The Allure Of Donald Trump

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: Trump has clear policies, which certainly on immigration correspond to the positions of populist parties in Europe….

He does not have a full policy platform, but that is not necessary for a populist party to be successful. It only needs to address the issues which anger its electorate. And that is the reality which needs to be considered: a section of the population is angry at mainstream politics, in Europe we would say ‘the political class’, for ignoring their concerns and fears. The denialist position which Neil Levy advances, in effect tells the political class that they can continue to ignore these voters. I think that is a dangerous strategy…

I suspect this kind of explanation [Trump voters being stupid and easily influenced] is popular, because it lets everyone else off the hook. Trump is seen a a jester leading the gullible peasants. No-one has to rethink their own positions and policies, which might be an uncomfortable exercise.

In reality, the primary explanation for the success of Trump, is that he is a competent representative of a section of the population, that is currently unrepresented in the party spectrum. By ‘competent’ I mean that he has an organisation, is seen as potentially electable, and accurately reflects the concerns of his own voters. This is also the primary explanation for the rise of UKIP, the Front National, the Dansk Folkeparti, the AfD, Geert Wilders’ PVV, and so on. Their success is essentially a restructuring of the party landscape, to conform more closely with the attitudes and aspirations of the electorate… Two-party systems tend to exclude new parties, but if enough voters are dissatisfied, then sooner or later there will be a shift in the political spectrum.

* Trump’s wife is a recent immigrant. His mother was an immigrant, and 4 of his 5 children were born of an immigrant. He has a very compelling personal story to use to show he is not in any way prejudiced against immigrants per se, just illegals. And he has not even begun to use this story.

My gut is that Trump will start displaying and describing women he has employed in high positions for decades with equal or better pay and contrast that to Hillary, who cannot even pay women in her Senate office equally with her male employees even as she decries wage discrimination.

Trump has already neutralized all the religious right social issue nonsense for the election, so the decision for or against him will be on economics, security, illegal immigration/border control, and personal trust. There won’t be any campaign discussion this year of birth control and transgender bathroom access or denying white women who are raped by a black criminal an abortion.

Most women may vote for Hillary unless this turns into a landslide, but these will primarily be blacks, other minorities, and single white women Trump was never going to win. On the other hand, he is going to push her into being incredibly alienating towards men, starting with #OffTheReservation.

* Republicans need to get away from the “path to 270″ rubbish. Narrowly trying to win an election generally means you are going to lose. The Democrats tried that in 2000 and 2004 and let the Republicans barely eke by, but otherwise they went for the jugular.

We should instead aim for 350+ like Obama did, knowing that if we lose a few, which is inevitable, we will still win. I honestly think there is a chance for a 450+ wipeout, especially if Trump can pull off the NY upset.

For Trump going for 350, that means competing for most of the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast (we can let MA, RI, and MD, and DC slide), the industrial midwest in Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa, and sandy swing states Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. This also has the advantage for Trump of making his travel itineraries simple and letting him sleep at one of his homes most nights.

WI, MN, CO, VA, and OR will be pulled along by external events nationally rather than overt campaigning – they are not Trump country.

Consider for a moment that winning Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida early is an opportunity to call the race at 11p EST and start partying, something Republicans haven’t gotten to do since 1988! There is a lot of pent up psychological frustration to win big that is going to come into play.

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Milo Yiannopoulos Doesn’t Have Feelings

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

New York Times:

You’re one of the loudest, most provocative voices at Breitbart News, and you’re currently on a speaking tour of college campuses, railing against “P.C. culture.” You once admitted in a profile that your public persona started out as a comedy character that you created because “I didn’t like me very much.” What didn’t you like about yourself?

I’ve wrestled with being religious and being conservative and being gay, but the reason I felt like that is because of other gay people. The only real shaming I’ve ever experienced has been from other gay people when I reveal my politics or my religion.

You’re a Trump supporter, and you frequently refer to him as Daddy. I do because that’s what he is.

I assume that’s not in a purely father-figure sense. Are you sexually attracted to Donald Trump? Oh, yes. I call myself a Trump-sexual. I have a very antiwhite bedroom policy, but Trump is kind of like the exception to that rule.

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A new book answers why it’s so hard for educated women to find dates

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Washington Post: For many women these days, it’s not “He’s just not that into you” that’s the problem. It’s that “There aren’t enough of him.”

So says Jon Birger, the author of a new book called “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.” The book, which Birger describes as “the least romantic book ever written about dating,” uses demographics, statistics, game theory and other wonky techniques to shed light on the surprising and growing gap between the number of college-educated women and the number of college-educated men.

The main idea is that women have been attending college at much higher rates than men since the 1980s, in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. That has led to a big demographic mismatch for people who want to date and marry others of the same educational level. The dating pool for college-educated people in their 30s now has five women for every four men. For people in their 20s, it’s four women for every three men.

The gap is even more extreme in certain places. In Manhattan, there are 38 percent more female college grads under the age of 25 than college-grad men, according to Birger’s data. The gap is 49 percent in Raleigh, N.C., 86 percent in Miami, 49 percent in Washington and 37 percent in Los Angeles. And it’s not just cities – many rural areas also have these “educated man deficits.”

…As “Date-onomics” shows, this mismatch in the number of college-educated men and women leads to some surprising consequences, affecting not just dating, marriage and fidelity, but campus culture, credit card debt and even pop song lyrics.

…I tend to agree with Claudia Goldin, who is an economist at Harvard. She argues that the big driver for college enrollment is the expectation of future labor force participation. In an era in which women were getting married young and having kids soon after, there wasn’t much of an expectation for long stays in the workforce. Goldin attributes the change to the pill, which allowed women to delay marriage and childbirth. The expectation of spending more time in the workforce made college a better investment.

But how we got to four women for every three men has more to do with biology and neuroscience. Some of the old discrimination obscured what is essentially a fundamental biological truth, that girls mature socially and intellectually faster than boys. Even though boys and girls score comparably on raw intelligence tests, when it comes to actual school work, girls fare much better. Girls are better organized, they’re more likely to be valedictorians. The girls are just better at college preparation.

One of the things I normally write about is the oil industry. If you spend any time in North Dakota, which is the big booming oil state these days, you have kids right out of high school, and 98% are men, earning 50, 60, 70 thousand dollars a year as roughnecks. Those kind of high-paying working class jobs are even harder to come by for women. That’s what makes the college wage premium so much bigger for women, because there are fewer job opportunities to earn a decent wage in blue collar jobs.

What are some of the effects of this imbalance on college campuses?

It’s clear that schools that have more men tend to have more traditional dating situations, whereas the ones that are disproportionately female tend to have more intense hookup cultures. It’s not just the social science I cite in the book, you can really see it in how kids talk about dating life at these schools.

I use data in the book from Niche.com, which is a college review site. At the schools that are predominantly male, the kids talk about how students like to be in relationships. So for Georgia Tech, which is 66% male, the comment on Niche.com was, “Tech is a fairly monogamous campus.” But for the schools that are skewed female, the hookup culture becomes more intense. So James Madison, which is 63 percent female, one comment is, “The deficiency of guys creates a scene that tends to embrace random hookups.”

Less educated men are actually facing as challenging a dating and marriage market as the educated women. So for example, among non-college educated men in the U.S. age 22 to 29, there are 9.4 million single men versus 7.1 million single women. So the lesser-educated men face an extremely challenging data market. They do not have it easy at all…

I think this is a largely a developmental issue. The real issue is that boys lag at least a year behind girls, both intellectually and socially, when it comes to brain maturity. As a result, boys don’t perform as well in school. I do think that if we essentially red-shirted boys and had them begin kindergarten a year later than girls, it would go a long way toward closing this gap. And in fact, the handful of western countries, like Switzerland and Finland, where both boys and girls start school later, tend to have smaller college gender gaps…

Looking at college-educated people age 22-29, the three best cities for men are Fort Lauderdale, Fla, where there are 71 percent more women than men; Providence, R.I., with 60 percent more women than men, and then Portland, Ore., at 56 percent. OKCupid recently named Portland the most promiscuous city in the U.S., and I strongly suspect that’s related to the gender ratio.

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WP: Hookup culture isn’t the real problem facing singles today. It’s math.

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

WP: Apps like Tinder are a symptom of gender imbalance in the dating market.

John Birger writes: Today’s hookup culture does have one big thing in common with the ’20s flapper generation, and that is demographics. In the Vanity Fair article, David Buss, a University of Texas psychology professor, says that apps like Tinder contribute to “a perceived surplus of women,” among straight men, which in turn leads to more hookups and fewer traditional relationships. Here’s the thing: This surplus of women is not just “perceived” but very, very real.

As I argue in “DATE-ONOMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” the college and post-college hookup culture is a byproduct, not of Tinder or Facebook (another target of modern scolds), but of shifting demographics among the college-educated. Much as the death toll of WWI caused a shortage of marriageable men in the 1920s, today’s widening gender gap in college enrollment has created unequal numbers in the post-college dating pool.

In 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. The imbalance has spilled over into the post-college dating scene. According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are now 5.5 million college-educated women in the United States between the ages of 22 and 29 vs. 4.1 million such men. In other words, the dating pool for straight, millennial, college graduates has four women for every three men. No wonder some men are in no rush to settle down and more women are giving up on what used to be called “playing hard to get.”

These demographics represent the true dating apocalypse, as stacks of social science show how dating and mating behavior is influenced by prevailing sex ratios. When there are plenty of marriageable men, dating culture emphasizes courtship and romance, and men generally must earn more to attract a wife. But when gender ratios skew toward women, as they do today among college grads, the dating culture becomes more sexualized. The good news, at least according to the work of psychologists and sex-ratio pioneers Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord, is that people tend to have better sex when ratios skew female. The downside? Women frequently wind up being treated as sex objects, and men are more inclined to exercise the option to delay marriage and play the field. As I note in my book, today’s uneven gender ratios “add up to sexual nirvana for heterosexual men, but for heterosexual women — especially those who put a high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock — they represent a demographic time bomb.”

Of course, these lopsided numbers might not matter if young, college-educated women become more willing to date — and, eventually, marry — across socioeconomic lines. But according to separate research by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood and by UCLA sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare, educational intermarriage is less common today than at any point over the past half century.

Because the pool of college-educated women is much larger, the unwillingness of college-educated men to consider working-class women as life partners has little statistical effect on their marriage prospects. But for college-educated women, excluding working-class guys makes their dating math much more challenging. If there is an undersupply of men in the college-educated dating pool, there is going to be an oversupply of men in the non-college-educated one. Indeed, there are 1.5 million more non-college-educated men than women among Americans age 22 to 29. Bottom line: New York City women looking for a match would be better off, statistically at least, at a fireman’s bar in Staten Island than a wine bar on the Upper East Side…

Dating and marrying across socioeconomic lines — “mixed-collar” marriages, if you will — is one possible remedy. I’d also urge marriage-minded women not to put off getting serious about dating because the math will only get worse over time. Call it the musical chairs problem: Nearly everybody finds a chair in the first round. By the last round, however, there’s a 50 percent chance of not getting one. Similarly, in a dating pool that starts out with 140 women and 100 men, the gender ratio among those still single soars from 1.4:1 to more than 2:1 once half the women get married.

Another solution (at least for the frustrated women interviewed by Vanity Fair) would be to quit Manhattan, which is one of the worst dating markets in the country for educated young women. Indeed, their new mantra should probably be “Go West, Young Woman.” The Western part of the country, in general, has more balanced gender ratios than those found east of the Mississippi River. California and Colorado, for example, each have 20 percent more college-grad women than men age 22 to 29 compared with 36 and 41 percent, respectively, in Illinois and North Carolina.

Unsurprisingly, men tend to be less — I’ll say it — promiscuous when women are more scarce. Consider Santa Clara County, Calif., home to Silicon Valley and the only well-populated area in the country where male college grads outnumber female ones by a significant margin. There, it’s women who have the dating leverage. “I think it’s pretty good for the girls,” one single woman told the San Jose Mercury News a few years back. “You can be more picky,” because guys “have to try harder.”

Perhaps as a result, 33 percent of college-educated women age 22 to 29 are married vs. 13 percent in Manhattan. Santa Clara County’s marriages happen to be more stable too: Among college-grad women in their 30s, 4 percent are separated or divorced vs. 7 percent in Manhattan.

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The Shiduch Crisis

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Time magazine: Secular-style dating is rare in the Orthodox community in which Elefant lives. Most marriages are loosely arranged—“guided” is probably a better word—by matchmakers such as Elefant. The shadchan’s job has been made exceedingly difficult, she said, by a mysterious increase in the number of unmarried women within the Orthodox community. When Elefant attended Jewish high school 30 years ago, “there were maybe three girls that didn’t get married by the time they were twenty or twenty-one,” she said. “Today, if you look at the girls who graduated five years ago, there are probably thirty girls who are not yet married. Overall, there are thousands of unmarried girls in their late twenties. It’s total chaos.”

For Orthodox Jewish women, as for Mormon ones, getting married and having children is more than a lifestyle choice. Marriage and motherhood are essentially spiritual obligations, which is why the Orthodox marriage crisis is so hotly debated and why it has earned its own moniker. Shidduch is the Hebrew word for a marriage match, and Orthodox Jews (including the more assimilated Modern Orthodox) now refer to the excess supply of unmarried women in their communities as the Shidduch Crisis.

Mormon and Orthodox Jewish leaders alike fear that their respective marriage crises reflect some failure to instill proper values in young people. Perhaps young people are too self-absorbed? Maybe the men are just too picky? Or maybe it’s the women who are holding out for the Mormon or Jewish George Clooney?

In fact, the root causes of both the Shidduch Crisis and the Mormon marriage crisis have little to do with culture or religion. The true culprit in both cases is demographics. The fact is that there are more marriage-age women than men both in the Orthodox Jewish community and in the Utah LDS church. And just as I predicted, lopsided gender ratios affect conservative religious communities in much the same way they affect secular ones…

As with the Mormon marriage crisis, the Shidduch Crisis has become a source of enormous heartache for Orthodox Jews, especially older single women and their parents. (Among Orthodox Jews, “older” often starts at 21.) The Letters to the Editor section of The 5 Towns Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper for the Orthodox community in suburban New York, has become a receptacle for Shidduch Crisis–related angst and sadness. “An absolute tragedy,” is how one mother described the situation. It is “what we as a family and I as the mother of a 27-year-old ‘older single girl’ go through every moment of my life, every breathing second of every day. And believe me, sometimes it hurts to do just that—i.e., to breathe.”

The statistical explanation for why Orthodox men are in short supply is different from the one for the shortage of Mormon men. Orthodox men are not abandoning their faith in large numbers and leaving Orthodox women behind. According to a recent Pew Research study, only 2 percent of Orthodox Jews are married to non-Jews, and the attrition rate from the Orthodox movement to the more mainstream Reform or Conservative branches of Judaism has actually been declining.

The imbalance in the Orthodox marriage market boils down to a demographic quirk: The Orthodox community has an extremely high birth rate, and a high birth rate means there will be more 18-year-olds than 19-year-olds, more 19-year-olds than 20-year-olds, and so on and so on. Couple the increasing number of children born every year with the traditional age gap at marriage—the typical marriage age for Orthodox Jews is 19 for women and 22 for men, according to Michael Salamon, a psychologist who works with the Orthodox community and wrote a book on the Shidduch Crisis—and you wind up with a marriage market with more 19-year-old women than 22-year-old men.

There is no U.S. Census data on religion. But Joshua Comenetz, chief of the Census Bureau’s Geographic Studies Branch, studied the demographics of Orthodox Jews back in his college professor days at University of Florida. Based on his academic research, Comenetz contended that each one-year age cohort in the Orthodox community has 4 percent more members than the one preceding it. What this means is that for every 100 22-year-old men in the Orthodox dating pool, there are 112 19-year-old women—12 percent more women than men.

The bottom line: According to a 2013 article in the Jewish weekly Ami Magazine, there are now 3,000 unmarried Orthodox women between the ages of 25 and 40 in the New York City metro area and another 500 over 40. That’s a huge number when you consider that New York’s Yeshivish Orthodox—the segment of the Orthodox community most affected by the Shidduch Crisis—has a total population of 97,000, according to the Jewish Community Study of New York published by the UJA-Federation of New York in 2012.

That is the Shidduch Crisis in a nutshell. Unfortunately, relatively few Orthodox Jews realize that the Shidduch Crisis boils down to a math problem. Most explanations for the Shidduch Crisis blame cultural influences for causing men to delay marriage. “Those of us who’ve tossed and turned with this, we don’t necessarily believe that there are more girls than boys,” said Elefant. “We believe God created everybody, and God created a match for everybody.”

As Elefant saw things, a 22-year-old man inherently has more dating options than a 19-year-old woman, because he can date down age-wise. “The guys act like kids in a candy store,” Elefant said. Of course, if there were gender-ratio balance among all the age cohorts, single 22-year-old men would not have more choices than single 19-year-old women because most of the age-19-to-22 women would already be married to older men—thus shrinking 22-year-old men’s dating pool…

There is, however, one major cultural difference between the two groups: Hasidic men marry women their own age, whereas Yeshivish men typically marry women a three or four years their junior.

“In the Hasidic world, it would be very weird for a man to marry a woman two years younger than him,” said Alexander Rapaport, a Hasidic father of six and the executive director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen in Brooklyn. Both Rapaport and his wife were 36 when I interviewed him.

When I asked Rapaport about the Shidduch Crisis, he seemed perplexed. “I’ve heard of it,” he said, “but I’m not sure I understand what it’s all about.”

In fact, there is no Shidduch Crisis in the Hasidic community. “When I mention the term to Hasidim, they don’t know what I’m talking about,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at City University of New York and an expert on Hasidic Jews.

Another academic, Hershey Friedman of Brooklyn College, reached the same conclusion, but from a different vantage point. When Friedman is not teaching finance at Brooklyn College, he volunteers as a matchmaker for Saw You at Sinai, an Orthodox dating service that combines traditional matchmaking with some of the tools of online dating. Friedman is not Hasidic himself, but he’s familiar with the Hasidic community because he lives in Borough Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood considered the epicenter of American Hasidic life.

“The girls have it made in the Hasidic world,” Friedman said. “They’re the ones in demand.” Friedman’s explanation for the absence of a Shidduch Crisis among Hasidic Jews is that there are more Hasidic boys than girls—a perception that I suspect is inaccurate but nonetheless reflects how different the marriage market is for Hasidic versus non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews.

The seeming immunity of Hasidic Jews to the Shidduch Crisis has not been lost on some Yeshivish rabbis. In 2012, a dozen American and Israeli Orthodox rabbis signed letters urging young men and their parents to begin their matchmaking process earlier than age 22 or 23. The rabbis noted that their community “finds itself in an increasingly difficult situation,” with “thousands” of single Jewish women struggling to find husbands. “[I]t has become clear that the primary cause of this is that [men] generally marry girls who are a number of years younger,” read one of the letters. “Since the population increases every year and there are more girls entering shidduchim than boys, many girls are left unmarried. Clearly, the way to remedy this terrible situation is to reduce the age disparity in shidduchim. Many [Hasidic] communities who do not have age disparities in shidduchim are not facing this tragic situation of numerous unmarried girls.”

The suggestion that the true origin of the Shidduch Crisis lies in demographics has not sat well with those who staked their reputations on alternative explanations…

Perhaps the most controversial—and definitely the most misogynistic— explanation for the Shidduch Crisis was offered up by Yitta Halberstam, coauthor of the best-selling Small Miracles series of books. Halberstam’s 2012 column in The Jewish Press started out innocently enough. “This is the harsh truth,” she wrote. “The mothers of ‘good boys’ are bombarded with shidduch suggestions on a daily basis—a veritable barrage of résumés either flooding their fax machines or pouring out of their email inboxes—while those with similarly ‘top’ daughters sit with pinched faces anxiously waiting for the phone to ring. The disparity is bare, bold-faced, and veritably heartbreaking.”

Halberstam knew all this because her own son was going through the matchmaking process: “I feel a little sad each time the fax machine cranks out yet another résumé for my son. I know full well that there are fantastic girls out there who are his equals—perhaps even his superiors—who are NOT receiving comparable treatment… I ache for their mothers, who repeatedly call the shadchanim [matchmakers] who never call back, but are visibly more responsive if you are the mother of a boy. Inwardly, I rail against the unfairness of it all.”

Here Halberstam went off the rails. She went on to describe attending a community event where single women were introduced to mothers of single men—and being “jolted” by the subpar looks of the girls.

“Yes,” she wrote, “spiritual beauty makes a woman’s eyes glow and casts a luminous sheen over her face; there is no beauty like a pure soul. Makeup, however, goes a long way in both correcting facial flaws and accentuating one’s assets, and if my cursory inspection was indeed accurate (and I apologize if the girls used such natural makeup that I simply couldn’t tell), barely any of these girls seemed to have made a huge effort to deck themselves out.”

In other words, the real reason these young women were still unmarried was because they were homely. Halberstam then doubled down on heartlessness, suggesting that a visit to the plastic surgeon might be in order for some of these Plain Janes: “Mothers, this is my plea to you: There is no reason in today’s day and age with the panoply of cosmetic and surgical procedures available, why any girl can’t be transformed into a swan. Borrow the money if you have to; it’s an investment in your daughter’s future, her life.”

…One cultural by-product of the Shidduch Crisis that has not been hushed up is the ever-larger dowries that Orthodox brides and their families are now expected to pay for the privilege of getting married. These dowries are financial promises made by the bride’s parents to help support the young family for the three or four or however-long-it-takes years that their future son-in-law may spend studying at a Jewish seminary. The fact that these dowries keep increasing demonstrates both the market power men possess as well as the desperation felt by young women and their parents. “It was never like this before,” said Salamon. “There was always a dowry, but it was pillowcases and things of that nature—not $50,000.”

Salamon noted that the practice of brides’ families paying five- and six-figure dowries has leached from the traditional Orthodox community into the more assimilated Modern Orthodox one. Indeed, the Summer 2013 issue of Jewish Action, the official magazine of the Modern Orthodox umbrella organization Orthodox Union, included an essay by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, a well-known Jewish scholar and lecturer. Kelemen told the story of his attempt to arrange a marriage for his daughter: “When I contacted the head of a prestigious American yeshiva [an Orthodox Jewish seminary] to ask if he might have a shidduch for my daughter, he asked me ‘what level boy’ I was interested in. Unsure what he meant, I asked for clarification. ‘Top boys go for $100,000 a year, but we also have boys for $70,000 a year and even $50,000 a year.’ He said that if I was ready to make the commitment, he could begin making recommendations immediately.”

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The One Righteous Man

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek writes: The American People have failed to support Ted Cruz. What if it turns out that having Ted Cruz in the race and as nominee was akin to the one virtuous man in Sodom whose existence would have led God to spare that city?

* That’s what I’ve been saying. We’ll all be consumed by balls of fire with an adulterous man leading us.

* It’ll be the New York Post vs. the New York Daily News.

* Who does the GOP belong to? For years the big donor class and the think-tankers lazily thought it was theirs to play with. They ignored identity. They ignored tribes. The Democrats increasingly became an alliance of the upper and lower strata against the middle. The Republican Party was and is really only a vehicle for the kind of middle American whose ancestors came from America’s founding stock, supplemented by pre-WWI European immigrants. That rage Trump tapped into was always there, and while the Beltway elite exploited it, they directed it for their own purposes.

* Are the descendents of today’s American middle class destined to become a stupid fermenting mass of tens of millions of desperately proletarianized working animals who are at best permitted to chew their cud before slaughter?

* I was paraphrasing and adapting language from Goebbel’s 1945 essay in Das Riech, “The Year 2000”. Specifically, the phrase “stupid fermenting mass” (which may have originated with someone else). Concerning which, some of us are that already, with more to be reduced to that level in the future.

* Inside of every American is a proletariat waiting to get out.

* George Walker Bush liberated mine.

* In his column today Los Angeles Times writer George Skelton asks how Trump could get to the doorstep of becoming the presidential nominee of the Republican party without Skelton ONCE mentioning immigration or the plight of the white working class. What on God’s earth does Skelton think all these people are mad about?

* If Donald Trump adopts these two ideas, game over – he becomes our next President. As someone posted on Reddit:
Premise: The country is full, and immigration should not drive population growth. So….
1. BALANCED IMMIGRATION. The United States should limit the number of immigrants it takes in from any given country to the number of Americans that country took in from the US over the previous year. In other words, on a country by country basis, immigration=emigration, and there is population balance. How would it work? If 100,000 American citizens say “screw America, I want to live in Pakistan” and are accepted as immigrants by Pakistan in 2017, then America would take in up to 100,000 Pakistani immigrants in 2018. If not many Americans immigrate to Pakistan (or Israel or Sweden – no need to play favorites) then not many Pakistanis would be accepted in exchange. Fair is fair, and who can oppose that? No need for any invidious discussions of the merits of this group versus that group. Just fairness and balance.
Premise: The Illegals have got to go. Also, increasing the minimum wage lowers demand for labor, so….
2. Raise the minimum wage due illegal alien labor to $75/hour. Collectible ONLY when the illegal alien leaves the US to wherever. We could even incentivize our vast army of under- and unemployed lawyers to help them collect by giving them a third of the cut. Plenty incentive for them to leave and screw over the greedy, unpatriotic businesses that hired them in the first place, and plenty of disincentive on the part of business to hire them going forward. The end result would be massive self-deportation of illegals.
I don’t see how even progressive, liberal folk could object to either of these ideas. Liberals used to believe in “zero population growth” and many still do. And who would begrudge an illegal alien a working minimum wage of $75/hour? Not I!
If Donald Trump incorporates these ideas into his immigration platform, then Donald Trump becomes President of the United States of America.

* A Stanford business school lecturer explains why tens of millions of Americans support Trump: “All I know about Mr. Trump’s America is that it will have a huge wall and new trade deals…. He threatens a global trade war while I am a free trader. ….He has supported single payer health care reform. He boasts that he would order firm leaders to build their factories in the U.S. and then threatens to punish them if they do not. …. I have yet to see an instance of a policy view from him consistent with free market capitalism and limited government intervention in the economy.” All of this sounds pretty good to the scores of millions of American citizens who have been screwed over by limitless immigration, open borders, free trade, and globalism.

* Neoconservatism succeeded as a reaction against Democratic/liberal vacillation in the face of the Soviet/Bolshevik threat of the seventies, our defeat in SE Asia in 1975, and the national shame inflicted on us by the Iranians in 1979. Absent all that, what do they think attracted people to them, their devotion to the ideas of Ayn Rand and low taxes for Wall Streeters?

* Whether you believe this is happening (it is) due to human activity or not (and this point isn’t so clear), for most Americans, global warming is not high on the list of things to worry about. Finding or keeping a job, paying for health insurance and medical care, finding good, affordable schools for one’s progeny and so forth rank much, much higher on the list of things to worry about. In sort, fretting over global warming is a rich man’s sport. And it does not help any that for most Americans, global warming has been experienced not as hotter summers but as milder winters, which for most people is a good trade.

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Why the Media’s Silence on Japanese Protectionism Gives Trump Another Priceless Opening

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Luke Ford

Eamonn Fingleton writes: In few places has Donald Trump’s rise caused more unease than in Tokyo. Indeed it is probably safe to say that, underneath an ostensibly imperturbable exterior, top Japanese officials are running far more scared than even Trump realizes.

They have a lot to be scared about. Much of what the Washington establishment thinks it knows about Japan is false, with the result that successive U.S. presidential administrations have never been able to bargain intelligently with Tokyo.

Here I will focus on Japan’s trading system, and I will address other potential flashpoints in future commentaries. Pace the mainstream American media, Japan remains as mercantilist as ever. As Trump has repeatedly pointed out, Japan poses as great a challenge for U.S. trade policymakers as China. In fact the Japanese economic system could no more operate without high trade barriers than a Las Vegas nightclub could survive without muscular bouncers.

Tokyo’s forebodings about a revival of 1980s-style trade friction have been greatly exacerbated lately with the demise of Marco Rubio’s “savior” campaign. Not the least of those who aspired to be “saved” by Rubio were Japanese trade officials and their Washington lobbyists. Given that Rubio was bankrolled mainly by Norman Braman, a big Florida-based importer of high-end foreign cars, Rubio seemed a safe bet to perpetuate the “trade-doesn’t-matter” consensus of recent presidential administrations.

Assuming he is elected and keeps his promises, Trump would be the first president since Ronald Reagan to challenge Japanese mercantilism. He looks likely moreover to adopt a much tougher line than Reagan. Reagan not only felt constrained by the Cold War but naively accepted his vaunted “friend” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s assurances that, given a little time, Japan would fall into line. After all, almost the entire Japanese elite was supposedly already on board (at least that was the happy story promulgated in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages). Japan’s problem was ostensibly that a few remaining “backwoodsmen” were for a little while longer blocking progress but once they were jostled aside, a younger, more enlightened breed of Japanese official would enthusiastically embrace American-style free trade.

Well, here we are in 2016 – more than 35 years after Reagan took office and nearly twelve years since he died – and Japan remains as protectionist as ever.

Consider cars. Cars are worthy of special mention in part because they are by far the most important advanced manufactured item traded internationally (their electronics alone are as sophisticated as anything in an Apple iPhone). The car industry is also of special note because its trade patterns are easy to track.

That the Japanese car market is protected is the first thing you notice on setting foot in Japan. Except for a few token German cars that are visible mainly in central Tokyo, the cars on Japanese roads are Japanese. Drivers don’t have much choice. Foreign marques are systematically marginalized.

Korean cars provide a striking example: at last count their market share was less than 0.02 percent. Yet it is hardly as if the Koreans can’t make good cars: Hyundai competes to win against the Japanese in virtually every other market. In Japan, however, Hyundai sold an average of a mere 1,700 cars a year in the early years of the twenty-first century – a performance so miserable that in 2009 the company just gave up and shuttered its Japanese car marketing division.

Japan’s apologists have suggested that Hyundai’s problem was merely ethnic bias. In reality, such a bias explains nothing. Certainly in other respects Japanese consumers hardly seem allergic to things Korean. Japan’s most popular foreign cuisine, for instance, is Korean, and Korean culture is widely respected as a progenitor of Japanese culture (in much the same way that the British acknowledge a cultural debt to ancient Rome). Meanwhile there is the fact that ethnic Koreans constitute by far Japan’s largest minority. Even if anti-Korean bias is supposed to explain something, it can hardly explain why ethnic Koreans don’t buy Korean cars. Nor does it explain why ethnic Korean entrepreneurs (of whom there is a plentiful supply in Japan) don’t set up dealerships for Hyundai and the others. There is, too, the fact that in other products – including even auto components – Japanese and Korean companies do a thriving two-way business. The conclusion is inescapable that Japan pursues a deliberate policy of keeping Korean car imports close to zero.

As for the larger picture, for most of the last fifty years total imports of foreign-brand cars – from all nations – have consistently been kept to a mere 4 percent of the Japanese market. This has applied whether the yen is high or low, and whether the Japanese economy has been booming or stagnating.

Of course, if you believe Japan’s excuses (as conveyed via, for instance, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal), the problem is that the Detroit companies don’t make cars with the steering wheel on the correct side for Japan’s drive-on-the-left roads. This is obvious nonsense. Not only has Detroit long made some of its models in the Japanese configuration (the Jeep, for instance) but the Detroit companies’ European subsidiaries make whole ranges of competitive cars configured for Japan.

Cars apart, several other aspects of Japan’s trade policy might also interest a future President Trump. Take, for instance, Japan’s trade with China. Officially the two nations are supposed to be daggers drawn. Yet if an intelligent Martian were to analyze international trade flows (and if he insisted on looking at hard facts rather than trusting to the Anglophone press – we are talking a really smart Martian here), he would conclude that the only mutually satisfying economic partnership among the U.S.-Japan-China ménage is between Japan and China.

Whereas Japan’s imports from the United States last year totaled a mere $64.4 billion, its imports from China came to a whopping $155.1 billion. If Japan were run on free market lines, such outcomes might be mere happenstance. But given the extent to which Japan regulates its trade, it is clear that Chinese-made goods enjoy affirmative-action status. This has indeed been apparent from the beginning of the Chinese miracle. Even in the 1980s and 1990s when China was competing mainly with nations like Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, Japan strongly favored China over the others.

What’s in it for Japan? Exports. Almost alone among advanced nations, Japan enjoys a broadly balanced trade relationship with China. In a macroeconomic version of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours, top officials on each side set policies to favor purchases from the other.

Posted in Japan | Comments Off on Why the Media’s Silence on Japanese Protectionism Gives Trump Another Priceless Opening

How Did Cruz Get This Far?

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The liberals have actually been helping Trump with a lot of their attacks. I look at video after video of Mexicans waving Mexican flags, while cursing in Spanish at middle class American citizens at Trump rallies who have to pay for all of them and take all the blame in the world, and all I can think of is how screwed up this country has become and how Trump is the only one who is even trying to tackle the problem, instead of exacerbate it. There’s clearly quite a few others who see it too.

* That which got Cruz this far was the same thing that meant that he wouldn’t make it all the way to the top. That is, being a lamestream conservative ideologue who plays by all the soi disant informal political campaigning rules. Like you’ve been saying, lamestream conservatism is trying to solve 1980′s already solved problems in 2016′s world.

The good news for him is that even in our era of the Presidency attaining more and more power over domestic issues, to match its near dictatorial power over foreign and military policy, being a United States Senator is still an enviable position; hell, I was one election away from being a staffer for one. I think that now that he realizes that the Presidency isn’t happening, Cruz will quit acting like he can or should be President, which I think was part of the reason why his Senate colleagues don’t much like him, and get to work being a good Senator. Also, part of the reason his colleagues disliked him is that he came right into the Senate thinking of the Presidency, they didn’t like him because they think he needs to win a couple of terms and pay his dues, and not jump ahead of older more experienced politicians. Now, Baraq Obama ran for and won the Presidency after barely working in the Senate after winning one term, but he was different for one very obvious reason: B-L-A-C-K. Cruz, while “Hispanic,” in terms of having a New World white Spaniard for a father and therefore his surname, wasn’t social justicey or civil rightsey enough for his election to be a profound or a first.

I can compare Ted Cruz to another Ted, that being Kennedy. At some point, he realized that the Presidency was never in the cards for him, and started getting down to business as a Senator. This is why he was able to go from being resented to being loved by Democrats.

* I personally liked Cruz for his oily Nixonian vibe. Sometimes you need a slimeball like Nixon. Michael Lind once said something like, “Nixon wasn’t the best president, but he was the best realistic option America had at the time.”

Ah, well. Maybe one could say the same thing about Trump. I said from the beginning I’d support him if he was the nominee, and I meant it. So here we go…

* I gotta say that Trump was ruthless with Cruz. Those attacks on his wife and allegations of extramarital affairs must have been psychologically extremely distressing and disruptive for Cruz’s family given that his wife has a history of serious depression. When people called Trump’s nasty tweet about Heidi a huge mistake and turning point I suspected they were wrong. It was calculated to land like a bomb right in Cruz’s house. Trump is a genius when it comes to f*cking with people. My dad was that way, so I know it when I see it.

Can he do it to Hillary? I bet he can. He’s played enough golf with Bill Clinton to know a thing or two about their dynamic. In fact, that may be what convinced him to jump in the race.

I think Hillary is going to be on the defensive from here on out, and she’s not very good when she’s in that mode. Even if she wins the general, Trump will have done permanent damage to her and her health, both mental and physical I’d wager. That man is merciless.

* I think it truly is time for the Republican Party and the conservative movement to come to a reckoning over its future. The numbers that are relevant aren’t just Trump’s, but the combined numbers of Trump and Cruz. Both ran in opposition to immigration. Both ran as outsiders (Trump with more credibility on the point than Cruz).

What is almost incredible is how very few votes were ever cast for a candidate acceptable to the establishment, and running on a platform acceptable to the establishment. Bizarrely, the establishment imagines that these outsider candidates — especially Trump of course — have betrayed the conservative movement. But what this nomination process makes crystal clear is that there is no conservative movement as the establishment imagines it. There’s just about zero electoral support for their “movement”. What Trump and Cruz have done is a splendid piece of exploratory surgery, effectively separating out what the voters really want, allowing them clear choices. What voters want is something the establishment has always opposed, and which the candidates the establishment have backed have been designed to obscure.

The establishment may generate all the ideas and policies and money they desire — but their movement fails to exist, because it is empty of voters.

* Bobby Jindal said on Hannity that he will put his differences that he has with Donald Trump aside and vote for him in the general election, because the thought of a Hildabeast presidency scares the hell out of him.

The Donald better hope that he gets more voters like Bobby who are not crazy about him, but sees him as the lesser of 2 evils when compared to Hildabeast.

* Stalin once said that he didn’t care who casts the votes, he only cared who counted the votes. The reason he said that is that he was a mid 20th century Soviet Russian. If he was an early 21st century SJW American, he would say that he doesn’t care about who casts the votes or who counts the votes, he cares about who interprets the election results.

Interpreting election results is a very underappreciated choke point in the machines of modern democratic republican governance in a modern media climate.

We all know how the Republican establishment, at the behest of the cheap labor gluttons in the donor class, interpreted Romney not winning in 2012 as a function of him not being open borders enough, therefore the solution is for the party to be even more open borders. This is why you had Gang Bangers of Eight, Schumer-Rubio, Jeb!.

Parallel to that, the people that live in the lamestream conservative bubble universe interpreted Romney not winning and the several million white people who voted in 2008 but did not vote in 2012 as a function of those four million people giving Romney a lamestream conservative purity acid test which he failed ergo they stayed home. That silly reasoning is so easy to refute on so many levels, (the easiest way is that these people did vote for John McCain, who is even less conservative than Romney). Sean Trende actually had the best analysis of these missing whites; I know you’ve had posts about it. And of course the elderly black women who turned out in record numbers. But, the truth doesn’t matter, it’s what lamer cons in the lamer con ideological cult bubble believed. This is why you had Ted Cruz running a campaign of lamestream conservative ideological purity, because he is one of those cultists. Sure, it was good for 7.2 million votes and 11 states, but it’s not good enough even to win the Republican Party nomination in 2016, much less the whole Presidency.

* I hope that the Trump campaign informs the #NeverTrump camp that they are cordially invited to go f**k themselves. George Will, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and all the rest of those flatulent gas-bags should be declared persona-non-grata. No innaugural ball tickets for you, fellas. Knowing who is on your side and who isn’t is an important part of politics.

* Cruz gave up because if he could not turn things around in Indiana, he knew it was hopeless.

Cruz’s major advantages in Indiana:

Talk Radio
Indianapolis’ WIBC, a Fox affiliate, along with a half dozen other major radio stations are owned by EMMIS (“Absolute Truth” in Yiddish/Hebrew) Communications controlled by uber neocon, ultra Zionist Jeff Smulyan. WIBC/EMMIS was heavily pushing Cruz, telling its listeners that Cruz was the “real deal”. Popular local Hoosier host Greg Garrison would say in his typically hokey way that “Ted Cruz is a strong as a garlic malt”. When Greg Garrison’s listeners started calling in complaining about state Republicans selling them out on immigration, Common Core, the Gay Agenda, and WIBC’s insane Zionist foreign policy, the station stop taking callers.

Jeff Smulyan was so strongly behind Cruz that last summer that when Rush Limbaugh started warming up to Trump because it was apparent that so too was his audience, WIBC made the unprecedented move of dropping its by far top rated show. Instead WIBC replaced Rush with ultra Cruz shill Dana Loesch, from Glenn Beck’s now cratering The Blaze media empire.

Apparently Smulyan played a big role in Cruz’s quick breakup with Kaisach in favor of selecting Carly Fiorina as a running mate. WIBC hosted several rallies for Fiorina in the last year. Smulyan was clearly delusional over Fiorina because besides being hated as an outsourcer of jobs, Hoosiers despised her for being an early supporter of Common Core right up until she realized how radioactive it is in the Midwest.

Indiana Republican Establishment
The ultra Cucked state Republican party establishment was 100% against Trump. Gov Mike Pence endorsed Cruz. Right up until the Republican base started screaming, they openly plotted to throw their delegate votes to anyone but Trump.

Indiana Right to Life
Indiana is one of those states where the abortion issue still miraculously motivates lots of voters and volunteers for the Republicans. Our home got 3 or more phone calls telling us Trump was immoral and lousy on Right to Life.

Demographics
Political Scientists like to describe Indiana as Northern Appalachia. And while it is true the state has lots of redneck migrants from Kentucky and West Virginia who talk like Tom Hardy’s Fitzgerald from The Revenant, the other major demographic are of 1848, not “1488″ Germanic stock. These folks are suckers for the universalist empty ideological rhetoric of the Neocons and Conservatism Inc. Another major demographic are the Christian Dispensationalists brainwashed with Scofield Reference Bible lunatic love for Israel.

* Cruz actually did run a very good campaign. He outlasted every other Republican (other than Trump obviously and the irrelevant John Kasich) and won about a third of the electoral votes. It was especially impressive for him to outperform Rubio, Bush, Walker, and Christie. It takes talent for a new Senator to come in and go that far.

Cruz was very adept at adjusting his ideology to fit the base, especially on immigration and foreign policy. He did very well at turning out the vote and grassroots organization. That was evident after his unexpected win in Iowa.

Cruz’s basic problem was that Trump’s nationalism was always a lot more popular than the standard 80s conservatism. When the base was exposed to a viable nationalist candidate, they jumped on the train. Republican voters realized that the typical conservative platform (smaller govt, lower taxes, hawkish foreign policy) didn’t really align with their interests as much as the nationalist platform (protectionism, immigration restriction, America first).

However, I don’t think many people (outside of Pat Buchanan, the AltRight, and Sailer) realized the appeal of nationalism until now. If Trump wins in November, nationalism may become the dominant ideology of the Republican party.

Of course, the Donor Class won’t be happy. So I expect plenty of opposition to Trump.

On the Democratic side, it’ll be interesting to see if the economic leftists can take their party back from the oligarchs within the next few years. Most likely not in 2016 (Hillary is the ideal candidate of the globalist oligarchs), but what about 2018 or 2020?

* Of course he is not actually a nationalist. Why would so many Big Money backers have donated if he had been a nationalist? Nationalism does not make globalist corporations increased profits.

Yes, he did come around to nationalist issues. To put it another way, he imitated what trump was saying after he realized that unless he did he was going to get buried. The problem is that a lot of us realized that he is just another lying politician who will say anything to get votes. We don’t believe lying politicians like ted cruz.

The media and the establishment had no problem whatsoever with cruz imitating trump on so many issues. Why? They understand also that cruz was just saying whatever he needed to say to get votes. They understand that he is a lying politician and that he will bend his knee to globalism if ever elected.

* Funny how when Trump started talking about America First, his campaign immediately went to a higher level….must have been a mistake, right????

* I never liked Fiorina. Her extremist foreign policy views alarmed me. After Russia began military involvement in Syria, I remember that she called for an American military confrontation with Russia. That’s absolutely insane. Russia is a nuclear-armed nation.

It’s strange that American media and political elites are so scared of Trump, who actually has very sober and restrained view with respect to foreign policy. It’s equally strange that they treat loony Fiorina as a serious public figure.

* Before Trump entered the race, I spent some time with Cruz at two or three private fundraising events. Back in May. Nothing frustrated me more than hearing him say that Reagan Democrats were coming to him and that the missing voters were Evangelicals. For how great his team was organizationally, they really whiffed on that one. The missing voters were non-southern, working class white voters. They all voted for Trump. They care about immigration, trade and US national interests (which we all here know). I begged Cruz in May to take populist/nationalist positions on immigration and trade. He didn’t listen because he didn’t believe it. In fact, he told us then that he was going to hit Walker because he had suggested cutting legal immigration. Then he wanted nothing to do with Jeff Sessions. He also had no problem with Muslim immigration. Once he came around to the nationalist issues it was too late. He lost because he’s not actually a nationalist.

* I want someone who could do 2 things.

1. Advise Trump on immigration policy
2. Help pass anti-immigration legislation through the House and Senate

Sessions can do that. He’s a very bright guy.

Of course, I think Kris Kobach could be good too. Even Tom Tancredo.

I see Sessions as a realistic choice because he’s very close to Trump and has been advising him extensively since August. I could see Trump choosing him as VP. While I like Kobach, I’m not sure if Kobach is close to Trump.

I do agree that if Sessions becomes the VP, we need a good replacement. A Senator who will fight for our side.

* Northeasterners like Trump because lots of them are ethnic (Irish, Italian, etc.) proles with abrasive personalities. Trump is their type of guy. Trump’s crushing victory in Staten Island really demonstrated his popularity with the east coast Italian/Irish loudmouths.

Nice Midwesterners feel Trump is too mean.

By the way, Trump did well in the South. Southern whites are polite, but lots of them are roughneck Scots-Irish types.

* By the way, isn’t it interesting how Trump talks about Japan so much? It’s been decades since American politicians even mentioned the trade threat from Japan.

NYTIMES: Donald J. Trump has often aimed his raucous brand of disparagement at foreign countries during his presidential run. There is China, “ripping off” the United States on trade and stealing its jobs. And Mexico, closing its eyes to a flood of migrants and drugs across the border.

But his preoccupation with Japan is perhaps more unusual, if not anachronistic.

Mr. Trump chastised Japan last week in a Republican candidates’ debate, naming it along with China and Mexico as countries where “we are getting absolutely crushed on trade.” He has previously accused Japan of manipulating its currency to achieve an unfair economic advantage, and of exploiting its military alliance with the United States to protect itself at little risk and cost.

His complaints are reminiscent of another era, when Japan’s economy was booming and its companies were buying trophy American assets like movie studios and Rockefeller Center. Since the 1990s, though, Japan’s growth has been mostly flat, and trade friction much more subdued, even as the United States continues to run large trade deficits with Japan.

Whereas Japanese officials once feared so-called Japan-bashing by Americans, today they are more likely to lament “Japan-passing,” a shift in attention to places viewed as more dynamic, like China.

“Trump’s comments on Japan remind me of the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, when Japan was considered a serious rival to American economic pre-eminence,” said Glen S. Fukushima, a former United States trade official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group. “It’s interesting that despite the two-decade stagnation of the Japanese economy, Trump is now reviving the idea of Japan as an economic rival robbing America of jobs.”

Or, as Robert E. Kelly, an East Asia specialist at Pusan National University in South Korea, put it on Twitter during the Republican debate: “Japan, Japan, Japan again. Trump is living in the Michael Crichton ’80s.” (Mr. Crichton’s best-selling novel “Rising Sun,” published in 1992, depicted a Japan that waged ruthless economic war against the United States.)

Mr. Trump’s ascendance has begun to cause serious unease in Japan. Even if his run ends short of the White House, the worry is that an election dominated by such talk could leave the United States more closed to trade and less willing to defend its allies.
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“My friends in the Foreign Ministry are in a state of panic,” said Kiichi Fujiwara, an expert on international politics at the University of Tokyo. “This is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen straightforward protectionism from an American presidential candidate.”
Continue reading the main story

“If there is a big shake-up in American politics, there is a danger that Japan could become an outlet for popular dissatisfaction with the spread of inequality and other issues,” The Nikkei financial daily said.

* We were told that this was the strongest most interesting diverse vibrant accomplished Republican Presidential candidate field of our generation.

Donald Trump just beat every last one of them.

Let that sink in.

And draw your own conclusions.

* eff Smulyan in is own way is a major Zionist media macher that most folks don’t know about.

Also people don’t know that Smulyan is the man who gave Alex Jones his start.

And for decades Alex Jones has been a textbook example of the TWMNBN tactic of creating a false “controlled opposition” that deflects populist outrage away from Jewish interests and if need be onto ridiculous conspiracy theory dead ends.

http://alexjonesexposed.info/alex-jones-and-emmis-communications/

The problem now is that Alex Jones seems to want to break away from Smulyan and hold on to his audience which is increasingly being “Red Pilled” by the alt-right.

* I live in a very wealthy area. But nothing pisses me off more than walking into Costco and feeling like I’m at the United Nations. You can’t go to the movies or mall or zoo anymore without feeling like you’re in some third world hellhole. And that doesn’t even speak to Islam, which so many of us believe has no place in the West and yet now is quite visible here. If I felt this – and again, I don’t live or work amongst the diversity that much, no doubt others feel it too. Why are these people here? The third world invasion has become too apparent.

Had Buchanan not been an anti-Semite, perhaps he could have won. He was right on a lot of issues, but he was a bit nutty on certain things, such as his WWII version of events. But yes, I agree that the future of the GOP is as a nationalist party. That’s what happens when you go multiculturalist.

* Southerners seem to mix their surface politeness with an underlying hardness. They sometimes give off a vibe that you don’t want to f*** with them. Midwestern whites generally don’t.

Perhaps that explains why Wisconsin blacks are so different from rural Mississippi blacks.

* As has been noted many times before, our rulers are culturally and economically completely out of touch with regular Americans. They don’t realize the anger below the surface because they don’t interact much with ordinary people. Also, PC makes people keep their anger quiet these days.

Trump has revealed that there’s a huge amount of discontent below the surface. He’s expressing how a lot of us feel. That’s why he wins.

For political elites and oligarchs who live in a bubble, this is tough to understand.

* A big factor in Trump’s success has been his decision to avoid fighting the culture wars and stick to populist issues like immigration and trade. Getting into heated debates about social issues like abortion and gay rights is a high risk, low reward strategy in the current political climate.

* LF: I think Trump will choose Scott Brown to be his VP. A great choice.

* Even if he loses, Trump has already accomplished more of significance than any R nominee of my lifetime; Trump has begun the process of de-legitimizing the cultural Left and re-legitimizing the traditionalist Right. Reagan only barely attempted such a feat.

I heard the best encomium to Trump from, of all things, a Wall Street (apparently financial industry) superpac regular R donor who was holding off contributing this year. Asked in an interview whether he was holding off because he didn’t like Trump he said, and I paraphrase, ‘me and my friends are re-examining the R party. The genie is out of the bottle and things will never be the same again.’ In other words, the scales have fallen from the eyes of too many Americans to ever return to the old ways. That ideological intersection between capitalism and rootless cosmopolitanism pawned off as ‘the conservative movement’ will be fighting a defensive war from here on out. If Hillary is elected, is there any chance the circumstances that brought about the Trump rebellion will be diminished? Of course not. Trump has ushered in a new era just as Thomas Paine did. Whether he becomes president or not is almost incidental.

* It’s very disheartening to see exotic third worlders imported en masse by assorted do gooders and leftist plotters. The state (meaning the stupid tax paying typical working person) pays these invaders to breed future democrat voting EBT SNAP Section 8 Obamaphone and Medicaid sucking parasites. Your tax dollas at work you rules obeying law abiding suckers

* The common image Europeans (who know Germans better than Americans do)have of Germans is of coldness to the point of unfeeling ruthlessness and merciless remorselessness – not traits of the sensitive at all. Perhaps this is all colored by the unspeakble Geramn atrocities committed in WW2, but the general idea (and I’m not being gratuitously offensie here), is of a deficit of ‘human’ qualities and a remorseless, robotic will to power and intolerance, yes Greeks and Italians might fail economically and have to be bailed out as basket-cases, but we recognise human failings in them and thus sympathise with them as ‘being like us’. The image that persists of the Geramn is of the square headed, shaven headed Prussian sergeant with a big moustache and spiked helmet barking out orders – and beating those who fail with a big stick – not Schiller or Beethoven at all. The idea is Nietzschaen ‘will to power’, the machine, efficiency, the ant-hill, science fiction warriors and societies etc – that old Hanna Barbera cartoon of the ants as Roman soldiers (which no one seems to remember).Of course the last war cemented the idea of the ruthless robots and their mad genius god shaking he world and only stopped by hubris.
Strangely enough, the image of Jews as tragic, etrnal victims, violin players and tortured, sensitive professors, persecuted by gentile beasts, is totally at odds with what the world has discovered of murderous, vulgar Russian oligarchs, agressive Isreali gangsters and pimps and neocon/zionist aggression and hatred in general.
Europeans, who have lived amongst other Europeans for centuries are much better understanding of these subtleties than Americans, who generally live by propagandised stereotypes and deliberate falsehoods.

* I am the anon at 7:51 who mentioned the book discussing the possible connection between Nietzche and Zionism and Zimbardo book on shyness which briefly discusses the low score of Jews on psychological tests for this trait.

A lot of interesting comments on so many different issues.

“Dr Van Nostrand said…

and pimps” and neocon/zionist aggression

Evil, evil Zionists for wanting to keep a land the size of Jersey ,surely no other people EVER acquired land any larger than by force …right…. .”

Yes, I once pointed out something like this to a Chinese American colleague who was highly sympathetic to the Palestinians and Arabs and not so much to Jews in Israel.

I suggested that the original land taken by the Israelis after WWII was not that large (particularly if you do not believe that most Israelies have designs for a greater Israel stretching to the Euphrates or “world domination” as some outliers claim).

I guess my attitude, probably shared by many other White Gentiles in the U.S., was it’s a fairly small amount of land with apparently no oil, why can’t they (i.e. the Israelis and Arabs) just learn to get along without having to draw the U.S. into it and spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives of our citizens (of course the Neo-cons have seen to it that we were dragged into Iraq, Afghanistan,, Libya and now on to Syria and Iran).

His attitude was that it was “principle” of the thing. That even if it might seem like a small piece of land in the grand scheme of things the Palestinians would never forget nor would their Arab cousins (nor should they).

Yes, I suppose this is true, but one wonders if some workable two state solutions could be devised. Sigh … it’s a mess. It would seem that there would be a lot of potential synergies if the two groups could cooperate rather than be in conflict, but perhaps that is asking too much of human nature.

The older I get the more I find solace in Schopenhauer’s remark that if you have low opinions of human nature you are more inclined to feel pity than anger when you see humans behaving badly.

“fnn said…
A minor literary classic that expresses these sentiments at great length is this memoir of an Italian officer serving on the Russian Front:
Few Returned: Twenty-eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-1943

Thanks for the tip. It looks interesting. I noticed that the Amazon reviewers remark about the propensity of German and Russian soldiers to shoot wounded enemy combatants they find.. I have a bunch of uncles who fought in WWII in the U.S. army. One of them relayed a story about killing Germans who were attempting to surrender ( his own platoon was lost behind enemy lines). He was still haunted by it. Under extreme conditions people do terrible things out of what may possibly even seem like necessity at the time. I am not sure that the Germans and Russians are that much different than any other group in this regard.

* Cruz may have destroyed his political career during this campaign. He should have realized he could not win the nomination after Trump won Florida. The betting parlors in Ireland actually paid off those betting on Trump to win the nomination after Trump won Florida, and for good reason, it was clear Trump would win…but then the neverTrump camp encouraged Cruz to dig in and fight for a contested election. He was not campaigning to win, he must have known this if he is intelligent. He was going to lose states in the northeast and even admitted afterwards he expected to lose these states.

His tactic to poach delegates was not acceptable to most republicans, but he had to boast and brag about his success which made it worse. it gave Trump a legitimate complaint and made it easy for him to attack Lyin Ted. Trump was much smarter than Cruz and encouraged Cruz to steal delegates, knowing it would tarnish Lyin Ted’s reputation. I will not applaud Cruz for his tactics, because it ultimately harmed him, thus it was not in his best interest, It was clear the establishment did not actually support him, Romney campaigned for Kasich in Ohio. Jeb refused to endorse anyone in Florida. The establishment sacrificed the political career of Cruz in an effort to get Ryan on the ticket in a contested election. Cruz fell for their trap in his quest for power.

Cruz was smart not to go after Trump early in the campaign, but then went viral , attacking Trump instead of promoting his own agenda, knowing the establishment did not fully support him. He should have maintained his integrity and avoided getting down and dirty with Trump. Now his political career is in jeopardy. Bad move for a young politician. He would have had more opportunities to advance his agenda, but not now. I am not happy he destroyed his career.He could have been useful to the GOP is a few years. Now he will be working for Goldman Sachs to pay off his loans. Thus I cannot cheer for Cruz. He is no longer of value to the GOP because he foolishly compromised with the establishment when the odds were stacked against him. He took a big risk for little gain, not smart. Not a long term strategist.

* George W Bush destroyed the GOP. any President who doubles the burden of federal spending in just eight years is disqualified from being a conservative – unless the term is stripped of any meaning and conservatives no longer care about limited government and constitutional constraints on Washington. Bush coerced republicans in congress to support the utterly irresponsible prescription drug entitlement. There is no doubt that Bush’s net impact on healthcare was to saddle America with more statism. On regulatory issues, the biggest change implemented during the Bush year was probably Sarbanes-Oxley – a clear example of regulatory overkill. Another regulatory change, which turned out to be a ticking time bomb, was the expansion of the “affordable-lending” requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

During the savings & loan bailout 25 years ago, at least incompentent executives and negligent shareholders were wiped out. Government money was used, but only to pay off depositors and/or to pay healthy firms to absorb bankrupt institutions. Bush, by contrast, exacerbated all the moral hazard issues by resucing the executives and shareholders who helped create the mess. Last but not least, let’s not forget that Bush got the ball rolling on auto-industry bailouts.

His hubristic attempt to remake the political culture of foreign nations via military occupation was not conservative. His profligate spending habits were not conservative. His empowerment of the federal education bureaucracy at the expense of state and local control was not conservative. Federal funding of embryo research was not conservative.

* I was an admirer of Cruz. Not anymore. He is a very bright guy but his instincts are poor. And, more fundamentally, there is really something offputting about his character.

Some of the missteps:

* Attacking Trump after the Chicago protests

* Blaming Trump for NE story (without any evidence) while calling Trump a liar for saying he was behind the Melania ad

* The whole fake Carson is dropping out so vote for me fiasco

* Constantly lying about his position on 2013 amnesty

* Saying that nominee would and should be the one with most delegates going into convention and that Establishment wanted a brokered convention but then switching course to defend a brokered convention when he no longer had a path to nomination

* Refusing to say he would support Trump as the nominee

* Defending the cancelled straw poll in CO. Could have merely said he was playing by the rules set by the CO GOP but that he prefers wider voter participation when possible

* In general, just his off-the-charts ambition. Cruz could have secured a place in a Trump administration or even SCOTUS. Instead, he put his personal ambition ahead of the country once it was clear that the only way he would receive nomination would be in a contested convention

* All the weird religious baggage on full display. None of it seemed to help him except perhaps parading out Beck in Utah. Certainly would have doomed him in general had he succeeded in winning nomination.

* Unlike Buchanan, Trump is not an ideologue and he is not an intellectual. He came to his nationalism emotionally, as did most of his voters and that is why he connected with them. Cruz was a phony when he spoke about immigration or trade and you could feel it.

Posted in Ted Cruz | Comments Off on How Did Cruz Get This Far?

More Diversity Please

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Luke Ford

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Palm-wine-tapper-butchers-20-year-old-lady-to-death-435336

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/worldNews/Congolese-Minister-fired-for-masturbating-in-office-435669

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/incest-lack-of-sex-education-drive-teen-pregnancies-in-el-salvador/ar-BBsxsxP?ocid=spartanntp

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/03/european-commission-turkish-citizens-visa-free-travel-schengen

Source

Posted in Diversity | Comments Off on More Diversity Please

Bernie Wins Indiana

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Hillary will be forced to campaign against Bernie a little longer. The more people see and hear Hillary talking the less they like her. She has very high negatives for a reason, it is not due to her politics as much as her personality and history of lying, such as fabricating the story about being under sniper fire when she landed in Bosnia.

* Bernie’s candidacy success has been good for Trump not because of anything in and of itself, but because Bern’s success and Trump’s success rely on a lot of the same forces and mentalities, the populist insurgent mentality. It means that populist politics were a hot iron that was ready to be struck in both parties, because populism is the national mood, not just a one party thing.

I find it curious that the two major Democrats for President this year are a former Goldwater Girl, and someone who at this moment is not an elected Democrat.

* I read the editorial as saying that Bernie has pulled Hillary to the left and that’s a good thing. It is a good thing, but not in the way that they meant it. It’s a good thing for Trump. The traditional route to the Oval Office is to seize the middle ground — if Bernie forces Hillary to the left then Trump has more middle ground to seize. He is already not very far right by Republican standards.

* Bernie is “the other side of the coin” of today, and ALL past 9 months for God’s sake. Earlier, tonight, I told my youngest son, “whoah, we are in a historic moment.” Half my family are Bernie Bros…the other; Dark Side – Trump. I have always liked “the house divided,”…always been good for Holiday conversations around the table, whether in Europe or USA. We all love to debate and eat…snow shoe/ski/ride the next day.

I miss all you guys, here, (and, some, very few girls- Unz still needs to work on that, or maybe not, whatever) and will post more late May. I wanted to say something…’cause: historic.

* Bernie’s disgruntled white guys are not the same as Trump’s disgruntled white guys. I doubt that many will cross over. However, Bernie’s disgruntled white guys may stay home because they have no desire to vote for Hillary, which is almost as good (for Trump).

* In primary after primary, looking at maps showing where they win, Hillary Clinton wins in areas with relatively strong local Democratic Party organizations. This was true in Indiana too. Sanders does alot better with independents voting in the Democratic primaries, where they are allowed to do so. In other words, Hillary Clinton is winning the machine or regular Democratic vote.

The Democratic Party is and always has been the more machine politics party compared to the Republicans, so this gets her the nomination. But her difficulty in winning independents and her complete dependence on the regulars point to her being a weak general election candidate.

In some ways Sanders is a left-wing, much more likeable version of Ted Cruz. His career shows him to be good at political strategy (remember he started his political career running and winning as a minor party candidate, which is really hard to do in this country), but to be a really unlikely politician due to his background and political views. He really shouldn’t have given Clinton this much of a challenge.

* Just as Trump mentioned tonight that people saw thru the 60,000 attack ads against him, people can also sense Hillary’s fundamental phoniness and are repelled by it, to the point that they prefer a Jewish socialist who would normally be radioactive, even in a Democrat primary.

* If Bernie wins most of the remaining states such as California and ends up with a delegate count more than Hillary’s, but loses because of the superdelegates in the tank for her, there’s going to be an explosion of fury at the Democratic party convention. I don’t see ticked-off Bernie Bros going to the polls to show up for Hillary in the general election, because they’ll be too angry with her for doing in their guy by foul means. It’ll finally dawn on the Dems that their own party rules let the traditional Smoke-Filled Room choose the candidate, right at a time period when they’d thought they’d made their party more egalitarian.

And if Hillary loses to Trump in the general, that will only convince a lot of Dems that they need to purge their party of the status quo wing if they want to see true leftism. Adding the Trump insurgency, the 1% may no longer have a party of any sort after 2016. It’ll be interesting.

* It helps Trump enormously if Bernie stays in the race. Even if he can’t possibly win, as long as he continues to have strong support, it makes Hillary look like a weak candidate. Constantly being reminded of the super-delegates issue also makes the Democrats look corrupt.

The GOP should capitalize on this moment in time to come together behind Trump and stop talking about 3rd parties and convention shananigans. They have everything to gain.

* The more Hillary talks, the happier this Bernie supporter is in the sure knowledge that she will not win. Every time she opens her mouth I see millions of dead brown civilians and thousands of dead American military pouring out. With Hil we have a 100% certainty of losing one, two, three, or more pointless new wars in the Middle East. Trump may be a wildcard, but at least there’s a chance he might say “no” to the permanent war machine running both parties.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Bernie Wins Indiana