People with high IQs commit fewer crimes than people with low IQs. They have more empathy (which depends on the ability for abstract thought to put yourself in the place of others) and they see the future more clearly.
Joe Domanick wrote two books about the LAPD: “To Protect and to Serve” and “Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing.”
Rob Eshman: What was your reaction as the events of last week unfolded?
Joe Domanick: I wasn’t at all surprised about either one of the two killings by the officers, because [each is] just one of the string of shootings that have come to public attention, really, ever since Ferguson [Mo.], because of cameras and other technologies.
And then when the five officers were killed in Dallas, that made me very anxious because, No. 1, we had a chief of police in Dallas who was really doing all of the right things to alleviate these kinds of situations.
RE: You’ve said there were 900 officer-involved shootings that led to fatalities in 2015, and 2016 is on track to have even more. Why? Iceland has one in 71 years. Germany has six.
JD: An even better comparison is Canada, which per capita has more guns than the United States, but has very few shootings.
I just think that America is a very, very violent country. It was born in violence. It started with genocide. Then it followed up with the most brutal, dehumanizing kind of slavery, which was enforced strictly through brutality. Then you had the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, when it really became the job of the police to closely monitor African-Americans, and that became a tradition. And the whole country, of course, was racist — it wasn’t just the South.
So I think that this is a very violent country. We worship violence. We see it everywhere in our advertisements. It’s hard for me to think of a movie star, man or woman, who I haven’t seen on a billboard off Sunset Boulevard holding a gun, holding a .45, wearing a police badge. So I think that we worship violence, we do, and I think that’s a big part of it.
RE: You really can draw a direct connection from the Fugitive Slave Law to what’s going on now in these communities?
JD: You had decades of people living in very violent communities, and the violence becoming almost a norm. And the African-American people that could get out of the ghettos got out, but what you had left was a kind of social pathology that imploded. That’s what’s made our ghettos so dangerous. We refuse as a society to do anything about it, to take the steps to alleviate, to change the values in that subculture.
A Jew can be a leftist, but leftism does not mesh easily with Judaism. Leftism does not accept race and religion as valid ways of organizing people. The essence of Judaism is separation — separation between Jews and non-Jews, between men and women, adults and children, the Sabbath and the other days of the week, etc.
The Hebrew word for holiness — “Kadosh” — literally means “separate.” Judaism conceives of Jews as a people who dwell apart.
If you are a normal Orthodox Jew, you put your Jewish identity first before all other identities. You see what is going on in the world in terms of whether or not it is good for the Jews. One of the major advantages in being an Orthodox Jew is that you know who you are. Your choices in life are simplified.
The stronger your in-group identity, be it as Jewish or black or Muslim, the less likely you are to be liberal (to live and let live and to be ok with diversity) and the more likely you are to have negative views of outsiders.
The more liberal they are, the less their tendency to be actively “Jewish.” The level of liberalism is high among those who raise non-Jewish children “or who are married to non-Jews.” Liberal Jews feel less responsible for other Jews. They have a somewhat lesser sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Only a third of the “very liberal” (34%) feel that “being Jewish is very important” – compared to 54% of “right of center” non-Orthodox Jews. The “very liberal” don’t belong to synagogues (18%), have less Jewish friends, and tend less than others to fast on Yom Kippur or light Shabbat candles. Their attachment to Israel is markedly lower than the attachment of less liberal Jews.
That is to say: all across the board – feelings, activities, traditions, and affiliations – the liberals show a lesser level of engagement. The correlation between liberalism and disengagement is “modest” when it comes to “feelings” (Feel responsible for Jews in need, Feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, Feel being Jewish is very important). It is “strong” when it comes to “religious engagement” (Being religious very important, Kosher home, Shabbat candles usually+, Attends services monthly). It is also “strong” when it comes to “Israel attachment” (Israel essential to being Jewish, Feel very attached to Israel). In other words: liberal Jews feel moderately passionate about being Jewish; but they do not appreciate religion and do not appreciate Israel, and they especially do not appreciate hawkish views on Israel…
Why is it so difficult to seriously discusses these numbers and this reality? That’s simple: because often times liberal Jews tend to value their “liberalism” more than they value their “Jewishness” (this is me speaking, not Cohen. I am not sure he’d agree). If the numbers tell a story from which one learns that liberalism and Judaism cannot go hand in hand, the liberals will choose liberalism. So the obvious policy of Jewish leaders and institutions is to avoid this seeming contradiction – to hide it for as long as possible and thus not force the choice on a growing group of Jewish liberals…
These numbers have meaning. They have implications, and these implications could be of three possible types:
– Judaism and liberalism cannot go hand in hand, and we ought to understand that some Jewish Americans are lost to us, Jews.
– There is a need to make Jews slightly less liberal – at least when it comes to the kind of liberalism that seems to make it difficult for them to be actively Jewish.
– There is a need to make Jewish Americanism more adaptable to the priorities of liberal Americanism.
In all likelihood, to succeed in an enterprise whose aim is to strengthen the active Jewishness of American Jewish liberals, it will have to be a combination of both points two and three (that is, if you do not accept point one). But the exact prescription will not be easy, as the numbers – while telling us a story – do not reveal its source. As Cohen framed it: “What about being liberal makes them ‘less Jewish?’”
In other words: as hard as it is to spell it out with such bluntness, as a general rule, liberal American Jews seem to be less Jewish.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on Liberalism and Group Identity
* Underearning is a disease of hiding. In terms of visibility, fear fades with prayer. Fear fades with action. Fear fades with repetition.
* For many years, I went through attempts to have a better life. At age 16, I had my first go round with magical thinking. I was thinking about being a photographer, a professional guitarist, and I couldn’t commit to preparing myself. I couldn’t commit to doing the work. Success and failure have one word in common — process.
* I had no idea how sick I was. I had no idea how much of an addict I was. Most people I know in recovery are multiply-addicted people. Three or four fellowships is the norm.
* I remember going to a Broadway play and I said to the guitar player and said, ‘I would like to sub for you.’ Who would go into a Broadway pit and say they would like to sub unless they could do it? But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the sanity to know what was required to do that. Why did I go? Because I was sick and I didn’t care. One of the things about underearners is that we don’t really care about serving the community. We don’t equip ourselves to want to do a good job. Why? Because we’re sick. I just wanted to be in the cave. This is a disease of experiential isolation, where I choose to hide in a substandard life because I am under the illusion that I am being safe.
For many years, I would go from one vision to another. Whether it was studying guitar or studying acting or writing or comedy, I didn’t know that I was under the bondage of self. This manifested itself a total cutoff of energy for anything my soul wanted to do.
The disease of underearning will not tolerate visibility, risk, criticism, praise.
I had a desire to do voiceovers. I got hired for my first voiceover and I looked in the control room and one of the guys was shaking his head, as they often do, and I couldn’t tolerate being visible. I got my first check and never did a voiceover again.
Over and over again for 20 years, the energy for the vision was cut off like electricity for a house. The energy goes and you don’t know why and you don’t care why because I was deep in this addiction.
I would always try to spin relatives. I would BS. But all I wanted to do was hide. The disease would always cut off the energy for my vision…and the visions I had were always blurry.
I was powerless over this cutoff of energy, just like an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol.
I learned to come up with excuses. All I wanted to do was go home and I didn’t know why I was terrified of visibility.
We have five character defects — fear, self-seeking, selfishness, inconsideration and dishonesty. We have three healthy instincts — social, sexual and survival. Those five defects will trample on those three instincts over and over again.
My character defects were part of my childhood. I could not control them but I was responsible for them.
I worked the 12 Steps. I was able to get the fog out of my head so that I was able to commit to time accountability with my action partner.
Posted inAddiction|Comments Off on ‘Fear Fades With Repetition’
Walls are not for little people. Only the elites get to protect themselves.
REPORT: To the Democratic National Committee elites, keeping average Americans away from their convention is a good idea, while protecting the southern border from intruding terrorists, rapists and murderers is a bad one.
The DNC has erected a four-mile fence around its convention site at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. (Isn’t it ironic they’re doing so much to protect a site named after a bank?)
The fence, which appears to be about 8 feet tall, is intended to keep out any individuals with whom Democratic Party leaders, delegates and other liberal elites would rather not mingle.
Fox 29’s Steve Keeley shared a picture of a portion of the fence he said was erected near the intersection of Pattison and Broad.
A man has been been killed and up to 11 others injured – some seriously – after the blast ripped through the Eugens Weinstube wine bar at about 10pm on Sunday local time (8pm British time).
The incident is believed to have been a suicide bombing – and the man killed was the attacker.
The wine bar is just yards from a concert venue where 2,500 were enjoying the Ansbach Open Music Festival.
It appears the festival was the bomber’s intended target.
Dr. James Thompson writes: If, despite her having made so may contributions to intelligence research, Linda Gottfredson had to be remembered for only one thing, I think it would be for her exposition of the meaning of intelligence in everyday life.
Whereas most previous researchers talked about the abstract concept of intellectual power, and gave examples only in terms of academic qualifications, Linda looked at the practical impacts of ability on trainability and the successful completion of everyday tasks. Even among my clinical psychology colleagues, most of whom who had done lots of intelligence testing, her papers were received with enthusiasm and some amazement. She explained what people could do at all levels of intelligence, in a way that made sense to patients and clinicians alike.
Some people are brighter than others. This is the finding which has emerged from intelligence research over a century. Read Linda Gottfredson “Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life” (1997) if only just page 117 for an explanation of the relationship between literacy, learning and intelligence.
The video below shows David Lubinski talking to Linda for her Distinguished Contributor Interview.
At 14 minutes she talks about the meaning of g, general intelligence. She recalls the three things that are required to detect g, according to Hunter and Schmidt: reliable measures, no restriction in the range of intelligence, and no sampling errors.
As a consequence of some people being brighter than others, and some jobs being more complex than others “You cannot have equality and excellence too”.
At 24 minutes she talks about the real tasks that people can or cannot do according to their intelligence levels.
At 35 minutes she describes how she came to write the statement on intelligence for the Wall Street Journal that was signed by 50 leading intelligence researchers in 1994. She said she kept it simple, and just summarised the main findings in the literature, and asked them to sign or not, not allowing them to change a word.
At 42 minutes she explains why intelligence is so important in health care: prevention requires a high level of self-care, and in the case of modern medicine, that turns out to be complicated. The dull are dying before their time, because the cannot follow the instructions for self-care.
At 57 minutes she mentions The Mind’s Eye: the capacity of intelligent people to imagine to imagine hypotheticals, and evaluate them.
At 1:07 why g matters, at 1.12 her admiration for Arthur Jensen, at 1.31 the contortions that some test creators have got into when trying to build a valid test which also annuls racial differences, mostly by complicated cheating (for example, restricting the cognitive elements of the test to being able to read at the 1st percentile).
A summary of a lifetime’s contribution, gracefully done by a researcher who suffered harassment for daring to talk about intelligence.
* This guy (who is John Updike’s son) married an african and has a black child or children. His older sister did the same thing. There’s no humble-brag here. He genuinely wishes to be something he’s not. And his decision–he was born in 1957 according to Wiki–wasn’t some accident of some confused and deeply regretful white girl we so often see today. It was deliberate–he obviously had choices.
The self-hatred and utter determination to destroy oneself is remarkable. Very revealing and sad.
* Anybody else noticing an increasingly frequent reflexive negative reaction to depictions of blue-eyed blonde people in any publicity or advertising? It’s as if “anti-racism” has become extremely prejudiced and racist itself, assuming that behind every “Aryan” appearance hides a snarling bigoted racist heart. I find it very concerning. I think I need to flee America for Europe like our dear favorite genius Ta-Nehisi Coates, because if I ever do get around to having kids, chances aren’t bad that they’d have blue eyes like my own and I don’t want them to suffer discrimination for it. Of course even there they seem to prefer the assertive, romantic, dark Mediterranean types, but at least they won’t have to face so much of that kind of discrimination for their white bread heritage.
* John Updike was a respectable 20th century novelist, his puling spawn turns out to be a wigger.
I found this priceless description of the Negro manqué on the Creactive Nonfiction website: “David Updike teaches English at Roxbury Community College in Boston and lives in Cambridge with his wife, Wambui, and son, Wesley.”
Such a pity he’s reproduced. Just what the world needs, another mulatto with one African parent and one deluded white parent who exalts the black race. I’m surprised David didn’t express a wish to find himself distantly related to Harry Belafonte, “the best-looking man on the planet”.
* Here’s a pic of the not hot Dr. Wambui Githiora-Updike in an article about the lack of teachers of color at the school where she teaches. She does not fail to mention “microagressions”.
“There is not a single black man on the core faculty,” added English teacher Wambui Githiora-Updike, referring to the required academic subjects known as core classes. She also cited “a lack of administrative support to confront systemic problems of race and microaggressions” as a critical factor in hampering retention of teachers of color.
* From John Updike’s “A Letter to My Grandsons”:
“a floating sexual curiosity and potential love between the races that in your parents has come to earth and borne fruit and that the blended shade of your dear brown skins will ever advertise.”
Further proof that xenophilia has a genetic component….
* Madam Wambui flogs the ‘Diversity thing’ as somehow beneficial to Boston’s school children, not to mention non-White faculty and staff…
Meanwhile, husband David publicly flogs himself for being too White despite his best efforts to erase himself via his mate selection and progeny. David’s mom must have really poisoned the relationship between David and his dad.
* David Updike teaches English at Roxbury Community College in Boston.
Roxbury section of MA is a 100% black ghetto. I suspect that the student body at Roxbury Community College is also 100% black, and that Updike’s students do not read novels written by dead White males.
* Updike made the news last year with this widely-reported open letter he addressed to a woman who reported him to the police as a suspected paedophile.
* Quite a… looker. Some …catch. All that and a breakfast table discussion each and every day about microaggressions, diversity, people of color. What a lucky guy. Wambui sounds very much like the gag name of the wife in Eddie Murphy’s comedy routine, not that anyone like Updike has ever watched it. Also find it hysterical to no end that so many black people and especially black women take 2 last names like they’re meeting Lord and Lady Grantham and the Duke of Windsor for high tea this afternoon.
* One thing worth remembering about John Updike is that his reputation was pulled into the gutter by a series of attacks commenced by David Foster Wallace, who called out his “phallocentric narcissism (along with other famous novelists of the era, such as Norman Mailer and Philip Roth).
Wallace was of course clearing the way for a new, far more enlightened breed of novelists, such as, say, himself. (He hadn’t yet realized, I surmise, just how white he was.)
But I get the impression that Updike himself never fully recovered from this attack; his politics seemed far and conspicuously liberal even at the end
Probably his children particularly took that criticism to heart, which would explain their abjectness.
One wonders also if abjectness is a genetic thing, since it seems so prevalent in North Western European Protestant peoples. I certainly don’t get the impression that Philip Roth was similarly moved by these criticisms.
* It’s funny that nowadays everyone wants to be something other than “white” whereas a hundred years ago, everyone wanted to not only be white but members of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution.) There was a time when being a member of the Holland Society or the Order of Cincinnati meant something but not now. And if you have a lot of ancestors who were pre-revolutionary or are listed on the rolls of those who received pensions in 1832 you better keep your mouth shut.
In my own family there are a couple of voids in the censuses and related materials that lead me to suspect some non-white (principally NA) ancestry in there, but it would probably be no more than my supposed Neanderthal ancestry and equally meaningless. In terms of family genealogy it’s much more valuable to know who your family consorted with and what they did, which includes Blacks (some as slaves) and Native Americans, as well as Chinese in the Gold Rush/Railroad days. That makes me feel an affinity to them, and to the history of this country, that “blood” would not provide.
But that goes to “white” ancestry as such. White ancestry is only non-exotic because of we are taught that it is not exotic. Hackett Fisher’s book goes a long way to underscore that there are many varieties of “English”, not to mention Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, etc. The same goes for French, F-Canadian, Basque, different regions of Italy, Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, and so on. If you really need to hang your hat on something “different” just look to Europe.
Another thing that tended to be suppressed was slave owning. The only thing I heard about that as a youth is that my ancestors were opposed to it. And so they were: but there was a distinct father/son dynamic there; the son rebelled against the father, who owned them. Nobody is happy that I discovered our slave owning ancestor. I doubt if any of us would ever want to volunteer in a discussion, “Oh, yeah, we owned slaves.” Talk about putting a target on your back.
As far as age goes, from a common sense perspective, 35 is too young, period. Part of this is actuarial, 70 is no longer the end point for the majority of persons; if I recall correctly the average lifespan in America is 79, and several developed nations are even higher.
I would say that 40 is definitely middle aged. But going gray is another index, regardless of age. I’m in my ’60′s, but my beard has been white for 20 years, and people have been calling me “sir”, opening doors for me, and giving me senior citizen discounts for quite a while now. On the other hand my hair is still brown, so I could theoretically shave off 20 years if I wanted to. But I wouldn’t feel like I was any younger.
So, if middle age is 40, I would still say 60 is old age. I note that many pension plans are accessible after 59.5, early retirement at that age or soon after is common, social security can start at 62, in full force at 65-67, and so on. And, remember too that when social security was first installed in Germany and then other countries the expectation was that you would collect for only a few years, not decades as is the case today.
The main problem with old age, aside from the loss of energy and longer recuperation times, is that you know you are basically unattractive to young people, if not worse. This can be particularly difficult for those, men and women, but particularly women, who have spent a lifetime stressing their attractiveness. That’s why you have to develop your inner life.
* When we [whites of northern European origins] see a stranger we think, ‘Ah, a possible friend!’ When people of other ethnocultural groups encounter a stranger, they generally think ‘Oh, no, a potential enemy, I have to be on my guard against this person,’ and/or ‘Here comes a sucker I can take advantage of.’ (this is paraphrased from Dr. Greg Johnson).
As such, NW Europeans create very pleasant, open, trust-based, progressive societies (in the best sense), but are also susceptible to takeover by hostile elites.
* It related to bin Laden’s observation that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they naturally prefer the strong horse. Or, as Americans say, “everyone loves a winner”. Non-whites are the “cool kids” and the wave of the future and whites are considered to be old and on the decline. So naturally some people would like to switch teams and claim membership in the winning group, even if that is genetically impossible. Updike couldn’t arrange it for himself but he arranged it for his descendants.
When white Christians were in the ascendancy, people with non-white Christian ancestry would marry white Christians and try to “pass” as white Christians themselves. This was common among light skinned black Creoles and Jews.
White European Christians have lost civilizational confidence and non-whites sense it and step into the power vacuum, not so much because they are eager for power but because everyone is afraid of being on a ship with no captain. Sometimes I watch that dog training show with the Mexican guy and one of his repeated themes is that when the dog is “behaving badly” it’s because it senses that there’s nobody in charge (the owner being some worthless liberal) so the dog feels compelled to do something about it because the SOMEONE has to be the adult in the room.
I can understand why European civilizations lost confidence – instead of culminating in some golden age, white Europeans spent the 20th century inventing ever more deadly weapons and slaughtering each other by the millions. Something like that has to cause you to doubt whether you were really on the right track.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on “What Genetic Secrets Hide Beneath a ‘white Bread’ Appearance?”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
