Tom Friedman: “President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?”

Posted on February 16, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* When some future Gibbon writes the Rise and Fall of the American Empire, I have little doubt that the death of freedom of association will figure prominently. I think you can really boil virtually any of the PC nonsense (i.e. conventional wisdom of the Current Year) down to the i-th iteration of the attack on freedom of association. Jews didn’t care for Obama’s policy toward the Jewish homeland so they don’t care to associate with him. Oh the horror.

* It’s hilarious. If Stalin had been an open-borders, politically correct, SJW fanatic bent on world revolution in the name of overthrowing the decadent micro-aggression masters, he could not have engineered the 3 acts of self-defilement Trump has oh-so-masterfully, yet at the same time so off-handedly, provoked in less than a month in office.

Let’s see – he’s gotten “Christian” leaders to declare that rescuing Christian refugees from the Middle East facing genuine religious persecution is decidedly NOT what their mission is. He’s gotten a Jew to declare that intra-ethnic solidarity and standing up for Israel is just not worth it if it requires using the most inhumane methods of the enemy (country club membership vendettas- oh the humanity!). And, oh yeah, the (anti-)Pope just chimed in this week about the Dakota pipeline, saying the preservation of native ancestral lands is very important to the Catholic Church, because heathens and their local spirits have been part of who we Roman Catholics are as a people from the very beginning.

* The suffering and oppression of the Palestinians is a consequence of ingrates such as yourself egging them on to fight conflicts they cannot possibly win. The historical record is very clear.

* Most Jews support a two state solution, because that means there is still an Israel.
I have yet to talk to a single, solitary Palestinian who would accept a permanent two state solution under any terms.
Only a tiny fraction of Muslims in general would accept a two state solution, and then only as an interim step to a single state.
Palestinians regard Israel as utterly illegitimate, and a toxic foreign body lodged in the Arab world. They intend to struggle until it is all Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The more moderate and Westernized ones indulge in the self-delusion that the new Palestine would be a secular state with a place for everyone, except whatever happens to the Zionists will be a bed they made for themselves.
How anyone solves this historical dilemma; I have no more idea than anyone else.

* I think it’s obvious that generally speaking, neither the Palestinians or the Israelis want a 2 state solution – they each one a single state with most of the population of their antagonist gone or subjugated.

Conflicts persist until one of the belligerents loses the will or ability to keep fighting, not by imposing a ‘peace’ that neither side wants.

* There cannot be a 2 state (or binational single state) solution now, because there isn’t enough land in the West Bank, and hard line Russian immigrants have altered Israeli politics. There is going to be an Apartheid system unless the Arabs are removed. VDARE

* I want to see a movie about a vulgar Mexican construction magnate named Eddie Guerrero joining a stuffy Germanic Jewish country club. Eddie brings in a Mariachi band during the Holocaust remembrance ceremony. He blows out the minora during Hanukah with a fart. He hosts a pig roast for the local Rabbi’s birthday. Another time Eddie gives tequila to the Stuffy Rachel Goldberg daughter’s Bat Mitvah because he thinks it’s a Quinceañera and all the kids are vashnigyered!

What’s a rich Jew to do?

* Trump just made the Israel-Palestine conflict real interesting for the rest of us. He fielded the one-state solution.

Liberal Zionists claim that this is an act of dangerous, ill informed buffoonery by Trump and that the Arabs would never accept this anyway. Why wouldn’t they? If they are smart, they would accept second class citizenship for Palestinians and play the long game of demographics and liberation. That’s already their strategy for Europe.

Radical Zionists are more interested in sacred land than in demographics. They believe their own propaganda. They are somewhat similar to cuckservatives who wanted amnesty with second class citizenship for illegals in the US. Zionists, unlike cuckservatives, are prepared to enforce Apartheid though.

The real losers are the liberal Zionist diaspora. They get diversity and inclusion of Muslims … in Israel. Most importantly for us, their “ethno-nationalism for us, but not for you” narrative faces collapse.

Trump is playing 3d chess after all.

Richard Spencer should seize this trolling opportunity and endorse the two-state solution as the only peaceful, demographically sound, ethno-nationalist option. That would be hilarious.

* Isn’t this the exact opposite reason why country clubs were created in the first place? Wealthy people created them to socialize with like minded people with whom they shared a common background and beliefs. It is no wonder why they are struggling to maintain their historic membership levels with this mentality. I can’t wait until someone proposes scholarship memberships for underrepresented minorities in the name of diversity.

* Friedman is wrong (no surprise) about the two-state solution. It is far from the only option that would preserve Israel as a Jewish majority and democratic state. Other, possibly better, alternatives include:

1) Israel annexes Area C of the West Bank which contains almost all of the Jews (“settlers” in the biased language of the MSM) but only a handful of Arabs. The rest of the West Bank unites with Gaza or forms its own state. This is ‘two state lite’ and solves the supposedly awful, awful problem of Palestinian Arabs having Jews living in their territory.

2) Israel annexes Area C of the West Bank. The rest of the West Bank reunites with Jordan (it was part of Jordan from 1948-1967) and Gaza reunites with Egypt (same). This makes the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza citizens of large, relatively stable Arab states that are all at peace with Israel. Three state solution.

3) The Emirates plan. Scholars have noted that Arab countries do not do well when combining different tribal and familial groups. On the other hand, emirates based on one local dominant clan such as Qatar and the UAE countries are stable and prosperous (oil helps, of course). The West Bank should be divided into seven emirates, to be ruled by the dominant family of each region. Gaza would be an eighth emirate, ruled by Hamas for the time being.

The main obstacle to the media and individuals understanding that there are good alternatives out there is that people have been propagandized by the fiction that Palestinian Arabs are a distinct, coherent people and therefore absolutely need one state. That is simply not the case. The Palestinian identity was invented in the 1970s. Before that, no Arab considered themselves to be a “Palestinian,” other than a political status.

* The Right caving in to the ’64 Civil Rights Act was the introduction of an insidious but lethal disease.
The Act’s continuing attack on freedom of association has been devastating.
Integration was proceeding at its natural pace, and would have found its natural equilibrium point desired by society, both black and white.
Instead it has been rammed down our throats de jure (though we are still quite segregated de facto).
Freedom of association absolutism would solve may of the ills we face.
Down deep, ignoring the hypocrisy, it is what we all want for ourselves.

* One of two sides is going to occupy that land. My money’s on the Jews–they’re smarter, wealthier, and better fighters.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Tom Friedman: “President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?”

Race & Nation

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Yoram Hazony writes:

It is important to notice that the Israelites’ conception of the nation has nothing to do with biology, or what we call race. For biblical nations, everything depends on a shared understanding of history, language, and religion that is passed from parents to children, but which outsiders can join as well. Thus the book of Exodus teaches that there were many Egyptians who attached themselves to the Hebrew slaves in fleeing Egypt, and that they received the Ten Commandments (more accurately translated as the “Ten Precepts”) at Sinai with the rest of Israel. Similarly, Moses invites the Midianite sheikh Jethro to join the Jewish people. And Ruth the Moabite becomes part of Israel by declaring “your people will be my people and your God will be my God”—her son being the forefather of King David himself.

But the ability of Israel to bring foreign-born individuals into its ranks always depends on these individuals’ willingness to accept Israel’s God, its view of history, and its laws. Without embracing these elements of the national identity, foreigners will not be able to contribute to Israel’s cohesion and strength in times of hardship. They will not be part of the Israelite nation.

And yet Jews form a distinct gene pool aka a race. Jon Entine writes for the Forward, May 4, 2012:

Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
By Harry Ostrer
Oxford University Press, 288 Pages, $24.95

In his new book, “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not just skin deep. Jews exhibit, he writes, a distinctive genetic signature. Considering that the Nazis tried to exterminate Jews based on their supposed racial distinctiveness, such a conclusion might be a cause for concern. But Ostrer sees it as central to Jewish identity.

“Who is a Jew?” has been a poignant question for Jews throughout our history. It evokes a complex tapestry of Jewish identity made up of different strains of religious beliefs, cultural practices and blood ties to ancient Palestine and modern Israel. But the question, with its echoes of genetic determinism, also has a dark side.

Geneticists have long been aware that certain diseases, from breast cancer to Tay-Sachs, disproportionately affect Jews. Ostrer, who is also director of genetic and genomic testing at Montefiore Medical Center, goes further, maintaining that Jews are a homogeneous group with all the scientific trappings of what we used to call a “race.”

For most of the 3,000-year history of the Jewish people, the notion of what came to be known as “Jewish exceptionalism” was hardly controversial. Because of our history of inmarriage and cultural isolation, imposed or self-selected, Jews were considered by gentiles (and usually referred to themselves) as a “race.” Scholars from Josephus to Disraeli proudly proclaimed their membership in “the tribe.”

Ostrer explains how this concept took on special meaning in the 20th century, as genetics emerged as a viable scientific enterprise. Jewish distinctiveness might actually be measurable empirically. In “Legacy,” he first introduces us to Maurice Fishberg, an upwardly mobile Russian-Jewish immigrant to New York at the fin de siècle. Fishberg fervently embraced the anthropological fashion of the era, measuring skull sizes to explain why Jews seemed to be afflicted with more diseases than other groups — what he called the “peculiarities of the comparative pathology of the Jews.” It turns out that Fishberg and his contemporary phrenologists were wrong: Skull shape provides limited information about human differences. But his studies ushered in a century of research linking Jews to genetics.

“Legacy” may cause its readers discomfort. To some Jews, the notion of a genetically related people is an embarrassing remnant of early Zionism that came into vogue at the height of the Western obsession with race, in the late 19th century. Celebrating blood ancestry is divisive, they claim: The authors of “The Bell Curve” were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting that genes play a major role in IQ differences among racial groups.

Furthermore, sociologists and cultural anthropologists, a disproportionate number of whom are Jewish, ridicule the term “race,” claiming there are no meaningful differences between ethnic groups. For Jews, the word still carries the especially odious historical association with Nazism and the Nuremberg Laws. They argue that Judaism has morphed from a tribal cult into a worldwide religion enhanced by thousands of years of cultural traditions.

Is Judaism a people or a religion? Or both? The belief that Jews may be psychologically or physically distinct remains a controversial fixture in the gentile and Jewish consciousness, and Ostrer places himself directly in the line of fire. Yes, he writes, the term “race” carries nefarious associations of inferiority and ranking of people. Anything that marks Jews as essentially different runs the risk of stirring either anti- or philo-Semitism. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the factual reality of what he calls the “biological basis of Jewishness” and “Jewish genetics.” Acknowledging the distinctiveness of Jews is “fraught with peril,” but we must grapple with the hard evidence of “human differences” if we seek to understand the new age of genetics.

Although he readily acknowledges the formative role of culture and environment, Ostrer believes that Jewish identity has multiple threads, including DNA. He offers a cogent, scientifically based review of the evidence, which serves as a model of scientific restraint.

“On the one hand, the study of Jewish genetics might be viewed as an elitist effort, promoting a certain genetic view of Jewish superiority,” he writes. “On the other, it might provide fodder for anti-Semitism by providing evidence of a genetic basis for undesirable traits that are present among some Jews. These issues will newly challenge the liberal view that humans are created equal but with genetic liabilities.”

…Both the human genome project and disease research rest on the premise of finding distinguishable differences between individuals and often among populations. Scientists have ditched the term “race,” with all its normative baggage, and adopted more neutral terms, such as “population” and “clime,” which have much of the same meaning. Boiled down to its essence, race equates to “region of ancestral origin.”

Ostrer has devoted his career to investigating these extended family trees, which help explain the genetic basis of common and rare disorders. Today, Jews remain identifiable in large measure by the 40 or so diseases we disproportionately carry, the inescapable consequence of inbreeding. He traces the fascinating history of numerous “Jewish diseases,” such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, Mucolipidosis IV, as well as breast and ovarian cancer. Indeed, 10 years ago I was diagnosed as carrying one of the three genetic mutations for breast and ovarian cancer that mark my family and me as indelibly Jewish, prompting me to write “Abraham’s Children.”

Like East Asians, the Amish, Icelanders, Aboriginals, the Basque people, African tribes and other groups, Jews have remained isolated for centuries because of geography, religion or cultural practices. It’s stamped on our DNA. As Ostrer explains in fascinating detail, threads of Jewish ancestry link the sizable Jewish communities of North America and Europe to Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews who have relocated to Israel, as well as to the black Lemba of southern Africa and to India’s Cochin Jews. But, in a twist, the links include neither the Bene Israel of India nor Ethiopian Jews. Genetic tests show that both groups are converts, contradicting their founding myths…
Although Jews make up less than 3% of the population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950. Jews also account for 20% of this country’s chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students. Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115, with their verbal IQ at more than 120, a stunning standard deviation above the average of 100 found in those of European ancestry. Like it or not, the IQ debate will become an increasingly important issue going forward, as medical geneticists focus on unlocking the mysteries of the brain.

Posted in Jews, Nationalism | Comments Off on Race & Nation

Can Trump Get It Done?

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek writes: If his critics are right, Trump may simply not have the intellectual toolkit to be an effective president, even though he was and is right on two very critical issues (immigration and trade). What’s that you say, “The Establishment does not like me, and they oppose me”? Cry me a river. Competent leaders, once they assume the reins of power, move beyond that. If they are any good. So is Trump any good? Well, just because you are in the right on some issues does not mean you have the necessary competence to move forward on any of them. His reliance on his kids for advice is strictly 3rd World stuff. Ball remains in his court, let’s see what he does with it. Too bad he did not hire AMALEK to guide him.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Can Trump Get It Done?

America First

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Michael Anton aka Publius Decius Mus answers questions:

MA: President Trump often used the phrase “America First” on the campaign trail and still uses it as president, including in his inaugural. For him, it obviously means something so simple and uncontroversial it’s almost tautological: the purpose of the American government is to serve the American people. Not foreign people, not the world’s people, the American people. That is the purpose of any and every government: to serve the people who enact and consent to that government.

Trump’s enemies try to make this into a big scandal because the phrase “America First” was the name of a famous committee in the late 1930s and early 1940s that wanted to keep the United States out of World War II. It was primarily an isolationist movement, but there were anti-semitic elements that supported it. What the Left has tried to do—with much success, unfortunately—is retcon the committee as primarily an anti-Jewish group when that’s not what it was. It’s classic guilt by association: here is this group that a lot of anti-semites supported, therefore the group was anti-semitic and anyone who says anything good about it is an anti-semite.

Now, I disagree with the America First committee’s isolationist stance. But that’s easy for me to do in hindsight. However, to the average American in 1940, it was not obvious why the United States should get involved in another European war. It took great strategic vision and foresight to see that clearly, and most just didn’t see it. FDR, who did see it, was very constrained in what he could do for the Allies before Pearl Harbor. Even after Pearl Harbor, absent Hitler’s mystifyingly idiotic declaration of war on the United States, public opinion probably would not have supported U.S. operations in Europe. In fact, in fighting the war, FDR prioritized the European theater over the Pacific against U.S. public opinion, and had to downplay the fact that he was doing so.

The point here is, the wish to stay out of World War II was the animating cause of the America First Committee and that wish was perfectly respectable and reasonable, if ultimately wrong-headed. That’s why I say it was unfairly maligned.

So what does “America First” mean in the current context?

It means prioritizing American interests in our foreign policy and the American people in our domestic policy. Which is what every state—at least every government that is acting as it should—tries to do.

This is such a “well, duh” statement and idea that the fact it would be super controversial shows how corrupt our intellectual discourse has become.

But there’s another layer here, too. There is now, and has been for some time, a broad consensus from the center-right all the way to the far left that America’s only legitimate role is to be a kind of savior of and refuge for the world. It’s not a country with citizens and a government that serves those citizens. It belongs to everyone. Everyone has a right to come here, work here, live here, reap America’s bounty. We have no legitimate parochial interests. Rather America exists for others. This standard does not seem to be held to any other country, although one sees it increasingly rising in Europe.

So Donald Trump’s forthright stance against that, insisting that this country is ours, belongs to us, and demands that we prioritize our own interests, sounds like the most horrible blasphemy against this universalist consensus. I think that explains so much of the freakout against his presidency and the travel executive order, for instance. People ask, “How can he do that? Doesn’t he realize that America belongs to the whole world?” And Trump’s response is: “Don’t be silly, of course it doesn’t. It’s ours and we must do what’s best for us.” No prominent leader has said that or acted on that in ages. So the reassertion of basic common sense sounds shocking.

COMMENTS:

* America, without a core ethnicity, will never survive. The historic American nation is British and Anglo-Celt. If that core ever gets swept away, you had best look out below. Things will come apart quickly, including any consensus on how to “interpret” the constitution. Ethnic nation states exist because within those self-selected cultural parameters we have consensual agreements on subjects such as ethics, religion, and foreign relations. Absent such a core ethnicity, a “nation” becomes a bickering miasma of varying regional and identity groups competing for power. And the whole thing is held together by political force. And that never lasts.

* “Race is not a nation…” then you go on to pick three examples of nations built by race.

I would love to read some discussion on what a nation is actually. In my observations it is exactly the contributions of the original race that defines the nation and when that race and it traditions, history, etc is diminished the nation of origin is no more. The problems of this country are showing up precisely because the originating race has weakened itself and has allowed the fractions of others to attack and destroy. This is why we are losing the country. We have allowed inside people not of our tradition and who are not members or admirers of our tradition. Thus they will not uphold it.

This is all propagated by the myth of equality which is an obvious fraud and a beleif that there is a universal sameness of mankind. By now if we have not proven thru empirical evidence that these are terribly flawed assumptions then preserving the west is a fruitless effort because what made the west what it was has been the particular views of a specific race and this idea that we are to be open to everyone is nothing more then suicide.

* No, the French, Chinese, and Navajo are not races. You are mistaking ethnic groups for race. Traditional Europeans belong to the Caucasian race, but they divide up into many ethnic groups, many but not all of which formed their own ethno-states, more commonly referred to as nation-states (England, France, etc.), but which now are devolving into multiracial states with their immigration influx from the Muslim world. China is multiracial but is dominated (>90%) by a single ethnic group, the Han. Their race is Mongoloid (or more politely, East Asian). The Navajo are an ethnic group. They belong to the race of Native Americans (or Amerindians). They are large enough to be described as a nation (= a tribe on a larger scale), but they do not have a state of their own, even if they are semi-autonomous.

Posted in America | Comments Off on America First

What Type Of Bedrock Supports The Oroville Dam?

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Former geologist here. What I’ve gleaned from Steve’s commentariat (but emphatically not from following the mainstream news) is that the multiple failures at Oroville are not uncorrelated, because they trace back to a fundamental issue: the bedrock at the dam site is highly fractured.

When we think of bedrock, we typically think of the granite of El Capitan, or impressive roadcuts like Sideling Hill. However, some rock is inherently weak (unconsolidated), or is prone to fracture and weathering, or has been subject to immense tectonic forces (e.g. pictures of conjugate fractures in rock at the San Andreas Fault here).

These are not observations that are new to the 21st Century, or to the 20th Century. For example, read the first paragraph of UCSB faculty Douglas Burbank & Brian Clarke’s ~2011 essay The Role of Rock Fracture in Erosion.

The engineers who designed Oroville Dam in the 1980s were obviously not blind to the implications of building on weak bedrock, or of the facts on the (chosen) ground. There are sure to be damning memos in the archives. But for whatever reasons, the dam was built the way that it was.

1. Failure at the middle of the main spillway — The concrete of the spillway cracked because it was undermined — the rock beneath it must have been eroded away by water flow over the decades that the structure has been in use. This happened because that rock was unconsolidated.

2. Risk that sustained water release at 100,000 to 150,000 cfm will cause the top part of the spillway to break up, undermining the spillway gate itself — Again, unconsolidated rock.

3. Loss of the ability to release 14,000 cfm through the power station — Result of #1.

4. Inability of the auxiliary spillway to operate at 12,500 cfm, 5% of its design capacity of 250,000 cfm — Photos taken Monday show that the emergency spillway flow eroded a deep channel in the hillside in a matter of days, and it was quickly expanding uphill, towards the spillway dam. In addition, the water cresting that 30 foot concrete spillway was likely to excavate spaces underneath it, risking its failure. Both are consequences of the unconsolidated nature of the bedrock at the site.

* Or, they could rally university SJWs to raise awareness about how fluid flow is just a social construct and then implement a program to break down flawed stereotypes about “erosion” and replace the discredited conventional demotics of dam dynamics with progressive intersectional theories that embrace a new sense of fluid diversity.

Posted in California | Comments Off on What Type Of Bedrock Supports The Oroville Dam?