Supreme Court Bans Race-Based Affirmative Action In Education (6-29-23)

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 Supreme Court ends university affirmative action based on race, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/supreme-court-admissions-affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html
13:00 Schools bring back police, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/school-police-resource-officers.html
18:00 The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Entitlement:_America_Since_the_Sixties
21:00 The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties–A Conversation with Author Christopher Caldwell, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36-nBl5uBmc
24:00 Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9fE3WwcxE
25:00 Gay marriage
29:00 Europe imitated American civil rights
42:20 Corporate diversity programs concerned about Supreme Court ruling
46:00 Dennis Prager on End of Affirmative Action, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08EjNHMCEW8
55:10 Democrats look like the party of winners, and Republicans look like the party of losers
58:00 If Trump is on your side, why would you care about the number of lies he tells? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/donald-trump-presidency-lies.html
1:09:30 Tom Friedman on Putin, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html
1:14:20 Elliott Blatt joins to celebrate Supreme Court ruling

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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Luke Ford

Christopher Caldwell writes in this 2020 book:

Men took feminism as a straightforward indictment of their own attitudes. They were right to. Sexism as Bird defined it was everywhere. The succinct explanation that New York Times war correspondent David Halberstam gave in 1972 for the high-quality work he and his fellow journalists had done in Vietnam was that there had been no women in their lives to mess things up.

“Because only one of them was married,” he wrote of his colleagues, “there was no wifely pull to become part of the Saigon social whirl, to get along with the Noltings or the Harkinses, the kind of insidious pressure which works against journalistic excellence in Washington.”

Women meant compromise and intellectual mediocrity.

If you asked women to name the quality they most admired in women, “intelligence” ranked tops, at 57 percent. If you asked men, the best thing about women was “gentleness,” at 38 percent; only 1 percent of them cited intelligence. It is obvious what the consequences of such attitudes would be in any man-run workplace. Look at the TV commercial and marketing campaign that Eastern Air Lines ran in the summer of 1967. Entitled “Presenting the Losers,” it announced that the company had hiring standards so rigorous that only one in twenty applicants for a job as stewardess was hired. Rather than describe those standards, it paraded a dozen young women across the screen and invited the viewer to check them out, accompanied by a narrator’s contemptuous assessments: “She’s awkward. . . . Not very friendly. . . . She bites her nails. . . . She wears glasses. . . . Oh! . . . Aww, she’s married.” One is too tall, one too short, another chews gum. Eastern’s standards were wholly physical. Sexual.

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Discrimination Is A Good Thing (6-28-23)

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

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CJ: Thank the Rebbe’s Followers for Turning the Tide of The Russo-Ukraine War

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

Charles Johnson writes:

The reason you don’t understand what just happened in Russia is because you don’t understand Chabad, its players, and the power they wield around the world.

Every so often I am reminded that I live an exceptionally colorful life.

So it was past week I received text messages, direct TMs, and a phone call from my friends within Chabad. Why they even left a message with my bank. Thank you for the blessings.

Whilst I was initially apprehensive and even frightened these outreaches amounted to blessing — and as with all blessings, a harbinger of the future. “The war is going to end,” one of my friends told me. I knew that Chabad had long opposed the war in Ukraine and that Putin’s rabbi — Berel Lazar — was planning to be in the United States soon. I tweeted about their having contacted me.

At their urging I informed my friends within the U.S. government and — sure enough — Prigozhin and his Wagner Group moved out of Ukraine and into Russia. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group provides security for much of the Chabad society operations throughout Africa.

After all, this past week was a holy day for Chabad. It marked the 29th anniversary of the death of the Rebbe Menachem Schneerson.

You probably didn’t notice that President Biden has signed two proclamations honoring the Rebbe or that his son Hunter Biden spoke with Chabadniks about getting back their library.

But I did.

The U.S. government has aligned itself with Chabad in its quest to rollback some of the nastiness of the Russian oligarchs and regime. Chabad has been a willing ally insofar as its rabbis feel that Putin hasn’t done enough to bring about peace between Ukraine and Russia.

I’ve heard that that was a major discussion in Brooklyn this past weekend. The event in Brooklyn was exceptionally well attended. By some estimates as many as 50,000 attended a remembrance for the Rebbe. Why here’s Berel Lazar, Putin’s rabbi. In Brooklyn!

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Dennis Prager Is Proud To Have Fought Lockdowns & Vaccines

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

June 26, 2023, Dennis said to Julie: “During the pandemic, I said I want my grandchildren that pappy fought the lockdowns, that pappy did not get vaccinated. I will be proud that they have that memory of me when I have left this world. I will be proud that they know I have called out the evil of the American medical establishment… Just as the people who fought slavery would be proud to have their grandchildren know that they had fought slavery.”

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Putin Fears For His Life (6-26-23)

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

00:10 One man’s adventure beyond good & evil (5-15-20), https://rumble.com/vfss5j-one-mans-adventure-beyond-good-and-evil-5-15-20.html
09:40 Biodiversity Crisis Drives Eradication Campaign Against Super-Predators (6-10-22), https://rumble.com/v181y3x-biodiversity-crisis-drives-eradication-campaign-against-super-predators-6-1.html
17:00 Everybody hurts
23:00 Putin’s Speech Reveals New Weakness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18uCyKjer4
32:00 Interview with Jonathan Howard on Covid Contrarians, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-jonathan-howard-on-covid-contrarians
47:00 Why does Amazon Music keep pushing Phantom of the Opera on me?
48:00 Why does Youtube keep pushing Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin videos on me?
1:08:00 WP: This photographer documents queer beauty in the South amid anti-trans laws, https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2023/06/26/trans-visibility-photos/

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Conservatism & Liberalism & Covid (6-25-23)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

Posted in Conservatives, Covid | Comments Off on Conservatism & Liberalism & Covid (6-25-23)

Book Review: The End of the World (Peter Zeihan) Is Wrong: Here’s Why.

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

Eric Engle writes in late 2022:

* What exactly is Peter Zeihan wrong about?
1. Zeihan Predicts the USA Will Withdraw from the World.
In Reality, Globalization will Continue and May Even Intensify with Invention
Peter Zeihan predicts, roughly, that the USA will withdraw from global engagement into a form of what I call neo-isolationism.
Zeihan argues that globalization has not benefited the USA. That is simply untrue. A better argument would be that the costs of global hegemony in dead Americans and trillions of dollars wasted for little or no perceptible benefit are simply too high for American voters. However, even the better argument is also untrue.
Zeihan miscalculates the costs and benefits to the USA of engagement.
The USA will not retrench, withdraw, or enter into any other form of neo-isolationism because states are, roughly speaking, rational power maximizers and the USA benefits with a sort of seignorage from global hegemony – literal seignorage in the case of the fact the dollar is the global currency, figurative seignorage in the form of several extensive and mutually supporting alliance and trade networks as well as soft power in the form of an attractive culture and ideology.
a. Zeihan Over-Estimates the Costs of the Failed Global War on Terror (GWOT)
Zeihan errs in part by over-estimating the damage done by 20 years of failed US liberal internationalist strategy. The GWOT was a costly failure. However, Zeihan doesn’t recognize just how much punishment the proles can take and still support the home team. Let’s just imagine London in 1940, Berlin in 1945, or Kyiv today. People no matter how beaten down don’t just roll over and give up.

* Although I do think Zeihan worth reading one must do so critically. Zeihan does provoke deep thinking about some of the factors which determine international relations and the resulting grand trends. His market-driven energy sector analyses are superb, since his corporate clients could never tolerate any inaccurate forecasts. When he strays outside of energy and agriculture markets, leaving the field of economics and entering into state-to-state relations the results are a fascinating mess, overlydetermined by geography and demography with inadequate consideration of history and ideology. I reach this conclusion with no great joy. Who wouldn’t wish to see the inevitable easy victory of America over tyranny through simple neo-isolationism and re-industrialization while the enemies of the republic collapse due to demography and geography? But “the world ain’t that simple bub”. The USA is locked into competition with varieties of authoritarianism and cannot merely “walk away”. China will not inevitably collapse, nor will global trade vanish to be replaced by famines and pirates. And these outlandish statements of Zeihan’s are why we can view him best as: very clever disinformation with some solid empirical foundations.

Too bad it won’t work.

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Does Peter Zeihan Present A Cartoon Version Of Reality? (6-25-23)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 If I were watching, I’d want this!
04:00 PragerForce!
31:00 Book review: The End of the World (Peter Zeihan) Is Wrong: Here’s Why., https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=148932
41:00 Vlad Reacts: Peter Zeihan on Rogan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AhWZGjbaJE
53:30 I Watched 99 Videos with Peter Zeihan in 2022 – Spoiler: he talks a lot about China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG4xUo2MoUI
54:30 Is Peter Zeihan telling Americans what they want to hear?
1:02:00 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about his San Francisco meet-up with Deep Left Jokkul
1:27:00 Is Peter Zeihan or Ray Dalio Right About China’s Economy?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo9oA4T2zSM
1:30:40 History Speaks Goes On Richard Spencer: The Holocaust—and Holocaust Denial—in American Life, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/the-holocaustand-holocaust-denialin
1:56:00 Has Mark Weber given up on Holocaust denial?
2:02:00 David Cole has changed his views
2:30:00 Introduction to Step Seven and Self-Esteem, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN31FehHdbg

* “This is the more prestigious weekly magazine Luke Ford Stream. He has a utility line like Chevrolet, then his Cadillac Prestige streams. Fordy does some of his best material after the spiritual tranquility and spiritual reflection of the Shabbas.”

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Exhausting

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

I get a stream of requests from people to do things for them that they can easily do for themselves via a Google search, such as links to videos, books and essays.

These requests are the most innocuous things in the world in themselves, but they always presage more requests to come. I’ve never found that they are one-off. Instead, in my experience, anyone who once asks you to do something for them that they can do for themselves, will keep coming back to the well.

When I call people out for asking me to do for them what they can do for themselves, I don’t recall one time when the other party has said in effect good point. Instead, they’re always put out.

The conversation always goes like this:

Requester: “Luke, can you direct me to that Richard Spencer freakout post-Cville audio you played onstream the other day, but the version where somebody synced the rhythm of his words precisely to crazy piano notes/chords?”

I put into Youtube’s search engine, “richard spencer as a piano piece”, and the video is the first result.

Luke: “Here. You could’ve found it yourself on YT without asking me.”

Requester: “Well, no, I tried and failed. Before asking you. Was it much of an inconvenience? Some of us are out here raising children and such, sorry for the inconvenience, lol.”

So, there’s no point it seems in trying to educate people to stand on their own two feet. One just has to accept that as soon as one is asked to do this once, if you give in and help them out, there will be no end of requests. People will take from you as much as they can with no consideration as to their own dignity and yours.

It’s an interesting dynamic. I don’t know what to do with it. One time means nothing, but hundreds of people do this to me in the course of a typical year. Whenever anyone once asks me to do something I think they could do themselves, it never ends there. It goes on and on and these importuners never turn out to be princes among men. It’s exhausting. I’m not looking at things in the best way. There’s got to be a better way of handling this. So far, the best thing I’ve found is to refuse from request one to be a patsy unless I’m sleeping with the requester, G-d forbid.

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