Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Make Yourself Great Again! A group of millennial bros find salvation in the teachings of Donald J. Trump.

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

I have experienced this too. Over the past eight months, I’ve felt a surge of energy and drive. I’ve doubled my income. I’m doing more than I thought possible. Every day, I wake up happy and full of drive and it keeps pumping all through the day.

From Politico:

On a morning in March, a 30-year-old computer technician named Nathan was tapping at the keyboard in his Pittsburgh home when he had a breakthrough with his support group. He wasn’t in rehab. And this wasn’t exactly AA. Nathan told me that for years, he’s fought alcoholism and an addiction to crystal meth, without much success—until he discovered the online self-help network that changed his life, a Donald Trump-themed discussion forum on the website Reddit. It was there that, two months ago, after weeks of reading messages of self-improvement and positive visualization, Nathan declared he had been saved, pecking out a message of hope and encouragement to his group under the title: “Quitting Drugs Because of Trump.”

“Trump has inspired me,” he wrote. “I’m getting sober and doing my bit to Make America Great Again. Thank you Donald!”

Nathan, who did not want his last name to be used for this story, is one of a substantial number of young men tapping into a growing informal online network: A dedicated denomination of self-improvement, built on the “teachings” of one Donald J. Trump. From his books, public statements, and general attitude toward the world, they’ve extracted a highly motivating philosophy of positive thinking and the virtues of self-love and brazening things out, as real men do. Their numbers are unknown, but the trend exists in the form of dozens of their posts flourishing online, bouncing across Trump discussion threads and Twitter and the right-wing blogosphere, peppered with buzzwords and moments of epiphany. “Donald J. Trump has already won, and changed my life,” declares one poster. “How Donald inspired me to be a great American once again” proclaims another. And many more: “Trump inspired me to change my life.” “Story of how Donald Trump changed my life around.” “Donald trumps campaign has changed me.” “Trump saved my life!” “Hey Brigadiers, stop wasting your time and learn what this is. Make Yourself Great Again!”

In a phone conversation, Nathan told me that he had been able to turn his life around thanks to Trump’s “high energy” persona, his refusal to give in or be pushed around—and his declared abstinence from alcohol, tobacco or drugs. “I’ve had an ongoing fight to get off drugs, but this is the most successful I’ve ever been,” he said. “I was given the strength and the resolve of spirit to not buy drugs again.” He took a deep breath. “Through the Trump campaign.”

When Nathan posted his message to his Trump discussion thread last month, he was smothered by a wave of positive responses, each a variation on a familiar theme. “I’m also quitting booze for many reasons, Trump being one of them,” commented one user. Wrote another: “It might sound lame, but trying to be more like Donald has led to positive changes in my life.” A commenter described his own years-long drug habit, chiming in, “After reading 2 of Trump’s books I decided it’s time to quit.” And then, about two-thirds down, the prevailing leitmotif appeared:

“I just tell myself ‘it’s time to make myself great again.’”

In gargantuan, all-capital letters: “MYGA!”

MYGA, of course, stands for “Make Yourself Great Again,” a riff on the Trump campaign slogan that appears frequently in these posts. Nathan’s message, and dozens like it, are appearing as a new strain of Trumpism on forums like Reddit and 4Chan, and echoing on darker corners of the Internet like the white nationalist forum TheRightStuff. Posters take turns soliloquizing on the lessons of self-reliance and perseverance from Trump’s life story, from his childhood and adolescence, to his early days as a struggling businessman, to his seemingly constant high energy as a 69-year-old man who refuses to drink or smoke (and who required the same of his children).

“Instead of an AA meeting, what you’re seeing here are good habits being broadcast as popular. It’s cool to make yourself better, to be trying to improve yourself, because of Donald Trump,” Jon Sharpe, a 36-year-old lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, told me. After seeing a tide of inspirational Trump-themed messages, Sharpe formed a Reddit group and called it MYGA, intending to vacuum up the people and posts espousing the philosophy. (His other Reddit adventures include moderating the forum HottiesForTrump.) He later spiked the idea, partly for lack of time, and partly for redundancy, citing the esprit de corps that already exists organically on Reddit. “You get the satisfaction that I’m part of this club,” Sharpe explained. “I’m doing something because of this, and everybody’s around to pat you on the back and say, yeah, this is awesome. Make yourself great again.”

MYGA posts cover topics as wide-ranging as they are banal: Themes include going to the gym, asking out beautiful women or asking for a raise. In one post titled, “Life Tips I’ve Learned from Watching Trump!!” an Illinois man lists a dozen areas of personal improvement in which he looks to Trump, including “Being a great parent” and “NO DRUGS AND NO ALCOHOL.” In a now-deleted post, a user noted that watching Trump inspired him to get into the “gym 5 times a week from 0,” adding, “no more pot, cigs, cut drinking a lot.” Finding Donald Trump, writes another poster, “inspired me to become the high-energy person I used to be,” adding, “I decided that I want to get back into running 10k races. … Remember guys, you can’t make America great again without feeling great yourself.”

“We take Trump’s energy and just magnify it,” Nathan told me. “We’re constantly feeding on each other’s energy. It’s great. It’s fantastic. It’s positive.”

The most common thread in the world of MYGA is a feral obsession with Trump’s domineering maleness. In posts and interviews, MYGA writers express varying degrees of the idea that the Trump campaign is helping them become real men—in similar terms as their understanding of Trump’s unapologetic, aggressive vision for the country.

“He’s this alpha kind of guy, and I do think that resonates with young men,” a 21-year-old professional athlete from Idaho and a MYGA poster who uses the name HighlyVenomous, told me. (He didn’t want me to identify his event, but instructed me to describe it as “extreme sports.”) Sharpe said the same. “He comes across as an alpha male. He’s sure of himself, and whatever flaws he does have, like his hair, he doesn’t care, and he runs with it,” he said. “Mainstream politics requires that sort of demure attitude, you have to almost apologize for whatever good you have. Trump doesn’t do that.”

“The Apprentice really showed me what a world class alpha male looks like and operates,” writes one poster in the Reddit thread LifeProTrumpTips. “As a group of dominant alphas you can achieve impossible things.”

As the MYGA crowd’s open obsession with dominance, manliness, and alpha-status suggests, the gospel can quickly turn down a dark corridor. The deeper one ventures into the strange world of MYGA, the more the country’s problems become laced with an array of white-male-themed anxieties—men are apologizing for their maleness, the users say; policies are lifting up the weak and punishing the strong; and culture at large is becoming more feminized. Go deep enough, and you’ll hit the so-called alt-right movement, an online waystation where MYGA has thrived most principally as an ideation of male virility. (The world of the alt-right is best known for creating the “#Cuckservative” hashtag—a racially tinged portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, created to call out those who are insufficiently far-right.)

Christopher Cantwell, a controversial anarchist-libertarian blogger from New Hampshire who has also credited Trump with helping him treat his drug addiction, is one of the denizens of this site. “There’s certainly an attitude toward the striking back against the emasculation of men,” Cantwell told me. “Let’s promote rugged masculinity—and that would be striving to be a more dominant strong, assertive person.” In an hour-long conversation, Caldwell riffed on the MYGA theme to describe his frustration that transgenderism isn’t treated as a neurological disorder; why taking the stigma out of mental illness was misguided; and how he was fired from his job as a radio host when his boss worried he was insinuating that other races are genetically inferior to whites. All such things, he suggested, violate the principle of MYGA. (He also, in a Trumpian effort to grab the initiative in our interview, recorded an introduction that tried to frame the interview as a “conversation,” as if I had been a guest on his online radio show, and told me he’d release it if I misquoted him.)

Much as it resembles the generally anodyne subgenre of Internet self-help, MYGA is also driven by a current of the aggressive politics that underlie a Trump rally. For starters, much of the posting is an uninhibited gush of patriotic intensity. At long last, I was told repeatedly, Trump has finally made it politically viable to say how much you love America. “It’s really a lot about pride,” says Sharpe, the Columbus lawyer who started the MYGA page. “We don’t hear a lot of people who champion a nation that we love very often. Trump kind of oozes it.” As one Reddit MYGA writer from Kansas put it: “Trump’s campaign has rekindled the fire of American patriotism in my heart, and the sense of purpose in my life. Trump and all his supporters Make America Great.” For many, incipient notions of self-betterment are linked to love of country. “This group reaffirmed that by staying off of drugs, I was doing something to help our country,” Nathan told me. “And that by helping ourselves, we helped to make America great again.”
And bound up in patriotic obligation is the greater moral duty to fight political correctness. Again and again, I heard, Trump’s refusal to bend to the whims of “social justice warriors”—an all-purpose designation for liberals, feminists, professors and other identity-sensitive types—is the stance desperately needed for a self-indulgent country obsessed with its victimhood status. “So fucking tired of the political correctness that has stiffed this country,” one poster writes. “WRONG. That is the kind of attitude that has poisoned this country.” For many, it seemed, Trump’s triumph over and above the basic decorum of politics served as an analogue for their own self-confidence.
“No longer into sluts. Looking for a good Christian girl,” writes one poster, in a now deleted 4Chan post titled Trump has inspired me to change my life. A discussion in another post is revealing. Commenting in the discussion Donald Trump’s campaign has changed me, a user writes, “I see [Trump] as our last hope, standing up to degeneracy,” and posted a video that plays a depraved pop-song parody, “Like A Degenerate,” alleging liberal responsibility for cultural decadence. “You want to lay me? Get in line / Abort my baby, spend my time getting high,” a voice sings, as video images of women activists marching and public dancing flash onscreen. Later: “You’ve got this culture cowed / Be gay, get AIDS, be proud.”
The imperative of the strong to dominate the weak is the moral structure hiding in plain site on MYGA. “There are such things as shills, weak people, and losers,” one post reads, Life Tips I’ve Learned from Watching Donald Trump. “Weak people get in the strong people’s way. If you’re weak, work to be strong, don’t bring them down.” The male connection is not far removed here; Cantwell referred me to an essay, How Strength Training Saved Me From Being a Cucked Leftfag, a rambling synthesis of male self-loathing whose main conclusion, apparently, is that leftism is anathema to weight training. “It was right and proper that the weak feel shame if their weakness is of their own making,” the author writes of his time in the weight room. “It’s a small but important part of becoming the man that you are meant to be, not only physically, but in every other way as well.”

There’s no reason to think the entire high-energy MYGA crowd shares Cantwell’s obsessions with cuckoldry and weight training, but then again the young-male-righty Internet is a messy place, where personal chest-puffing can easily bleed into race resentment and misogyny. Whatever the motives, the subtext of the movement seems clear: Society taught us to behave one way. Then Trump came into my life. Now I can be a real man.

Posted in America, Donald Trump | Comments Off

Mr. Trump, explain why America First requires eliminating the U.S. Department of Education

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Michael Scheuer writes:

One of the more daunting problems Trump would face in implementing a comprehensive America First orientation in the national government is the Department of Education. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, the leaders and personnel of that department have, for more than thirty years, developed and provided anti-American curricula to the nation’s schools and have used their control of an enormous budget to force their acceptance and implementation. In particular, their target has been the alienation of young Americans from their own republic’s history, which, with a common language, a common faith, and allegiance to the rule of equality before the law are all Americans have ever had to hold themselves and their Union together. The Democrats and the media already have destroyed the first three unifying commonalities, and so the republic’s history is the final target in their quest to divide and conquer America’s diverse regions and populations, and then establish one-party, authoritarian rule in the United States. In this task, the Department of Education has the leading role.

The product being delivered by the Department of Education is just what the authoritarians want, but it cannot for a moment be deemed a truthful, fair-minded education in America’s history. The Department’s product is more accurately termed the deliberate distorting of US. history, which is applied in an indoctrination of America’s students that leaves them all but ignorant of U.S. history. It also leaves them deeply infused with a near-fanatic belief that the United States engages in evil whenever it puts America’s interests first and manifests a durable preference for the republic’s survival over extravagant and always wasted and war-causing funding for the welfare, Westernizing, and democratizing of poor, suffering, oppressed, diseased, or otherwise unfortunate foreigners – especially, as the saying goes, those “of color, which has come to mean anyone who is not English-speaking and white. At home it means, legal, financial, political, and media preference for any group – no matter how reprehensible, felonious, slothful, or deviant — that reliably votes for the Democrats.

In addition, the Department’s prescribed indoctrination demands the mandatory awarding of empathy, sympathy, and limited liability to foreign nations, organizations, and individuals that deliberately attack America, as in U.S. soldiers and Marines not being allowed to fire on the enemy before being fired on; the lack of retribution for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing responsibility for generating the Islamists’ war against the United States; official U.S. silence over Israel’s intentional aerial attack that wrecked the U.S. navy’s ship Liberty and killed or wounded many of its crew; and bipartisan acquiescence in the undeclared but vicious war the Mexican government is waging against the U.S. economy and America’s sovereignty, independence, language, and social cohesion.

For several generations of American students – from which have come most teachers at all levels of U.S. education – the idea of “America First” has been directly and intentionally defined by the Department of Education as American selfishness, racism, isolationism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and a mean-spirited lack of sensitivity to always-worthy foreigners. While examples of this Department of Education-inculcated, anti-America mindset are legion, several recent ones are worth noting.

Posted in America | Comments Off

Wealth Of Los Angeles Jews Is Limitless?

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: Steve, have you ever read about this? It was a mini-scandal in Los Angeles back in 1988. Memos leaked to the L.A. Times revealed that two Jewish political consultants gave a Jewish city councilman running for mayor some frank advice on how to defeat Tom Bradley.

Los Angeles Times:
One of the frankest parts of the memos urged Yaroslavsky to capitalize on his close ties with the Jewish community to raise money.
The two advisers said they were not fund-raising experts, “but what we do know is that Jewish wealth in Los Angeles is endless. That almost every Jewish person who meets you will like you and that asking for $2,000 is not an unreasonable request to people who are both wealthy and like you.” At one point, the memo said, “The Yaroslavsky campaign becomes the United Jewish appeal.”
[…]
[Republicans who voted for Bradley] are racially tolerant people who are strongly pulled to Bradley because of his height, skin color and calm demeanor. They like voting for him–they feel less guilty about how little they used to pay their household help.
“To beat Bradley, you must be intensely, thoroughly and totally committed to your vision of L.A.,” they said. “It is the way you overcome the racial tug many Jews and non-Jewish liberals feel toward Bradley. It is also the way you overcome the possible Republican preference for the conservative black over the Jewish kid friendly with the Waxman-Berman machine.”
The consultants dwelt at length on the politics of blacks and Jews, major political forces in the city. “Bradley can and will excite black voters to outvote the white electorate especially if there is a runoff where his mayoral office is seen as jeopardized by a perfidious Jew, and/or most Jews and tree huggers will be, simultaneously, happy with both alternatives or distraught with having to choose between the two alternatives and therefore will turn out at their normal rates.”

(A few months later, Yaroslavsky dropped out of the race.)

Shades of the ’16 Democratic primaries: Hillary, the (honorary) black candidate, the heroic defender of Obama’s legacy, excites more black voters than Bernie, the (perfidious?) Jew.

And how many moderate white voters were TelePrompted to vote for Obama in ’08 because he was a tall, soothing, non-threatening black man with an Ivy League pedigree?

Posted in Los Angeles | Comments Off

New York Times Reporter Jonathan Weisman Retweets Harsh Attacks On Jews

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

I wonder if Jonathan Weisman has ever studied Talmud? There’s nothing in his twitter feed more shocking than what you will find in the Talmud.

I’m not hurt and upset and discombobulated when Jewish texts contain anti-gentile sentiments. Ever said Aleinu? Why should Jews be upset when gentiles have anti-Jewish sentiments. We’re all competing for survival and for the prosperity of our respectives peoples. Nothing is personal. Life is all about survival and propagating your genes and bringing up kids and helping your people.

SPLC tweets: “NYTimes reporter @jonathanweisman is retweeting antisemitic tweets from Trump supporters and trolls. It’s ugly. We’ve seen it for a while.”

Jonathan Weisman tweets:

* Better to have it in the open. People need to choose sides.

* Don’t worry about me, friend. Just airing the filth.

* Flabbergasted that antisemitism in the Trump voter ranks isn’t getting more attention, at least from the @RJC.

Haaretz:

Jonathan Weisman, deputy editor at the Times’ Washington bureau unleashed hell when he retweeted a Trump supporter (the tweet has since been deleted):

Flabbergasted that antisemitism in the Trump voter ranks isn't getting more attention, at least from the @RJC. https://t.co/qt5uI5bUIb
— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 19, 2016

Weisman spent the next eight hours retweeting missives that he has received throughout the day:

@jonathanweisman @either_orwell @vdare all kike-americans that would put Israhell first should be dropped from a helicopter over Tel Aviv
— Aaron Swenson (@AaronCSwenson) May 19, 2016

Poor @jonathanweisman is 4 open borders, sexual degeneracy, and turning the US into 3rd world shithole. Elite Jews went 2 far and have 2 go.
— Flesh Bomb (@FleshBomb) May 19, 2016

@jonathanweisman I found that menorah you were looking for. pic.twitter.com/8dAF2gbF4a
— Jack Jackson (@nukethespooks) May 19, 2016

@sidhubaba @jonathanweisman robust debate. Isn't that a good thing? Especially concerning taboo topics. pic.twitter.com/BAlKLPzFcx
— Henry Smith (@FoundersRace) May 19, 2016

Smh do the white Christians attacking @jonathanweisman even realize their place in the hierarchy of the races? pic.twitter.com/fRlvFpJHfq
— Grigory Ovenkin (@Ovenkin) May 19, 2016

J W E J
E E
WE J E W
E E
WEJ J
J W E J
E E
WE J E W
E E
WEJ J@jonathanweisman
— JudenPhysikLügen (@deutsche_physik) May 19, 2016

Finally, Weisman bade farewell to his followers and legions of anti-Semites:

For those who sent kind thoughts, thank you. Antisemites, thank you for showing yourselves. No more retweets. My work is done for the day.
— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 19, 2016

This was not the first time criticism of Trump by Jewish reporters has resulted in anti-Semitic backlash. On Tuesday, Melania Trump, the wife of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, suggested that journalist Julia Ioffe “provoked” the anti-Semitic abuse she faced from Trump fans after publishing negative profile about her.
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania said in an interview with DuJour. “But I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”
Ioffe, who is Jewish, received calls from people playing Hitler speeches, told that she “should be burned in an oven,” “be shot in the head,” and was sent photoshopped images of her in a concentration camp uniform.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Journalism | Comments Off

Surrounded by Jew-Haters

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

For Two Thousand Years
by Mihail Sebastian, translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
London: Penguin, 231 pp., £9.99 (paper)

John Banville writes:

In his Journal 1935–44, Mihail Sebastian, lawyer, journalist, novelist, playwright, left a profound and moving record of some of the most terrible years in the history of Europe. His native Romania may have been on the geographical periphery, but it was, no less than Spain, one of the cockpits in the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy that was to lay waste to entire countries, and cause uncountable millions of deaths and the near annihilation of European Jewry. The wonder of it is that the Journal (not published in Romania till 1996 and in English till 2000) is not only an invaluable historical document, fully as significant as the diaries of Victor Klemperer and Anne Frank, but also a beautifully shaped and subtly executed work of literary art.1 Never has the savagery of which human beings are capable been recorded with such insight, style, gracefulness, and, amazingly, humor. Now, in For Two Thousand Years, we have a fictional precursor of the Journal that in its way is equally fascinating, and equally shocking.

Mihail Sebastian was the pen name of Iosif Mendel Hechter. He was born to a Jewish family in Brăila, a port on the Danube, in 1907. He studied law in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, which at the time liked to think of itself as a second Paris, and then in Paris itself, before returning to Bucharest and becoming a typical figure of the times, an intellectual flaneur, a habitué of literary cafés, a chaser after girls. He worked intermittently as a lawyer while also writing essays, novels, poems, and plays, and moving in a milieu that included writers and thinkers such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, and Camil Petrescu.

In that fevered year of 1934, with Hitler established as German chancellor and Spain stumbling toward civil war, Sebastian published For Two Thousand Years. The novel caused an immediate scandal in Romania. The Zionist left accused him of being anti-Semitic, while the fascist right saw him as a wild-eyed Zionist. He had asked his friend and hero, Nae Ionescu, charismatic teacher, philosopher, mathematician, and, eventually, fascist activist, to write a preface to the book. Ionescu obliged, but what he wrote turned out to be not the sympathetic and approving puff Sebastian had hoped for but a disgraceful indictment concentrating on the fact of Sebastian’s Jewishness. Assimilation was a foolish fantasy, Ionescu wrote: no Jew could ever belong to a national community. “Someone can be in the service of a community, can serve it in an eminent way, can even give his life for this collectivity; but this does not bring him any closer to it.” He told Sebastian bluntly that he should not even think of himself as Romanian:

It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian…. Remember that you are Jewish!… Are you Iosif Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.

It seems inconceivable yet Sebastian, despite sadness and disappointment, went ahead and published this appalling diatribe as a preface to his novel. Later he was to write that including the piece was his only possible revenge on Ionescu. This is completely typical of Sebastian’s stoical and endearingly wistful attitude toward the unashamed, indeed loudly proclaimed, anti-Semitism of so many of his most intimate companions. When Nae Ionescu died in 1940, at the age of forty-nine, Sebastian wept bitter tears for his lost friend.

Indeed, Sebastian’s capacity to accept and even forgive the excesses of his friends is truly remarkable. In the Journal he records how at a time when the private houses of Jews were being confiscated by the Romanian government and distributed to Gentile families, he chanced to meet his friend the novelist Camil Petrescu, who complained to him that he probably would not be given one of the houses:

“They never give me anything,” he said, disheartened.

“Well, this time,” I replied, “even if they gave you something, I’m sure you wouldn’t take it!”

“Not take it? Why shouldn’t I?”

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Romania | Comments Off

The Arab Takeover Of Latin America

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

It must be because of Arabs’ high IQs.

Steve Sailer writes: “As we all know, we have to allow massive immigration from Latin America since nobody could possibly make a living there. Except … all sorts of people have moved to Latin America and many made a killing. What does this say about the people we are getting from Latin America and what does it say about the people who are dumping their unwanted populations on us?”

Donald Templar writes:

The Comparison of Mean IQ in Muslim and Non-Muslim Countries

The present research found that the Muslim country mean IQ of 81 is half a standard deviation below the mean IQ of non-Muslim nations and is not related to strength of Muslim culture as defined by the percentage of Muslims in the country. The mean IQ of 84 in Arab countries is not associated with per capita income and is incompatible with the intellectual achievements of the golden age of the Muslim Empire. Possible explanations for this decline include hybridization with sub-Saharan Africans, dysgenic decrease in the more educated Muslims employing birth control as suggested by Meisenberg, the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking, and the intellectual contributions being both exaggerated and made by non-Muslims.

1. Introduction

The purpose of the present study was to compare the mean IQs of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The great intellectual achievements of the Muslim Empire from the 7th to the 12th century have been written about by numerous authors (e.g., Bloom & Blair, 2000; Lyons, 2009; Masood, 2009). These achievements have been especially noted in science, mathematics, architecture and medicine. However, the contemporary Muslim world is underrepresentated in highly creative contributions published in prestigious scientific journals. Lynn (1991) presented the total number of Nobel Prizes in science, literature, and economics combined with the Fields award in mathematics as a function of five major categories of ethnic origin. Europeans had a total of 541, North East Asians 23, South Asians and North Africans combined 10, Africans one (in literature), and Southeast Asians none. It is apparent that the predominantly Muslim countries are in the bottom three categories. Such a dearth of superlative scholarly achievement is consistent with the Lynn & Vanhanen (2006) Table 6.5 listing of mean IQs of the world’s countries. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a mean IQ of 87. If the standard deviation in Indonesia is 15, two standard deviations above the mean is only 117, which probably is not a high enough IQ to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from prestigious universities in high mean IQ countries. Even if mean IQ differences between two countries are modest, the disparity of extremely gifted persons can be huge.

The IQs of the Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries tend to be lower than those of the majority population (Lynn, 2008a). In the Netherlands, the mean IQ of Turks is 83, of Moroccans 81, and Indonesians 94 (Lynn, 2008a). Mackintosh (2007) reported that in the United Kingdom Pakistanis score 4 to 6 IQ points below the Indians. It is unlikely that this can be attributed entirely to minority status. The Chinese are a minority in many countries of the world and yet obtain higher mean IQs than the majority populations. They generate and/or control over half the wealth in Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia the Chinese constitute 3.8 % of the population and generate/control 73% of the wealth. In Malaysia they constitute 28% of the population and generate/control 69% of the wealth (Lynn, 2008a). Caution should be employed because of the possibility of selective migration.

Special attention is given here to the Arab countries for two reasons. One is to examine the role of the great variation in per capita income. At the high end are Kuwait with $25,314, Qatar with $20,987, and the United Arab Emirates with $20,585. At the low end areYemen with $2,588 and Syria with $2,892. The second reason is to raise for consideration an incongruity between the achievements of the past and the state of the present. The Muslim Empire began in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabs played a dominant role in its expansion and rise to greatness. Islam did not become established until the 15th century in Indonesia and in what is now Pakistan. The 16 countries regarded as Arab are Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:

* In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

* Lebanese Christians are largely descended from the native people who go back to the Phoenicians, while the Muslims have much more ancestry from nomads from the Arabian peninsula. The Lebanese that we get in the West are largely from the Christian community.

* I’m more than a little surprised that the professional media don’t seem to have bothered to look at Trump’s own writing. I’ve listened to bits and pieces of two of his books in audio format at YouTube and they’re really content rich for anyone curious about his views. The book he co-authored with Robert Kiyosaki is very expressly political, despite its self-help title. I found it at YouTube under: “1. Why We Want You To Be Rich (Audio Book) Trump & Kiyosaki”.

* I have a kind of ridiculous theory that the world’s 2 preeminent transnational market minorities have divided Earth into 2 basic spheres of commerce. Our good friends the Jews get the big, important countries like the USA, France, Germany, Russia, England and the developed white world in general. They have their eyes set on China and India too, of course. They handle the big, big, big money.

The Lebanese are in charge of setting up shop in little, less important countries like Haiti (hehe), African countries (with the exception of South-Africa back in the day), south and central american statelets etc. There are middling countries like Brazil and Argentina where the 2 spheres of influence overlap.

* Hayek was not a Jew. In fact, he probably didn’t care for them:
“I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as Levantine, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians —basically a lack of honesty in them.” (Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek, Regents of the University of California, 1983. p. 490).

* There are Jews in Brazil too. The richest banker in the world is a Brazilian Jew, Joseph Safra.

* Having spent decades working the Middle East scene, I’ve had lots of dealings with Lebanese as immigrants to America as well as native Lebanese “marketing” the Middle East. My take: they can “out-Jew the Jew” when it comes to financial scheming, which suggests that the stereotypical behaviors we attribute to the Jews are not religious based but rather endemic to the culture of tight, clan-based international traders. The Lebanese are better at this game than the Jews.

Most of the Lebanese I’ve dealt with claim a Christian heritage. They spoke English, French, and Arabic. The cross-cultural perspective gave them an advantage in international deals. As one Lebanese told me, their objective is to become a millionaire by the age of 30. If you haven’t made it by age 35, your family and clan consider you a failure.

I considered one a close friend until it became clear that I was nothing but a potential source of revenue. He said that if I ever needed any money laundered or needed to spirit large amounts of cash into the United States, let him know; they had the process wired. (I had no need of either … I was a “techie” not a businessman and both were also illegal.) When I announced I was relocating back to the United States, they threw a “going away” party for me. I naively took my wife and son. It turned out to be a “hot hand-off” to their Lebanese business partners in the United States. It was embarrassing. Yes, the clan pursued me in the United States in the hope that they could become involved in one of my high-tech company’s international business deals.

The Lebanese business model (one they share with the Jews) was clear. You find out where the cash flows are among the elite in targeted countries and you stand in the middle. You scheme as an obstructionist. The hope is that the other parties will realize that the deal won’t go through until you get your cut … so, you get your cut to go away. A variation on this theme is to collect indigenous business partners to force the parties at the receiving end of a cash flow out of the game and own the deal. (Carlos Slim?)

It is also clear that, in this business model, the Lebanese obstructionists bring no value added to the table. The business model is a form of wealth extraction or looting based on family connections, shady business deals, and exploiting local politics among corrupt ruling classes.

Damn, am I describing the evolving business model in the United States?

* You can’t drink tap water in Shanghai. The press is government controlled and it’s a police state. There is probably a cancer epidemic in Shanghai, but we don’t know for sure. Chinese who migrate are not considered residents and have no say with the local party chiefs. The minimum wage is less than $200 per month. They cannot afford to buy the stuff they make. There are no public golf courses in or around Shanghai. There are no birds (other than sparrows), squirrels, rabbits. I could go on.

* Vietnam is where Chinese expansionism, one of the biggest forces in human history, finally met an immovable object.

Henry Kissinger talks about his first secret trip to Hanoi in early 1973. He asked to visit museums. They all turned out to be war history museums. Damn, he thought, we sided with the less nationalist side.

* Nasser, for all his failings (and there were many) was a great politician. Compare him to Hillary – it’s like day and night. You see him up on the stage relaxed and confident and comfortable and joking and in command of his audience, convinced that history is on HIS side and that his opposition is just a bunch of hypocrites who do not practice what they preach. He’s not shrilly haranguing his audience in dictator style. Trump (and I mean this as a compliment) is more like Nasser than Hillary but Nasser was much better. Despite hating 99% of Nasser’s beliefs (his opposition to radical Islam was good) you just have to like the guy and his style.

Posted in Arabs, Latino | Comments Off

Divide & Conquer

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* What have puzzled me is that the Bernie people still don’t get that what the dissident right (libertarians, nationalists, traditionalists, paleo-conservatives and national-conservatives) go against are the same enemy they go after. The Bernie people just don’t seem to grasp it. Instead they have created some weird unrealistic alt-globalization communist ideology which basically is about “everything to everybody”. I think it is a matter of time until more of these Bernie people (just like the Paul people) will turn more nationalist. There is some evidence that it is possible. You see it in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Scotland.

* You know, in my youth as an orthodox liberal I always wondered why the paleocons and nationalists (no alt-right back then) didn’t realize the rich people they loved so much were playing them for fools. If only the black and white working and middle classes would unite instead of fighting over social issues they could get rid of the rich and shut down globalization and bring back the unions and a less-racist version of 1950s America.

My answer to you is my answer to my old self: the divide-and-conquer scheme is too effective. Identity politics is natural to humans because we’re made to get into tribal wars with people who look, speak, or act different. So once you have a multiracial working and middle class, they’ll spend all their time going after each other instead of the man on top. There’s always some black guy who got shot by a cop or some white guy who got mugged by black kids (yes, these are real problems, I don’t deny that and that’s why this is so effective), and bang, off we go again.

We’ll see what Trump does in 2016. At this point I’m past hoping for a better world and just that immigration runs slow enough for assimilation to occur.

MORE COMMENTS:

* I was surprised to see that Zuckerberg actually sat down with a bunch of conservatives to hear their issues with Facebook.

Today’s google doodle is about an obscure Asian-American radical who’s main claim to fame seems to be that she cradled Malcolm X as he lay dying, which is pretty typical for a google doodle. But you’ll never see Sergey Brin apologize for Google’s effort to drive the culture leftward.

* Transfer of population has been going on since Roman times (and before). The Visigoths started out on the Black Sea and ended up in Spain. Millions of Greeks had lived in Turkey for thousands of years and then after 1923 they didn’t. Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of WWII. These things usually seem unthinkable until they happen and then they are not. Usually these movement happen by force (although a relatively small # of killings can panic the rest to flee) , but maybe they could be accomplished by peaceful means.

Most of the Arabs living in the West Bank don’t have deep roots in the area – even many of those that fled Israel in ’48 had migrated from other parts of the Arab world quite recently, attracted by the Jewish economic development of Palestine. If you read Twain’s Innocents Abroad, he describes Palestine as being mostly empty – think of Arizona, which had 122,000 people in 1900 and 6 million today. There was never any such thing as a “Palestinian” nationality – the identity of the people in the area was just “Arab subject of the Ottoman Empire” and there were no barriers that prevented people from moving around. Arafat himself was born in Cairo. They already share a religion and culture with the rest of the Arab world, so the obstacles to relocating them are mostly political. That being said, there are a lot of vested interests in keeping things the way they are, and a whole mythical “Palestinian” identity has been constructed (keeping in mind that to some extent all national identities are myth based) so the idea of transfer of population will meet fierce resistance, be labeled genocide, etc.

* I think I’m going to have to start using Yahoo search. A Google doodle honoring Yuri Kochiyama. Yes, truly an honorable American. What does a search into this Great American worthy of note on the home searchpage by the biggest US search engine turn up? A loudmouthed rabble-rousing activist with all the boilerplate stereotypical ideals you’d expect from a 60s far-left liberal. But while most of the rest of the people from that era grew up, she continued on with it through to the present day. She praised Osama bin Laden for the attacks on 9/11, and even went on record thanking Islam for Osama. She supported a number of other violent attacks on the US and Europe. In a sane world, Google would put out a doodle honoring the day she pushed up the daisies, instead of her birthday.

* I think it’s clear that some Jewish nationalists and some defenders of Jewish nationalism want the land between the Jordan and the Med but not the people living on it. That’s cold, even if that’s what we did in the US when we settled here, but let’s not forget that same justification was used by Goering at the Nuremberg Trials (using the American example.)

You just aren’t going to get much traction for population transfers of this kind in today’s world. The underlying idea is that you cannot have a pure ethno-state for one group of people unless you get rid of everyone who isn’t a member of the group. It is extremely ironic that any Jew would argue like that, which is why Ben Gurion did not endorse expelling all Arabs in 1948. And the idea that one cannot remain a democracy unless you expel approximately 50% of the people living on the land you control is extremely funny, if you stop to think about it. It’s far easier and much less morally problematic to just stop being a democracy, without declaring it so.

As for the demographics, that’s the way it goes. Anyone who is a student of history knows that borders, and nations, rise and fall and change their composition over time. Israel is not likely to be any different. The entire 20th Century is just a snapshot in recorded human history, and the history of the USA, which comprises about 2-3 snapshots, has changed radically from what it was in the 240 years of its existence, particularly in terms of ethnicity, culture, and demographics. Concerning our future, sure, I’d like to see a European resemblance in America for the future. But based on current global demographic and migration trends, I doubt it. We just have to hope that the best parts of our culture survive.

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RENT TO CRIMINALS — OR ELSE

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

FrontPageMag: Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords.

Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

“The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama’s far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.

This is part of the campaign by the most radical left-wing president in American history to de-stigmatize criminality itself. The Left views criminals — especially minorities — as victims of society, oppressed for mere nonconformism. Lawbreakers, they believe, should be treated the same as law-abiding citizens.

Obama’s policies strike at the very heart of the criminal law system. Removing the stigma of a criminal record undermines the system and respect for the law and attacks the underpinnings of civilization itself.

Of course, a criminal record carries with it a degree of social stigma, as it should. Removing or watering down that socially beneficial stigma reduces disincentives to commit crimes and hinders the marginalization of the antisocial. Without stigma and social ostracism, society would eventually collapse.

But this administration treats criminals as a protected class. It wants felons’ voting rights restored. It supports legislation “banning the box,” that is, banning employment applications that ask if the applicant has a criminal record. It wants to empty the prisons and afford illegal aliens special protection by frustrating law enforcement in so-called sanctuary cities.

Refusing a prospective tenant is now fraught with danger in the Obama era. Since minorities are over-represented in America’s criminal cohort, landlords are automatically deemed racist if they balk at housing criminals.

“The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics,” said the enforcement directive issued by Castro.

“Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics,” the document states.

It may be true that, as the HUD guidance states, “African Americans and Hispanics are arrested, convicted and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population,” but that’s only because African-Americans and Hispanics commit crimes at rates out of proportion to their numbers in the United States.

Ignoring a black would-be tenant’s criminal history amounts to what David Horowitz calls “black skin privilege.” The African-American lawbreaker gets a free pass because of the color of his skin.

That’s not what America is supposed to be about.

The legal memorandum continues, “While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”

The guidance laments that “When individuals are released from prisons and jails, their ability to access safe, secure and affordable housing is critical to their successful reentry to society.”

It continues, “Yet many formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as individuals who were convicted but not incarcerated, encounter significant barriers to securing housing, including public and other federally-subsidized housing.”

Cue the violins.

Posted in Crime | Comments Off

‘Dr Death’ Psychiatrist Charged With Murders

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

News: A Georgia psychiatrist dubbed Dr Death has been charged with murder in the overdose deaths of three patients.

Thirty-six of Dr Narendra Nagareddy’s patients died while he was prescribing them painkillers, court documents allege.

Twelve of them died of prescription drug overdoses, post-mortem examinations confirmed.

The doctor could face further charges for at least 30 other deaths, the Henry Herald reports.

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