Luke Ford

Comments:

* I don’t know if anyone has been watching the “Power Players” version of Jeopardy! which is hosted in Washington D.C. They had former RNC chairman Michael Steele on. It did not go well. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and journalists aren’t really as smart as they’d like to think they are, but how was he so clueless on Final Jeopardy? He tries to make up for his ignorance with a feeble joke. He later on Twitter tried to blame his poor performance on the clicker, but he stood there blankly most of the time well out of his depth. He was once one of the leaders of the party?

* Comedy is a brutally competitive field where only the strong survive (on their wits).

Sucking at the corporate teat of CNN requires a different skill set–like connections and a willingness to suckle eagerly (see eg Anderson Cooper, another moron exposed on jeopardy).

Norm Macdonald is another brilliant comedian who dominated a TV quiz show.

Heck, even Cheech Marin crushed those CNN anchors and affirmative action baby political hacks (some Hispanic woman with a lot of clout in the GOP was particularly dumb).

* Steve Sailer: My clicker was broken when I was on Jeopardy in 1994.

I was constantly holding up my buzzer pushing it over and over with it only going off about 10% or 20% of the time. During both commercial breaks, the Jeopardy technical crew besieged me, asking what I was doing wrong to keep my buzzer from going off.

A few years later, a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a decade dropped by. The first thing he said was, “I saw you on Jeopardy. What the hell was wrong with your buzzer?”

A few weeks after me, General Schwarzkopf appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy and his buzzer was unreliable. He made them stop taping until they fixed his buzzer.

It probably cost me around $25,000.

I believe the Jeopardy episode I was on aired February 27, 1994. It was filmed about a month earlier, not long after the Northridge Earthquake.

* Look up Wolf Blitzer on Jeopardy on youtube – you’ll be shocked at what an idiot he is (or maybe you won’t). OTOH, Andy Richter (Conan O’Brien’s sidekick) did great on the same show – go figure.

* Milo has a Greek father and a Jewish mother. I think he gets away with it because he can pull both the Jew card and the homo card. Maybe he has US residency or citizenship. Plus he is eloquent and amazingly quick on his feet, as you’d kind of expect from an upper echelon Jew/Greek. Zuckerberg would be a fool to be interviewed by him, though I’d love to see it.

* I failed to line up an internship one summer and did temp labor. One job was at P+Gs general headquarters building. I cleaned toilets, mopped the johns, buffed the floors, wiped down desks, emptied trash, vacuumed … did it for barely more than minimum wage, didn’t die of shame and went back to school in the fall.

Cleaning toilets and other janitorial stuff is not even difficult work. Who the heck do you think is cleaning most of the toilets, public, office, hotel, restaurants in Japan or even Germany–two of the most advanced nations on earth? Japanese and Germans. And it used to be that way in America. Seriously, restrooms were cleaned in America before the Mexican invasion.

This is *entirely* a question of employers paying enough. And when you have to raise the pay rate too high for something, folks change procedures, develop work arounds, automate it away, substitute, etc. etc.

This idea that you need immigration for *anything* is nonsense. Most societies down through the ages have *not* had immigration to any significant extent at all. Immigration is invasion and is resisted while a society, people, nation can resist it. And yet these societies were able to do all the work they needed to do.

* Twenty years ago, I had a blonde American maid cleaning my hotel room in Michigan, and had white American men as cab drivers in Spokane and Scottsdale.

* I lived in Salt Lake City five years ago. The landscaping crew at my small apartment complex was all white.

The “need” for immigration is the desire to suppress wages. Elon Musk paying foreign construction workers $5/hour is the latest example.

In the book Freakonomics, drug dealers were interested in being janitors. Janitors earned more and weren’t at daily risk of violence or arrest.

* In San Francisco there are plenty of white bus drivers, but they work for Golden Gate Transit, which runs up to Marin and Sonoma counties. Their drivers often work 13- hour shifts. You don’t see any whites in the SF Muni system. I assume this reflects the differences in extent of government connection. GGT may be privately run with only some government subsidy. But they let blacks ride free by flashing a “mentally disabled” card.

* There was actually something of a UKIP boomlet in 2014 (they reached 25% in one poll). The reason they didn’t do better is because David Cameron has more political talent in his little finger than every Republican politician combined. Seriously, watch Prime Minister’s Questions on YouTube; it’s astonishing how much better British politicians are at debating than American politicians are.

The EU started off as a right-wing initiative — a free trade area (the “Common Market”). In the first referendum in 1975, Thatcher and the Tories campaigned for it while Labour was officially neutral but with the majority of the membership, led by ur-loony-leftist Tony Benn, against.

The subsequent expansions of EU power were also right-wing; harmonization and liberalization of regulations, and the Euro, joining which was supposed to require balancing the budget and keeping inflation minimal on an indefinite basis.

Then they added the removal of border controls and free movement, still not particularly leftist since it was still confined to Western Europe.

And then, in the mid-90′s/early 00′s, Conquest’s Second Law (“any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”) came true, with the creation of the European Court of Human Rights and the expansion agenda.

Since then, the sides have switched, with EU supporters mainly being on the left and opponents on the right. Most of the old loony leftists (such as Corbyn) are now firmly in the Remain camp, and it’s just a few especially crazy types like George Galloway who still support Out. (Presumably, they’re still awaiting word from Moscow that the party line has changed).

* Dying former Republican senator wants to tell Muslims how much they improve America, implying they are better than existing Americans. We’re not told what the recipients of his grovelling thought.

Link: Joyce told her son that his father had approached people wearing hijabs in an airport to “let them know that he was grateful they were in the country and the country was better for them being here.” “

Daniel Greenfield writes: Mickey Fearn, the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance, made headlines when he claimed that black people don’t visit national parks because they associate them with slaves being lynched by their masters.

Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in 1872 in Wyoming. Slavery was over by then and no one had ever been lynching slaves around Old Faithful anyway. But false claims of racism die very hard.

Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased “inclusiveness” at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, “African-Americans have felt unwelcome and even fearful in federal parklands during our nation’s history because of the horrors of lynching.” What do national parks have to do with lynchings? Many national parks have trees. People were hung from trees. It’s racial guilt by arboreal association. Trees are racist down to their roots.

The origin of the bizarre racist lynching theory of national parks appears to be Carolyn Finney. Finney was an actress noted for, apparently, little more than an appearance in The Nutt House. Then she became a cause célèbre for race activists when she was denied tenure by Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management because her work didn’t meet academic standards.

Her supporters blamed racism, rather than her academic shortcomings, and protested vocally.

These days she’s a diversity advisor to the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board. What wasn’t good enough for UC Berkeley is good enough for national parks. She is also the author of Black Faces, White Spaces. In it she claims that “oppression and violence against black people in forests and other green spaces can translate into contemporary understandings that constrain African-American environmental understandings.”

Finney cites the work of Joy DeGruy Leary who invented a Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome that she claims black people suffer from. Affected by PTSS, black people experience “fear and mistrust of forests and other green spaces.” According to Finney, the tree is a racist symbol to black people.

“Black people also wanted to go out in the woods and eat apples from the trees,” Finney explains.” But black people were lynched on the trees. The tree became a big symbol.” Black people are triggered by trees and suffer Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome flashbacks. You can’t expect them to go to on a hike.

What shall we do about the racist trees? Finney is front and center at the new “inclusion” initiative, “You’re sitting here making up a rule and assuming that everybody is going to feel comfortable to come to the woods and go on a hike,” she whined. “Maybe they’re not interested in doing that, that’s not how they like to come to the woods.”

In addition to complaining about the racist trees, the inclusion initiative also claimed that national parks alienate Latinos because of the “color of the uniforms that rangers wear.”

What’s wrong with the color of park ranger uniforms? According to the Hispanic Access Foundation, they look too much like the border patrol. Even though the uniforms are actually completely different. But much like the lack of lynchings at Yellowstone National Park, the truth doesn’t matter here.