Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger Charged With Taking Bribes

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Gavriel Cohen of Los Angeles is also charged with taking bribes.

Rabbi Cohen told me today via email that these charges are “unfounded.”

Reactions in the Los Angeles Orthodox community seem evenly divided between those who are surprised by these charges against Rabbi Gavriel Cohen and those who are not.

Rabbi Cohen tells me:

Dear Luke: This is a statement from my lawyer May 7 2015: “In my opinion, after a lengthy discussion with law enforcement (US and Israeli) officials in this case and my experience practicing criminal law as a prosecutor and a defense attorney for over 40 years, that Rabbi Cohen did not violate any law, statute or regulation of the United States.”

From Jerusalem Post:

The Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday filed an indictment against former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger for allegedly accepting NIS 10 million in bribes.
The charges also include fraud, breach of public trust, fraudulent receipt of a benefit under aggravated circumstances, theft, money-laundering, tax violations and conspiracy to commit a felony, all while using his position as chief rabbi. The indictment ushers in a new stage in the latest legal drama of a major public figure to grab the country’s attention.
The indictment, filed with the Jerusalem District Court, was filed after Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein rejected arguments by Metzger’s lawyer against the charges at a pre-indictment hearing.
Weinstein emphasized that his decision was in keeping with the recommendation of State Attorney Shai Nitzan and other prosecution officials on the case. Such pre-indictment hearings do not usually cause the attorney-general to change his decision.
Previously, Metzger’s defense team said in response to the attorney-general’s prior announcements that he would likely indict Metzger that “we received from the attorney-general the allegations against Rabbi Yona Metzger and the summons to a hearing. Rabbi Metzger denies the allegations made against him. According to the rabbi, he did not receive bribes, not through the state’s witness and not through anyone else, and did not launder money. We will address the allegations against the rabbi at the hearing he has been summoned to after we receive and review the investigative material.”
The indictment said that of the NIS 10m., NIS 7m. had gone directly to Metzger (the numbers are according to exchange rates at the time of the crimes – at current rates the amounts would drop to around NIS 8m. and NIS 5m., respectively.) According to the indictment, in most of the suspected criminal actions, Chaim Eisenstadt, Metzger’s driver, acted as his representative for his receiving bribes…
In the “Conversion Affair,” Metzger allegedly received large bribes from foreigners who wished to convert or to clarify whether they were Jewish under standards acceptable to the Chief Rabbinate.
The indictment said that Metzger and Rabbi Gavriel Cohen, the former head of the Beit Din rabbinical court of Los Angeles, split funds paid to Cohen regarding the issues in question.
It added that sometimes Metzger received the money, but made sure that at least in initial stages that checks were not made payable to him, such that he could better hide his involvement.
In 2011, the indictment said that Metzger and Cohen helped convert the children of a Russian businessman who had made aliya, at a price of $360,000, of which Metzger received $180,000.
Next, the indictment said that Metzger received 30-40 percent of donations slated for charitable organizations in exchange for his support and activities on behalf of those organizations.
One donation for $28,000 which was slated for a yeshiva in Metzger’s synagogue with connections to the Aish Hatorah yeshiva, found its way to Metzger and Eisenstadt instead, said the indictment.
Another donation of NIS 105,000 earmarked for the organization Beit Hatavshil, which helps provide food for the poor, was split between the charity and Metzger, who received around NIS 31,500 of the donation, without the donor’s knowledge, according to the indictment.

The last I knew, Rabbi Gavriel Cohen headed the Beit Din of Beverly Hills. Now, according to a Google search, the first result is for the West Coast Rabbinical Court at http://www.beth-din.org/:

“The West Coast Rabbinical Court, headed by HaRav Gavriel Cohen is authorized to handle all matters of Jewish religious law and is designated by the State of Israel to serve the western United States, Canada, Mexico and the Far East in matters of Halacha (Jewish law). Whether you need Brit Milah, Marriage, Counseling, Ravakut, Conversion, Kashrut Certification, Arbitration, or Divorce, we can help you. As the population is diverse, we can render our services fluently in 8 languages thus creating an efficient network with most communities worldwide – Israel, Europe and the Far East. We are also able to perform tasks in the appropriate nusach (i.e. Sefardi, Ashkenaz) as required by halachah by Rav Elyashiv zt”l and all Gedolei Hador.”

When I last paid attention, R. Gavriel Cohen charged $5,000 per conversion, which sounds a lot more than the other Batei Din (Orthodox Jewish law courts) in Los Angeles, but it apparently included tutoring, while for most other conversion programs, tutoring was extra. I remember one Orthodox rabbi telling me that the Beit Din of Beverly Hills “had a license to print money.”

Rabbi Cohen did fewer than five conversions a year on average.

Rabbi Gavriel Cohen with Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar (above).

Rabbi Gavriel Cohen with the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Amar (above).

Rabbi Cohen and other rabbis visit with President Ronald Reagan (above).

Former Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger (center, above)

FailedMessiah reports:

Metzger allegedly split the proceeds of that scam with as yet unnamed Orthodox rabbi from the Diaspora.
Metzger also took large cuts of donations – and sometimes even the entire donation – made to charitable organizations in exchange for endorsing those organizations. The organizations included a yeshiva located in Metzer’s synagogue and Beit Hatavshil, an organization that is supposed to provide food for the poor.
Metzger also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct bribes he tried to conceal by calling them “gifts.” For example, Metzger got a $70,000 “gift” from a close relative of a rabbi who Metzger appointed to an official state position.
And Metzger also allegedly cheated on his taxes.
Metzger was put into office in a backroom deal orchestrated by then-haredi leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, despite the fact that Metzger had already had a string of ethical and sexual peccadilloes (including alleged sexual harassment of females and males) while he was the government rabbi of a posh Tel Aviv district.
Elyashiv knew of the allegations against Metzger, and of rabbinic investigations into them that had found Metzger to be extremely problematic, when he made the deal that put Metzger into the chief rabbi job but he backed Metzger anyway. When asked by this writer a decade ago why he had done this, Elyashiv – who had been fighting a decades’ long war against the Chief Rabbinate when he got Metzger the job – responded through a spokesman that he had done so “to return the glory to the Chief Rabbinate.”

* Reminds me of a rabbi in Dallas weakly aligned with AISH. His sole consideration as to whether he would grant a conversion (one that at the time WAS accepted in Israel) was whether or not the applicant could pay the $10,000 fee. If you arrived with cash in hand – the conversion took as long as it took him to walk you to the lake with 2 of his friends.

* I recall Metzger from his days as rabbi at the Adam Hacohen St synagogue in TA. He was not a personable fellow and had weak Torah knowledge, but at least he did his service in Zahal. Like all Jews, Metzger’s weakness is GELT: “The Moshiach will not come until the Jews’s excessive love of money has been knocked out of him!” (Chofetz Chaim 1929 during the Wall St Crash)

Miriam writes: His [Gavriel Cohen] beis din used to be on this list [of recognized conversion courts] for a few years until one day (about two or three years ago) it mysteriously disappeared.”

FROM THE LAKEWOOD SCOOP:

Harav Gavriel Cohen, Dayan and head of the Badatz West Coast Beis Din which services both the West and East Coasts, has opened this Summer a Beis Din in Lakewood. Rabbi Cohen, primarily located on the West Coast, has expanded the services provided by his Beis Din to the east coast, the Dayan explains to Peretz Baruch Eichler in his broadcast interview.
Rabbi Cohen will also be heading the Kollel and activities of the newly-expanded Tiferes Eliezer Shul, located at 10th Street and Monmouth Avenue.
The Kollel and Shul were built up by father and son Rabbis Gavriel and Rabbi Eliezar Cohen, the Rav’s Son, who was hand picked by BMG and unanimously-approved by the Atlanta community to be the Rosh Kollell of the newly-formed Ner Ha’Mizrach Kollel, in Atlanta.
Read more about Rabbi Cohen’s West Coast Beth Din here.
Listen to the interview below.
AUDIO INTERVIEW:

Posted in Conversion, Israel, R. Gavriel Cohen, Rabbis | Comments Off

How Do I Improve My Social Status?

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Luke Ford

A friend told me today I should go to Jerusalem and get stabbed by an Arab. It would help my reputation in the community and be good for my career.

Later in the day, he gave me a modified Heil Hitler salute in tribute to my shaved head.

* Rabbi Elazar Muskin at Young Israel of Century City never goes to his left. When he stands at the bima, all the solid citizens of his community sit to his left, and all the scallywags congregate to his right. So when he needs to shush the shul, it’s always directed at the rascals to his right.

Some shuls at rabbi-run and some shuls are board-run. Rabbi Muskin runs YICC, Rabbi Kanefsky runs Bnai-David, and the board runs Beth Jacob and Beth Am.

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The Race Bowl

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The New England Patriots team roster is still majority black. The whitest teams in the NFL are mostly black, even though whites heavily outnumber blacks in America.

I think it would be far more fascinating if instead of the Pro Bowl there was a Race Bowl, pitting the best white players and coaches against their black counterparts. That might get a bigger audience than even the Super Bowl.

* Besides maturing later, whites tend to lose their speed faster than blacks. The great baseball player Mike Trout has gone from stealing 49 of 54 bases at age 20 to 11 of 18 at 23.

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off

NYT: Police Killings of Blacks: What the Data Says

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

As an economist who has studied racial discrimination, I’ve begun to look at these deaths from a different angle. There is ample statistical evidence of large and persistent racial bias in other areas — from labor markets to online retail markets. So I expected that police prejudice would be a major factor in accounting for the killings of African-Americans. But when I looked at the numbers, that’s not exactly what I found.
I’m not saying that the police in these specific cases are free of racial bias. I can’t answer that question. But what the data does suggest is that eliminating the biases of all police officers would do little to materially reduce the total number of African-American killings. Police bias may well be a significant problem, but in accounting for why some of these encounters turn into killings, it is swamped by other, bigger problems that plague our society, our economy and our criminal justice system.
To understand how this can be, let us start with the statistics on police killings. According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The actual percentage of murders committed by blacks is probably higher than the reported 52% by a fairly substantial margin.

About a third of the murders in the US are not cleared. The unsolved homicides are disproportionately urban and black, and probably committed by other blacks. In Chicago no suspect is arrested in two thirds of the homicides. It’s about the same in Detroit and Atlanta and New Orleans, all high bodycount cities that collectively have a significant effect of the nationwide statistics. The unsolved homicides are mostly the result of anonymous black urban street violence. In Chicago 77% of the victims are black, and it’s a good bet that most of the perps who killed them but whose race is unknown are also black. In contrast about 4% of the victims are white.

I suspect the actual percentage of murders committed by blacks nationwide is closer to 60%, maybe more.

* A “bad” shooting of a black guy in an urban area means the cop’s employer is out about about $5 million in a civil suit. Places with rowdier whites usually don’t have juries who will soak a city over a police shooting like this, so there is much less economic incentive to discourage police from opening fire.

As a further disincentive, shooting a black guy will often become a political headache in a way that shooting a white will not. You won’t have hundreds of people protesting, calling for you to be fired and jailed, and maybe vandalizing your house.

A couple years ago some tests showed that cops are less likely to shoot blacks all other things being equal.

Urban blacks have limited political capital, and they have stupidly but successfully used much of it to make police marginally less likely to draw their guns and fire in encounters with young black males.

* The BLM tards that held the Baltimore City Council hostage this week made a list of 19 demands including millions in handouts and carte blanche to commit “minor crimes”- not just misdemeanors but thefts as well. One of their state principles said “human life is always more important than property.”

I have heard this argument so many times from the hand wringing blacks that, “He just stole some jewelry, he didn’t deserve to lose his life over it.”

Uh, yeah, probably not, but when he decided to fight the cop that was trying to arrest him, he sealed his own fate.

“Well that cop should have just let him run off when he started to run/fight.”

This is a fundamental disagreement in how civilization should be structured. Whites see law-breaking and theft as always wrong and always deserving punishment from authorities. Blacks see theft as something everyone does- sometimes you get robbed and sometimes you get away with the loot. It’s yin and yang, take the good with the bad- no need for cops.

This is why both sides should be for separatism. Blacks will never be a majority in this country, therefore their utopian Detroit dreams will very rarely come to fruition. However, this particular brand of lawlessness is so potently detrimental to urban living (from a white perspective) that whites will always flee and dislike it. No compromise will make either side happy. Separation appears to be the only answer.

* A complete separation would bring out the truth about race. It would finally reveal how blacks would deal with the matter of justice and policing when left to their own devices. If a black was shot by a cop, it would be a black cop. If he were handed a tough sentence by a judge, it would be a black judge, black prosecutor, black prison authorities dealing with him when he’s incarcerated. It would soon be revealed that the administration of justice by whites, far from being harsh on blacks, actually had a moderating influence.

* Blacks violently offend at many, many times the multiple of whites. This has been well known for centuries. It is a pattern repeated in just about every society studied at every historic time period studied. I offer no explanations, but that’s just the way it is.

* Apartheid in South Africa appears to have been an approach based on that point of view; but, however satisfactory it may have been, it could not survive the opposition from other Western nations operating under the theology of Liberalism.

Section 8 housing is the weapon employed by American liberals to destroy the same kind of separation of the races otherwise achievable by White flight.

White people may find themselves with nowhere else to run to, and sooner rather than later.

* Both the NYT article and your comment focus on percentages, but neither cites an absolute number of persons killed by cops. Wouldn’t it help to know that in evaluating the problem? I tried Googling and came up with a total of 623 for 2014, the last complete year.

I don’t want to minimize the problem, but 623 does not sound like a terribly large number in a nation of more than 320 million people. I would venture to say that a large proportion of those 623 killings by cops involved criminals involved in serious crimes and very few involved people like Eric Gardner up in NYC or the 12-year old in Cleveland who was waving a plastic toy gun which looked awfully real. I decided to look up my old home town, Washington, D.C., and here is what Wikipedia says: “Washington was often described as the “murder capital” of the United States during the early 1990s.[107] The number of murders peaked in 1991 at 479, but the level of violence then began to decline significantly.[108] By 2012, Washington’s annual murder count dropped to 88, the lowest total since 1961;[109] though the number of homicides has since risen each year to over 100 in 2015.” For some reason, I couldn’t quickly locate a number of murders nation-wide.

* Yes, yet again more ink and human capital is wasted trying to intellectualize around the obvious genetic differences. It is a staple of the times – especially the progressive cause. Equality of outcome is the goal but one that proves more impossible with each passing year.

The progressive goal is to question and eradicate those institutions of society that they perceive to be racist/sexist/etc by arbitrary measures of “disparate impact” or “unequal outcome.” They concoct more convoluted theories with each passing moment to explain our differences as being the result of a rotten system or of individuals bent on the discrimination.

But they fail, and forever will, because they address the problems without understanding the root causes. It will never end and the problems that plague society will never be solved by their endless purges and constant decimation of the pillars that support our country. It will not end until they have laid bare the entire structure of the country, and in the process destroyed what makes America great.

* Michael Brown was only one perpetrator in that incident.

Three other African-Americans — Dorian Johnson, Piaget Crenshaw and Tiffany Mitchell — aggravated the situation by telling the mass media repeatedly that they saw Brown standing still, raising his hands and trying to surrender when he was shot dead.

None of those three saw the incident’s final gunshots. The hands-up yarn that those three told the mass media was a deliberate and malicious lie defaming Wilson — because he is a police officer and because he is White.

And then their lies were supported by other, even worse liars in the neighborhood. The latter said they saw Michael Brown down on his knees and pleading for his life, when Wilson shot him to death. Some said even that they saw Brown lying motionless on the street when Wilson approached his motionless body and fired the final gunshots.

None of us should ever forget how all our country’s Scientific Progressives supported all those liars in Ferguson. The Scientific Progressives furiously denounced as racists anybody who dared to express any skepticism about the liars.

On the other hand, White police officer Wilson ultimately was exonerated by the grand jury because many African-American and bi-racial real witnesses did tell the truth courageously. Even Eric Holder’s US Justice Department was compelled to acknowledge their courage.

* After ‘hate speech’ is banned, what will be next?

‘Disdain speech’?

Followed by

‘Dislike speech’?

Then, ‘ambivalent speech’? And then ‘unenthusiastic (about PC) speech’?

* But blacks tend to screw up spectacularly more than whites do across a wide range of fraught situations so the interesting question is why blacks don’t make up 50% rather than 30% of homicides by cops the way blacks make up 50% of homicide offenders?

One guess is that the total of whites getting shot by cops is inflated by a higher white propensity to decide to go out via suicide-by-cop. That was my impression from reading about a few thousand killings in L.A. County in Jill Leovy’s L.A. Times Homicide Blog, but I didn’t try to count it up.

One way to check that it to look at ages of blacks v. whites shot by cops. I think the white ages tend to be older, while blacks get shot a lot by cops at young ages whey they are full of life but not so much when they are older and tired of living.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

The Right People

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

Luke: “I converted to Judaism 22 years ago. Where’s my seat on the board of a bank or a movie studio?”
Friend: “You have to pay me, and Chaim and Shlomo $10,000 a month for three years, and then we’ll introduce you to the right people so you can get on that bank board.”

* Pure racism. I’d like to see quotas imposed and equal opportunity for every egg. Some high-end fertility clinics and egg-donor agencies ignore the guidelines and pay more for eggs from particularly attractive donors: actresses, models, Asians, Jewish women and Ivy League students with high SAT scores.

* What’s more awkward? Running into your rabbi at the Christmas tree lot or your cantor at the hardware store?

* Friend: “You don’t speak Hebrew.”
Luke: “My tzitzit are longer than yours.”

* Tubby white guy gets divorced in his 40s, dates hot young black chicks for a year, reports, “It was like shooting fish in a barrel. They were just so grateful for attention from a professional white guy.”

* A fellow convert to Orthodox Judaism says to me: “Becoming a Jew can make you the worst anti-Semite and you realize all those WN whackos were right about some things. Jews and gentiles are natural enemies. It’s how God made the world.”

“It’s too ironic. I mean converting to Judaism awakening their white national identity. That is ****ed up.”

* Unlike with Christian clergy, rabbis don’t usually consider what you divulge to them in private with the expectation of privacy to be confidential. They often want you to open up, and then they spread it around. I guess they find it a useful tactic to weed out the bad ones or to just govern the community.

* Growing up a Seventh-Day Adventist, it was basically forbidden to sue anyone. Jewish life is a tad different.

* I just realized that most (it not all) of my GFs had fathers who were sex addicts.

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Paleo-Conservatives Vs Neo-Conservatives

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried writes: Neoconservative publicists and media personalities in the US, particularly George Will and Bill Kristol, identify their “conservatism” domestically with being loyal establishmentarians. But since the American center, particularly on all social issues, has been veering leftward for decades, this repugnance for the non-establishment Right hardly indicates a conservative orientation. What it suggests is a willingness to go with the leftist flow in return for bipartisan support for a neoconservative foreign policy. Neoconservatives can easily live with a left-of-center government (prominent neoconservatives, including Murdoch, were close to the Hillary Clinton for president camp in 2008) as long as it backs a neoconservative direction in international relations. The neoconservative powerbroker Bill Kristol has already put Republicans on notice that he will back the Democratic candidate for president, if he doesn’t get his movement’s choice for a Republican presidential candidate.

To their credit, the paleoconservatives defended what remained of a real Right for several decades, and they carried out this thankless task in the face of professional threats. The traditional Right was suspicious of the direction that the civil rights movement was already taking in the 1960s, and they have consistently opposed the feminist and gay crusades with a powerful but generally ignored arsenal of arguments. Paleoconservatives have taken stands against the liberal internationalist foreign policy advocated by the neoconservatives and more broadly, the Republican Party. Critics on the right have resisted this approach because they are deeply skeptical of what Burke mocked as the “armed doctrine” of global revolutionaries. Paleoconservatives also stress the resemblance between the present call for world revolution and the Marxist internationalist vision. The real Right (if I may use this phrase) totally rejects any call by the fake Right for a global democratic revolution. They challenge the view that our transformed America represents such a lofty state of moral enlightenment that we are entitled to cram our progressive values down the throats of the unwilling.

Unlike the neoconservatives and the corporate interests that fund the GOP, all paleoconservatives are immigration restrictionists, oppose birthright citizenship, and underline the difficulty of integrating newcomers from very different cultures. They also maintain that until the US can recover from its devastating commitment to multiculturalism and political correctness, we shouldn’t even try to “Americanize” more immigrants—or indoctrinate with our own aberrations those who are already here. But the differences between the sides go even deeper. Whereas the neoconservatives view most of the rest of the world as being in desperate need of what late modern America has become, paleoconservatives by contrast long for an earlier time, before we became a leftist-neoconservative paradise.

Between the two visions of America, there is a clear line of demarcation. One side regards what is best in the American experience as coming to pass in the present age; whereas the other side considers the country derailed politically culturally and socially and looks for ways mostly in the past that were not taken. Typical of neoconservative heroes are Martin Luther King, Harry Truman, the Churchill who fought the (for the neoconservatives) hated Germans in two World Wars, and Abraham Lincoln, as a precursor of the post-World War Two civil rights movement. Paleoconservative heroes include antebellum Southern statesman John C. Calhoun,5 exponent of limited and distributed federal power Senator Robert Taft,6 man of letters Russell Kirk,7 social theorist Robert Nisbet,8 political theorist and critic Richard M. Weaver,9 literary intellectual Mel Bradford,10 and the Southern Agrarian critics of modern industrial society.11 Those who are often cited by contemporary paleoconseravtives include other writers such as Peter Brimelow,12 John Derbyshire,13 James Kalb14 and others.

Although one can occasionally hear a paleoconservative saying something nice about Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, those political figures are more likely to be praised by neoconservatives, who admire their global democratic tropes and liberal internationalist foreign policy. An inextinguishable enmity between the two sides developed in the first year of the Reagan administration, when a venerated paleoconservative literary scholar M.E. Bradford was passed over for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities.15 The position went to a neoconservative pick, who came out of the moderate Left, William Bennett, after a relentless campaign of character assassination undertaken by neoconservative journalists. Bradford’s negative comments about Abraham Lincoln and his known sympathy for the Confederacy (for which his ancestors had fought) were cited by Irving Kristol, George Will and others closely linked to the neoconservative camp to depict Bradford as a (what else?) “racist”.

Paleoconservatism has lost cohesiveness as well as resources, but this movement has been displaced rather than totally eradicated. In the 1990s, efforts were made to forge an alliance between paleoconservatives and socially traditionalist libertarians (then known as paleolibertarians). The unifying personality in these efforts was the economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard, who tried to build bridges to traditionalist groups, in the face of growing neoconservative power. After the death of Rothbard in January 1995, this bridge-building foundered because of squabbling between the two camps, and it has never been seriously resumed. Moreover, the paleolibertarians and their talking partners went off in different directions, one toward the almost exclusive discussion of economic questions and the avoidance of foreign entanglement, while their onetime negotiating partners at the Rockford Institute and Chronicles magazine remained in tune with the changing enthusiasms of the institute’s head. Defenses of the Southern secessionists in 1861, Serb and Pan-Slavic nationalism, and militant (often emphatically anti-Protestant) Catholic traditionalism all belong to the peculiar mixture of positions that the reader encounters in Chronicles.

An even more significant direction in which some in the paleoconservative camp have wandered is toward identitarian politics.16 The “Disaligned Right”17 in the US has taken over selectively paleoconservative concerns and absorbed them into their own ideological configuration. Already in 1986, as I pointed out in an essay for Policy Review written at that time,18 sociobiology became a major interest among some of the younger right-wing warriors as they battled against the neoconservative ascendancy. Support for national and cultural particularity against the neoconservative’s glorification of human rights and egalitarian politics had led at least some paleoconservatives into stressing innate differences among different groups based on non-voluntary criteria. Similar arguments were also marshalled against government social engineering, which it was argued was an effort to change human nature through political coercion.19 Since the 1980s, however, this focus among most of the now older paleoconservatives has disappeared. This has occurred largely because of the Left’s escalating war against any discussions of human nature that is not centered on the view that all people are the naturally the same everywhere. Any deviation from this myth, we are told, must result in reactionary repression and the endangerment of minorities; it is therefore just, or so one would believe from listening to our elites, that those who take up forbidden subjects should be punished professionally and socially. Our eyes and eyes must be protected from dangerously divisive ideas.20

But some on the American right have pushed sociobiological issues even harder in the teeth of leftist persecution. Despite the fact that these preoccupations are not my own (I may be too old to change my paleoconservative colors), those of this persuasion have baited the Left and the neoconservatives with fearless determination. They have also been relentless in going after immigration expansionists and exposing the efforts of large corporations to flood this country with an uneducated Third World labor force. Although isolated and vilified by the “conservative” as well as conventional leftist media, those who push “biodiversity,” as they like to call it, from the right cannot be put off by ostracism and intimidation. Indeed by now its rhetoric has filtered through into the columns of Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other syndicated columnists. For all their exaggerations, indiscretions, and lack of interest in those things that interest me, these mostly young people who focus on innate human differences may represent a genuine movement of the Right. Needless to say, I won’t bet on their coming to power very soon. And I doubt these partisans will get neoconservative funding or media exposure on a Republican channel.

Posted in Paul Gottfried | Comments Off

Welfare: Who’s on It, Who’s Not?

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

F. Roger Devlin and Henry Wolff, American Renaissance, October 14, 2015:

The numbers are even worse than we thought.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has published a new report called “Welfare Use by Immigrant and Native Households.” The report’s principle finding is that fully 51 percent of immigrant households receive some form of welfare, compared to an already worrisomely high 30 percent of American native households. The new study is based on the most accurate data available, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). It also reports stark racial differences in the use of welfare programs.

Previous studies of welfare use have been based on the less accurate but more easily accessible data available from the Current Population Survey; this led to less alarming figures of 39 percent of immigrant households using welfare and 24 percent of native households. CIS’s Steve Camarota took the trouble to work with the SIPP data, which cover a larger number of welfare programs. His results have been independently verified by Decision Demographics, a company specializing in analysis of Census Bureau data.

The programs covered in Mr. Camarota’s study include Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (what used to be most commonly called “welfare”), the Women, Infants and Children food program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“food stamps”), free and subsidized school lunches, Medicaid, and public housing and rent subsidies.

Needless to say, the percentage of immigrants using some form of welfare varies enormously according to the part of the world from which they come. Rates are highest for households from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent). Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest rates.

A majority of native black and Hispanic households are on some form of means-tested welfare, compared to just 23 percent of native white households.

A striking 82 percent of black households with children receive welfare–double the white rate. Hispanic families are not far behind blacks.

Among natives, blacks receive cash handouts at more than three times the white rate; Hispanics at more than twice the white rate.

Among all households, native blacks and Hispanics receive food handouts at three times the white rate; for Hispanic immigrants, the figure is four times the white rate. Among households with children, nearly all immigrant Hispanics–86 percent–get food aid. Native blacks and Hispanics aren’t far behind, with rates of 75 and 72 percent, respectively.

Native Hispanics and blacks, especially, are also heavy users of housing assistance. Among households with children, native Hispanics use these programs at nearly four times the white rate and blacks at seven times the white rate. Some effort is made to limit the access of illegal immigrants to subsidized housing, which helps explain why Hispanic immigrants get housing handouts at less than half the rate for native Hispanics. Amnesty for illegals would mean a sharp rise in the percentage of Hispanics in public or subsidized housing.

Spreading the wealth around

For each of the four welfare categories presented above, the black and Hispanic rates are at least double the white rates. Native Asians appear to use welfare at slightly lower rates than whites, but their SIPP sample size is too small to be certain. Asian immigrants, who are not included in the charts above, exceed native white welfare rates by about 25 percent (see table A3 in the CIS report). The US has three times as many immigrant Asian households as native Asian households.

What little public discussion there is of disproportionate welfare use by blacks and Hispanics is inevitably muddied by the claim that the majority of those receiving welfare are white. This ignores the fact that there are five times as many whites as blacks and four times as many whites as Hispanics in the United States; what matter are differences in the rates at which each group uses welfare. Furthermore, at least in terms of households, this claim is no longer be true.

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When Moshiach Comes…

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek writes: Wwhen Moshiach comes, the Mexicans will fight with one another for the chance to work in one of our dusty warehouses for free. No, they will pay US with free labor (housecleaning) just for the chance to say to the other goyim “I work for Rav such and such” which will be the highest mark of status any goy will be able to attain. But first, Moshiach must arrive!

When Moshiach comes, the shvartzes will sing and dance for us for free, like they do now.

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How Do We Suppress This Non-Story?

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

Forward: Warehouse workers at the massive Hasidic-owned photo and electronics store B&H Photo Video are demanding union representation, while alleging unsafe working conditions and unfair hours at the store’s two Brooklyn warehouses.

Organizers filed a petition October 13 with the National Labor Relations Board for roughly 200 workers at B&H warehouses in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Workers are seeking to join the United Steelworkers.

“The warehouses are full of dust,” said Jorge Lora, 36, an employee at the warehouse. “We don’t have training or knowledge how to use the machines.”

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WP: Tough Being Black In DC

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments at the WashingtonPost.com website:

* So when blacks left DC for PG County, is it racist that the crime rates in PG went up? Or is just simply because – not ALL blacks – but certainly the thug blacks just packed up and moved their business (crime) elsewhere.

* Never mind how this “article” isn’t on the opinion page. How in the world did it get past any editor. According to the author, affordable housing has disappeared. However there are at least 8 organizations devoted to affordable housing in DC. At just one of them, there are thousands of units. Just as you would expect.

* Pet knows the motive of landlords, but doesn’t quote any. Meaning she doesn’t know them at all. She’s ascribing her beliefs. Her race-baiting liberal beliefs.

* I agree, the writer of this article is clueless. Tenants rights in DC are the toughest in the country. DCHA and DCRA are all over ANY Owner who violates the laws. All any tenant has to do is file a complaint. All units have two inspections every year and not at the same time. One by DCHA and one by HUD. Of course things fall thru the cracks and yes there is a housing shortage but here we have activism masquerading as journalism. The ‘women’ who called 911 on these young men shouldn’t be allowed to procreate. How stupid to think that an potential ‘robber’ would hold open a door. And after the police confronted them they had every reason to fear.

* Let’s face it, rap music has made us realize there could be a danger if you’re approached by a couple of guys wearing hoodies and baggy jeans with the underwear sticking out. Why are people even surprised?

* The condition of the capital city of the United States of America has been a horrible embarrassment for decades–a gleaming Capitol District surrounded by horrible ghettos–more or less overlapping with the so-called “Chocolate City” period. As an American, I for one am very happy to learn that it’s finally being cleaned up and economically improved.

* Here’s an idea: every once in a while, the paper features some big foldouts with faces, as in “Faces of Those Killed by Police,” or “Faces of Immigrants Who Have Done Great Things,” or whatever the meme of the month is. How about running one of these which captures “Faces of Those Convicted (By a Jury of their Peers) of Crimes In Georgetown?”

Let’s see how unreasonable these unreasonable fears are. Show us some faces.

* What a racist article. Harder to be black in DC? Why? DC is restricted to blacks? Under what law?

* I recall a lecture in business school at UCLA in the 70s on “the value of slums”, which was intended to be outrageous : but the point was, that there is a real market for very cheap substandard housing in many urban areas, and to engage in wholesale slum clearance will displace poor urban residents needed for low wage jobs. This is both really distasteful but also obviously true.

* Petula needs to drink a big cold glass of reality. I dare her to actually go through the police twitter feed and count the “look out for (LOF)” descriptions of the last 500, 1000, or 5000 tweets and post the numbers in her column. It’s 90%+ “AA male(s)”. I know she doesn’t see it as much because the Post refuses to report that the suspects were black – they will only mention race if the suspect is white – but the truth is right there in the pudding. 90%+ young black guys.

Now let’s do a little simple math – blacks make up about 45% of the population. Roughly half of the black people here are male, so 22.5% of the population. Exclude small children and middle age and elderly black males and you’re down to about 10%. Ten percent of the population committing 90%+ of the crime.

Noticing that and acting on it – crossing the street, calling the police when you feel unsafe, etc, is not racist. It’s not even just that you have a grasp of simple mathematics. It’s self preservation. We, as a species, identify threats and avoid them. We don’t touch hot stovetops, we run from bears, and we pull over on the shoulder of the freeway to change a tire rather than do it in the center lane. Now, is it possible that those threats won’t hurt us every time? Sure. But we have a biological response to avoid them when we can. That’s the way we are wired as a species, it’s normal, and it’s not something I am willing to feel guilty about.

I’ve never crossed the street to avoid an elderly black lady with a walker late at night, because I’ve never seen an LOF for a black grandma with a Colt in the waistband of her pantyhose hitting people with her walker and stealing their iPhones. If that turned into 90% of the LOFs, though, I’d cross to avoid them too.

* She calls its gentrification, I call it progress. Maybe she’s too young to remember the state of the typical American city in the late eighties/early nineties. There wasn’t much “nurturing” going on.

* Yeah. Being the murder capitol of the US was pretty awesome. Good times, good times..

May I suggest Chicago? You’d love it there! Real authentic.

So what was your favorite part? Paying homeless people not to vandalize your car outside the old 9:30 Club?

The point being of course that the out-of-control violence was a direct result of a permissive attitude.

* Petula seems to consider slum clearance a racist plot, and the existence of slums as a racist plot, and the concentration of blacks in one city as a racist plot, and the dilution of the black population as a racist plot. Moral: at WaPo every story about living in the city revolves around the racist plot narrative.

* Is pocket billiards racists because the white ball chases the colored balls around?

* Petula Dvorak, a high-white-guilt-priestess, is simply chanting her “I hate myself for being WHITE–and YOU should TOO!” rosary for other true believers in the religion of the Scared Brown Peoples. Her Twitter site has less than 3000 followers so she couldn’t even fill a Dallas mega church with enough idiots to by her far left propaganda.

* She is actually kind of funny, in an absurdist way. My favorite article was the one where a black guy knocked her down and stole her iPhone in Baltimore. I have no doubt she was wracked with guilt about the whole thing. Truly bizarre.

* God forbid that she mention that nearly all robberies and other crimes of violence are committed by blacks in DC.

* To the “reallargeprofessor” who wrote “Thank you Ms. Dvorak. I am a black man with an advanced degree and a medical degree with three children born and raised in Washington, D.C. The overwhelming majority of black Americans are hardworking upwardly mobile Americans. My kids log on to WaPo regularly to read commenters call them criminals, deviants, and freeloaders. My wife and I are seriously considering moving to Africa or the West Indies and so are many of the county’s other productive African-Americans. We realize that there will be no equality for us in this country. The saddest question is…where can Native Americans go?”

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. But seriously, please dont act like a victim. You know as well as I do that Africans (and Asians and Whites and Latinos and presumably Eskimos) have never had it so good as they have in the USA. For every one doctor (like you) wishing to leave the USA for supposed slights, there are 100 doctors around the world (including Africa) who would be glad to trade places with you.

* Gentrification often involves replacing one favored urban demographic with another. A lot in DC has replaced AAs with millennials or LGBT. The gays are incredible for property values.

* How exactly does the author suggest that residents of DC be cautious and aware of their surrounding?

Are we no longer allowed to use street smarts, such as paying attention to who else may be on the street when walking home late at night?

I remember that it use to make me laugh twenty years ago when I could tell that old women when cross the street to avoid me when I had long hair and would often wear clothes purchased at salvation army when I was in college. But, I respected their right to use their judgment as to who they thought might pose a risk to them.

* It’s also undeniable that the city has also become miles better to live in than it was 15 years ago. Lattes > guns.

* Why not diversify by moving some of the “black flight” out of Washington DC into subsidized housing in Georgetown and other wealthy areas? Children of poor black families would get a chance to go to better schools and live in nicer neighborhoods. Financing would come from increased property taxes resulting from increasing property values and (if necessary) increasing property tax rates.

* The woman was a concerned citizen, and she had a right to call 911. The uncomfortable truth is that most street crime in DC is perpetrated by young black men. This city has an epidemic of brutal violence perpetrated by young black men.

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