Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Ben Shapiro Writes For WP: ‘The Breitbart alt-right just took over the GOP’

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

A friend says:

Dear Luke,
I don’t want to insult Ben Shapiro. Others have done a good job in exposing his pretentiousness. But for him to warn that the Alt Right will take over the GOP and banish true conservatism is pretty funny. Perhaps now he will have more empathy for paleo conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Anne Coulter and Paul Gottfried, who have been dismissed by “true conservatives” such as Shapiro and banished from discourse within the Republican party. I don’t remember Shapiro taking a never Mitt Romney pledge or a never John McCain pledge or a never George Bush pledge, as all three of them certainly did not show fidelity to the conservative principles that Shapiro listed. Unfortunately for Ben, there are very few true conservatives of his ilk within the United States; instead until Trump came along the dominant Republican media outlets became an echo chamber. Basically two thirds of the Republican voters never bought into the Republican principles but voted for Republicans because of antipathy toward the Democrats. Trump has exposed that there is at best a small Republican base supporting Republican media such as Shapiro.
Shapiro has two problems as I see them, and in that sense he is not unlike Obama. He thinks he is the smartest person in the room and he is young and doesn’t understand political movements within any sort of historical context that goes back farther than when Reagan was elected.

Washington Post:

If Republicans aren’t careful, they’ll soon see true conservatism banished from their party.
Constitutional conservatives can’t stand the alt-right. Conservatives — real conservatives — believe that only a philosophy of limited government, God-given rights and personal responsibility can save the country. And that creed is not bound to race or ethnicity. Broad swaths of the alt-right, by contrast, believe in a creed-free, race-based nationalism, insisting, among other things, that birth on American soil confers superiority. The alt-right sees limited-government constitutionalism as passé; it holds that only nationalist populism on the basis of shared tribal identity can save the country. It’s a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.
Trump himself has flirted with the alt-right for months, from taking his sweet time distancing himself from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to failing to condemn alt-right anti-Semitic attacks on journalists. The alt-right association came into focus after I left the site in early March — I worked there as an editor for four years — with the elevation of alt-right cult hero Milo Yiannopoulos to a position of prominence.
I’d heard, of course, that the some of Breitbart’s comment sections had been occupied over previous months by a motley collection of white supremacists and anti-Semites (I generally never check the comments). I’d certainly felt their online wrath, accused by alt-righters of being an anti-Trump “cuck” — accusations that came with memes of gas chambers and “shekelmeister” cartoons that could have come directly from Der Stürmer. Such material flowed into my inbox and Twitter feed. That flow escalated dramatically after I declared that I would not support Trump, and it escalated again after I left Breitbart over its attempts to smear its own reporter, Michelle Fields, in order to shield then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski against charges that he’d yanked her by the arm at a campaign event.
But it wasn’t until March 29 that Breitbart’s full embrace of the alt-right became clear. That’s the day the site featured Yiannopoulos’s lengthy piece glorifying the alt-right. Yiannopoulos had already given interviews in which he stated that “Jews run the banks” and “Jews run the media,” dismissing anti-Semitic memes as merely “mischievous, dissident, trolly.” He wrote, along with co-author Allum Bokhari, this insane sentence: “There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence.”

Posted in Alt Right, Ben Shapiro | Comments Off

Research find that as a group, only men pay tax

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

ESSAY: Legions of feminists will ferociously type smash the patriarchy! at their Internet rallies, calling out for the end of the male supremacy in all spheres of life. Yet, few of them acknowledge the fact that one of these spheres, the government (the institution granting them rights), is entirely funded by male taxpayers. Economically, women cost more to the state than they benefit. The government is literally paying women to be alive. As such, strong independent women are only that way because the state is transferring money from men to them. Feminists are not seriously against being dependent on men, they are just against men having the full control over their money.

Let’s explore a fiscal research report in New Zealand.

THE REAL GENDER GAP: THE TAX GAP

While the 77¢ for a dollar wage gap has been under the spotlight for the past years, the 200¢ for a dollar tax gap has, to my knowledge never been mentioned, at least not by our supreme feminist leaders Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau. A quick glimpse at the data reveals a massive difference in taxes paid by men and women.

The first thing that comes to mind is that half of women might be at home raising kids. However, the workforce participation rate gap between men and women doesn’t seem to exceed 10% in either age group. (see figure 4 in source)

The second thing that may come to mind as a confounding factor is that women spend more for children in education and health. Nope. No support for that either. Men and women spend approximately the same amount in both education and health (see figure 10 and 11 of the source).

IN NEARLY ALL AGE GROUPS, WOMEN RECEIVE MORE TAX THAN THEY GIVE

With the exception of the age group between 45-59 (a 15 year span) years old, women cost more to the state than the tax they provide. In contrast, men generate more tax revenue than they cost between 23 and 65 (a 43 year span). In the brief period in which women generate more or as much tax money than they consume, men outscore them by at least 3 times.

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Why Brazilians can’t help booing anything and everyone at the Olympics

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Tom Holland tweets: “2 ways for host cities to enjoy the Olympics: applaud competitors from other countries (London) or boo them (Rio)”

It’s like New Yorkers. They love to dump on LA. People from Northern California also love to hate LA. But residents of Los Angeles can’t be bothered to hate any other city.

It seems like everything Brazil touches gets corrupted.

Mark Moffett writes:

It didn’t take long for the Brazilians to rewrite the norms of Olympic fandom.
The list of Olympic participants targeted by Brazilian boos is long and varied: Russians, due to its doping scandal; Spaniards, as symbols of Latin American colonialism; a tennis ball boy who had butterfingers; favorites—like the poor Romanian women’s handball team—when they played the underdogs; and, of course, anyone from Brazil’s historic rival Argentina, who probably get the worst of it.
Pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie was booed by the Rio fans—twice in 24 hours—to the point he was in floods of tears on the podium, leading the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach to take the unprecedented step of saying the crowd’s antics were “unacceptable at the Olympics.”
The fans were so boisterous at a beach volleyball game between the Brazilian and Czech teams that the public address announcer had to repeatedly admonish them against booing the visitors (link in Portuguese). A normally staid air-pistol event almost turned into a melee when unruly Brazilian fans tried rattling the concentration of foreigners as they pulled the trigger (link in Portuguese).
At a tennis match where fans heckled the player from Argentina, there was a scuffle in the stands (link in Spanish)—perhaps the first ever case of tennis hooliganism.
In London four years ago, the British fans got behind not only their own country, but every other in the spirit of sportsmanship. Alberto Murray Neto, a Brazilian lawyer who has served in the past on the Brazilian Olympic Committee, says that as Brazilian soccer dominated the sporting culture here, mastering the codes of other sports will be a learning process for many people who have never seen them played. “This is the Brazilian way, which is different from the very proper English way in 2012,” he says.
At the Riocentro sports complex on Friday night (Aug. 12), the fans were as much the talk of foreign tourists and athletes as the Games themselves. Marian Busch, a German tourist, said Brazilians are wonderful people—as long as you don’t run into them in the bleachers. “They do things that would be considered unfair and unsporting in Europe,” she says.

Good sportmanship is a gift of the WASPs just as the least corrupt countries were created by WASPs (United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand). WASPs make the best citizens.

Ron Guhname writes:

WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.
I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:
Bad Behavior Index
Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47
My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.

Posted in Brazil, WASPs | Comments Off

‘I’ve Spent My Whole Life As A Child Hoping Some Family Would Come Along And Adopt Me’

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

I heard that sentence in a 12-step phone meeting (from a woman who sounded like she was in the second half of life) and it resonated. I’ve felt that too. I have perfect good family and yet I often yearn for some other family to come along to adopt me. Growing up, I often preferred to spend time with my friends’ fathers than with my friends. In my work life and in my learning particularly I’ve sought out father figures.

Because my mother was dying of cancer and my father had his hands full with his work and looking after her, I was largely in foster care ages one to four. That’s had a permanent warping of my personality.

Sometimes when I say something cruel, a friend or relation will ask me, “How can you think that way?” And I might answer, “Because I didn’t have a mother.”

I’m a chronic under-achiever. I’ve rarely done well in work or academics unless I was passionate. I got fired from my first few jobs (6th thru 10th grade) and usually performed in a mediocre fashion after that. I kinda half-ass things. I prefer to take the easy way out. I’d go to one job and spend time on another job or looking for other jobs.

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One Jerk Can Ruin Things For Everybody

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

One obnoxious noisy neighbor can ruin a block. One jerk on the roads can tie up traffic for thousands of people. One idiot in a 12-step meeting, either in person or over the phone, can ruin a meeting. One toxic person in a shul can wreak havoc.

Freedom of association is vital otherwise we are all held hostage to the jerks.

It humbles me to think how often I have been the jerk that has ruined things for everyone. I have something in my psyche that wants to be the big shot in every group I join. In class, I’ve often felt a yearning to show off how smart I am and many teachers found me disruptive. In my blogging, I’ve often been a bully, picking on people more than they deserved. In my dating life, I’ve zeroed in on women who want to give because I want to take.

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The Wisdom Of Jerry Seinfeld

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

I moved to Los Angeles in March of 1994. Jerry Seinfeld was a popular TV show (there was a guy at Aish HaTorah who looked just like Jerry Seinfeld) but I had never seen it and over the years I developed pride in never having seen it.

At the same time, Jerry Seinfeld dominated popular culture. I felt a tad out of it from never having seen the show. When I’d make Jewish jokes, people would tell me about the Seinfeld episode where the dentist who converted to Judaism so he could tell Jewish jokes. Eventually I broke down and watched that episode on Youtube and then decided to start watching the show from season one.

I’m glad I did. It’s the perfect thing to watch before going to bed. It cleans your mind out and you are never agitated afterward. You can just drift off.

S3E11 is another superb episode and it ends with Jerry doing his stand-up comedy: “The best part of being in a relationship is when you are sick and the best part of being sick is when you are in a relationship. If I were to get married, all those vows about for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, all I need is the sickness. That to me is the most important one. Do you take this man in sickness? That’s the only time I need somebody there. The rest of the time? Go out. Have a ball. Do whatever you want. But if I get the sniffles, you better be there.”

I’m halfway through season three and there is not one mention of all the main characters, aside from Kramer, being Jewish.

Posted in Comedy | Comments Off

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.

Criminals With Peanut Allergies
A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
Or, rephrased in another domain:
A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
Granted, sometimes, in practice, we hesitate to use the bathroom with the disabled sign on it owing to some confusion –mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, under the belief that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.
Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.
Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).
Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.

Posted in Diversity | Comments Off

Shadow-Banned By Twitter, Google

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

If you put my name into the Twitter search function, you won’t find my profile or my tweets (or not at least without a great deal of sleuthing, far beyond the time I’m willing to commit). I’ve been shadow-banned for weeks.

If you put my name into Google, nothing on my main website, LukeFord.net, will come up. None of the thousands of pages of the site will come up in any search. My website has been completely banned by Google.

When I turned realistic in 2014, Adsense stopped allowing my site Lukeford.net into its network (though it would serve ads on my other — less controversial — sites).

A few years ago, I had an account with Google for an email address, a series of blogs and a video channel and with one decision without the possibility of appeal, they deleted and close down all of it (claiming a violation of Terms of Service for copyright infringement) and there went a hundred of hours of my (admittedly sloppy) work.

I am not an innocent party here. A friend says: “Luke, you regularly post other people’s articles in full. It’s not surprising AdSense banned you etc. Even this post ends with someone else’s article. I remember seeing a review of one of your books on Amazon. The person complained you post massive quotes.”

Twitter repeatedly makes me change my passwords — for my own security! — over the past two months and every time I log in these days, they send me an annoying email:

We noticed a recent login for your account @lukeford.
DEVICE Chrome on Windows
LOCATION Los Angeles, CA
IF THIS WAS YOU
Great! There’s nothing else you need to do.
IF THIS WASN’T YOU
Your account may have been compromised and you should take a few steps to make sure your account is secure…

So I get this email on average three times a day.

On Facebook, I got suspended for 24 hours recently for retweeting a positive reference to Milo’s “Dangerous Faggot tour.” Any mention of “faggot” will get removed from Facebook, and the second mention will get you a 24-hour ban and the penalties escalate from there.

The clear goal of companies such as Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc, is to make life as difficult as possible for people with views they dislike, such as America First.

Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
There is no such thing as Pro-Trump free speech as Clinton corporate allies serve up a carefully curated view of the campaign
By Liz Crokin • 08/12/16 8:30am
My dad always told me that conservative candidates have to work twice as hard as their liberal opponents to win elections because they’re fighting two opponents: the Democratic Party and the media.
The usual suspects from left-leaning major media outlets like The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and even entertainment networks are doing everything in their power to ensure a Clinton victory. Look no further than to Wolf Blitzer mincing around and drinking wine at the Democratic convention, celebrating Hillary’s nomination. But the propaganda skewing this election runs much deeper than just the media: our iPhones, iPads, social media networks, Google and even video games are all in the tank for Hillary Clinton—and it’s chilling.
I began looking into how strong the bias and censorship runs in these forums after I did an interview on the pro-Trump podcast, MAGAPod. The show’s host, Mark Hammond, was disappointed Apple wouldn’t run his show without an “explicit” warning. Hammond’s podcast didn’t contain content that would be deemed explicit under Apple’s policy, and most other shows in the News & Politics category aren’t labeled as such.
On June 18, Hammond talked to Sandra, a representative from Apple. She explained that, since the description of his show is pro-Trump, his show is explicit in nature—because the subject matter is Donald Trump. So, an Apple employee concluded the Republican presidential candidate is explicit.
iTunes has dozens of podcasts discussing Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler—none of which is marked explicit. I encouraged Hammond to contact Apple again, via email to their podcast support team. Within 48 hours he received a response from “Tim,” who informed Hammond that his podcast would be updated to “clean” within 24 hours.
Further digging on Apple revealed more evidence that the computer giant is feeding users pro-Hillary and anti-Trump propaganda.
Over the past year, Apple twice refused to publish a satirical Clinton Emailgate game, “Capitol HillAwry,” claiming it was “offensive” and “mean spirited” even though the game’s developer, John Matze, cited in communications with Apple that the game fits the standards of Apple’s own satire policy. Apple has, however, approved dozens of games poking fun at Donald Trump—including a game called “Dump Trump,” which depicts the GOP nominee as a giant turd.
On July 25, Breitbart exposed this blatant double standard and favoritism toward Clinton. A few days after the article was released, Apple caved and published Capitol HillAwry, 15 months after Matze’s first attempt to go live.
While it’s commendable that Apple resolved both situations, Trump supporters and conservative users should never have faced such biased treatment in the first place.
Around the same time I was a guest on MAGAPod, a friend complained to me about how biased his Apple News feed is against Trump. I set up an Apple News account on my iPhone.
First step: select an outlet. Fox News. Conservative. But my news feed? Liberal.
And if there are articles above the fold from more right-leaning sites? They paint Trump in a negative light and Hillary in a positive light. Of all the channels listed in the Apple News politics section, only two of the 16 arguably lean right—the rest are reliably left-wing.
This has, of course, been pointed out before, and anyone with an iPhone or iPad can go to Apple News to determine on his or her own if Apple is pushing leftist propaganda. Apple claims not to endorse candidates, but their actions suggest otherwise, and some of their executives—including CEO Tim Cook—actively support Clinton’s campaign. Buzzfeed recently obtained an invitation to a private $50,000-per-plate fundraiser Cook is hosting for Clinton with his Apple colleague, Lisa Jackson, at the end of this month.
Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.
For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging.
But Google has gotten into hot water on multiple occasions for connecting Trump to Adolf Hitler. In June, when users searched “when Hitler was born” it generated the expected information on Hitler but also an image of Trump. In July, searches for Trump’s book, Crippled America, returned images of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf. Google has since fixed both—but again, why do these issues always conveniently disparage Trump and help Clinton?
Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops.

Posted in America, Apple, Google, Twitter | Comments Off

Thank God For The Proud Black Woman

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

It was 10 pm on a weeknight and my Jewish neighbors were working on something awfully noisy and all the whites and Jews around simply put up with the racket they were making while cursing under their breaths, but thank the good Lord, there was a strong proud black woman neighbor who yelled out her window, “Excuse me! It’s 10 o’clock.”

And then the noise ceased and we could all get some rest.

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off

The Jew in the West

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

If you grow up Jewish in the diaspora, you are likely to identify with Jews and develop contempt for the goyim, or you will identify with the goyim and develop contempt for Jews. I understand equally well both of these possibilities. The third possibility — of growing up happy with your Jewish identity and feeling equally happy with the majority culture — is not one I understand. Perhaps that reveals something dark about my psychology. I don’t understand someone identifying strongly as Jewish or Christian or Muslim or black or gay and being equally thrilled with the majority culture around them.

If you grow up on an Orthodox Jew, you will likely continue to grow your Jewish identity and have many negative feelings about the goyim. If you grow up Jewish outside of Orthodoxy, you will likely increasingly identify with the majority culture and develop contempt for Judaism.

Social Identity Theory teaches us that the more you identify with something such as Jewish identity, the less favorable you will be to outsiders.

A friend says: “Two poles, each pole attracts some people. Sometimes both attract the same person.”

Posted in America, Jews | Comments Off