Yermie Kurkus writes on FB: This Shidduch Crisis is more of a Social Crisis found amongst the Orthodox circles. It is men and women who do not know what they want. In the non-religious and non-Jewish world – dating is for companionship, they simply don’t want to be alone, so they get together and 4-5 or 10 years later they decide to marry. However in the religious world, dating is for marriage. There is a very low education level on what marriage truly is! Women think, that the guy needs to be successful (what is that?) or a certain hight or weight or look. The men want certain barbie models or women with certain criteria – all are missing the point… What is marriage? What are the criteria, mindset or characteristics of what makes a marriage work? your hair color, belt size, shoe size? (thank God religious women cannot openly find out other “sizes”)… unsure emoticon I think that the moment women stop fantasizing on Vogue Magazine, and men stop looking for Victoria Secret models – this “crisis” will come to an end!
I’ve seen and heard it all at this point… the common denominator is that women (in my case) have absolutely no idea what marriage is and what they are looking for. They automatically judge on everything that is so external and irrelevant. They don’t even bother to communicate (a key ingredient to successful marriage – even if you don’t plan on marrying the guy) to find out more about a certain circumstance or situation that may seem (from the outside or on set) as a hurdle, they don’t even consider that perhaps it really is not an issue at all!
Again, in my case specifically, I am extremely accomplished and successful BH, I actually do come from a very prominent blood line (although not too famous) but notorious non-the-less (can be proven wink emoticon ) yet – I have heard every excuse under the sun why the woman would refuse dating or even properly looking into the Shidduch.
For example, there was one perfect profile that I approached – it was as though we have both copied and pasted each other’s profiles in the opposite fields (her looking for in my description and my looking for in her description) – our goals, mindset and characteristic matched 120% – yet she refused, she simply said no… with no excuse or reasoning! Ask for a reason and get ignored…!
Chaim Amalek: As I understand it, this problem is purely the result of one mathematical fact and one social fact about the demographics of these people: 1. It is a young and very fast growing population, with every age group slightly more numerous than the age group just preceding it. 2. Men prefer to marry women who are a few years younger than they. So every woman finds herself looking up at a cohort of men that is slightly smaller than the cohort of women to which she belongs. Hence the slight imbalance that they care calling a crisis. I think it impacts just a few percent who will be left out. Of course, if everyone married someone his/her age, this problem would vanish, as it would if males would occasionally marry someone a year or two older. And that’s that.
This works in reverse if you are a man born into a “baby bust” part of a demographic cycle, and want to have a family.
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“Conservatives now are telling us that we must curtail government, cut government spending, cut government powers, reduce government personnel for the sake of making individuals more free.
“Liberals, on the other hand, are still telling us, as they have for a long, long time, that in order to make individuals free, we must destroy communities. By communities I mean villages. Ghettos and cities. Ethnic groupings. Religious groupings. Anything which is segregated. We must destroy them. So that all individuals would be, if possible, identical. Including boys and girls.
“But the area of political action … in which you have government, individuals … three others: voluntary associations (which I’ll say no more about), corporations and communities. And if the liberals destroy communities for the sake of the individual, and the conservatives destroy the government for the sake of individuals, you’re going to have an area of political action in which irresponsible, immensely powerful corporations are engaged in opposition to individuals who are socially naked and defenseless.”
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* I like this quote. It shows the left and right wings are not diametrically apposed. They just force us to disrobe different clothes, with the ultimate result of having us naked on our hands and knees with our beneficent master behind us.
* There is an aspect of this that has intrigued me for years, and that is the Left’s need to define new ‘communities’ at the same time they are destroying the old ones. The ‘gay community’, the ‘trans community’, the ‘black community’, the ‘activist community’, etc.
I doubt this has a basis in Classic Marxist ideology. Perhaps it can be found in Cultural Marxist/Frankfurt/New School teachings. The theoretical need to oppose Hegemony on a group (ie ‘community’) basis, perhaps.
What I do know is that their clarion call is not Libertinism or Individualism per se. They preach alternative ‘communities’ … right up until one group of dissidents cannot live within the last alternative ‘community’ and splinters off to form another, e.g. the now-coalescing ‘trans community’ versus the ‘feminist community’.
Mind you, the end result is the same: complete individualism.
The ‘community’ concept is an almost completely left-centered notion. If you coopt their ‘community’ language from the right, they almost visibly gnash their teeth. Try talking about the ‘prison guard community’, the ‘pedophile community’, or the ‘gun community’ and listen to the reaction. For example: ‘As a member of the gun community, I am concerned that you …’
* Yes it is ONLY the White Normal areas that have to be broken up. No one says El Paso must be made more diverse. No one says Kenya needs a flood of White people.
But we are still having a hard time wrapping our head around the central truth of our time: These modern movements are anti-White. They are led by Whites who are anti-White.
For whatever reason, everyone runs from this obvious fact, I guess because they think it makes them Hitler to notice it.
* But things change. Viking warriors are now emasculated Swedes where the dad does exactly half the baby sitting. The Bundeswehr consists not of Teutonic warriors but of gay friendly oompah bands. Quiescent Hindoos run 1/2 of Silicon Valley. Putin doesn’t seem like a very docile Slav. Etc.
Ross reminds me of Walker, the president of MIT who wrote in the Atlantic in 1896 that we were making a big mistake letting in Italians, Jews, Hungarians, etc.:
“The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.”
Boy, in the ’30s the Germans really showed a great flair for making laws and choosing chieftains.
The point is that “past performance is no guaranty of future results”. The same Hindoo who seems quiescent in his village may make a great tech executive once you clean him (or his grandchildren) up and get him an engineering degree. The Teutonic warrior may develop a taste for the settled life.
This is not to say that in the future Zulus and Quechas will fill the shoes of the former immigrants. It’s like dog breeding – all you can do is turn up traits that are already present but dormant. You can’t create new ones out of thin air. You can develop a dog that will retrieve ducks or dig for gophers but not one that will climb trees. There is no hidden pool of Mixtec geniuses waiting to be exploited like the shtetl talent that exploded in the 20th century (literally exploded – there would have been no Fat Man and no Little Boy without them).
But, once you put aside prejudice, you can see that, for example most Asians make great Americans and are no more incapable of integrating than the Italians and Jews who Walker thought unsuited for life in a democratic society.
* Northwest Europeans developed a way of co-operating on a large scale but at the cost of losing their ability to compete at the clannish scale – hence why their countries used to be so good (compared to most places).
Most other places are the opposite. They are good at the clannish scale but as a side effect they co-operate badly at a larger scale – hence why their countries suck.
If the two patterns are combined the clannish sub population(s) will pick a niche and very rapidly come to dominate that niche as they co-operate as extended families (clans) versus people competing as individuals or nuclear families. However too much / too many and the originally NW Euro type countries will simply collapse to the standard pattern (except with hundreds of different ethnic groups per region / country).
When Jews were the only high IQ relatively clannish (compared to NW Euros) sub population they had a unique advantage but increasingly they won’t.
(Although East Asians may figure out a third way as a result of watching the western collapse.)
* I go long, long stretches of time without thinking of Jews. There was another version of this country where they did very well at a number of things like business, entertainment, the sciences, and it wasn’t a secret or anything.
My biggest reaction would have been to grunt, and think “Good for them, whatever.” and forget about them for another long stretch of time.
But now, I really wonder how smart Jews are sometimes. Playing it my head I don’t think the changes that are coming to this country are going to be beneficial to them. Very much the opposite in fact.
Dunno, maybe I’m wrong and Jewish Central Command in Jerusalem knows exactly what it is doing. I kind of doubt it though, for a number of reasons to include Jewish Central Command existing.
I think it’s more a case of they’ve actually come to believe the BS. Maybe they always did.
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Blacks and latinos in general are never going to vote Republican because they consistently reside at the lowest ends of the socio-economic spectrum and want the maximum of government assistance. They’re never going to move up the spectrum because of low average IQs (85 and 90 respectively in the USA).
The following idea is nonsense: “That complexity of opinion is one reason why Republican strategists hope that with the right candidate — and a little bit of luck — they can reverse the pattern of Latinos voting overwhelmingly for Democrats. In New Mexico, where Latinos make up more than 40% of voters — more than any other state — Latino Republicans have made considerable gains, even though the state voted for President Obama in the last two elections.”
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A frum friend just invited me to bring Chaim Amalek to Shabbos lunch. I said he’ll come for dessert so long as the home is Amalek-friendly.
Chaim Amalek: “Is the dessert uber-glatt Kosher? What are the midos and tznius of the hosts? Will women be allowed to dine at the men’s table? Speaking of which, how much yichhus do these people bring to the table?”
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* Here are five biographical questions which can eliminate, IMO, 95% of bad people (based on my experience and seeing patterns):
Did he or she grow up in a two-parent household? Are his or her parents still married and is it a first marriage for both?
How many siblings does he/she have? How many sisters?
Did he/she grow up with a dog and does he/she like dogs/animals?
Did his/her parents bring him/her to church/synagogue when he/she was growing up and does he/she attend now?
How does he/she feel about people who are different from him/her (racial, religious, sexual orientation, etc.)?
* One thing that has always bugged me about these flashmobs where you see a horde of black kids invade and loot a place…
You just know each and every one of them has a cell phone.
And you also know that in most cases the cell phone provider has the ethnic profile of the user.
Or heck, voice recognition has gotten to the point where I think it could reliably id the race (and a lot of other things) of a speaker from the speech itself (idiom, timbre, word selection, etc).
Even if you could care less about what they had to say, it’s easy to imagine a program processing this to id the user. For demographic reasons you understand.
I’m sure it is an invasion of privacy; but as someone who has no knowledge or experience with law, it has always seemed to me to be a crapshoot as to what lawyers can torture out of this system, meaning what is allowed and what is not permissible comes across as totally random.
Anyway, I’m quite sure that cell providers could do something to identify “swarms” as they are forming. It would be nice if different providers shared data for this purpose, but even data from one popular provider would be very useful for this concept.
Anyway, just idle musing. But the future is already here in a lot of ways. It just hasn’t bothered to materialize yet.
But me personally I think I could set up a system where these kids loot a store then walk out and find the police and barricades waiting for them.
* The mistake white people make is thinking that blacks naturally trust other blacks more than they trust whites. It’s just another example of how white people outside the South know very little about black people.
Most blacks, those outside the talented ten, look at whites in authority positions as more trustworthy than blacks in authority positions. The assumption of blacks when seeing a black cop is that he is a Tom and mostly interested in showing off to other white cops. An older white cop will usually get more cooperation from older blacks because they assume he will treat them fairly.
Young male cops of any race are assumed to be no different than the bangers. That’s not too far off. Most cities deploy their dumbest and youngest to the ghetto. It takes guts to confront a group of hoppers, much less full on bangers. It also helps if you’re stupid and in good physical shape. Older cops of any race will ignore most of the petty crime anyway. They simply don’t need the hassle.
* My experience with blacks is that they don’t trust anybody, but they have a pathological mistrust of whites, and the hatred of Toms is merely a reflection of that. Hatred of Toms does not equate to trusting whites.
Anecdotally, I have seen primitive displays of primate aggression, going up to the brink, and then backing down, between young black men, and only young black men, brought on by mere glances. One black guy simply looks at another black guy for a fraction of a second too long, and this aggression display erupts. I’ve never seen a black guy take such umbrage at a white guy. If the white guy does something the black guy doesn’t like, he’ll let it pass.
It’s like two parallel universes.
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Robert Weissberg writes: Americans seem to have an irrepressible urge to uplift the bottom—the lumpenproletariat, to use a fancy word– no matter how daunting the mission. The federal government has spent billions since the mid-1960s (e.g., AmeriCorps) with scant success. Numerous non-profits have also sought solutions and here, too, the results are not encouraging. Now the private sector is trying its hand. With Starbucks taking the lead ($30 million from the CEO’s own foundation), corporate America (Hilton, Microsoft, Walmart, J.C. Penney, among 13 others) is rolling out a plan to create 100,000 jobs, internships and apprenticeships by 2018 targeting the 5.5 million young Americans who are neither in school or in the workforce. These youngsters (called “disconnected youth”) are predominantly non-white, poor, and are often teenage single parents. That these youngster lack any extended work experience hinders getting even to the first rung of the economic ladder.
The Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Network will monitor and oversee the enterprise. All and all, this is a mega buck project supported by a Who’s Who of corporate America with access to an army of policy wonks.
Will it succeed? Absolutely not, despite its corporate capitalist pedigree. Begin by recognizing the awaiting legal pitfalls. Any effort to target black kids without a similar outreach program for whites, Hispanics, and Asians may instigate litigation and EEOC complaints. This may tie up the project for years as Aspen lawyers seek to circumvent anti-discrimination laws in employment. And if that were insufficient to impede progress, what about hiring those with criminal records? Does Walmart really want to hire ex-cons and thereby face the potential liability if one of these employs assaults a customer? Even more vexing, what about those with drug addictions? Imagine making a reasonable workplace accommodation for a chronic sex offender? Clearly, many of the most challenging cases, those most in need of a corporate-supplied opportunity, will be risky bets and would justifiably never be hired in the first place.
Far more important, a few exceptions aside, these youngster will arrive with terrible work habits and I defy any firm, within today’s legal and political environment, to overcome these liabilities. I suspect that all the well-intentioned CEO’s and their white, middle class Aspen facilitators are clueless regarding the toxic underclass culture. It will be a major struggle to get these kids to be prompt, follow directions dutifully, avoid on-the-job conflicts, speak clear English absent profanities, disdain socializing or periodic texting, function without close supervision, always dress neatly and be well-groomed (including conservative haircuts, no piercing), eschew petty thievery, control one’s temper when challenged (“dissed”) and otherwise conduct themselves according to traditional standards of a “good employee.”
Invariably, civil rights activists will condemn this training as cultural imperialism, making blacks into whites, and this argument is not easily dismissed. The Al Sharptons of the world will insist that there’s nothing inappropriate with black slang and a “black accent” in the workplace, and corporate America should accept it much like they currently tolerate immigrants who speak with a Chinese or Indian accent. Ditto for program enrollees who continue to wear their pants well below their waist or otherwise dress in the ghetto “style.”
Then add the obstacles of bringing these “disconnected youth” up to speed on simple arithmetic, an 8th grade reading level, legible penmanship and properly filling out forms. In a nutshell, corporate America, with the help of the Aspen Institute must transform deeply rooted cultural habits, habits that may even be classified as survival tools in Hobbesian inner cities. Clearly, far more is involved here than simply spending an hour or two teaching how to make a tall soy milk latte and then use the cash register to make change from a $20.
Posted inBlacks, Economics|Comments Off on Lifting up the lazy, shiftless and criminally inclined
Stanley Kurtz writes: It’s difficult to say what’s more striking about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation: its breathtaking radicalism, the refusal of the press to cover it, or its potential political ramifications. The danger AFFH poses to Democrats explains why the press barely mentions it. This lack of curiosity, in turn, explains why the revolutionary nature of the rule has not been properly understood. Ultimately, the regulation amounts to back-door annexation, a way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of nearby cities.
This has been Obama’s purpose from the start. In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, I explain how a young Barack Obama turned against the suburbs and threw in his lot with a group of Alinsky-style community organizers who blamed suburban tax-flight for urban decay. Their bible was Cities Without Suburbs, by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk. Rusk, who works closely with Obama’s Alinskyite mentors and now advises the Obama administration, initially called on cities to annex their surrounding suburbs. When it became clear that outright annexation was a political non-starter, Rusk and his followers settled on a series of measures designed to achieve de facto annexation over time.
The plan has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and when possible encourage suburban re-migration to cities. This can be achieved, for example, through regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by relative neglect of highway-building and repair in favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban poor into the suburbs through the imposition of low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional tax-base sharing,” where a state forces upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul).
If you press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money to cities, you have effectively abolished the suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call themselves “regionalists.”
AFFH goes a long way toward achieving the regionalist program of Obama and his organizing mentors. In significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto regional annexation of America’s suburbs. To see why, let’s have a look at the rule.
AFFH obligates any local jurisdiction that receives HUD funding to conduct a detailed analysis of its housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, and class (among other categories). Grantees must identify factors (such as zoning laws, public-housing admissions criteria, and “lack of regional collaboration”) that account for any imbalance in living patterns. Localities must also list “community assets” (such as quality schools, transportation hubs, parks, and jobs) and explain any disparities in access to such assets by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and more. Localities must then develop a plan to remedy these imbalances, subject to approval by HUD.
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FROM CNN: Cincinnati police are investigating the fatal shooting of an apparently unarmed black man by a University of Cincinnati police officer after a confrontation during a traffic stop Sunday.
The dead man, who was shot in the head, was Samuel Dubose, a 43-year-old father of 13 children, according to CNN affiliate WKRC-TV. A CNN records search showed that Dubose had more than 60 arrests.
Authorities identified the officer as Ray Tensing, who has five years’ experience in law enforcement and who has worked for the University of Cincinnati Police Department for more than a year. He is white.
According to Cincinnati police, which is handling the investigation, Tensing saw Dubose driving without a front license plate around 6:30 Sunday evening and tried to pull him over. Police said Dubose continued for about a mile before stopping the car…
Tensing asked several times to see Dubose’s driver’s license, Cincinnati police said. Instead, police said, Dubose handed the officer a bottle of alcohol.
According to police, Tensing asked Dubose to step out of the car, at which point a struggle ensued.
“There was a struggle at the door with Mr. Dubose in the vehicle and the officer outside the vehicle, and the vehicle sped away,” Cincinnati police Lt. Col. James Whalen told reporters.
Police said Dubose then stuck his key back in the ignition and sped away as Tensing fired a single shot, hitting the driver in the head.
Tensing fell to the ground as he fired the shot, bruising his legs and tearing his uniform, Cincinnati police said.
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