Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

The Donald

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

* Since he entered the race, I’ve heard people talk about The Donald as a bumbler, a clown, a fool, an idiot. Well, he’s no idiot, and that should have been obvious from the start. As to the rest, for some reason I’m reminded a bit of Casablanca where Strosser and Renault are discussing the blundering Americans.

Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.

Captain Renault: We musn’t underestimate “American blundering”. I was with them when they “blundered” into Berlin in 1918.

* Hey iSteve, doesn’t the whole migrant invasion sound like a Gremlins movie? A few Gremlins show up and the Chancellor adopts them, but then they start mysteriously growing in numbers.

* I wonder why the communist Pope Francis didn’t take the opportunity when he was in Mexico, a country that is nominally 80+% Roman Catholic, to criticize Mexico for its restrictive immigration laws, which I understand are much more restrictive than those of the U.S. His words might have had much more effect in a country which is more than 3X Catholic than the U.S. (percentage-wise) and thus more inclined to follow the wisdom of their Holy Pontiff and more likely to accept his criticism that such restrictive immigration policies are not “Christian.” Where did the Church find this left-wing buffoon who insists in intruding into political matters that have little connection to the Church’s mission?

* An old line in politics is that some candidates are blessed to have great enemies. Clinton was the last guy who fit this role. Newt Gingrich was a great foil for Clinton and probably saved his presidency. A Speaker who was smart and restrained could have made Clinton’s life hell. Instead, the ridiculous Newt made Clinton look like Churchill and reminded everyone that you could do worse than the soft-core Caligula.

Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies. Jeb was a great a foil. Cruz, surprisingly, has been a great enemy of Trump because Cruz is the one guy everyone agrees is a s-bag, even if you like him. His friends say he is a d-bag. When the charge against Trump is that he is aesthetically unacceptable, having that charge made by a guy who reminds everyone of a young Montgomery Burns is manna from heaven.

Of course, big personalities attract a lot of crazies so maybe the the law of averages just kicks in for guys like Trump.

* FNC is claiming that a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows Cruz leading Trump in SC.

Funny how a poll commissioned by both the Globalist Sociopaths at the WSJ and the Cultural Marxists at NBC could be so wrong.

Trump keeps gaining momentum not to mention millions in free advertising with these bogus polls. FNC not to mention CNN and the rest of the dinosaur news networks have no other choice but to quote Trump telling the world that they are full of it.

In response to Pope’s latest idiocy I would love to have Trump sit down for a one on one with Bill Warner the retired college professor who runs the website Political Islam. Almost single handedly Warner has stopped the construction of several Saudi financed mega mosques across middle America.

The Cultural Marxist Media would have the vapors over the lastest antics of our soon to be “President Sh*tlord”.

* Pope Francis is warning of a surge of drug trafficking in Argentina, saying he hoped his native country could stave off “Mexicanization,” in a letter he sent to an Argentine lawmaker.

“Hopefully we are in time to avoid Mexicanization. I was speaking to some Mexican bishops, and it is a thing of terror,” the pope wrote in an email to lawmaker Gustavo Vera, in response to a letter Vera had written to him expressing concern about drug trafficking in Argentina.

* Maybe this is good that we can have a discussion on the history of Arabs/muslims and Europeans. Too many people think it is about the French colonizing North Africa. Too few realize that for the past 1300 years the muslims have had the upper hand over the Europeans more often than not. I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.

* Donald Trump may not regard Muslim immigrants as invaders but I sure do. That opening of minds and hearts you refer to is a very one-way business. The penalty for apostasy to Islam, to the best of my knowledge, remains death. “Extremist” Muslims are the Muslims most faithful to the dictates of their religion. They’re free to practice it in Islamic countries, and I wish them the best, but it is increasingly obvious that they cannot mix peacefully in Western countries.

Insofar as the division of authority between popes, kings and emperors, this was a constant struggle in the Middle Ages (e.g., the Investiture Controversy). Early popes acknowledged the spiritual as well as the secular authority of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. The Church was a huge landowner and bishops had considerable secular authority.

* It’s not so much Trump’s Luck, it’s that he picks his enemies so well.

During his initial entry, he made Jeb his #1 enemy, and had a battle plan laid out on how to attack him. He could have spent his time taking on Cruz (the presumptive intellectual candidate), Christie (the former lobbyist with the quick tongue) or Rubio (the minority with the mostest—sorry Ben), but instead concentrated his fire on Jeb, the awkward, inept, weak beta male next to whom Trump looked golden. Then he hammered Jeb with hilarious lines and got big by beating him up. He could have ignored Jeb and concentrated on clearing the field, but he picked Jeb to highlight his own strengths and make himself look strong.

Similarly, Trump could have ignored this sally by Pope Francis (the “pope’s opinion is religious, not political” or some other meaningless pablum) but realized (1) the pope isn’t popular amongst traditionalist and conservative Catholics, as he’s basically a liberation theologist; (2) the pope is setting himself up for YUGE hypocrisy (both with the Vatican walls and the Mexican wall between it and Guatemala) that Trump’s own followers would notice; (3) the pope was inadvertently propping up the old American Protestant fears of Catholics being less loyal to the U.S than Protestants—which carries more weight in evangelical states like, say, SOUTH CAROLINA WHERE THE PRIMARY IS.

And, most importantly, just like with !Jeb!, Trump knew he could win this battle.

So he pounced and made Francis his enemy-of-the-moment, and slaughtered him politically.

Make no mistake that Trump picks his battles to make himself look like a winner. He ignores others that are losers. He picked it with Megyn Kelly to make himself look independent of Fox News and prop himself up with male, anti-pc voters. He picked it with Jeb to make himself look tall, strong, and alpha. And he picked it with Francis to make himself seem loyal, American, and consistent, while the pope looks hypocritical.

* Scott Adams has this amusing take on the Francis-Donald dispute on his dilbert blog:

“I could write a long essay about this Pope versus Trump situation, but I think it will be funnier to summarize it instead. What follows is – as far as I can tell – an accurate description of what happened.

1. The Pope criticized Donald Trump.

2. The Pope’s credibility declined.

If this were fiction, no one would believe it.

I predict that the Pope will issue a public apology to Trump for questioning his faith, as opposed to his policies. [Update: And here it is, sort of.]”

* Brilliant headline in the Telegraph today: “Trump forces pope to climb down”. Turns out it was just an opinion piece, but good God! Donald Trump is Victory!

* It is of course the height of hypocrisy for the pope to go to Mexico and criticize Trump’s proposed immigration policies, when Mexico’s actual policies are many times more racist, xenophobic, brutal, and harsh. And of course, the Pope himself allows zero muslim refugees to wander into the Vatican.

However, buffoon? Perhaps not. How about whore. Remember, the Catholic church needs donations from reach people. And rich people love cheap labor. If the pope was not carrying water for the people making all that money from cheap foreign labor (I hear that Merkel is proposing to force the refugees to work for big German companies for a euro an hour!!!! How profitable is that!), then donations to the Catholic church would like decrease significantly.

It’s hard to go too wrong in analyzing politics, than by following the money.

* British America dates back to around 1607. That’s 400 years of history of which we’ve only been a nation for 240 of those years. There were parts of Spain that were occupied for 700 years! Parts of Greece and the Balkans for 450 years! That’s longer than the entire English experience in the New World. Throw in a couple million European slaves and suddenly the narrative loses its power to all who are not already insane.

* Good thing His Holiness is protected by infallibility in regard to faith and morals. That allows him to be right about something.

* To my knowledge the instructions contained in Deuteronomy haven’t been enforced recently. Donald Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism–I haven’t noted his call for her execution for apostasy. I have read of sentences of death for apostasy in Afghanistan. Yes Muslims are a continuum, but enough of them are at the extreme end to constitute a genuine menace. Even “moderate” Muslims support the ultimate goals of Islam: the Ummah of the One True Faith, in which non-believers are tolerated only so long as they remain in dhimmi status. Moderate Muslims just disagree with more energetic Muslims about how to get there. I can see why moderate Muslims are frustrated; in a few generations they will be so numerous in the west that they can use the existing political process to impose the sharia–the more energetic faction alerts the dhimmis to their eventual fate.

You distinguish the United States from Western countries–upon what basis? The U.S., it is true is slipping into Latin America status, but the tradition of the United States is rooted firmly in the West–representative government, the common law, etc. As for terrorist incidents in the U.S., you should check with the relatives of the almost 3,000 people killed on September 11. Or how about Major Hassan, Soldier of Allah, gunning down fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar?” Or that business in San Bernardino? Or the recent attack by a machete-wielding Somali in Ohio? What does it take to convince you these people are a threat, As Kipling put it, you just never know “When the gods of his far-off land, shall repossess his blood.” We have a colossal surveillance state and are stripped of our dignity every time we board a commercial aircraft, largely to avoid terrorism by Muslims.

And what do they bring us? How many couscous cooks and rug merchants do we need? They come from a culture that peaked around 900 A.D. and hasn’t amounted to much since. If we really need immigrants (which I very much doubt) there are better choices than the results of recurring counsin marriages since the Bronze Age.

There are numerous Muslim majority countries. If you find these people so noble and interesting, by all means go and live with them. You have my sincere best wishes. But they are little but trouble when they try to mix in Western (and I include the U.S.) countries.

* And if anyone doubts the power of “game”, the dark arts, learned charisma, etc., or still thinks of it as some gimmick for socially awkward losers, watch and learn from Senor Trump, the true MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD. After blows and controversies that would have folded most candidacies, Trump looks like he actually will wrap-up the GOP nomination.

And in true Trump alpha fashion I hope he uses this little dust-up with His Holiness to keep pushing farther, harder, deeper. Don’t apologize. Don’t back-down. Reframe. OWN IT.

CNN Anchor Erin POZette: “How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
TRUMP: “I’m not hated. And look, I’m doing so well in the polls, and I have such a good message, that all the world’s leaders are talking about me. President Obama talks about me. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in their debates talk about me. The British Parliament holds a special session to talk about me. And now the Pope talks about me. When was the last time you had all the leaders of the world talking about someone who isn’t even out the primaries yet? They talk about me imore than the guy currently in the White House [tin laugh].”

Yeah, like a lot of you and our gentilious host I too would prefer a Presidential style less down the road to Idiocracy, but that horse has long left the barn. If Trump is a blowhard or buffoon what does that make the other candidates?:

Yeb: Invasion is an act of love.
Kasich: Single moms are the real heroes of our society.
Rubio: And Obama knows exactly what he’s doing…
Christie: Since we can’t not let Muslims in, let’s pretend to do something by attacking Russia so we can start pretending we’re doing something by attacking Syria.
Clinton & Sanders: Mmmm… refugees good, smugglers BAD!
Sanders: My first act as President will be to smash the Syrian refugee for-profit smuggler industry and then organize the refugees into employee-owned, LGBT-friendly, migration co-ops so that these poor Syrian families can get to Europe and America in a carbon-neutral manner…
Clinton: My first act as President will be to send Navy ships into the Mediterranean. My second act will be to give the State Dept. nuclear weapons to destroy those Navy ships, so that State Dept. personnel can unimpeded begin issuing green cards.

* Massive European immigration was a disaster for the first natives. Massive African immigration was a disaster for the recent European immigrants. And even the newer waves of European immigration had major negative consequences (introduction of ethnic voting blocks and continental preferences for leftist politics, flooded industries with massive supply of labor to kill wages and set off union/capital wars, gave us the Mafia, etc.) despite a shared Western heritage.

* Muslims deserve to have their own countries, where they ought to remain, or who ought to help there fellow religionists.

Western countries should refrain from dropping bombs on them. They need to be contained in those nations.

* We agree that:

1) There can be substantial negative consequences to large-scale immigration,

2) Kosovo is an example of very negative consequences natives from large-scale immigration, and immigration by Europeans to the New World is another,

3) It is sometimes possible to assimilate small numbers of Muslim immigrants without large negative consequences,

4) It is difficult or impossible to come up with examples of non-harmful large-scale Muslim immigration.

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WP: The so-called ‘Islamic rape of Europe’ is part of a long and racist history

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

I guess Muslims don’t rape European women at a high rate? Or is it that we should not notice?

Ishaan Tharoor writes in the Washington Post:

A popular right-wing Polish newsweekly, wSieci or “The Network,” published a deeply provocative magazine cover this week. It shows a young blonde woman, garbed loosely in the flag of the European Union, being groped by three men. Only the six swarthy arms and hands of the assailants are in view, but the message is clear and barely needs the brutal cover line: “The Islamic rape of Europe.”
According to the Daily Mail, the Polish magazine said it was focusing on “what the media and the Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of Europe.” An editorial in its pages, entitled “Hell Europe,” inveighed against a culture of “tolerance and political correctness” that supposedly led to the grim scenes on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne and other northern European town centers.
Groups of men, many apparently of Arab or North African descent, went on a shocking criminal rampage that led to hundreds of complaints to the police of rape, sexual harassment and other abuse. The incidents fed into an already growing backlash against European policies welcoming migrants and refugees, particularly an influx from war-torn Syria.
Breitbart, the far-right American news website, picked up on wSieci’s cover story and detailed its message of a clash of civilizations:
Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress” — the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”. This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”, as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.
The narrative of an Islamic or Arab takeover of Europe, though hardly new, has gained real traction in recent months, propagated by both xenophobic activist groups as well as populist political leaders and parties.
To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns posed both by the surge in new arrivals as well as the continuing instability and conflicts in the Middle East. The attacks in Cologne, writes the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, were a reminder to the West of the Muslim world’s “sick relationship with women” — a product both of patriarchal and religious norms as well as the stifling legacy of authoritarian rule.
But perverse, misogynist behavior is not the province of just one culture or society. And much of Europe’s anti-refugee hysteria, as my colleague Adam Taylor charted this week, has been overblown and fueled by often misleading innuendo and rumor circulating on social media.

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May A Jew Pray On His Knees?

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Is it OK for a Jew to pray to God spontaneously while on his knees? Or is that too goyish? Asking for a friend who grew up a goy and got used to praying on his knees.

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NYT: Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

For the past 300 years in the West, Jews have often had incentives to side with the fringe against the core. Now that the fringe (including blacks, latinos, and Muslims) is more anti-Jewish than the white core, that might change. Jews, like blacks, respond to incentives. If Jews in Europe keep getting slaughtered by Muslims, Jews will increasingly side with the anti-Muslim nationalist core (National Front in France, etc).

If people are rewarded for pointing out all the flaws in the majority, they’ll keep doing it. If they are punished, they’ll stop.

In strongly Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, there’s no incentive for Muslims to criticize Muslims. That’s not tolerated.

Every functioning society has to have taboos. The flag was a sacred object in America, for instance. The more Jewish Israel gets, the less permissible it will be to trash Jews and Judaism there. The more Jewish the Jew, the less interested he is in hearing criticism of Jews. Orthodox Jews tend to be more Jewishly nationalistic and chauvinist than Reform and secular Jews. If you want to get along in Orthodox life, you don’t trash Jews and Judaism.

The main reason blacks love Obama is that they see him as black. The main reason many non-blacks hate Obama is because they see him as black.

New York Times:

CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court.
“They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.”
When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters.
After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.

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Are Palestinians Getting Smarter?

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

The average Palestinian IQ is about 85, the same as American blacks.

The average Ashkenazi IQ is between 105-120, the average Sephardi IQ is 97 and the average Mizrahi Jew has an IQ of 92.

A friend tells me that it seems Palestinians have gotten a lot smarter. They attack police, military, border guards rather than civilians.

It is sort of like the BDS. The Israelis wanted the Palestinians to practice non violence and then when they started the boycott movement, the Israelis have gone all out to try to defeat it.

When the initial stabbing attacks were on random civilians it helped Israelis say the Palestinians were irrational and didn’t care about civilian life. But by switching to the military, it is more like a war and it becomes difficult to label the Palestinians as targeting civilians. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Debka: Sunday, Feb. 14, will go down as a landmark day in the terror campaign the Palestinians have been waging against Israel for five months. It marked the latest, deliberately ramped up phase. After advancing from rocks, stabbings, car rammings and teen attacks, through the stage of loners to gangs of two and three, it moved up this week to shooting and explosive devices. Four Palestinian shooting attacks took place in 12 hours, most using knock-off Carl Gustav submachine guns turned out by illegal foundries in Nablus.
The latest attacks were deliberately planned to maximize casualties amomg Israeli police officers and soldiers. In Jenin it started with an ambush: Two 15-year old boys threw rocks at a group of Israeli reservists, who gave chase. One of the fleeing boys then pulled out a submachine gun, turned round and sprayed the pursuers, who returned the fire, killing the boys.
Using another tactic, at almost the same time, a Palestinian drew a submachine gun during a search at a checkpoint between the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa and Bethlehem. Before the Border Guards police manning the checkpoint were harmed, they shot the gunman dead.
That evening, gunfire from the Palestinian village of Jilazon struck buildings at the Jewish community of Beit El near Ramallah. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
This new terror trend played out shortly before midnight Sunday at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. A 20-year old Palestinian approached a group of Border Guards as they were changing shifts, He carried a suspicious looking bag. When ordered to halt for a search, he pulled a Karl Gustav submarine gun out of the bag and started shooting. The police were faster and shot him dead. But during the melee, a second Palestinian positioned unnoticeably 100 meters away opened fire on the police He too was shot dead before causing harm.
He was later discovered to be a Palestinian policeman, a member of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus. He was the third Palestinian cop known to have taken part in a terrorist operation.
For the past three weeks, ever since the combined shooting and explosives attack on Jan. 25 in Beit Horon next to Route 443, in which Shlomit Kirgman was murdered, it has been clear that the Palestinians have shifted from loners to teams of two or three terrorists and upgraded their weapons from knives to guns and explosives.
The current stage holds even greater menace because, even though a guiding hand is evident, Israel’s intelligence and security services are still unable to provide an advance alert of imminent attacks.
The IDF chief of staff, Lieut. Gen. Gady Eisenkot, admitted on Jan. 19 that the intelligence networks had not provided a single advance warning of any attack. On Feb. 9, he offered an explanation: “The situation today is very complex with no central direction. Terrorists don’t have to depend on accomplices and don’t need an organizer, a planner or a laboratory for making explosives. All they need to do is snatch a knife from their kitchen.
Five days later, it is obvious that this theory no longer washes. Not every Palestinian can pick up a Karl Gustav in his kitchen. Someone is handing them out with ammo to specific addresses. The recipients are also undergoing some sort of training in their use. In that case, how are the preparations for imminent attacks being missed by the Shin Bet?

Posted in Israel | Comments Off

The Indispensable Sex

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Martin Van Creveld writes: Last week a female Israeli soldier, Hadar (meaning, roughly, “Splendor,” or “Glory,”) Cohen, was killed in the course of duty. Two months into the Israel Defense Force, just two days after she had completed her basic training and taken the military oath of allegiance, she found herself standing guard at Old Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. With her were another female soldier and some male comrades. Three terrorists (some would call them Palestinian freedom fighters) armed with knives, submachine guns which they concealed under their coats emerged. One terrorist stabbed and was able to wound the other female soldier before Hadar gunned him down, probably saving her comrade’s life. Thereupon a second terrorist turned on her and stabbed her to death before he and the third terrorist present were “wasted”—this is standard language—by her fellow soldiers. She was nineteen years old.

I did not know Hadar personally. Ere she was killed, I had never heard of her. By all accounts. she was what her name proclaimed her to be: namely, a splendid young woman with her entire future in front of her. Idealistic and determined to prove herself by serving her country as best she could, she volunteered to do a man’s job; i.e was trained to become what both the IDF and the media call a lohemet, meaning either “fighter” or “warrior.”

But do not allow yourself to be misled. The term does not mean she went through anything like a full infantryman’s course. No Israeli woman does, and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly. All it means is that she was taught how to use her weapon, apparently a shortened version of the M-16 rifle (the real thing would have been too long for her to operate efficiently), and put into a bulletproof vest. So equipped, she was made to stand guard at what is currently one of the most dangerous spots in Israel; dangerous in the sense that, over the last few weeks, it has been the scene of several more or less similar attacks.

Even in Israel, the only country in history which (to its shame, some would say) has conscripted women into its military, a dead or injured female soldier is no ordinary event. That explains the media circus that has been going on around the deceased girl. Hadar’s own funeral was attended by the minister of home security. Accompanied by his retinue, the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Eisenkot, came to visit the female injured soldier in hospital and saluted her in front of the cameras. Not to be outdone Prime Minister Netanyahu, normally not the most sensitive of men, did the same. Had the dead and injured soldiers been male, almost certainly none of them would have bothered. All three may have felt that there was something deeply wrong, morally speaking, in making Hadar stand guard as she did. Or else, which in Netanyahu’s case seems more likely, that doing so would provide yet another photo-op.

Ultimately the reason why there is something deeply wrong with having women guard men and sacrifice themselves for them, instead of the other way around, is rooted in our mammalian biology. As everyone knows, the mammalian female’s investment in conceiving the young, bearing them, and bringing them into the world is huge. Not so that of the male who takes just a few minutes to do what has to be done and withdraws. Females can only have so and so many offspring during their lifetime; for males, so large is the number as to be practically unlimited.

The mathematics of reproduction explain why, among many mammalian species, the lives of males count for much less than those of females. When there is a threat it is the males which defend the females, never the other way around. Among us humans, the dangers surrounding delivery—at one time, one woman in four used to die in or soon after childbirth—provide another reason why women should not be heedlessly sacrificed. Briefly, nature itself has made women the indispensable sex. Compared with men, in any society they are a biological treasure and must be preserved. Even if doing so costs the lives of men.

Elementary, my dear Watson, Sherlock Holmes would have said. Yet the members of that peculiar species, modern feminists, seem unable to grasp even the most elementary biological facts. Half a century after Betty Friedan raised the standard of revolt, their real motives in claiming the kind of equality that cost Hadar her life remain no less mysterious than the famous feminist mystique itself. Unless, of course, Freud was right and penis envy makes the world go round.

Poor Hadar. I am aware that some people on the other side would say that she got just what she deserved. Be that as it may, and putting politics aside, all she herself wanted was to “contribute” to her country. But apparently she could find no better way to do so than to do what men normally do and what nature, by giving them stronger bodies, has made them more fit to do. Now she is dead, and my heart goes out to her and her family. Yet I cannot help wondering whether, by getting married, giving birth to a couple of children, and raising them properly as a mother should her contribution would not have been greater than it was.

May her soul rest in peace.

Posted in Feminism, Israel | Comments Off

Break Up The Banks?

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that bring John Lennon back? Would it cure asthma? Would it cure AIDS? Etc.

Little kids formulate more intelligent arguments than this when they’re trying to get out of being punished.

* The game is as old as time. Divide and conquer.

It works on even the people that see it. Steve is an intellectual so he hates businessman. He wants a strong white culture but where is any power supposed to come from if a group gives up trying to win? Almost every win at some point derives from strong businessmen.

* That’s unreal. Of course it could really be used as a retort for any policy under deliberation. For example, would raising the tax rates end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?

* In my hopeful moments I wonder whether the last 8 years (I’m including the election season) has soured a majority of the American electorate on identity politics to a degree that Hillary would be rejected. It’s been so downright exhausting, and I have to wonder whether continuing the grinding (this time with sex in place of race) would be enough of a turn off to people to preclude a Hillary administration.

* Before thrifts were allowed to “grow their way out of their problems” with “reforms” during the Carter and especially the Reagan administrations, regulation was as simple as pie or maybe you forgot all those jokes about bankers hours.

Back then all a thrift could do was make residential real estate loans which were single family houses and housing blocks with under 4 units. That is why you see so many 4 blocks in the older parts of a city. You tend to see them as the duplex on the bottom floor and the duplexes on the top or the 4 townhouse unit like the Monopoly game apartments.

The thrifts took in deposits and made safe well documented home loans. They paid out more in interest than banks and charged less for home loans. That was their niche and the commercial banks got the rest.

As long as interest rates stayed constant and low everything was fine. They started offering assumable mortgages just before interest rates went haywire and money market funds started sucking away their deposits.

Unless the bank is involved in criminal activity, how difficult is it to determine if the bank is solvent when you only have a few main variables in a linear equation? You have your depositors accounts and the interest rate. You have the home loans and the interest rate. You have your costs and the amount of money you have set aside for loan losses. You have the number of problem loans and a reasonable determination of what the default rate will be and the percentage of the loan recoverable in foreclosure. There isn’t much more than that.

The problem was that the House of Representatives biggest source of campaign cash was S&Ls which were usually smallish 1-3 branch office operations. Carter was supposedly given a report that it would cost 15 billion to wind down all the bad thrifts and roll the whole industry up. The FSLIC would have had more money for that operation but the deposit insurance rate had been reduced at the behest of the industry many years before. The roll-up wasn’t popular with the thrift owners, many who would be wiped out if they were insolvent beyond all reasonable help.

As is usual they turn to the “experts” from the industry who deduce that the way out is to allow thrifts to branch out and make new loans so that the old assumable mortgages would be a much smaller percentage of their whole portfolio. When Carter’s deregulation didn’t fix the problem they do what they always do and dig the hole deeper. This also makes regulation a lot tougher since the mix of loans is more complex. Now add in a gutted regulatory agency, the ability to accept deposits from anywhere in the country, and sleazy developers buying thrifts so they can have their own private piggy bank and you get the mess it became.

* “Made her” take her clothes off?

If the late 20th Century taught me anything, it’s that girls will take off all their clothes, outside, in public, for photos (or just casual delectation), for damn near anything: art, civil rights, slut walks, peace rallies, rock concerts, anything.

All they need is some authority figure to tell them it’s OK, and they’ll get nekkid as a jaybird.

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NPR’s Contempt For White Working-Class America

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The host of Morning Edition. Nobody plays the part of smug East-Coast Progressive media professional better than Steve Inskeep. His two trademarks are an insincere belly-laugh when a worthy interviewee says something mildly amusing, and a tone of incredulity that comes into play when reporting on the antics of low-class flyover country whites. He and NPR are a match made in heaven.

* The coming onslaught will be vicious. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

I remind my fellow Trumpers of the words of a Great American, “Hold! Hold! Hold!”

(Well, if he had been an American and if he had actually said that.)

* Steve, how does one develop the confidence of Donald Trump? He’s unflappable. I think if I had his confidence life and work would be a constant game.

* Trump has had exactly the same distinctive personality for all the decades he’s in the limelight. He’s the anti-David Bowie, never reinventing himself.

* Guide to code words: Mr. Trump promises to fix his supporters’ problems, no matter who else is hurt. + Appalachia + Jackson = Trail of tears

* Journalists have the easiest job in the world.

Take an arbitrary part of history that makes Salon readers suck in air disapprovingly.

Then have one or two paragraphs where you put it next to the name of a guy you dislike. Words like “symbolic, redolent, represent, reminiscent, echoes, reflects” are important. Don’t make the link too logical, we’re not autistic here.

Then close with a sarky indirect dig that’s not a conclusion to any argument but nevertheless sounds like it wraps something up. Hit post.

God I wish I had no backbone, money making would be so easy.

* I don’t think genetics has anything to do with Trump’s appeal; most of my roots are with Germans and Scots Irish but it’s way too facile to suggest that Germans and Scots Irish were even on the same page when it came to things like Indians and Slavery.

What I do think that Trump does is that he has a wide populist appeal, and that’s something most Americans, can relate to, as long as their American identity is not “trumped” by some special interest group agenda or grievance.

Jackson had notorious popular appeal, in fact he was the first real “man of the people” to become president. Trump has popular appeal. Full stop. That’s where the comparisons should end, in fact, I think the guy who made the comparison is making an invidious one: “Don’t want Jackson on the $20? You won’t want Trump either!”

Actually, the one former president that Trump reminds me of in some ways is Teddy Roosevelt.

Jackson was famous for the huge cheese wheel (about 1,400 lbs) he offered at a White House party, that was open to call citizens. I hope if Trump is elected he will have the good sense to make it a pizza, and at least half pepperoni.

* I suspect that the popularity of Trump is indicative that he is in sync with the majority of Americans.

* Try The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/trump-the-power-of-positive-thinking-and-american-evangelicalism-143903/

Also see the New Thought Movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought_Movement

The self-help genre, American business and salesmanship culture, Christian Science, “dianetics” in Scientology, hypnosis, the Prosperity Gospel and other forms of Evangelicalism, etc., were influenced by the New Thought Movement.

Trump uses classic sales and hypnosis techniques from this genre:

https://theweek.com/articles/600497/donald-trump-hypnotizing-gop-literally

* I would say there’s far more similarity to Teddy Roosevelt, from the pugilism to the trust-busting protectionism he espoused. Who do these quotes sound like, minus the Victorian-speak:

“Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber.”

“In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin.
But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. […] We have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

“If the minority is as powerful as the majority there is no use of having political contests at all, for there is no use in having a majority.”

Jackson was a true populist in both the good (decentralizing banks) and bad (manifest destiny to an extreme and cruel degree) senses of the word. I’d say Trump is more play-acting the populist — he supports eminent domain for private interests after all — but at core he’s a nationalist, with support and sympathy for the working and middle class backbone of the country.

Trump could certainly use more of the “speak softly and carry a big stick” approach, however.

* Scott Adams summarized the responsibility of the POTUS a month or two ago:

“The job description says the president needs to protect citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic. It is silent on the questions of hurting people’s feelings and protecting non-citizens.”

It is illuminating how some people feel hurting non-citizen’s feelings trumps protecting citizens.

“The people Mr. Trump favors are to be protected from all harm. Nobody else matters. …”

* Pundits seriously underestimate Trump’s appeal to Blacks and Hispanics.

How many Mexican men are going to vote for Hillary? Close to zero, Mexicans hate harridans, women who don’t know their real place is in the kitchen. As for Sanders, they don’t know what to make of a old style effete Jewish Liberal. Sanders might appeal to Asians, though. Hispanics like colorful personalities and they have a soft spot for big men. Men with cojones. Actually, Trump’s their kind of man. A white boss they’d like to have a beer with. Except for some Hispanic professional activists, they don’t give a damn about illegals. And close to half of Hispanic ladies secrectly dream of bearing a son for Trump. He’s the big man in the hacienda, after all.

Most Blacks also respect an unapologetic white man . I really can’t see Black men rushing to vote for a Jewish dweeb like Sanders or an obnoxious feminist and/or carpet muncher like Hillary. Black men will stay home. Not sure about the sistahs.

* Trump favours Americans. Many Americans seem to appreciate this sentiment and would like to see it in their president.

* Reuters-Ipsos has an ongoing daily tracking poll that allows users to create their own cross tabs.

Trump’s strongest showing among self-identified Republicans is in New England, followed by the mid-Atlantic and then the Southeast. These census regions don’t quite allow for the Appalachian McCain Belt to be zeroed in on, but while he’s doing okay in states like West Virginia and Tennessee, he’s really crushing it in states like Massachusetts. It’s probably important to distinguish between total population support, and support among people who are likely to ultimately vote for the Republican nominee. In the case of the former, NPR would appear to have us write off Republican appeal in blue states.

There is also a huge East-West divide, as Agnostic from Face-to-Face first made me aware of. In the Mountain West and West Coast, Trump’s lead over Cruz is in the single digits in the R-I poll. In New England, by contrast, it’s nearly 40 points, with Trump in first at 48% and Cruz at a very distant second at under 10%.

* Take a look at the internals of some of the polls. One of the things that jumps out is just how broad based Trump’s support is compared to any one else. The beautiful people like to say Trump is riding a wave of angry white losers, but the data says otherwise. His support with college grads(winners), for example, is the same as with high school grads (losers). He polls better with NAM’s than any of the other Republicans.

The fun thing about the Trump Effect is what it exposes about his critics. The great bogeyman of the ruling class these days is the meth addicted white guy living in Boone County. We know that because they associate this character with the monster currently tormenting them, Donald Trump. The Professional Right and the Professional Left share this same nightmare.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, NPR | Comments Off

The Onion Loses Steam

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Ever since the Onion apologized 3 years ago, for saying that Quvenzhane Wallis was “kind of a c*nt”, they’ve been going downhill in terms of being politically correct.

With the exception of a few articles mocking political correctness on college campuses, there’s very little that’s even amusing coming out of them now, since anything they write about politics, gender, sexuality, or any kind of minority POV always takes the SJW viewpoint for granted. And, let’s face it, nothing but jokes about entitled Republicans gets old very soon.

The Onion is sort of the parody version of the parody version of the SJW mindset, that is, The Atlantic. It’s very hard to tell them apart.

In fairness, I should say, that following the Onion since its inception (it functioned sort of like Mad magazine or National Lampoon for my kids) the humor was hit and miss and always tended to take a funny premise and run it into the ground.

I’m tuning out the Onion, if they ever publish an article critical of Hilary Clinton and/or Israel, let me know. I’m guessing ….. not.

* Has she thought about releasing a sex tape? Presumably with Huma. That might get the youth interested.

Posted in Humor | Comments Off

Canada’s Idiot Prime Minister

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* For all intents and purposes, Canadians chose Kim Kardashian as prime minister. Further proof that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

* That boxing match and the video of Trudeau doing some Indian dancing are enough to make me believe that Canada has reached idiocracy ahead of the US, but then I remember that Barack Obama gave us his March Madness bracket and I’m reassured.

Trudeau insisted on having a cabinet that was 50/50 male/female. When asked why his entirely sensible response was “because it’s 2015.”

He’s a clown. If he ran a real country that would be of more consequence. Since Canada is a country of no significance they’re free to remind us of that fact by electing imbeciles like Justin Trudeau.

* As a plaid-shirted, redneck Canadian nationalist, I should take umbrage at your cruel words and challenge you to a bake-off or a snow-angel contest in no-holds-barred Canuck fashion but, unfortunately, what you say is true. Our very own Sunny Boy Trudeau, he of the red shorts, declared to the world a few months back that Canada is now officially a “post-national state with no core values”, whatever that Orwellian concoction is. BC now stands for Becoming Chinese and there is even a prof at UBC who teaches that English is a white supremacist language and the Chinese are one of the founding people of our nation, make that post-nation. Ironically, any hope we have of salvaging our pre-post-nation may lie in the Quebec separatist movement and a revival and re-legitimization of ethnic nationalist sentiment. Quebeckers have traditionally not been as PC-whipped as Anglos but, unfortunately once again, even they are being swamped by French-speaking immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. And I suppose that if ever the shit hits the fan in your low-boil three-way race war in the US, we’ll pick up all the Blacks and Hispanics who feel unloved down there and figure that the welfare and other government programs more than compensate for the cold and the snow. Toronto is already a self-declared sanctuary city and Vancouver is itching to become one, though I imagine they’ll only be unmulticulturally interested in Asian refugees. Oh Canada.

* Peter Brimelow wrote a wonderful book about Canada called The Tangled Skein(?). He wrote about Pierre (whom he loathed), saying this: “Pierre Elliot Trudeau was not a great Prime Minister of Canada. Indeed, he was not even a good Prime Minister of Canada. But he was a great man. Unquestionably the greatest man who has ever been Prime Minister of Canada.”

He then went on to write in open admiration of the man’s sheer physical courage.

Item: He’s 70. A trucker walks into a bar and starts giving him the gears. Pierre throws down, says, “Let’s go right fucking now.” Trucker backs off. Lots of other incidents. Sheer physical courage.

Item: (my favourite): Pierre’s on a stage with Quebec Liberal pols in the 60s, an angry ugly time in Quebec. A group of radical separatists charge the stage, throwing material at the pols. What material? Tomatoes? Rotten eggs? Uh-uh. Slabs of concrete. Bottles.

The pols flee, instantly. Except one. Guess who? Pierre, of course! He’s sitting in a folding chair, rock and stone and glass exploding all over the stage…and he doesn’t budge. He adopts the Cicero pose, musing, Rodin’s thinker, but with a sneer of contempt for his assaulters…and sits there, not moving an inch. There’s a pic out there if you want to find it.

Courage. Sheer physical courage. I knew his son had the same quality, and the parasitical (Native) thug Brazeau (a corruptoid kinda-Indian who is living the life today to which he was born) with his martial arts training and his bullshit rodomontade, didn’t stand a chance.

Justin’s his father’s son. Combative chip off the old fearless block.

* Steve, How can you ignore Trump? Why won’t you seriously write about him? What is your deal with him? You make a tangential reference to him now and then but overall you’re ignoring the most important candidate vis-a-vis your views to ever come along. It’s absurd and you’re letting your readers down.

* This is ironic, as disgraced Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi was just on trial here for allegedly punching his lovers in the head. It’s been everywhere in the news.

Ghomeshi was known for being uber-progressive, so the lefties in the Canadian media have been in a quite a tizzy, especially when all three of the complainants basically collapsed on the witness stand, most of them being caught in blatant lies.

* I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about the Trump yesterday; his analysis was very apt.

Rush says that Trump is appealing to blue collar whites not just with his policies but with his speech patterns and brash boisterous in-your-face Noo Yawk persona. By talking and behaving like a working glass joe sixpack white guy Trump is signalling that he is one of them or at least understands their concerns. The recent debate performance yelling and calling other candidates liars being prime examples of this. Rush says that since this group still represents some 40% of the population this can be a winning strategy.

Made me realize that underneath the folksy nice guy manner Rush is a actually a very intelligent guy and that perhaps he’s been reading some of iSteve’s material.

* How did the Bushes become such a dynasty? I once saw them described as the WASP Corleones. They’re more extended-family-oriented than is normal among northern Europeans.

How did the old European royal families become established? By someone conquering a lot of land? Wrong. That’s not enough. Northern Europeans are nuclear-family-oriented, but politics is a team sport. The larger and more disciplined your team is, the more chances you have. Most of the conqueror types did not found lasting dynasties because they lacked the desire or the ability control who their kids married and what they did with their time. But, as with any trait, some are going to be more willing and able to do this than others.

The Bushes aren’t much smarter than most people of their background. But they’re much more familial. That’s probably the key.

* Richard Ben Cramer’s big book on the 1988 Presidential candidates makes the point that the Bush-Walker clan was super-competitive internally, with constant sports and games waged among cousins at a very high level of intensity. But it eventually emerged as clear within the extended family that George H.W. Bush was The Guy, the member of that generation who could go the furthest, so the clan’s resources coalesced behind him.

* Jeb’s voice is excellent, deep and warm, and should be a huge asset for him — but somehow it’s not; he alternates between sounding halting and petulant. And his physical presence should also be an advantage, because he’s a tall man who’s also quite well-proportioned.

You’d also think, as a younger son in his family, he’d have grown up quite scrappy and confident, after a childhood of trying to keep up with and compete against his older brother, but it doesn’t seem to have turned out that way.

Jeb strikes me as a big man who was a big kid who was likely clumsy and self-conscious about it, and who’s been trying to diminish himself his whole life in order to fit in better.

I’m two inches taller than Jeb, and went through much of my adolescence wishing I were more ‘normal’. Later on, though, I started to enjoy being tall and saw how it could be a positive. That feeling never seems to have kicked in for Jeb.

* You take this alpha beta stuff way too seriously. That’s a very omega thing to do. Look, as far as ideology vs blood goes, we can look at libertarians. They’re ideological as hell. What good has that done them? All their ideologies have been turned against them. 99.99% of libertarians are white males and they support open border and free trade policies that dispossess and weaken the only segment of the population from which future libertarians can come. They have to choose between common sense and liberty above all else, and they choose liberty because they are in an ideological straight jacket. How could they still call themselves libertarians if they allowed sanity to triumph over sanity? The only thing that matters is blood, faith and soil. Trump knows that and you need to figure it out quick.

Posted in America, Canada, Donald Trump | Comments Off