of emotional information. Male brains lack this hemispherical connectivity but each hemisphere is wired separately in ways that connect the frontal and posterior portions of that hemisphere. This facilitates manipulation of objects, quick decision making, systemic analysis and highly focused thinking, i.e., uni-tasking.

Unfortunately the women on the show were not going to let feminist dogma go down without a fight. One of the female researchers pointed out that girls and boys brains are much alike until puberty, when these newly discovered differences first arise. This suggested to her that it would be very difficult to separate out whether a surge in hormones or emerging social pressures created this difference, i.e. the difference might be a social construct rather than a result of biology.

No one on the show saw fit to point out that this same logic would suggest that it was impossible to determine whether swelling breasts in girls, increased testicle and genital size in men, male hirsuteness, and other secondary sexual characteristics were perhaps just the result of social pressure. Feminism appears to be destroying the intellectual capacity of even intelligent, skilled and technologically savvy women. It’s like some horrific alien infection.

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The Lost City of Z (2016)

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

I respect the ambition of this movie, but I couldn’t get into it. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the characters and the stories. I wanted to care. I wanted to like this story. I couldn’t. I am curious what might have brought some viewers to care about something in here. How did they do it?

I certainly didn’t care for the cheap feminist and cheap third-world mythology in the script.

From about 15 minutes in, I couldn’t wait for this movie to finish. Much of the dialogue was unintelligible, but the script was so bad that this was probably a good thing.

I am printing lots of amateur reviews on this movie because I wondered most of the time I was watching if I was missing something. But no.

From IMDB.com:

* It’s a really good example of how a terrible script can completely destroy a movie. There are too many things which make no sense to list, but the key issues are:

For a film that seems so keen to virtue-signal about white ignorance and racism, it does nothing to explain to us Fawcett’s theories about the people of Z. Who were they? How did their civilisation operate? Why did they disappear? Surely these explorers would have built up far more of a picture from the surrounding tribes, artefacts, and previous finds. There is a tiny smattering of these things, but in 2h21ms nowhere near enough to build up a mythology. Therefore it’s difficult to see why this obsesses Fawcett. You literally get more detail from the quests in the Indiana Jones movies.

Instead it focuses relentlessly on the most tedious and dangerous aspects of the trips, their suffering, or switches back to London with almost every old man of course a stiff- upper-lip racist and sexist cliché. Imagine a more insidious General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Forth and you won’t be far off.

There is an extremely cringey attempt to insert a modern feminist perspective. At one stage, Nina wants to go on the expedition. Her reasoning? She found an important document relating to it. This apparently makes her equal to Fawcett’s many years of soldiering and survival skills. It’s clumsy and anachronistic. The trip could very well kill them both and so would leave their children orphaned. Surely a more logical argument would be whether he has to go at all. He is, after all, a father, and has responsibilities at home.

The First World War section adds absolutely nothing and captures none of the horror of the battlefield. It’s all just tally-ho chaps, almost Hallmark channel-like. Just awful.

Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson and especially Charlie Hunnam wring what they can from such a sparsely-written script and should be commended for that, which is why this isn’t a 1.

Don’t be fooled by the title – it’s not about a lost city or even a lost man. It’s a lazy and pretentious destruction of what could have been a thrilling find.

* Based on the true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who made several expeditions to the lost city of Z, believed to be the remains of El Dorado in the Brazilian jungle. The movie follows three of these expeditions and first picks up his life with a long introduction from his military career onwards. The movie becomes only interesting with the start of his first map making expedition on the border of Bolivia and Brazil in 1906. Based on documentary and field research (pottery finds), Fawcett became ever more convinced that a complex civilization had existed there. The movie then touches upon a second expedition initiated by the Royal Geographical Society that lead to controversy about his role in that expedition. The first World War comes in between before he makes his last expedition in 1925 with his son.

The script is based on the fascinating book by David Grann, who visited the region in 2005 and came back with interesting findings about Fawcett’s expedition. By now, Fawcett has turned into an icon of exploring ancient civilizations, making its way into popular culture, Indiana Jones and The Lost World come to mind.

The movie and script is however too obvious for the story at hand. It is painting by numbers, going from phase A to B in Fawcett’s life without any intelligent storytelling, ending up with a movie that I first thought was made for TV or online. Compare this to the classic Herzog movies Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, and it is clear what went wrong here: Being about exploration, the movie itself shies away from exploring cinematic possibilities and just plays it safe. Wouldn’t it for example not be far more interesting to just focus on that final expedition and make the multiple accounts into a movie? Why Pitt’s Plan B saw anything in this is beyond me, as the company has by now a reputation of risk-taking (and often being awarded for that).

* This film lost all credibility when the expedition party were shown crossing the Atlantic on what looked like a 1950s cross channel steamer. Also clips were shown of an English Great Western Railway Castle class locomotive built in the 1930s with a train of 1960s carriages which was supposed to be the train on which they were travelling through Bolivia. British built locomotives were sold to Bolivia but not this type and anyway it was 30 years too modern. Although there do not appear to be any heritage railways using steam locos operating in Bolivia it would have been easy to arrange a shot of the steam locomotive hauled trains in Ecuador or even an Amerian steam tourist line such as the Cumbres and Toltec which uses convincing looking locos. Mistakes like this are lazy and contribute to a shoddy production. And by the way Stoke Canon is not by the sea or even on the Exe estuary.

* I found the experience of watching this film to be akin to that of listening to a person living with dementia telling you about their life, with an adoring relative interjecting only to say “Oh he was lovely!” every now and then.

It is, in essence, a series of episodes vaguely summarising various events of Fawcett’s life. Occasionally but briefly in intricate detail, but predominantly with a general lack of substance. To return to my analogy, I imagined myself at one point saying “That’s incredible! Tell me how you felt at that moment, did you realise right then the magnitude of your discovery? Tell me about the gruelling journey home, was it fraught with peril?” Only for the storyteller to continue.. “So I arrived back in London…”.

No! Please give me more details. I’ve dedicated over two hours of my life to hear your story, but I’ve come away with roughly the same amount of information as I could’ve gleaned from the back of a primary-school student’s pencil case. You know, like the ones that just have a time-line with monarchs’ names or some such alongside, but are lacking in any further description.

On the plus side, it was quite nicely shot at points although it did feel as if this, coupled with the apparent fact that this film was shown in selected, more ‘prestigious’ and therefore expensive theatres/screens were little more than candid narcissism and was tantamount to the director pleasuring himself in my face for the price of my £16 ticket. Additionally, and somewhat bizarrely, the first 20% of the film had a near-constant and somewhat mediocre musical score, immediately followed by a scene wherein some mediocre opera playing within earshot of the characters could be easily mistaken for a continuation of said score. This was intrusive and unnecessary, and although it didn’t continue throughout the duration of the film, this did not excuse its inclusion in the first place.

Due to the lack of detail or any attempt at interconnection between what I shall continue to refer to as ‘the episodes’ with a deliberate lack of capitalisation as I don’t consider them worthy of a title, alongside abrupt changes in setting, the experience could also be likened to that of being held hostage in a stranger’s living room as they mindlessly alternate channels between a Channel5 period drama and a recap of a Blue Peter trip to the Amazon told from the perspective of a donkey wearing blinkers, such is the lack of momentum and detail. Dialogue is painfully slow and, were this not the case, the running time could’ve been significantly shortened or better still been put to good use in filling in at least some of the notably absent detail. I am an advocate of a move away from the 90minute format of most films but this does nothing to support that argument.

There is also a borderline-distasteful adoration of Fawcett’s alleged delivery of faux-profound proclamations worthy of being printed on the back of a market-stall iPhone case. I am left unsure of whether this was artistic licence or if Fawcett really was that much of a nob. Similarly, little reference is made of his questionable attitude toward the role and capability of women or his insistence upon prioritising the recognition of his peers and reclaiming of the status of his family name over the emotional well-being of his dependents.

Ultimately, his blind faith led only by local legend and a randomly placed Russian fortune teller, and failure to commit to his children led Fawcett either to his death and that of his son or, according to this film, to his decision to remain in the utopia he may have discovered, thus abandoning his wife and remaining children and leaving them only with a faint hope that he survived. The former is likely more plausible, though the latter would come as no surprise.

In summary The Lost City of Z is a vacuous, self-indulgent and ultimately forgettable portrayal of what may have been a great man, but likely was the exploration equivalent of a modern-day philosophy student embarking upon a degree in order to suspend the responsibilities of adult life.

Recommended as an alternative to viewing your Auntie’s slide show of sunburn-heavy holiday snaps from her latest trip to Alicante or similar Sun holiday destination.

* Trying to film an unsuccessful man’s unsuccessful search for a city that did not exist is sure to cause problems. Early Spanish explorers from the 16th century onwards told of wide avenues, canals, palisades, cities of tens of thousands. Trouble was, when organised searches entered the land, everything was gone, and had disappeared into the jungle. So was it all hokum? Well no. There was never a city as Fawcett imagined, a Machu Picchu, made of stone. It was all earthworks, which after just two generations had been abandoned and returned to jungle. The Indians living there were all but wiped out by diseases brought by the first Spanish. They were not aware that their ancestors had built this remarkable system which only started to show up in the latest satellite imagery and was confirmed by on the ground digs in the past 20 years or so. Indian soil management techniques had reached a high level to transform human waste and leaves into rich compost enabling long term stay in villages. Fawcett was part adventurer, Indiana Jones, part David Attenborough, and part war hero, who was always skint. Rather than being a systematic geographer, he embarked on a poorly financed gung-ho expedition and vanished in 1925, being killed by Indians, without ever realising he had probably walked across part of the “city”.Just how big this complex was, what language they used, how it was commissioned, we will never know, nothing was ever written down. Did it all link the Amazon from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps it did. What drove Fawcett ? Certainly the lure of gold; he was skint after all. And he was sure there was a city. But is it the “sure” of the gambler, who is sure he has the winning lottery ticket?

* My main problem was the narrative. The story takes place over a few decades and follows the efforts of Fawcett to discover the “Lost City of Z”. He embarks on 3 “perilous” expeditions going up the Amazon but no sense of danger or suffering is at any point conveyed by the narrative.

The 3 trips are each expedited under 20 minutes of screen time. We have absolutely no idea of the time involved (apparently the expeditions lasted a few years each) nor any feeling towards the hardships the crew faces. To make matters worse, new crew members keep appearing out of nowhere and at some point even a horse!! which was nowhere to be seen on the raft in previous scenes. If this was not enough…. the raft keeps going downstream when they are supposed to go UPSTREAM, towards the source of the river…. oh well, I could have lived with these inconsistencies if I had a character to root for. Unfortunately we never feel any sympathy towards any of the protagonists. The character development is non existent and not helped by the fact the acting is very stiff at the best of time and downright awful for most of the movie. I didn’t find Charlie Hunnam convincing as a Hell’s Angel in SOA but he is seriously laughable as an English Army officer. This absence of feeling and empathy is also to be experienced towards the wife and children he leaves behind, every time he embarks on one of those trips. We simply do not care for them.

I obviously did not go into it expecting a new Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now but for a movie which should have dealt with a man’s obsessive doomed quest for a Lost City, the jungle and/or the river should have been part and parcel of the movie, a character in itself, an omnipresent entity. No such thing. The whole movie could have been shot in a winter garden for all I saw… You never have the feeling you are in the mud with the protagonists. The only feeling you experience is one of utter detachment and an urge for the movie to finish as soon as possible.

Extremely disappointed. Do not believe the hype!

* After watching the trailer for the lost city of z i was excited to see the film. The cast was promising and i’m a huge fan of historical exploration films and unashamedly the Indiana jones franchise. Having recently watched Master and Commander i thought this could be of a similar calibre. Unfortunately the script was dire and the acting was so awkward and cringeworthy i thought of leaving the cinema (which i’ve never done) there were times where the film felt like a satire, the main character played by charlie hunnam was paper thin and had no believable or relateable character traits that made you care about his struggle. The plot was pieced together and i cant recall a single scene which felt gritty or believing, as you would hope an amazon rainforest set epic would be. Instead we saw a single dimensional poor acting display from almost the whole cast, with Tom Holland (protagonist son and upcoming actor of the new spider-man) breathing a slight breath of life into the film with a more believable and rounded character. The attempt at having a strong female character was a good idea but it was poorly done and not in sync with the usual characters submissive role, not seeming to care of her husband leaving her and their children in England. Overall possibly the worst film i’ve seen at the cinema, mainly because of my expectations being let down so drastically. I’d avoid this film and wait for it to be on TV or Online and watch on a rainy Sunday in August. I’d imagine if you went into this film with no expectations it could be enjoyable, but unfortunately a big disappointment from what could have been an enthralling period adventure.

* This is a film about exploration, about class structure, about being able to fit in, and about success and failure. The protagonist (Percy Fawcett) has a tainted reputation due to his father being a drunk and a gambler. Percy is a military officer who is offered an assignment to chart the Amazon and particularly the area around Bolivia where rubber production was the most lucrative industry, we learn there was a dispute over the position of the border, charting the area would avert a war between the rubber producers. He accepts the mission in an attempt to repair his family name and restore some reputation.

This film challenges the belief that Western Civilisation was the first to be established. Percy flits between jolly ‘Old Blighty’ and the Amazon several times to continue his obsessive search for this civilisation.

It’s hard to believe that he leaves his wife pregnant before leaving for every 3-4 year long expedition, she shows an incredible level of personal sacrifice. It might have been a good idea to have explored her character in more depth.

The film really irritated me because Percy was an absent parent, his eldest son had a justifiable hate / love relationship with him which seemed to miraculously improve from one scene to the next without any stimulus.

There could have been more dramatic filming of the jungle areas. Scenery around the Amazon should be easy to photograph, although we see far too little of this or the atmosphere.

This could have been a more fascinating epic. Although I really like true stories, this was extremely long and dull. A viewer at the end of my row actually fell asleep within the first 30minutes and remained that way for the majority of the rest.

Not a bad film but overlong and ultimately irritating (for me).

* I was really looking forward to this film, as how can the exploration of the Amazon be anything other than amazing? Well I was wrong, this was utterly boring, excruciatingly dull and just plain awful. I can only give it a 1 out of 5 rating. After the first 30 minutes I was looking at my watch and wondering if I should bother, as I had more important things to do, like clean the oven. How can anyone make the exploration of the Amazon so tedious? This could have been like real life Indiana Jones! There was absolutely no sense of danger at any point, just flat as a very thin pancake. The film should really be re-named The Lost City of Zzzzzzz.

It was a truly odd film, this bloke gets asked to go Bolivia for the Royal Society to do some maps and stuff, doesn’t want to go, But they offer him a shiny medal so he goes (leaving his wife and new born son), has a rubbish time, comes back to London, goes back to the Amazon (leaving wife, and second son), comes back to London, Goes to France for WW1, comes back to London and then goes to Amazonia again… For Heaven’s sake man – just choose one! I shouted through gritted teeth.

It’s terribly directed and the cinematography is really bad (and I say this as a trained cinematographer). It’s so dark that I actually wondered if the bulb in the projector was bust, but then it would cut to a scene outside in a garden and it would (almost) be correctly exposed. Some interiors were so badly lit I actually couldn’t see who was speaking, and a huge number of shots were so out of focus I again wondered if we were watching a dud print.

There was a really important (cough) scene with two blokes on a train having a chat about something. Now one bloke has a beard and one has a moustache, so that helps tell them apart in the dark, but for some reason we are looking at them over their shoulders and not ‘at’ them, and Mr Moustache-bloke turns away from camera (probably trying this ‘acting’ thing) and I can no longer see his face just his ear. Now it’s so dark I can’t tell if he has a nice ear, if it’s too big or too small or if it sticks out, and By God this must be damn boring if I’m wondering about the relative angles of ear projection rather than what the hell is going on.

The framing is really odd, and the eye lines are all over the place, so I don’t know who is speaking to who, and often the camera operator decided to be above or below eye-lines, making my head ache as it was so badly composed.

The first three scenes of the film could all be cut, or would serve better as flash backs, as they just don’t go anywhere at all. OK a bit of back story, but we know the Major wants a medal with a single line of dialogue, not three flipping scenes as dull as a rainy Sunday.

The main character Major Blokey-pants was utterly dull and his motivation was all rather thrust down out throats, and I didn’t care for him. Only after 90 minutes or so did his wife start talking about some bloke names Percy and I thought “Who is Percy?” and I realised it was the main character, who had been referred to as Major something or other (I forget) for the entire rest of the movie.

Couple of massive plot holes: they were in the middle of nowhere running low on food on a raft made of branches saying how no white man had ever been here before and clearly in the background is a bloke on a horse in a field. I kept thinking they would pan around and explain but they never did. I also wondered if they were travelling to seek the source of the river, how they were just floating along and not constantly rowing, as a river flows away from the source to the ocean.

They have been travelling down river for a year apparently and it all goes wrong and they decide to send this bloke back on a horse. Where did this horse come from?

And they are in the middle of the river all weak and dying and the other bloke (Beard-o) says to the main bloke “and here’s a letter from you wife.” FTAF??? Where had he been keeping that then?

When we finally get to the WW1 scenes the dead bodies in the trenches are clearly shop window dummies and for a film that is this expensive that is just rubbish. These scenes add absolutely nothing to the film, we could just have had a Voice over which went “After the first world war, where I saw active service in France and that bloke I knew who was on the trip to Bolivia with me, you know, thingie, was killed, I returned to London…”

Eventually we get back to Amazonia for the third time and Major Blokey-pants has bought his son with him this time Blokey-Pants minor, and they bang on about finding this lost city of Zzzz but never does he put forward a reason why he thinks there might be a lost city or indeed, why he is so keen to find it, he just wants to find it. Who were these people? Why did their civilisation die out? what was their favourite past time? Did they like cheese? None of these questions were answered or indeed even asked.

Compare this film to the savage Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972 Herzog) the bonkers Fitzcaraldo (1982 Herzog) or even the rather depressing The Mission (1986 Joffe) and you will be sorely disappointed.

* What was probably an incredibly interesting story has been turned into an incredibly dull film. Charlie Hunnam’s Fawcett is as flat as roadkill and Robert Pattinson might as well have stayed at home in bed for all he brings to the tale. As for Angus Macfadyen; he obviously thought he was in a different movie entirely. Three times during this film Fawcett travels to the Bolivian jungle yet we barely learn anything about the place or his expeditions. The director skips hastily from one badly written scene to another with all the depth of a Stephenie Meyer novel. This film is an episodic series of set pieces, many of which should have been left in a heap on the cutting room floor; the entire WW1 sequence brings absolutely nothing to the story except filling quarter of an hour of screen time with clichéd dialogue and hackneyed visuals. With Fawcett’s final trip to the jungle you might think that the fabled Lost City of Z might finally make an appearance; you’d be wrong. The film fizzles like a damp squib and then the credits roll, and not too soon either. Snore on.

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