Labour calls for inquiry into Israeli diplomat’s ‘take down MPs’ plot

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

The Guardian: The Labour party has called on the government to immediately launch an inquiry into “improper interference in our democratic politics” after the disclosure that an Israeli embassy official had plotted to “take down” UK MPs regarded as hostile.

The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, said: “The exposure of an Israeli embassy official discussing how to bring down or discredit a government minister and other MPs because of their views on the Middle East is extremely disturbing.”

The Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, has apologised to one of the MPs on the “hit list”, foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan, describing the remarks as unacceptable. As a result, the Foreign Office said it regarded the matter as closed.

But Thornberry said: “It is simply not good enough for the Foreign Office to say the matter is closed. This is a national security issue.” As well as calling for an inquiry, she said the embassy official should be withdrawn.

The official, Shai Masot, who describes himself as a senior political officer, was caught on camera in an undercover sting by a reporter from the al-Jazeera investigative unit.

The embassy said Masot would shortly be ending his term of employment with the embassy. Masot had been speaking to Maria Strizzolo, a civil servant who was formerly an aide to another Conservative minister. Sources at the Department for Education said on Sunday they understood Strizzolo had resigned from her civil service post.

The revelations also provoked anger among many Conservative politicians. One former minister in David Cameron’s government said the embassy’s efforts to exert improper influence on British public life went far further than any plot to “take down” unhelpful members of parliament.

Writing anonymously in the Mail on Sunday, the former minister said: “British foreign policy is in hock to Israeli influence at the heart of our politics, and those in authority have ignored what is going on.

“For years the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) have worked with – even for – the Israeli embassy to promote Israeli policy and thwart UK government policy and the actions of ministers who try to defend Palestinian rights.

“Lots of countries try to force their views on others, but what is scandalous in the UK is that instead of resisting it, successive governments have submitted to it, take donors’ money, and allowed Israeli influence-peddling to shape policy and even determine the fate of ministers.”

The former minister said there needed to be a full inquiry into the Israeli embassy’s links with CFI and LFI, and that while political parties should welcome funding from the UK’s Jewish community, they should not accept any engagement linked to Israel until it ceases new developments on Palestinian land.

“This opaque funding and underhand conduct is a national disgrace and humiliation and must be stamped out,” the former minister wrote.

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The Truth About Cars

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The truth about cars? Ok, but you won’t like it. They cost about $25 per day to own, and most people use their car for about an hour per day. Vast resources are expended to conceal these facts from us.

It costs about $9,000 per year in after-tax income for a reliable four seat vehicle. Sure, argue with me, but car execs (and the leaders of related industries like insurance, road construction, oil) know it’s true. They (and their dads and granddads and great-grandads) have been playing this game for 100 years, my friend.

* What purpose does a high performance vehicle serve in a driving environment packed to the gills with traffic congestion, poor and getting poorer driving habits and an over-reaching State that seeks to control, punish and extract sustenance – with the utmost technology-enabled efficiency – from those who possess the temerity to drive Their vehicles on Its roadways?

* One of my favorite things to point out to people is the drabness of our age. In 1970, a walk through a parking lot offered a rainbow of colors and all sorts of shapes and sizes. In the early seventies, the most popular color for Corvettes was orange. I think that was ’73 or ’72. My father’s Valiant was powder blue and my mother’s Plymouth was green.

Today, the top three colors are black, gray and silver. Walk through a parking lot and it looks like film noir made in the GDR. The general ugliness of our cars is due to the unrelenting claim that form follows function in all things at all times. The neo-Puritan scolds in charge of our lives lie awake a night worried that somewhere, someone is enjoying themselves.

One of the ironies of the age of plenty is we have a lot less fun.

* Here in my part of coastal SoCal, the most popular vehicles are (in no particular order)
Big pickups, usually tricked-out enough that you can be certain that they aren’t used for work;
Small pickups of indeterminate age, used almost exclusively by Hispanic men in the 30-to-50 age range, clearly doing either gardening/lawn care or construction work;
Large SUVs driven by soccer moms;
Hybrids (Toyota Prius in particular) driven by either incipient cat ladies, or white collar men and women who want the carpool lane stickers (supposedly carpool lane stickers can increase the resale value of a car by up to $5k in LA);
Everything else out in the long tail of the distribution – sedans of all ages; Mercedes and Cadillacs in regions where the average age is pushing 60+; quite a few Audis among the 30+ reasonably affluent professionals; BMWs for the dickhead drivers; etc. I see few new Camrys or Accords, but I don’t see many Rogues except among college-age women. And Tesla is pretty popular among a certain demographic.

* About six months ago I shopped for a car for the first time in over 30 years. (I’m moving from NYC, where you don’t need a car, to CA, where you definitely do.) Research junkie that I am, I did a lot of test driving and I read a lot of reviews and comments online. The car journalists are definitely well-informed and they write well, but Steve’s right — car journos live in their own universe, where cars and car-ness are infinitely more important than they are to the rest of us. I finally wound up relying on the car forums on Reddit; the buyer reviews on Edmunds were much more helpful to me than the pro reviews were. Everyday people’s reports are often great.

* Toyota directs their work directly at the mass market, which is why critics don’t like it. They’re the Norman Rockwell of cars–technically proficient with values (dependability and ease of use in the case of Toyota) the elite doesn’t appreciate but the commoners do.

As I recall from your blog, you liked Rockwell for that reason. I think it makes sense you would like the Toyota too.

* One of the interesting things about the Camry – if you talk with a Toyota mechanic – is that the 1985-90 vintage is considered one of the best car models EVER for reliability & longevity. It was common for them to exceed 300,000 miles on the original transmission if cared for reasonably. Some argue that it was such a good car that it was hurting Toyota’s sales, and it was intentionally degraded in the 90s so it would’t last so darn long.

* Before Toyota brought out the Lexus luxury marque at the end of the 1980s they put everything they had into their Camrys. After that, they tried not to make Camrys too good to give you a reason to upgrade to a Lexus.

* I remember back in the ’70′s reading a book with the title, if I remember right, “The Screwing of the Average Man” or something similar. The chapter on cars explained that if you took all the time the “average man” spends driving, maintaining his car, working to pay insurance, taxes and registration, gas, oil, repairs, and the monthly payment and divided by miles traveled the average speed was about 5 miles per hour. I suspect today’s figure would be similar.

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Racist vlogger who became global YouTube sensation unmasked as jobless ex-student who lives with dad

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

Mirror: A vile racist whose ­hate-filled videos have made him a global YouTube sensation has been unmasked as a jobless ex-student who lives with his dad.

The extremist has amassed 20,000 followers on his “video blogger” channel – where he spouts pathetic white ­supremacist views and promotes hatred of black people, Jews and women.

The sick ‘unknown’ discovered notoriety via his ­Millennial Woes blog – and has gone to great lengths to hide his identity.

But today The Daily Record named him as Colin Robertson, 34, from Linlithgow in Scotland.

He ­broadcasts his vile rants from a bedroom of his dad’s ­semi-detached house situated in a quiet street in the town.

And he even delivered a speech at a US rally where far-right ­extremists shouted “Hail Trump” and made Nazi salutes.

Neighbours in the Scottish town in West Lothian last night spoke of their shock over the racist living next to them and branded his outbursts as “despicable”.

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Reactionary Jew – Is it Possible for Jewish Nationalists & European Nationalists to Work Together?

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Goy: “That interview with reactionary jew is good. Makes me feel more & more confident that this whole idea — the red pill — is not going away. It won’t be put back in the bottle. We’re going to win. It’ll be fun watching to see how long it takes my political science friends to wake up and see what’s happening… for now, none of them follow any alt-right accounts. But they’ll only be able to bury their heads for so long, and ONCE THEY SEE IT, I don’t know how they come down on the side of multiculturalism again.”

Red Ice:

Reactionary Jew is a prominent, although presently anonymous, money-lender, cultural critic, and Talmudic scholar based out of New York City. A proud dual citizen of the United States and Israel, Reactionary Jew has devoted his career to social justice and diversity in the United States – the greatest strengths of any free and liberal society. Both a persecuted minority and, as integral founding members of Judeo-Christian civilization, the greatest ally of Europeans, Jews have the historical obligation of helping Whites to achieve diversity and cultural enrichment in their nations. Reactionary Jew is proud to carry on this tradition of social improvement. His thoughts on how to promote diversity and enrichment while ending systemic racial, sexual and gender colonial oppression can be found at thejewishalternative.com.

Just kidding. Actually, Reactionary Jew is a nationalist who wants a strong ethnostate for his own people, which isn’t bound by foreign aid, isn’t a fulcrum of Western foreign policy, and exists alongside successful, homogenous, high-trust, traditional white countries as part of the broader Global North. His new publication, The Jewish Alternative, along with its sister podcast, The Skype Chat, hopes to encourage Jews to support European nationalism, be stronger nationalists for their own kind, move to Israel where they belong, and serve as a bridge between right-wing Jews and the White Alt-Right.

We’ll discuss Reactionary Jew’s Orthodox upbringing, red-pill process, and eventually dive into current events and modern politics. We’ll also question if it’s possible to create a bridge between Jewish nationalists and European nationalists.

Guest’s website: https://thejewishalternative.com/
https://soundcloud.com/user-420094542

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Vox: How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy The movement’s many online communities prey on male insecurity to advance a racist political agenda.

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

In other words, community builds up in-group identity. Joining a soccer club can build white community and white supremacy.

Vox:

Most white men who become radicalized into the alt-right start out in search of some like-minded friends.

Though various branches of the movement are often at odds with one another, they share a number of core beliefs — and a common meme-flavored vernacular — that serve to unite them in what is sometimes called “the manosphere.” This realm includes the “men’s rights” movement, pickup artist culture (a community of men also labeled “PUAs” that essentially makes a game of the art of bedding women), “incels” (men who are “involuntarily celibate” because they feel women reject them), and geek gatekeepers like supporters of the Gamergate movement.

On the surface, PUA communities and incel communities have a lot of generic appeal: The PUA lifestyle emphasizes self-esteem and confidence building along with physical health, while the incel community allows men to bond over their struggle to achieve all of the above in spite of their sour luck with women. Meanwhile, gamers and geeks habitually tout the importance of gaming in providing social interaction for young men.

These spaces foster the kind of male friendship whose importance doesn’t get a lot of attention in the real world. But the benefits of their existence are often accompanied (and sometimes negated) by their tendency to instill in their members a newfound articulation of fundamental anxiety over their position as men in a society where women are actively seeking empowerment.

And in building its membership from so many different communities of white men who ultimately feel threatened and rejected by women, the movement promotes a sense of male entitlement that is easily radicalized into white nationalism and white supremacy.

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