Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

‘Rabbi for Trump’ Gets Behind The Donald on Facebook

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

On Facebook there are “Rabbis for Human Rights,” “Rabbis for Bernie” and, until recently, “Rabbis for Hillary.”
Now, these groups are joined by a rabbinical flag-bearer for Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump.
The controversial GOP front-runner’s fiery rhetoric about Muslims may have drawn condemnation from American rabbis and other Jewish leaders across the denominational spectrum, but that hasn’t stopped Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg from cheering on The Donald.
A Yeshiva University-educated rabbi who is rabbi emeritus of an Edison, New Jersey, Conservative congregation, Rosenberg started a Facebook group, “Rabbi for Trump,” on Dec. 8. (Originally called “Rabbis for Trump,” he reportedly renamed it after failing to attract many like-minded colleagues.)
The group’s page has 520 “likes” so far, though how many of the likers are actual supporters, as opposed to interested bystanders, is anyone’s guess. So far, the posts consist mostly of praise for Trump, fiery complaints about negative media coverage of the candidate, promotions of Rosenberg’s book and a proud mention that Rosenberg’s congregation hosted the controversial, anti-Muslim blogger-activist Pamela Geller.
Rosenberg told the New Jersey Jewish News he started the group because Trump is “the leader among all the Republicans at this point.”
He added that he also “wanted a vehicle to communicate a very strong message to [Trump] for supporting the State of Israel.”
The rabbi, who is the child of two Holocaust survivors and says he was born in a displaced person’s camp in Germany, shares Trump’s opposition to allowing Syrian refugees into the country.
“My concern is that these Syrian refugees are not being vetted by the FBI,” he told the New Jersey Jewish News.
Rosenberg, who notes frequently (and all in capital letters) on the Rabbi for Trump page, “The Nazis and Hitler murdered most of my family,” told the New Jersey paper he objected to a letter signed by 1,000 rabbis several weeks ago comparing Syrian refugees to Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
“There’s no comparison between this and the Holocaust, where Jews had nowhere to go to. Certainly in this case Europe can take them in and certainly the Arab countries can take them in. I just don’t want something to happen where my children or somebody else’s children live. I think it’s a disservice for Holocaust survivors to make the comparison,” he said.
“The truth is my parents had to go through all sorts of checks and be sponsored … They had to have jobs. I know more about being a refugee than many of these rabbis.”

Posted in Donald Trump, Rabbis | Comments Off

Haaretz: Book Ban: Israel’s New Mainstreaming of Racial Separation

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Racial separation is the most natural thing in the world. It’s a common theme throughout Torah — separating Jews from Gentiles, kosher food from trafe food, holiness from impurity, sacred time from secular time, adults from children, men from women.

The more a society fails to make these sorts of distinctions, the more decadent it is.

There is no concept of any such sin as “racism” or “sexism” or “homophobia” or “Islamophobia” prior to the 20th Century. Instead, these were distinctions taken for granted by first-world peoples.

Israel can be a light unto the nations when it shows the world the power of ethno-nationalism.

Us vs them is the most natural division in the world.

Until the 1930s, the phrase “the Jewish race” was widely used. There’s nothing wrong it. Jews are a genetically distinct group.

Haaretz:

Nostalgic White South African diehards are going to be delighted at the spirited defense of racial separation mounted by senior Education Ministry official Dalia Fenig last week.
Not since the end of South African apartheid in 1994 has the policy of apartheid been expounded as explicitly and clearly as in Fenig’s explanation of her disqualification of a novel from inclusion in the general high school curriculum in Israel.
The novel, “Borderlife,” by Dorit Rabinyan, deals with a love affair in New York between a Jewish Israeli woman and a Palestinian man. Last week, it was deemed inappropriate for Israeli high schoolers.
“Young people of adolescent age tend to romanticize and don’t, in many cases, have the systemic vision that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation,” Fenig is reported as saying in her own defense.
Until recently, Israeli racism could be shrugged off as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Animosity and distrust are bound to occur when two national groups clash over their rights and narratives. It was possible to see it as a sort of operational racism that would gradually disappear when the conflict was resolved.
Most of us knew of the bigoted and pernicious Judaism taught by extremist rabbis in the occupied territories, but they and their teachings always seemed to be too obscure and too inconsequential to be taken seriously. Their rants about Jewish exclusivity and blood purity were never going to fly in Tel Aviv.
Well, they’re flying now. Fenig represents mainstream Israel and her thinking has a direct influence on the education our children receive and, by extension, the people they grow up to be. Nor is it just Fenig. She happened to stumble into the limelight, but behind her is Naftali Bennett and the burgeoning forces of darkness that he commands.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the essence of apartheid in South Africa was never segregated park benches or puritan censorship. Those, and many other absurdities, were just the outgrowths of apartheid – the tumors, rather the cancer itself. And, as we know, cancer can manifest itself in many ways.
Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for what in English is best translated as apart-ness; a policy designed to keep races or ethnic groups from mixing out of fear of racial pollution. Or, as Fenig put it, to prevent them from “threatening [each other’s] separate identity.”
Identity, of course, is a laden concept – Fenig-speak for both racial xenophobia and the power and privileges associated with the superior socio-political position of the dominant race, to which Fenig just happens to belong.
Like Fenig, the Afrikaners who were so enthusiastic about retribalizing the Zulus, Xhosa and Tswana into bantustans had zero interest in the culture and traditions of those tribes, but enormous interest in ensuring that they could neither challenge nor share in the self-enrichment of the Whites. Sanctimonious concern for the other – “it will be best for them as well” – is classic racism.
The proponents of apartheid liked to describe it as a policy of “separate but equal,” a proposition as preposterous in South Africa then as “democratic and Jewish” is in Israel today. In a power structure in which just one race (or religion or caste) has the monopoly, both equality and democracy are a sham. In apartheid South Africa it meant that, once the races were fully separated, whites would be equal to whites and blacks would be equal to blacks. In Israel it means that a small number of Arab parliamentarians with no chance of ever gaining power are allowed to be a PR window-dressing.
Fenig’s racism – her “systemic vison” of national-ethnic identities – is the real cancer, and it’s metastasizing fast. In South Africa, a similar systemic vision required anti-miscegenation legislation, separate living areas for the different races (known as Group Areas), separate – and highly unequal – education and, of course, separate political institutions, to prevent one race from polluting the other.

Posted in Israel, Race | Comments Off

Life As A Deeply Closeted Orthodox Rabbi

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Some Orthodox rabbis are impossible to understand until you realize that they are deeply closeted gay men.

Sure, they might have wives and children, but at heart, they feel a romantic and sexual tug towards males. They may never act on these urges, but their closeted gayness shines through.

Gay men are more effeminate, more emotional, more teary, more precious, more empathic, more nurturing, more dramatic, more explosive, and more sensitive than straight men.

It’s not unknown in Orthodox Judaism for men to be married for more than a decade, to father children, and then to divorce and to declare themselves gay and to continue to live in Orthodox Judaism.

It would not be easy, however, as an Orthodox rabbi with a wife and children and a pulpit, to come out as gay. That happens in the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, but not in Orthodoxy.

Some of these deeply closeted gay rabbis are a threat to molest kids or to otherwise act out in ways that are deeply destructive to themselves and to others. I expect that they feel very alone in the world and very desolate.

Almost all priests who molest are gay men who molest boys (how often do you hear about priests molesting girls?). Orthodox rabbis who molest boys are also by definition gay or bi.

I am sure that many men who struggle with their homosexual urges turn to religion to try to transcend these unwanted parts of themselves. I expect the efficacy of this varies.

Heterosexuality and homosexuality are a continuum. Acting on these drives depend to an extent depends on circumstance and social norms.

Many of the institutional, theological, and interpersonal conflicts between Orthodox rabbis make more sense when you realize that these fights are between robust heterosexuals on the one hand and those rabbis who are confused (gays, feminists, marxists, pro-Muslim, want to share sovereignty of Jerusalem with Arabs, etc).

Many politicians, journalists and commentators make more sense when you realize that they are deeply closeted gay men. Columnist Michael Barone seems like a deeply closeted gay man who just so happens to enthusiastically support gay marriage as a conservative value.

A couple of deeply closeted gay men (including Jules Zentner at UCLA) helped me through difficult periods of my life when it seemed like everyone else had abandoned me (not true, just a symptom of my depressed thinking). They were attracted to my vulnerability, to my appearing lost and alone in a big world and needing a dad. One hit on me and the other didn’t, but upon realizing that they were gay, I was able to better understand why they always seemed so queer.

Posted in Homosexuality, Rabbis | Comments Off

WP: Unhappy in Europe, some Iraqis return home

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: The story reports on “refugees” who are unhappy in Europe and decide to go home. It’s interesting in several ways, not least of which is the approach taken by the reporter: She writes sympathetically about the refugees, thus avoiding the wrath of the goodthinkers, while the story itself clearly supports an anti-Narrative POV. I think Steve has pointed out a similar trend at the NYT recently. It’s a new year; I’m optimistic that cracks in the unity of Received Opinion will continue to grow.

As usual at the WaPo, the comments are mostly uncensored and almost 100% on the so-called right wing (really just common sense) side of this issue.

Posted in Europe | Comments Off

Black Underclass Runs Riot, Elects Donald Trump

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The black underclass has been allowed to run rampant across the nation, because police have all but stopped patrolling black underclass portions of American cities.

It’s only going to get worse as Obama and the Department of Justice start letting out MORE black criminals from the jail.

Remember: Freddie Gray had THREE pending heroin charges when he died, and had recently pleaded down a heroin charge to a mere 100 hours of community service.

My bet for 2016: at some point, all of the six officers indicted in the Freddie Gray murder trial will be acquitted, blacks will riot (with black elected leaders like Marilyn Mosby encouraging the mob violence) and Donald J. Trump will finally give the GET TOUGH ON CRIME speech most of the country has been dying to hear.

* Most of the increase in black homicides in 2015 over 2014, and most black homicides in general, are no good black thugs murdering other no good black thugs. That’s what officials say when they want to dog whistle to white people who are worried about (don’t say) black crime, though one can find plenty of examples of black on white homicides. So, if we’re to take this official story literally, why are we to care about the 15 over 14 delta increase, or the actual high number of black homicides at all?

The answer is that they want us not to care when our caring would hurt the economies and tax rolls of black heavy big cities. Meanwhile, they want us to care and to think it’s the world’s biggest crisis when our caring means they could channel our anger into political energy to get something they want, such as more gun control, more spending programs for big cities, and so on.

* When you see a spike in the black-on-black murder rate, it means black drug dealers are fighting over sales territory. If the territory is worth killing someone for, it means the drug trade is making more money these days. That means idiotic whites are using more drugs. See the rise in heroin/painkiller deaths, etc.

You can always trust blacks to be the sharks in the white population’s gene pool, feeding on the weak, stupid, and self-indulgent.

* Libs hate stop and frisk more than they hate high violent crime rates, or even gun crime.

It’s common sense that S&F is the best way to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals. Libs love to point the finger away from their own jurisdictions as an excuse for their local crime rates, and for their federal-level gun grabs. They say the next jurisdiction over having “lax” (AKA, Constitutional) gun laws obviates anything they try to do to restrict the proliferation of firearms in high-crime locales. S&F points them out as liars. S&F means they don’t have any excuses. With S&F, it doesn’t matter what the gun laws are nearby, or how much smuggling is going on, because cops are routinely stopping and frisking people and confiscating any illegal firearms they find. A functioning handgun is all but impossible to conceal from even a cursory search, and costs $100 and up. Violent crime prone demographic groups can’t afford to go dropping $100 and up to re-arm after every confiscation in a frequent S&F environment.

Libs probably hate S&F because it works. They don’t want to take handguns from blacks who are using them to bump one another off in epic numbers, they want to take black rifles from whites who are using them to put holes in paper.

* Managing demographics is key. This is how Rudy G. and successive NYC administrations (who were aggressive with career criminals) saved the Big Apple.

Unfortunately, the countless criminals who could no longer do business in NYC had to go somewhere. Thus, NJ municipalities such as Camden, Atlantic City, Asbury Park and Trenton have all declined precipitously in recent decades. Squeeze one side of a water balloon and the liquid magically expands elsewhere.

What NYC did was push countless Big Apple criminals across the river into already black-heavy cities and townships. Today, nearly a dozen once-prosperous New Jersey cities are 1) increasingly black, 2) losing (white) population, 3) black ruled and 4) overwhelmingly Democratic.

These demographic transitions are the hallmark of a predictable urban death spiral.

* “Unwanted party guests” is a significant cause of homicides.

* The entire state of Utah recorded 63 homicides last year.

The number is up from last year, but still small enough that the local press can catalog each one individually, including a synopsis of the circumstances and a photo of each victim:

The total population of Utah is about 2.9 million.

The total population of Chicago is about 2.7 million.

* People who move to DC are chasing power and influence. People who want power are risk-takers, and they get more of a thrill from dancing on the edge of danger than the average person does. This sort of person is also more likely to use recreational drugs. You’ve a got a bunch of overconfident, monied whites in DC who want their kicks. This means the local drug business thrives and makes a ton of cash the more the city gentrifies–if you’re the last black drug dealer left standing. A monopoly is worth fighting for, plus you get all those extra perks if you’re the head of the local cartel and you enjoy hanging out with politicos at all their expensive parties.

* In the past the media could censor the truth and make out that black people were always the victims but with the internet and camera phones – i’d say camera-phones in particular have been the clincher – the truth has managed to break through the media’s wall.

* You wouldn’t want to commit the ultimate sin of Willie Horton campaigning. Of course, 1988 was the last time a GOP Presidential candidate reached 51% of the vote or higher, but it’s better to lose than to run on a popular issue.

* I do think guns are more common among juvenile delinquents than a couple of generations ago. You don’t hear much anymore about knives, like in West Side Story, and you never hear about homemade zip guns, suggesting that quality guns are more affordable today.

* I think blacks are very big on not being “dis-respected” which can be a look, or a word put wrong, and is now dealt with by guns. This is anecdotal I know, but from what I have read, most white guys would just ignore this kind of a*****e behavior (I know I would) and move on. Blacks are ready to kill each other over it.

* Much is made about how camera phones have changed policing in the media. Not surprisingly little is made about how camera phones have open the eyes of many to the behavior of underclass blacks.

Worldstarhiphop has probably done more to fuel the backlash towards the MSM’s spin on race than any conservative media outlet, including Drudge.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

‘The USA is the ONLY country I have ever been to where immigration does NOT check you out of the country. Why?’

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* A biometric ID for all persons in the United States, citizens and non-citizens alike, is the answer. It would be produced whenever you use a credit card, cash a check, etc.

* Here’s an idea for an immigration reform which is compassionate but has teeth. If you are over 18 and you are discovered to be in the country illegally, your biometric data is taken, and you are given 1 year to wrap up your affairs and leave the country, and if you do so future LEGAL attempts to enter the country will not be prejudiced, you will be forgiven. However, if you are found to be in the USA illegally after the 12 months is up, you must serve 12 months in Federal Prison after which you will be kicked out and prohibited from entering the USA legally for 20 years (only exceptions would be people with foreign diplomatic credentials or who are allowed in on an individual basis by an Act Of Congress).

* I don’t get it. First, I visited the US about ten times under the visa waiver program. Still I had to submit an online request for that including my passport number and a lot of other data. Before entering the country, I was questioned by an immigration officer, and my fingerprints and photograph was taken. So I assume this happenes to anyone entering with a visa as well. The expiration date is known, and you have to produce your passport when checking in for your return flight. So if the airlines submit their passenger lists with passport numbers when the passenger leaves the US, this can be checked against the known and finite list of people who have entered the country and whose visas have not yet expired. If and when an expiry date passes and no record has been submitted by an airline of the person having left the country, the system give a red flag and that person is automatically assumed to have overstayed his/her visa. No biometrical data needed, just a decent database.

Facebook knows when my birthday is, and my friends’ birthdays, and can send me reminders, so why can’t the federal government know when a person’s visa has expired and whether there is a record of that person having left? Seems no more complicated.

I don’t see the need for biometrical data, but if they are capable of taking my data when entering (as they have done a dozen times), why can’t they do so when leaving? I don’t buy the technology argument for one minute.

* Given how incompetent the US government is with border control, how about bringing in some foreign experts – I’m sure Japan, Switzerland and Singapore have some useful ideas.

* Really, there is no one better at making the case in hostile environments than Ann Coulter, and she does it with a smile on her face. Virtuosic.

Learned something new there, that Trump asked her for an advanced copy of Adios America after seeing her on Jorge Ramos’s show. She took on all comers there.

* I would apply penalties to the sending countries as well as the overstaying individuals.

That is, assign a non-immigrant visa quota to Brazil, of 1,000,000, for the sake of argument.

If 100,000 people overstay their visas, next year’s quota is 900,000, and the reductions accumulate.

If a Brazilian national commits an act of terrorism here, the visa quota is cut by 50% for ten years.

* Foreign born population 1980 v 1990

Latin America 4,372,487 / 8,407,837
Africa 199,723 / 363,819
Europe 5,149,572 / 4,350,403
Asia 2,539,777 / 4,979,037
Canada 853,427 / 753,917

Yes, when Reagan was elected, there were more European immigrants living in the USA than Latin American immigrants.

Hispanic population 1990 v 1980 21,900,089 / 14,603,683

* Don’t want to have problems with visa overstayers or unwanted immigrants, in general? Then don’t invite them into the country. Like the Japanese, allow immigrants that offer a specific service to the country, then see that they leave once that service or contract is fulfilled. The United States has long outlived its need for immigration of any sort – we don’t need Somalis, we don’t need Afghans, we don’t need Iraqis, or Mexicans or Europeans, for that matter.

Once we were a self-sufficient country; we could be that again, but not with the mindset that permeates our upper echelon of government and business and education ‘leaders’. We are an example, the prime example, of capitalism allowed to run amok. I like capitalism, don’t get me wrong, but benevolent capitalism, not arrogant capitalism.

Immigration should be stopped, the mess sorted out, and then allowed again only with the most restrained conditions.

* All of the 9/11 hijacker-terrorists were “visa-overstayers”. They killed over 3,000 Americans.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

NYT: U.S. Doesn’t Know How Many Foreign Visitors Overstay Visas

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: I’ve been working US Immigration since the Clinton Era. Since before this law was passed. Hopefully I know what I’m talking about.

Without getting into the specifics of each administration (Because it’s our overall governments fault, not any party in particular) here are the issues.

It’s not about the Visa. Saying they are Visa overstays is a way to confuse the issue.

When someone enters the country, their visa could be valid for several years, or for one day. But the moment they enter into the United States, right there on the border, they are issued a permit. A form we call the I-94. The I-94 gives you your length of stay depending on what sort of a Visa you present. For example, if you present a student visa (F1) then you are admitted for D/S, which stands for Duration of Status. This can be a big problem because it’s difficult to determine when a student is out of status. Sure, it seems simple, but it’s not. And since there is no firm date, it’s their actions that determine when they are out of status. If we can’t keep track of people who stay past their admission date, how do we keep track of students who aren’t acting like students anymore and are therefore “out of status”??

Another example, the most common example, is a visitors visa (B2). When you enter on a visitors visa, you are admitted for 6 months. Even if your visa were to expire tomorrow, you are admitted for 6 months. Even if you plan to leave in 3 days, you are admitted for 6 months. It doesn’t matter what you tell CBP when you enter, whether it’s a week you want to stay or a month or five months, you are given a 6 month admission.

The second most common example is the Visa Waiver. This is someone who comes from a Visa Waiver country (Like the UK) and has a valid issued passport from that country. If you come into the United States from the UK today, you will be given 90 days to visit the United States. Again, doesn’t matter how much time you ask for. If you want a week or if you want several months, you’re given a 90 day stay. The only requirement is that your passport is valid for the entire length of stay (Passport validity is different than visa validity and of course, you don’t even have a visa if you’re getting a Visa Waiver).

There are, of course, many more ways to enter the country legally. Many more visa’s one can enter on, to work, or to perform in a band, or olympics, etc. But these three, students, visitors for pleasure and visa waivers are the most common.

You fix these three things and you fix a lot of our “Visa Overstay” problem.

The student visa thing is a particular bee in my bonnet. We make it way, way, way too easy to become an authorized school for international students. As a result, we have schools in this country, located in strip malls, with 2 employees, that take in 1500 students a year. Students who live in New York, or the south, and the school is located in Los Angeles.

The F1 student program is a huge mess. Someone comes into government and cleans that program up and you’d go a long way to getting rid of visa overstays.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

Instapundit Vs Steve Sailer

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer wrote Dec. 1, 2002:

If I can make sense of what Instapundit wrote, he seems to be saying that his reason for opposing rationalization of our immigration system stems (as implied by his link) from the fact that his brother is going to marry a very pretty young lady who arrived in America due to one of those Diversity Visa lotteries. You know, the program where the State Department collects 5 to 10 million Green Card applications annually from around the world, and then, instead of trying to benefit America as a whole by skimming the absolute cream of humanity off the top of those millions, simply picks 50,000 foreigners randomly.
Nice that Instapundit’s family has personally benefited from this law, just as it’s not nice that the families of the two Jews murdered at LAX on July 4 by Diversity Lottery winner/terrorist Hesham Mohamed Hadayet personally suffered from this law. Of course, personal anecdotes like these are of limited use in analyzing whether this policy is good for American citizens as a whole.
For a disinterested take on the Diversity Lottery, click here. For an amusing comparison of the rational Canadian system of selecting immigrants to the bizarre American system, see my article "Canada
doesn’t want me."

Instapundit blogs Dec. 16, 2002:

STEVE SAILER’S DISSING ME, over the Lott affair, though I have to say that his disrespect hasn’t stopped him spamming me with emails in the past in the hopes of getting some attention.
I don’t like Sailer’s stuff, or his VDare.org anti-immigration site for reasons that should be pretty obvious. I’m not surprised that he’s sticking up for Lott. That he’s doing so reflects badly on Sailer. And on Lott.
The good news is that, beyond the fringe, America seems to have outgrown this stuff.
UPDATE: In fairness to Sailer, I have to admit that he’s dead-on in saying that fast typing is the secret to my success. Kids: stay in school, and take typing! Thanks, Mrs. Pack — I owe it all to you.
ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to an email from a reader, no, I don’t think that an opposition to illegal immigration is necessarily racist. And, in fact, legal immigrants are often notable for their hostility to illegal immigration — having jumped through the hoops themselves, they naturally resent those who bypass the hoops entirely.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Some of these early adopting things are just in the realm of ideas though, like taking an interest in GNXP and especially Steve Sailer way back when. Even when I read how Instapundit disliked Sailer back in the day because black in-law, I think I stopped reading Instapundit not long after that. Another example is becoming concerned enough about Islam to read the Koran.

Steve is pretty up there when it comes to early adoption re: interest in interesting concepts. Maybe identifying products, not so great. But isn’t the Roomba still in production?

I suppose another example is using imdb ratings to decide which movies to see. Now I’ve noticed that in video stores, they’ve really moneyballed it. High rating movies that were very hard to find are much easier to find in the average DVD rental place now. I guess the general trend of this is that there are other perfectionists out there, and people find it easier to find really good stuff, e.g. through ratings sites etc. Perhaps not settling for mediocre politicians that don’t represent white interests is an outgrowth of this general phenomenon.

* Steve Sailer wrote Sept. 6, 2005:

You may recall last week’s gigantic brouhaha over the two New Orleans pictures, one of blacks and one of whites and the captions that said the blacks were “looting” while the whites were “finding” food. This took up an enormous amount of space in the brains of high-minded folks for quite some time since it provided a welcome distraction from the obvious reality that blacks were doing the vast majority of the looting, raping, sniping and so forth in New Orleans. See, those captions proved the problem in New Orleans was … white racism!

As Larry Auster says in his addendum to Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society:

The worse blacks behave (in this case the total failure of the black-run government of New Orleans to take the absolutely necessary steps to prepare for and respond to the disaster), the more this black failure must be blamed on white racism.

This week, my essay on why the New Orleans nightmare shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as it apparently did, to all levels of government might replace the now tapped-out Caption Controversy as an enjoyable distraction from reality, a Two Minute Hate, for the pure of heart.

Thus,we see libertarian Radley Balko blogging:

I have never understood why Steve Sailer gets taken seriously. Even by people I respect.

One can only hope that after this vile screed, said serious-taking will cease.

This “vile screed” of course being my VDARE.com article on New Orleans. This is representative of the usual “point-and-sputter” attacks on me — no facts or logic are presented, because that’s not the point. The point is merely to gesticulate in fury at the sheer unmentionability of what I’ve said.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin blogs:

Via Instapundit, Steve Sailer weighs in with a related column on race and Katrina. Sailer has written many brilliant articles, and I admire his willingness to challenge politically correct shibboleths. But I strongly disagree with his assertion that African-Americans possess “poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.”

No, I wrote, “tend to possess.”

Thus, the rest of her entry is attacking a non-existent straw man: the idea that I claimed that “moral cowardice and weakness is not predetermined by race,” which I of course never did. I merely pointed out that by the overwhelming weight of statistical evidence, it appears that African-Americans on average show less resistance to temptation than Asians and whites, so a moral environment like that of New Orleans, which specializes in encouraging people to give in to temptation, will tend to be particularly deleterious for blacks.

UPDATE: Michelle has since corrected her out-of-context quotation. My substantive response to her argument that there is no correlation between race and judgment is here: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/is-there-relationship-between-iq-race.html

A reader writes:

My sense is that on a whole range of issues, the more something is at variance with obvious reality, the more fervently people attack those who suggest that fact. This was pretty similar to what happened for two or three generations in the late, unlamented USSR.

I think a secondary element in this is that people who’ve worked/trained very, very hard to “doublethink” their way around reality are bitterly resentful at some indication that maybe all that training might have been wasted. After all, given the nature of human evolution, pretty much *everyone* can see reality, while only highly-trained elites can manage to (pretend to??) avoid seeing it.

As I’ve said before, I suspect that almost everyone in the world is actually a human biodiversity realist, though the highly trained make enormous efforts to pretend not to be, much like the religious zealots of the Middle Ages sometimes did and claimed to believe all sorts of peculiar things, partly to demonstrate their elite status. Compared to flagellating oneself every Easter (or on Ali Martydom Day, as the Shiites do), just “lying” a lot on TV for lots of money doesn’t seem particularly difficult.

By contrast, I’m almost sure that the simply-educated Latinos who work at my morning coffee shop watch TV and say to each other “those dangerous blacks are rioting again in New Orleans—Boy, I’m glad I don’t live there!”

Careerism is an important part of it (is it really so crazy to say silly things on TV about black rioters so that you yourself don’t actually have to live in a neighborhood near them??) and so is “fashionability.”

Consider the latter. Fashions come and go each year, in partially manipulated but partially mysterious ways, and most people mostly go along with them. Near as I can tell, they’re approximately random (e.g. the fashionability of hair length over the last 50 years).

If all the fashionable people are saying what seem to be silly things, well then, you, too, should probably also say those same things, lest you be considered unfashionable. And if all the smart people (e.g. Harvard professors) say those things, then maybe you’re just not smart enough to understand it properly. And any Harvard professor who might consider saying otherwise would worry about getting in trouble with the Harvard President. And when the Harvard President (accidentally) said something different, well, he learned never to make that same mistake again.

Posted in Steve Sailer | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: Schumer vs. Rubio: Which One Looks Smarter?

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* But he’s also the uncle of Amy Schumer, who the POZ establishment has lately been working overtime to convince us is the next hot, appealing “it” girl, and if you don’t agree (and here’s a penile plethysmograph to gauge your sincerity) you’ll be exiled to work the Dakota oil fields with no other entertainment during your off-time than these GIRLS re-runs (specially edited to contain only Lena Dunham’s nude scenes).

* Chuck Schumer is a smart guy who has been in the game a long time. He laid a trap hoping the GOP would jump into it as they so often do. This is a good example of a political gambit that has no downside to the person deploying it. Ted Cruz is a smart guy and figured out that it was a trap fairly early and largely stayed away from it. He filed some amendments that were never going anywhere so he could later say he tried to stop it if the thing ever got passed.

Rubio is Ms. South Carolina with a penis so he did not see the trap. Instead, he thought he would be hailed as a hero for making a deal that his party elders thought was wonderful. I think what makes Rubio even dumber is that he had an easy way out of this mess back in the summer. He could simply have said he learned a valuable lesson about trusting the Democrats. That would have let him switch sides on immigration. Instead, he made it worse.

The shame of it with Rubio is he is a helluva a pitchman. If he was on our side, pitching our issues, we would be talking about him as a great leader. The trouble is he is too dumb to be reliable.

* Rubio may look like he paid a price for betraying the American people with cheap-labor open-borders immigration, but the donor class loves him. He will be showered with publicity and support and cash and opportunities. He will be allowed to make gaffes that would sink a non-annointed politician. etc. If the donor class coalesces behind him to stop Trump, he may yet be our next president. And if not, he will do very well for himself in the meantime, and there’s always next time.

Ditto with Schumer. If you have the big donors pushing for you and helping push your program, it’s easy to look like you are a tactical political genius. And if you are in a sailboat race, and the wind is at your back, and it’s blowing against your opponent, it’s pretty hard to lose too.

Look at how McCain came out of nowhere to win the Republican nomination for president, ditto Bill Clinton. That wasn’t political skills. That was big money and the establishment press in action.

* Monroe got mixed up with a shrink-monster (like Brian Wilson later-but he survived: she didn’t), Nancy Sinatra had Daddy’s money and pull, Debbie Harry was a hippie under the glam and didn’t care about real success. Madonna isn’t necessarily smarter than any of them, but she sure was determined and disciplined.

I get a chuckle out of people who call her a has-been. When you have a billion dollars you earned yourself, you really don’t care. In fact, a Madonna show will still fill pretty sizable venues, both overseas and here. I’d venture to say she could still pack a venue in any place in America as well as Taylor Swift. For a 57 year old female that’s not too shabby.

* I recall Schumer’s first Congressional run in Brooklyn. He would day after day stand on the Kings Highway elevated subway platform obnoxiously gladhanding people and quite mindlessly yelling to morning commuters as they were getting upstairs onto the platform if an express or local train was coming. Anyone with eyeballs could look down the tracks and very quickly see for themselves, so such ravings were pointless. Struck me then that American politics was a crazy business, and nothing has changed my mind since. And that Schumer so debasing himself was a deeply disturbed person. He looked craven, deranged, unhinged. For all his book smarts, would not trust him with a coffee order.

As it happens I took the Kaplan SAT prep class at their main office at that time, which was about 2 blocks from that station. Never had any class taught by Schumer, but do remember that the teachers were uniformly badly dressed, socially-inept housebound weirdos, mostly orthodox or conservative Jews.They all bragged about high SAT scores they had attained, and perhaps that job paid very well. But they also looked and behaved so odd no law firm, engineering company, bank nor investment brokerage would ever hire any of them. Later took their LSAT prep class too. Was helpful only because it showed how the questions of those tests were asked rather than giving any specific insight into the questions themselves.Which sounds just like Schumer, playing the game instead of doing anything substantive. In fact, this is the first time I have ever heard he held any paying job at all except political office.

* I passed on the opportunity to vote for Senor Rubio when he ran for the Senate in 2010. He ran on basically two major issues, no amnesty for illegal aliens and a very aggressive, neoconnish foreign policy. As Senator, Rubio quickly broke his first pledge but has remained very faithful to his second pledge, which tells you a lot of where his true priorities lie.

* Why does Rubio obviously look like a dummy? Not arguing with you, but we’re talking about looks here. Are his eyes too close together? Forehead not high enough? Isn’t this really a case of postjudice? I.e. hardly anyone’s ever met a dumb Jew.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

On Black Crime, Obama’s ‘Blackism’ & Burke’s Allergy to Neocons

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Ilana Mercer writes:

The following is Part II in a conversation with Jack Kerwick, author of “The American Offensive: Dispatches From The Front.” Read Part I, “Black Muslims & the Racial-Industrial Complex.” Visit Jack’s Beliefnet blog—”At the Intersection of Faith & Culture”—friend him on Facebook, and email him at: [email protected].

ILANA MERCER: Barack Obama as a devotee of “Blackism.” Explain. Why do you think this president is incapable of empathizing with the untold number of white Americans dead by blacks and Muslims?

JACK KERWICK: What I call “Blackism” is an ideology, a recipe for achieving racial “authenticity.” Like any ideology, it is the distillation, the cliff note, of a cultural tradition, the tradition of black Americans. Biological blackness is necessary for authentic “blackness.” It is not, though, sufficient. Blackism is designed for the Barack Obamas of the world, those who are at least partially black biologically but for whom black culture is a foreign language. The ideology is a simple method that, being a method, is comprised of a few principles that need only be affirmed in order to achieve “racial authenticity.” One of these principles is that ultimate reality is comprised of collectivities, primarily racial collectivities. Another principle is that non-whites are perpetually oppressed by whites. It isn’t that Obama or any other Blackist would think to deny that whites (and others) can and have been harmed and killed by blacks and Muslims. It’s only that they must see such violence as stemming from “root causes”—“racism,” a “legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” “the Crusades,” “imperialism,” “poverty,” etc.—that, ultimately, whites should have rectified.

MERCER: Like me, you are still haunted by the “Knoxville Horror”? Why?

KERWICK: This real life story is the stuff of nightmares. In 2007, in Tennessee, a young white couple in their early 20s, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were carjacked, abducted, raped, tortured, and finally murdered by four black men and a black woman. Newsom was blindfolded, sodomized with an instrument, and shot execution-style. His body was then set on fire.

According to The Knoxville News Sentinel, “Christian suffered horrific injuries to her vagina, anus, and mouth. She was not only raped, but savaged with ‘an object’…She was beaten in the head. Some type of chemical was poured down her throat, and her body, including her bleeding and battered genital area, likely scrubbed by the same solution [.]” “She was then ‘hog-tied,’ with curtains and strips of bedding, her face covered tightly with a small white trash bag and her body stashed inside five large trash bags before being placed inside a large trash can and covered with sheets.” The medical examiner concluded that “Christian died slowly, suffocating [.]” Far from being the chronic victims of interracial crime, as the Racism-Industrial-Complex would have us think, blacks are much more likely to be the victimizers: In roughly 90 percent of all attacks involving blacks and whites, the former are the perpetrators. Thankfully, your average black-on-white attack doesn’t involve the savagery of the “Knoxville Horror.” Yet the latter is the textbook illustration of the reality of black-on-white racial violence, as well as the randomness and mercilessness that far too many such attacks do involve. Beyond this, the “Knoxville Horror” is the textbook case of the media’s complicity in the evil of black-on-white violence, for just as it routinely refuses to cover the latter, so the national media refused to cover the ghoulishness in Knoxville.

MERCER: In “The American Offensive,” you recount the forgotten, white, race riots of the 1800s. You reach an unexpected conclusion about the founding American people, also a pathologically passive population. What is it?

KERWICK: Black crime in-general, and black racial mob violence specifically, are huge, persistent problems in contemporary American life. Only the most self-delusional and shameless of race propagandists would think to deny this (though even they admit that black criminality is a problem, albeit, to hear them tell it, the result of a larger problem: “white racism”). WND’s Colin Flaherty is one courageous journalist who has meticulously, unapologetically, chronicled this phenomenon.

Given current racial realities, then, it may surprise people to hear that most race riots in this country until well into the early decades of the 20th Century involved white perpetrators and black victims. And they were brutal, making the black perpetrated riots of today look like temper tantrums.

My point in noting this is not to engage in but another exercise of white guilt-mongering. Rather my point is to remind people that just because whites no longer engage in the type of racial mob violence for which blacks are known today doesn’t mean that history couldn’t repeat itself if circumstances were just right. Since enough violence has a way of provoking more violence, this is something worth bearing in mind.

Posted in Barack Obama, Blacks, Islam | Comments Off