December 29, 2017 How Often Do You Regret A Day Spent Working Hard? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

How Often Do You Regret A Day Spent Working Hard?

Posted on December 29, 2017 by Luke Ford

I find that when I get to the end of a long work day, I rarely feel bad about it.

On the other hand, when I get to the end of a day where I haven’t worked (aside from the Sabbath or a Jewish holiday), I often feel a measure of disquiet that I haven’t used my time as well as I should have.

On Monday, Christmas, I set myself a goal of working on my Fourth and Fifth Step. In particular, I wanted to compile a harm inventory — a listing of ways I’ve needlessly hurt others. I ended up spending 10 minutes on this. I just got stuck. My back hurt me so I wanted to limit the time I spent sitting (I don’t yet have a standing desk at home because I typically work 50-60 hours a week and don’t spend much time sitting at home) so I went for a walk and ran into a friend and I ended up walking him home because I so enjoyed our conversation and it was the only significant human interaction I had all day. I managed to stave off the bad feeling by walking in the sun and listening to 12-Step lectures. I notice that listening to good 12-Step talks always changes my state in a positive direction. I literally get sober and I usually follow it up by taking some action such as cleaning my room or car or dusting off my book shelf or cleaning the bathroom or organizing my closet. I never feel bad after spending time cleaning and organizing.

What else did I do on Christmas? I watched the final four episodes of Season Two of El Chapo, the superb Univision production on Netflix. Early the next morning, I had an El Chapo inspired horrific nightmare and staggered into work hung over.

Aside from Monday, I’ve worked all week and spent my spare time, aside from listening to 12-Step meetings and talks, listening to the audio version of the novel War and Peace and listening to Youtube lectures on Clausewitz.

I love these Goals Pages:

Preparing to Define My Goals – What is my Vision?
Do I have a Vision for my life?
If yes, how will my goals emerge out of that vision?
If not, how will clarity of Vision help me to define my individual goals?
How will I define my vision?
Removing Obstacles:
Am I willing for life to be different? What does willingness look like, how do I
express willingness?
Am I willing to let go of all attachments I’ve had to suffering?
Am I willing to let go of any and all resistance I have had to being happy and
prospering? (if not, what is in my way?)
What would it look like (feel like, sound like) if I let go of all resistance to
happiness and good fortune?
Am I willing to let God (as I understand God) show me – or to see – a new way of
living?
Am I willing to enjoy my life? What will enjoyment look like?
Am I willing to be different, to be the change I wish to see, literally?
What will that change look like?
What are my goals?
Defining My Goals:
I will have goals for the different areas of my life — as I define those areas.
Examples: Overall vision, Earning (immediate earning or B-job and vision-based earning); Service;
Spirituality/Recovery; Self-Care (including Home Care); Family & Friends; Recreation/Play; Learning.
What do I define as the major areas of my life?
How does each area relate to my underearning?
GOALS PAGES
“We set goals to measure our progress and reward achievement”
I will write down my goals and I will be specific. I will separate each goal.
I will develop small action steps necessary to move toward, and achieve,
my goals.
Can I allow myself to go one step at a time?
Can I allow myself to take action in small time-frames (15, 20, 30 min.)?
Getting Ready for Action: Looking at all goals or one specific goal
Am I willing to accept help in achieving this goal from Source, God, Higher Power?
Am I willing to allow a spiritual solution, to transform my life around each issue or
goal? (if not, what is in my way?)
What other support will I need to follow through to completion?
What people do I know that can and will support my reaching my goals?
Who do I know that may not be able to support me in reaching my goals?
Who may actually be draining – and that perhaps I should avoid?
***
How will committing to take, and then taking, the action bless my life in positive
ways?
How will avoiding or not taking the action harm me?
What has been the payoff, I’ve been getting, for not taking or completing the
action(s)?
i.e. Getting to be right, to be a victim, to complain, addiction to familiarity with suffering,
fear of change, loss of identity who will I be without this condition, staying in the drama of
old communication and habit patterns that do not serve me, living in the problem instead of
living in the solution.
***
Am I willing to show up (do my part) and let go and let God?
Am I willing to let go of the need to know how it will happen (all the details)?
GOALS PAGES
“We set goals to measure our progress and reward achievement”
Am I willing to let go of the need to know the outcome?
How do I let go?
Am I willing to take a leap of faith and trust that I am in the care of God (as I define
or understand God) – and that God is with me every step of the way?
Am I willing to ask my Higher Power to remove my blocks and for the willingness
and strength to take and complete the necessary actions? (if not, what is in my way?)
How do I ask for help and guidance?
Getting Into Action:
Am I willing to put one foot in front of the other and take the next indicated step?
How will I do this?
Am I willing to bookend the action with someone in Underearners Anonymous?
What are the steps necessary to complete the action?
What is a realistic timeframe for completion of the action?
On what date will the action be complete?
***
What kinds of things would I enjoy as a reward for reaching a goal?
How will I reward myself each time I reach a goal or complete a major action?

Posted in Addiction, Personal | Comments Off

Top Ten Contributors To American Politics 2016

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

Friend: “Steyer is only one half Jewish and technically not a Jew at all. His mother is an Episcopalian. I do not think she converted or that Steyer was raised as a Jew. His wedding was officiated both by a Rabbi and an Episcopal priest.”

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The West Changes Direction On Immigration

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I’m quite impressed with the dramatic change in direction pretty much everywhere in the West on the immigration issue.

First Brexit, then Trump, freed up discussion of immigration. What they exposed is the bankruptcy of the case for immigration: it comes down to nothing more than an accusation of racism in its opponents. Nothing more than pure taboo supports it. Every fact runs against it.

But taboos come and go. They can’t survive open challenge.

We have three more years of Trump, at the very least. I think we’ll end with a very different culture surrounding immigration from the one we started with.

* Despite having a strong leaning towards the left at times, the arrogant French (not really a put down) don’t seem to hate themselves, or their cultural legacy, in the same way the rest of the West does. BLM can only thrive when a significant portion of the majority population truly hates itself (culturally.)

* Bannon has pulled his endorsement of Paul Nehlen over his retweeting of cartoon that says “It’s ok to be white”. Bannon was never alt-right or even close, but he’s now virtue signaling big time to put space between himself and alt-right/white nationalism.

Bannon is a big supporter of Jewish tribalism and thinks blacks are prime candidates for civic nationalism, but whites who don’t hate themselves are beyond the pale for him.

* Reading the piece so you guys don’t have to: yes, saying that he’s reading CoC and it’s okay to be white is the extent of Nehlen’s inflammatory activity. You have to see it through a Jewish lens: if Nehlen had stolen Palestinian land or bombed a Palestinian neighborhood or shot a Palestinian kid, that’d be one thing, but reading books and tolerating whiteness is a whole ‘nother level.

* Nehlen had been on Fash The Nation during his first try at unseating Paul Ryan. I had found that odd and thought that it might have been a misstep on his part. Then he went on FTN a 2nd time and indicated that he was a regular listener.

I like that he memes. I do think that he should have stuck to #ItsOkToBeWhite. That hashtag is genius in that it’s very, very easy to defend in the eyes of normal people.

I’m not sure why he’s hitting the JQ so strongly, especially since his stance on the “fellows” is that he’s willing to respect them if they respect him. Sounds a bit like Ann Coulter’s stance, who just dog whistles her stance on the “fellows” and doesn’t shout it out.

* Why don’t progressive men and women executives hire all of these put-upon women at a discount price and crush the competition? There must be a veritable surfeit of talented women executives out there just dying to get their chance. Yet, no one seems willing to tap that ass – sorry, that well of talent.

Posted in France, Immigration | Comments Off

Mexico’s Congress Seems Oppressively White

Posted on December 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

* Whites like Del Toro sit as a thin film at the top of Mexican society, much as Jews do in the US. In both cases, the .7-1.0 SD difference in IQ at the group level leads to several orders of magnitude of outsized influence.

It’s La Griffe’s smart-fraction theory through the lens of ethnic networking.

Del Toro the individual, who would be a despised conquistador in Chiapas, is a typical Hollywood/Manhattan courtier peddling crap that he knows will receive support and acclaim from the Ministry of Information.

* Bottom line, ‘the fringes’ are really the centers of power. They are the ones who cannot be criticized in any way, are the defacto Aristocracy, and do most of the censoring and controlling of society’s boundaries.

* Del Toro is one of those people, like James Whale, Tim Burton and David Cronenberg, who have a gift for design, but aren’t terribly good at storytelling.

* I think you hit Del Toro’s weakness on the nose – he’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting moods with visual design but without stories to match. The visual style can fool you into thinking there’s going to be a good film but it just doesn’t work out that way.

He also seems to have a fetish for inserting his own Manichean politics into his projects. Of course both Pan’s Labyrinth and Devil’s Backbone featured Francoists as the baddies. The Strain couldn’t resist making both the original Vampire a fan of the NAZIs and his adjutant an actual NAZI, and hitting you over the head with NAZI parallels to the vampires.

* Remember Mohamed Noor, the Minneapolis policeman who for unknown reasons shot and killed a nice Australian tourist when she tried to say something to his partner? Turns out he was hired after the city drastically lowered their standards for psychological screening in the name of diversity. Welp, turns out that those lowered standards are still keeping out too many vibrant applicants, so they are being lowered even further.

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Bribing The Press

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* It would seem to me that Mexico is just practicing a less sophisticated form of message control that is commensurate with its generally lower standard of living, i.e. outright bribes in the form of advertising payoffs and the occasional strong-arm tactics. Whereas here in America, the money is sanitized by funneling it through a maze of government agencies, obscure grant windows, foundations, think tanks, endowments, shell companies, and other financial subsidiaries, until it becomes ritually purified; and the threat of shunning, silencing, un-personing, and career track devastation are enough to keep any dissenters in line. Not there are many dissenters anyway, since all practitioners of the journalistic craft are carefully vetted by the universities, the professional organizations, and the internship process so as to ensure that they are bonded and certified PC.

But, since in both cases, after normalizing for the degree of sophistication, the process is essentially the same, it appears to be an intrinsic feature of modern societies rather than an aberration. It should not be surprising that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Most journalists would rather eat than be martyrs for truth.

Indeed, there really cannot be any such thing as a “free press” that does not depend on money and protection from another source who may seek to influence it. What there can be, however, is meaningful opposition to Leviathan’s press corps, but only if people are willing to put some effort into it.

In plain English, this means that people have to be willing to pay for it. It is unrealistic to expect anything to materialize from the efforts of a few heroic bloggers who, after exhausting themselves at their daily wage slavery, stay up late into the night trying to fight the power by tapping away at their keyboards for stuff-all. Nothing against the heroes, mind you; but it is a poor reflection on the people they are trying to lead, when the latter will not lend their encouragement and financial support. There are entire books that could be written right now, and there are people with the talent to write them, but they are lacking in the time and the means. If only such support were forthcoming, we could genuinely change the face of American culture.

This is why I’m supporting Steve’s fundraising drive with my limited abilities and I entreat everyone else here to do the same. There was a time when journalists would produce extremely well-written and and well-researched monographs, traveling to foreign lands, hanging about the encampments of battlefields, diving into industries and governments. We can make it to be so again, and the books we write will influence a generation and will shine out across time. We have the will to do so, we just need the means.

Posted in Journalism, Mexico | Comments Off

Why Are Guatemala And Honduras Moving Their Embassies To Jerusalem?

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Newsweek: “The United States is an important source of assistance to Guatemala and Honduras, and Trump had threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that supported the U.N. resolution.”

According to ADL surveys and the like, Latinos have a high rate of anti-semitism but it is more accurate to say that they have a high rate of noticing. By assenting to propositions such as “Jews control the media” or “Jews have disproportionate power and influence over American politics”, Latinos are then graded as “anti-Semitic” by the ADL.

Posted in Israel, Latino | Comments Off

WP: Jeff Flake is the latest Republican to acknowledge the GOP’s race and gender problem

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

How come you rarely see stories about the Democrats race and gender problem? After all, white males are reluctant to vote Democrat. How come that’s not an issue?

The Coalition of the Fringe (minorities) have an interest in banding together against the white Christian core. The Democrats represent the angry fringe and Republican represent America’s core.

Black reporter Eugene Scott writes for the Washington Post:

Sen. Jeff Flake (R.-Ariz.) repeated a frequent criticism of his party that could be a bigger challenge for them in the 2018 elections than President Trump’s unpopularity — a lack of diversity.
The conservative lawmaker said on ABC’s “This Week”:
“When you look at some of the audiences cheering for Republicans, sometimes, you look out there and you say, ‘those are the spasms of a dying party.’
“When you look at the lack of diversity, sometimes, and it depends on where you are, obviously, but by and large, we’re appealing to older white men and there are just a limited number of them, and anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy,” he continued.
This is a familiar critique of the GOP that even conservative lawmakers have become increasingly vocal and concerned about. In recent large scale elections, most people of color have voted Democrat and most Republicans are white, according to the Pew Research Center. And most women have voted for the Democratic candidate while the right often wins the male vote.

In other words, the more divided and angry Americans get, the more likely they are to vote Democrat. The more people get married and have kids, the more likely they are to vote Republican. The more affordable it is to make a family, the more Republicans thrive. The more challenging it is to make a family, the more Democrats thrive. It all comes down to Steve Sailer’s Affordable Family Formation theory.

Jews will tend to vote for the Coalition of the Fringe because they fear a strongly white Christian majority could hurt them. Blacks and latinos will usually vote for the Coalition of the Fringe because their low average IQs means they need more social welfare spending and don’t mind higher taxes on the wealthy because they are rarely wealthy.

Most white people around the world want strong law enforcement, lower taxes and less social welfare spending because that is in their group interest.

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NYT: ‘ISIS Is Resilient in Afghanistan Despite U.S. Campaign’

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

I presume this condition exists because the ISIS program better fits with the Afghani DNA than does the American program. Liberal democracy is great for populations with an average IQ of 97 and higher. The average Afghan IQ is 84, four points lower than the average IQ of Mexico.

Some groups do better under authoritarian regimes.

New York Times:

The Islamic State is far from being vanquished in eastern Afghanistan, surviving intense pressure from American airstrikes and raids by United States and Afghan forces.
The group has waged brutal attacks that have displaced thousands of families and forced even some Taliban fighters to seek government protection.

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LAT: Pivoting to video is the biggest trend in media — but it may not prove as lucrative as publishers hope

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

If you want to get massive traffic from Facebook and Google, you have to produce the content that these companies want.

If you want to be prosperous, you have to excel at meeting the needs of other people.

If you just want to do your own thing, and not take into consideration the consequences of your behavior on other people, you’ll likely be poor and miserable. If this is you, you’ll be unable to change your mindset through self-will. The thinking that produced your agony won’t get you into happiness. You probably got addicted to hiding and biting because of abuse you suffered in childhood. You are so hungry for affection and recognition, to trying to prove that you are worthy of love, that you won’t make sane choices. You’re lost unless you can find a way to rewire your reward center and to do this you’ll need help (such as a 12-Step program or a good therapist or coach).

Los Angeles Times: “But as more video creators rush to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube to share their content, the shift to video may prove less lucrative than publishers hope.”

As Twitter and Facebook and Google increasingly censor their platforms, I take the attitude that these are private companies and they can and should do what they want.

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off

LAT: The profane origins of ‘Merry Christmas’

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

I wonder why the news media and the entertainment industry revel in trashing the sacredness of Christmas. Why are there incentives among our elites to trash the public observance of Christianity? A nation that does not have a sacred zone is in big trouble.

Los Angeles Times Op/Ed:

For most of its history, the Christian church regarded Christmas as a small event on its calendar not requiring much observation. Puritans in England and later the American colonies went one step further, banning the holiday altogether since they could find no biblical support for celebrating the day. As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum has explained, the Puritans imposed fines on anyone caught celebrating and designated Christmas as a working day. These strict rules were necessary since so many men and women engaged in the drunken carousing that accompanied winter solstice festivities, an ancient tradition that the church had failed to stamp out when it appropriated Dec. 25 as a Christian holiday.
In this setting, “Merry Christmas” was born. The greeting was an act of revelry and religious rebellion, something the uncouth masses shouted as they traveled in drunken mobs. Troubled by such behavior, the New Haven Gazette in 1786 decried the “common salutation” of “Merry Christmas.” “So merry at Christmas are some,” the paper lamented, “they destroy their health by disease, and by trouble their joy.”

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