Bill Campaigning Hard For Hillary

Diversity & Corruption

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Yet another prosperous, red-blooded American city with a water problem. This time it’s Crystal City, Texas, with a name that sounds like it must certainly must be filled with white, Republican evangelicals.

Oh wait. In a Crystal City story unrelated to the water problem: “Indicted were Mayor Richardo Lopez; council members Rogelio Mata and Roel Mata; former council member Gilbert Urrabazo; and William James Jonas, who served as city manager and city attorney. Ngoc Tri Nguyen, a businessman, was also indicted…Councilman Margo Rodriguez was indicted January 27 on unrelated federal charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants, KSAT reported.

That’s a lot of news in one month for a city of just 7,000 people. It’s not the first time a slew of Crystal City officials have been indicted. It happened back in 1976, as well. But it should be all ok once these good Latinos assimilate to American ways. Crystal City (95% Latino) has only been overwhelmingly Mexican-American since at least the early 60s.

Because Orthodox Judaism Is Hard

A goy messages me: "Why are so few Jews orthodox? Behind all my trolling, I really admire the orthodox. I even admire an Orthodox Jew who screws up all the time and retains a sad masturbation addiction or whatever. But these Pharisee reform "Jews" who pay no attention to the Law at all... What are they? It's pure tribalist in-group stuff with no moral core. Disgusting. And of course all the editorial writers are this sort. John Podhoretz is the most revolting to me."

The Possibilities For Mayhem With Self-Driving Cars

Comments to Steve Sailer:

 * One thing is for sure, self-driving cars will be a boon for terrorists. No need to kill yourself nor risk running out of courage on the drive to the target. Just pack a self-driving car with explosives, place a couple of dummies in the car and give it a target. Sounds like a winning combination.

 * Beyond the automated bomb carrier for crazies and a way for drug lords to move drugs around without mules and patsies, these cars will be very tempting targets for computer hackers. I’m not talking about script kiddies and other wannabes but the hard cases who crack companies like Target and Home Depot like they were eggs. Oh let’s not forget hostile foreign nations either who have it in for Americans. The first thing the bad guys will do is steal or buy one and dissect it, the same way safe crackers buy safes to learn how to crack them. Once they figure it out, they’ll run a couple rich dudes off the road in some spectacular fashion or simply turn the the cars on when they are in the garage and gas pipe the people living in the house then have the car go rogue like some deranged criminal. Then watch the stock price of Google and the car manufacturer tank. The possibilities for mayhem with these robot cars will be endless.

 * Anyone notice the commonality between self-driving cars and sex robots? Both of these nerd projects apparently have the goal of de-skilling teenage boys. In 20 years we’ll have a generation of young men who won’t know how to drive, and who won’t have to acquire social skills for dating girls. I have to wonder if some of the same people play a role in developing both of these technologies and in propagandizing us about their alleged advantages.

 * Keep this in mind: autonomous vehicles do not need to be autonomous everywhere in order to be viable products. Look at Tesla autopilot and, soon, Cadillac’s supercruise. Good on highways, not on surface roads. People will buy that. Drive to the freeway and then let the freeway part of the commute get done by computer. Makes the commute easier. The range of conditions in which autonomous vehicles can operate will expand with time. As soon as an autonomous vehicle can handle some local roads a blind person who lives at a local road address an autonomous vehicle can handle can start taking trips to every place that the autonomous vehicle can go to. That’s a step-up in mobility. As for avoiding pedestrians in parking lots: There’s already a pedestrian collision avoidance option on some luxury cars. The tech for doing this is going to get better every year. Specific addresses in Santa Monica in 2025? Hard to say. But certainly some starting home addresses and destination restaurant addresses will be viable for an autonomous vehicle in 2025.

 * The other alternative would be to have a homogenous, high-trust society like Japan’s, where the little kids just take public transportation home from school.

* I would guess that the very situations which we ourselves imagine would create the most difficult scenario for a self driving car — where a crash is about to take place — are the situations in which the self driving cars will do far better than a human driver.

It takes us a good deal of time to process something dangerous, but a computer with the proper sensors should be able to figure that out almost instantaneously, and know what the best response to it is to avoid a crash or reduce its harm. The physics here, of the objects in question and the car itself, and of the brakes and/or accelerator and/or steering, are pretty basic and easy to compute. (To me, there seems to be analogy here to how many people used to think that the hardest thing to get a computer to do was play chess well, when, in fact, it was among the easier things to accomplish).

The things that seem to elude the systems at this stage seem instead to be odd things one wouldn’t really anticipate. Evidently, the Tesla self-driving car, as I recollect, did some weird thing when it came to certain exits on a freeway, going off when they shouldn’t. But those are presumably things that are ultimately pretty tractable, once known.

What I personally would worry about more would be situations which are more predictably difficult, such as bad weather or night driving, where the information from the sensors may be greatly impaired.

* It’s easy to imagine, but why be terrestrial-bound? The unique selling point to raise the billions would surely be to float safely above the potholes, gridlock, mangy dogs, aggro humans and revenue-raising highway cops. This thing can’t run until it leapfrogs.

* Detroit has a light rail system that nobody uses and that loses money. It’s also terribly named. It’s called the “Detroit People Mover.”

* Pedestrians are easy for a self-driving car.

They have complete omniscience of what’s around them in a 360 degree radius with sensors. The only issue is pedestrians coming out of something like obscured corners the same way they are big issues for humans, if cars are connected and share information, probably not an issue at all.

The real issue is can we get sensors that work in all conditions? Eventually I hope so, we’ll have to. Decision making is the easy part with these cars.

Also if self-driving cars become a thing our whole country will be reshaped to fit them.

There will be very clear divisions between traveling zones and drop off zones. It won’t be possible for pedestrians to cross into traveling zones, same for cars in pedestrian zones. We won’t need parking lots, cars will just drop off and go to centralized area until someone else calls for them (like automatic taxis). We won’t own our own cars, we’ll subscribe to a service that sends a car whenever we need one.

Cars will congregate in a local standy by area where they detect higher density, people can schedule cars to be somewhere, e.g. before they leave for work.

If we can truly get self-driving cars working, the whole world will change. Cars are cheap, private, and it’s easy to build a ‘track’ for them. People will always prefer cars over public transportation, bikes, etc..

What I look forward to most is all of the jerks who are sitting on and overvaluing the land in prime city areas and see their values crumble. Who cares if I live 30 miles away from Manhattan, I can just take a nap/work while I commute there.

Density won’t be a concern with self-driving cars. We’ll be able to travel the same distance in half the time, and we can do whatever we want while we wait.

* You know how we’re all concerned about the power the SJW/lefty authoritarians have over our activities online? Now imagine them having that same power over most of our offline activities as well. That’s the potential of self-driving cars.

Say you want to make a 2am run to Taco Bell. You summon a self-driving car and enter your destination. The car measures your weight and body fat, and its Bloomberg Chip rejects your destination.

Or, say you summon a self-driving car to go the pub, after an argument with your spouse. She uses her smart phone to falsely accuse you of domestic violence, and that triggers the car to deliver you to your local police station instead for a debriefing.

The flip side of autonomous cars is less autonomy for you.

* Target/Home Depot hacks were nothing.

You don’t understand how laughably outdated most security is in retailers. There just isn’t much emphasis on fixing it because banks/credit cards will cover the costs, and they can cancel card #s in an instant.

There was nothing technically impressive about those hacks.

How often do you hear of hackers hacking mobile signals (e.g. LTE) and getting internet for free?

Never.

How often do banks lose money to hackers, excluding social engineering (getting password from someone?)

Never.

Everyone has this grand image of hackers in their head, but you can’t actually hack anything properly encrypted. 99.9% of hacking is social engineering.

* If gasoline is $2 per gallon and I can work in my car, why wouldn’t I want a big cheap house in the exurbs instead of an small expensive apartment in the city?

Similarly, much of the movement toward the city is driven by drunk driving crackdowns, but if I can drink and have my Google car drive me home, why pay to live in the city?

Traditionalist & Degenerate Themes in Game of Thrones

Guillaume Durocher writes: Game of Thrones is perhaps the single most popular mass cultural product today. One indicator: In 2015, the show’s Wikipedia page was among the ten most-visited in English, German, French, Italian, and Russian, a remarkable distinction. Game of Thrones really is one of the major planks of our “global culture” as produced by the media masters in America. Given the show’s popularity, it is worth examining the values it promotes.
Game of Thrones’ most pervasive degenerate theme[1] is the gratuitous inclusion of numerous quasi-pornographic sex scenes, something the Jewish-owned company which produced the show, HBO, has long been notorious for. This includes an explicit portrayal of brother-sister incest “doggy-style” in the very first episode. Though I have not read the novels on which the series is based, I am told the author George R. R. Martin’s literary description of that event was much more allusive and vague. (There is, after all, nothing degenerate as such about telling a story involving incest.) The pornographic elements were therefore presumably inserted by the TV show’s creators, David Benioff (born David Friedman) and Daniel Brett Weiss.
Nonetheless, Game of Thrones also portrays traditionalist values, in keeping with the show’s medieval fantasy setting, such as honor, loyalty, and discipline. The two overwhelming facts facing people in the world of Game of Thrones appear to be family and hierarchy, two eminently Right-wing themes.
These values and the show’s violence create a sense of realism, quite different in this respect from the Lord of the Rings films, despite the inclusion of magic. The brutal violence, often eliminating leading characters we have come to identify with, is quite in keeping with the actual violence among the ruling classes of early medieval Europe. White viewers get a taste of the kind of tough and often brief lives of their forefathers, a rarity. Forefathers who, it cannot be emphasized enough, fought on and persevered despite the incredible hardship, making our lives possible as their descendants.
The show frequently portrays younger characters being lectured and educated by older ones in the realities of the world and traditional wisdom, in order to have them better accept the decisions and disciplines expected of them.
On family, Catelyn Stark, the loving mother of the young King in the North Robb Stark, urges her son to not marry out of ephemeral passionate love. She tells him:

Your father didn’t love me when we married. He hardly knew me or I him. Love didn’t just happen to us. We built it slowly over the years, stone by stone, for you, for your brothers and sisters, for all of us. It’s not as exciting as secret passion in the woods, but it is stronger. It lasts longer.

While I am not an advocate of arranged marriages, this is wonderful advice for finding genuine love and happiness, and founding good, healthy families. Catelyn’s words are completely at odds with the glorification of frivolous sex that otherwise dominates Western pop culture today (especially in pop music).
Tywin Lannister, a powerful and ruthless southern lord embodying raison d’État, also speaks to his son, Jaime Lannister, about family, albeit very differently. He tells him:

Your mother’s dead. Before long I’ll be dead. And you and your brother and your sister and all of her children. All of us dead; all of us rotting in the ground. It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor, but family. Do you understand?

Tywin, like Catelyn, thus condemns individualist selfishness, albeit in a very different way. Individualism is vain because the individual ends in death. His life can only have meaning if it is part of something greater, more lasting. For Tywin, that thing is family. And what are nation and race but extended families?
The character who is most explicitly schooled on respect for hierarchy is Jon Snow, a Stark bastard who joins a kind of monastic warrior order known as the Night’s Watch, which guards the realm’s northern border. Jon is dissatisfied with his role and frequently criticizes or disobeys his superiors. The Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch takes him aside to scold him saying: “You want to lead one day? Then learn to follow.” Another Night’s Watch superior, Alliser Thorne, on a separate occasion also gave Jon some wisdom on this theme:

Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second guessing himself, that’s the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.

This is something that we who are so critical should bear in mind. Armchair criticism is very easy, actually doing something is supremely difficult. (Personally, I try, though this is difficult at times, to limit my denunciations of others to cases of bad faith, and make only constructive criticism of others’ execution.)
There is also a brilliant scene in which Tywin, not disinterestedly, advises in Socratic fashion the boy-king Tommen, his grandson, to hold wisdom as the highest virtue, and to be modest by heeding the advice of those wiser than he is.
Beyond these individual cases, what are the overall values of the show? This article cannot claim to make a comprehensive assessment, and much depends on future episodes (I am writing as of season five) but some observations can already be made.

Game of Thrones is a constant and brutal education in the disasters that sentimentality brings about in a dangerous world. The show’s original protagonists are the Stark family, who are clearly portrayed as the good guys. The Starks, again and again, are defeated, murdered, and even destroyed due to misplaced sentimentality. Ned Stark tries in good faith to be an honest and honorable prime minister (“Hand of the King”) and as a result is quickly outmaneuvered and executed by those who do not have such scruples. Catelyn Stark put a sentimental attachment to her daughters above a higher sense of family interest and loyalty, leading her to foolishly release a major Lannister prisoner and sow discord in her own camp. King Robb himself offends an important ally by reneging on a promise to marry his daughter, in order to follow his heart instead, leading to his and his family’s downfall in the notorious “Red Wedding,” a truly shocking and traumatic event for the viewer.
The story of the Starks’ undoing, which is the main event of the show’s first three seasons, is a lesson in the perils of putting sentimentality before reason and of being honorable with those who are dishonorable. It is an ode to realism. This is a good antidote to liberal illusions.
There is however a second set of good guys, those around the young Daenerys Targaryen, who is busy building an empire in the show’s equivalent of Asia before returning to Westeros (Europe) to reclaim the throne. Daenerys’ adventures are rather disconnected from the rest of the show and have a rather infantile, magical quality. She triumphs without real effort or dramatic tension (her struggles are not, as in the wars of Westeros, between fellow main characters, but between her and secondary characters, leaving no doubt that she will always win).
What’s more, Daenerys not only wins but does so despite ruling arrogantly as a young person and as an idealist (she emancipates slaves, promises goodness to all, et cetera). She promises not to be another spoke on the wheel of the “game of thrones,” but to “break the wheel.” Thus Daenerys can be considered a stand in for an infantile femininity and sentimental egalitarianism, ultimately leading to Bolshevism (which is, among other things, the critique of an existing order based on the lie that one can form a human society without a ruling class or even without inequality in general). Daenerys overcomes the contradictions of all this, basically, through an outsized and implausible character shield.
If Daenerys really does triumph and create an egalitarian utopia, then Game of Thrones will not have been an illustration of the merits of realism, family, and hierarchy, but a denunciation of the real world, with all its viciousness, in favor of a communistic imaginary world.
I am curious as to the direction the show will take in the next seasons, which will apparently not be based on George R. R. Martin’s still-unfinished novels, but will be invented by the producers. Martin himself is incidentally a big fat liberal who cites Emma Lazarus to demand settlement of Muslims in America. Nonetheless, at least for me, Game of Thrones has been an enjoyable romp through an often compelling fantasy world, one which recalls the experiences and wisdom of my European forefathers.
1. I will not discuss gender roles in the show, which are for the most part traditional but feature some unrealistic portrayals of female fighters. The latter is for the most part considered unusual. Nonetheless, the inclusion of a little girl shown physically defeating grown men on occasion is degenerate. This gives women and girls unrealistic portrayals of their own physical strength. In the real world, such illusions lead them to be raped and murdered.

Election Open Thread

Comments: * The times are ripe for a new third-party whose platform is a restored emphasis on a healthy domestic economy and disengagement from fruitless and exorbitantly costly foreign entanglements. Such a party could attract majorities from independents and the bases of the two current parties. If forced into it, it’s conceivable Trump could form a new, majority party utterly dominating two ineffectual minority parties composed of the stalwart remains of our current, disastrously failed, two-party system.

Does Israel Want More African Immigrants?

Just curious:

Israel to Pay African Asylum-Seekers $3,500 to Leave Voluntarily ... Nov 27, 2013 ... Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet voted unanimously on Sunday to allocate NIS 440 million to deal with African asylum-seekers in ... www.amren.com/.../israel-to-pay-african-asylum-seekers-3500-to-leave- voluntarily/

Israel's Operation Wetback | American Renaissance Jun 22, 2012 ... Once the government made up its mind that the Africans had to go, it went ... “I prefer that there will be criticism of Israel while the state remains ... www.amren.com/features/2012/06/israels-opereation-wetback/

Israel to Expel Thousands of African Migrants to Unidentified Third ... Jun 11, 2013 ... Israel has struck a deal to expel thousands of African migrants to an unnamedAfrican country in return for supplying it with military aid, the ... www.amren.com/.../israel-to-expel-thousands-of-african-migrants-to- unidentified-third-country/

Sweden Accepts Dozens of Eritrean Asylum Seekers from Israel ... Jan 7, 2014 ... As a strike by tens of thousands of African asylum seekers against Israel's migration policies entered its third day on Tuesday, Interior Minister ... www.amren.com/.../sweden-accepts-dozens-of-eritrean-asylum-seekers-from- israel/

Interior Minister: We Must Deport African Refugees | American ... May 16, 2012 ... Under his plan, the deported would be provided financial assistance by Israel. South Tel Aviv has become a center of African illegal immigrants, ... www.amren.com/.../interior-minister-we-must-deport-african-refugees/

Illegal African Immigrants Protest Israel Detention | American ... Dec 19, 2013 ... Nearly 200 African asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally demonstrated Tuesday in Jerusalem against being housed at a new open ... www.amren.com/.../illegal-african-immigrants-protest-israel-detention/

Israel Passes Law to Detain Illegal African Migrants | American ... Dec 10, 2013 ... Israel's parliament has approved a law which allows illegal immigrants from Africato be detained for up to a year without trial, MPs announced ... www.amren.com/.../israel-passes-law-to-detain-illegal-african-migrants/

Exodus: Israel to Drive Africans from Holy Land | American ... Jul 18, 2012 ... Israel has initiated the first stage of a controversial “emergency plan” aimed at interning and deporting an estimated 60,000 African immigrants. www.amren.com/.../exodus-israel-to-drive-africans-from-holy-land/

Israel Police: Unemployed African Refugees Turning Tel Aviv ... May 2, 2012 ... Israel Police: Unemployed African Refugees Turning Tel Aviv Beaches into High Crime Spots. Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz, May 2, 2012. www.amren.com/.../israel-police-unemployed-african-refugees-turning-tel- aviv-beaches-into-high-crime-spots/

Number of Infiltrators Leaving Israel Skyrockets in August | American ... Sep 1, 2014 ... So far this year, 5,388 illegal Africans have left Israel voluntarily; Israeli authorities who have investigated the infiltrators have repeatedly ... www.amren.com/.../number-of-infiltrators-leaving-israel-skyrockets-in- august/

Jewish Self-Hatred

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: Cape Town, South Africa – The global center of the world BDS movement is, when you think about it, South Africa. BDS, in an attempt to sound more reasonable and less hateful, rarely compares Israel to Nazi, Germany, the way, say, arch-anti-Semite Roger Waters of Pink Floyd does. No, BDS argues that Israel practices apartheid the way that pre-Nelson Mandela South Africa did.

You can imagine, therefore, that it’s not all that easy being a proud lover of Israel in South Africa. That the Jewish community here pulls it off, remaining staunch Zionists, is impressive. But there are fissures in the support. Israel is under constant assault by some ANC ministers who make the false and erroneous comparison of Israel’s existential war against Islamic terrorists to the ANC’s struggle against white apartheid rule. Last week I responded to this ridiculous comparison. This week I want to focus on what it’s like to be subject to it. It’s impossible for world Jewry to be the brunt of so much hatred, and to constantly be on the defensive about Israel, without some of that bile and poison seeping in. The constant attacks start playing with your head. Maybe there is something wrong with us Jews.

With Christianity saying for 2000 years that Jesus is loving while the God of the Old Testament is vengeful, maybe Judaism is too rigid. Maybe in Israel we’re overdoing it. With the Palestinians saying they’re humiliated by checkpoints, perhaps Israel is purposely trying to degrade them as opposed to instituting security measures to stop buses filled with children from being blown up. And maybe, just maybe, we Jews who live outside of Israel are simply giving Israel too much mindless support. I remember twice visiting Dakar, Senegal, one of the poorest countries on earth, and being struck by the advertisements all over the city for skin bleaching agents.

But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gorie island in the city is where millions of African slaves departed through ‘the gate of no return’ to a life of chains in the Americas and Caribbean. When you’re brutalized with that kind of hatred just for the color of your skin you don’t always see beauty when you peer in the mirror. The gradual trickle of self-hatred into the Jewish soul is evidencing itself in the growing American Jewish call for Israel-hating speakers to be hosted by Jewish organizations at Jewish venues in order to demonstrate our open-mindedness.

We first saw this with Swarthmore Hillel when it bizarrely announced its “Open Hillel” policy, opening their doors to anti-Zionist speakers. Asking people who wish to destroy Israel to come and address Jewish audiences – and make no mistake about it, BDS is only about destroying Israel – would be the equivalent of the ANC inviting white bigots to argue that apartheid should be reinstated. I am all for inviting Israel’s opponents to open, rules-based debates, where they are forced to rationally defend their positions in the marketplace of ideas, and indeed, our organization, This World: The Values Network, will be sponsoring debates along these lines across the United States, beginning at Columbia University on 31 March. I believe strongly in freedom of speech and fair and intelligent exchange. And if it’s a credible opponent but who has the intention of obliterating your very home it can only be a debate format and on neutral ground. But what fool would allow poisonous, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda offered to impressionable Jewish minds without a retort? To invite people who want to malign and defame Israel to address Jewish audiences is proof of the old adage that there is no hatred like Jewish self-hatred.

Europe & The Jews

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: At the Oxford Union debate on Iran that I participated in last Thursday night, I waited for the inevitable argument that we’re wasting our time fighting over the Islamic Republic when the real wolf in sheep’s clothing is of course the Jewish state. Sure enough it came in the first thirty minutes when a bearded Islamic student who did not look much different to me (lucky, handsome devil) joined the floor debate. He argued that Israel, an apartheid state, is responsible for the real atrocities in the Middle East. So why bother with the Iranian distraction? Time was when an argument like that would have been shot down by the intelligent students witnessing the debate. Really? You’re going to compare a liberal democracy like Israel, with every freedom from religion to press to assembly, to a theocratic nightmare like Iran? Iran last year put 700 of its citizens to death, hangs gays and blasphemers from public cranes, and stones women to death on false accusations of adultery so their husbands can marry younger women. Are you seriously going to compare Israel to a country that used snipers to murder political protesters in the streets of Tehran in 2009 and infamously shot Neda Agha-Soltan in the heart? The martyred Iranian woman even has a scholarship at Queens College, Oxford named after her. Press accounts of the Oxford debate have our side demolishing those of the pro-Iran faction and for anyone who was there the huge applause I was fortunate to receive from the entire audience – easily in evidence on the video of the debate shows how well we connected with the students. But… we lost anyway. When it comes to Israel, British Universities seem impervious to reason.

Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer

I did this interview via email.

 1. LUKE: How eager was the publishing world and then the reading public for the messages of your book “Into the Cannibal's Pot”?

 ILANA MERCER: As is often the case, the “publishing world” was at odds with the reading public. The public was extremely eager for the message of “Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” With the exception of the book’s heroic publisher, whose words of wisdom your readers can read on “The Cannibal’s” Amazon page (“This is a book about ideas and ideology,” he writes.) The courage and forethought of Stairway Press of Seattle paid off. The book has done well, given the fact that mainstream publishers ran from it horrified. The “Preface” to the book, available through Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, details the ridiculous responses my agent received from what conservatives and libertarians consider their go-to imprints.

 2. LUKE: What are the chief lessons for America from South Africa's decline?

 ILANA MERCER: One crucial lesson, and I quote form the “Introduction” to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” is that “a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer.”

The US is fast becoming a mass of competing interests, in which the politically weak vie to keep more of their rightful property; the politically powerful fight to get their paws on that very property. Democracy is especially dangerous in such ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined and politically permanent. Like South Africa, America is destined to degenerate into a dominant-party state. Thirty years on, when the immigration Rubicon is crossed, the population of our country will be poorer, less educated and more welfare-dependent. One party will represent this majority. This party will serve as an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by a politically powerful majority, just as the African National Congress does in South Africa.

3. LUKE: Given the decline in South Africa since the end of apartheid, do you, in retrospect, give apartheid more credit? Do you think your father was right to protest apartheid?

ILANA MERCER: My book distinguishes between natural rights and political rights. Man is endowed with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. People fuss about apartheid having denied the majority its democratic rights (the vote). Citizenship rights, however, are not natural rights. It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In denying blacks these rights, apartheid was reprehensible. To quote from “The Cannibal”: "In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable." (Page 231.) Dad was right and heroic to oppose apartheid before it became fashionable to do so; he was wrong to place his trust in the ANC and in what I’ve termed “raw, ripe democracy.”

 4. LUKE: What do you think about Israel absorbing about 80,000 Ethiopians and calling them Jewish? Do you expect more non-Jews around the world to identify as Jews if it will get them into the prosperous modern state of Israel? Should Israel fall for this scam? Do you expect Israeli Ethiopian Jews to assimilate into Israel and to reach the same average levels of success as Ashkenazi Jews achieve? Do you think all peoples and races and religions are equally suited for flourishing in a first world economy such as Israel's or America's?

 ILANA MERCER: I believe that very many Russians have done just that—immigrated to Israel for a better life claiming Jewish ancestry. Unlike America’s preferred immigrants, these Russians are said to be right-leaning and nationalistic. However, Israeli leaders seem far more inclined than America’s louts to do what’s in their countrymen’s best interests. Bibi Netanyahu wants to retain Israel’s national character. He said as much recently to members of Israel’s Manufacturers Association. And I quote the Israeli PM: “We suffer from a problem that actually stems from Israel’s economic success,” he said, explaining the problems that arise from the breached border with Egypt. “We have become almost the only First World country that can be reached by foot from the Third World. We are flooded with surge of refugees who threaten to wash away our achievements and damage our existence as a Jewish democratic state.”

 Unlike the Demopublican quislings, Benjamin Netanayu doesn’t suffer any blind spots when it comes to the very real potential of Third-World refugees flooding Israel and transforming his country for the worse, forever.

As to the other part of your question: I’m not up on the Ethiopian issue, but I see societies as a reflection of the individuals that make them up, and individuals as a reflection of their actions. Thus, I have no doubt that certain Israeli Ethiopians will do very well in Israel. As an individualist, race as an organizing principle doesn’t work for me. Rather, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state so that individuals can regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.

 *** ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a contributor to the preeminent libertarian site Economic Policy Journal, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank. Ilana’s latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.BarelyaBlog.com.

Dad, I Forgive You

I’m reading the book The Father Factor and I want to do an exercise from it. Dad, I forgive you for not getting the help you need for your own stuff. You therefore couldn’t help transmitting to the rest of us your anguish and anxiety. You had parents who neglected you and therefore you were never able to be affectionate. I have no doubt that you loved me and I have no doubt that you did the best you could and you always aimed for upright behavior, but you’re uncomfortable with emotion and you’re fundamentally ill at ease with yourself and with others. You avoid emotion as much as you can and that has left me struggling with how to deal with emotion. You’re not demonstrative and affectionate. You’re not comfortable saying, I love you, unless you’re on a stage in front of people. Your inability to deal with emotion and to let people around you know that you love them left me feeling worthless. I’ve battled all of my life with a deep feeling of worthlessness. Much of the time, I feel like a horrible person. I forgive you for infecting me with your high levels of anxiety. I forgive you for not seeking the help you need. Jesus is not enough. Your own life proves that. Dad, I forgive you for putting your career ahead of my well-being and best interests. Dad, I forgive you for needing to be the center of attention everywhere we went. Dad, I forgive you for your insatiable need to stir up controversy so that you could have people talking about you. This constant tension in the home and everywhere you went was not in our best interests, but you were in the grip of your own emotional addictions and you were not willing to seek help. Dad, I forgive you for having a total block at learning anything from me. Dad, I forgive you for your inability to have a normal conversation. Your primary interest is in giving instruction rather than emotional connection. Dad, I forgive you for your inability to share much with me about your life beyond the pro forma. Dad, I forgive you for having a need for control so great that you would try to distort the reality around us by denying what was really happening in our home so that we could keep up appearances. Dad, I forgive you for speaking for me so often and not allowing me to say what I feel and to own my own reality. If I feel, you had to speak up and let everyone know I was ok, even if I was in great pain and wanting to speak for myself. Anything else is a minor detail.

The Power Of Orthodox Judaism

William B. Helmreich writes: In 1964 the eminent sociologist Marshall Sklare declared Orthodoxy to be irrelevant. His view was that Conservative Judaism was the wave of the future in America. How wrong he was. Orthodoxy has become a powerful force in American Jewish life. And its power center is New York City, where, according to the latest census figures, the Orthodox comprise 40 percent of the Jewish population. At the same time, 60 percent of Jews living in the city are either nominally affiliated or have no religious identification with Judaism. A few months ago I chanced upon a remarkable book by Philip Fishman, A Sukkah Is Burning: Remembering Williamsburg’s Hasidic Community. It is a rich and detailed account of life in that Brooklyn neighborhood during the 1950s. The chassidim who came during this post-Holocaust period found an entrenched Modern Orthodox community with a different approach to Orthodoxy and, predictably, tensions ensued. Fishman, who is Modern Orthodox, was part of that community and attended Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, a school that became a flagship institution for a third community – strictly Orthodox or, if you will, yeshivish Jews. During this period the Orthodox community was weak. The Modern Orthodox were a small group and the survivors who made up much of the immigrant Orthodox were burdened with rebuilding their own lives. In that sense it’s not surprising that no one could foresee the movement’s future. How did it happen? How did a community seemingly marked for oblivion revive and thrive? The answers lie in an understanding of the internal dynamics of Orthodoxy and a comprehension of developments in the larger society.

This Rabbi Gets Me Excited About Orthodox Judaism

Orthodox Judaism is tough. There are so many required rituals, it can drive you crazy if you're not born into it. One thing that keeps me going is inspiring Torah study and my favorite teacher for the past decade is historian Marc B. Shapiro.

I've often gotten discouraged with my Judaism. I feel like I'm just doing things by rote. It's so hard. I feel like my mind is dying. Then I put on a Marc Shapiro lecture and I get excited again about Torah.

From Wikipedia:

Marc B. Shapiro (Hebrew: מלך שפירא, born 1966) holds the Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton and is the author of various books and articles on Jewish history, philosophy, and theology. His writings often challenge the bounds of the conventional Orthodox understanding of Judaism using academic methodology while adhering to Modern Orthodox sensibilities. Shapiro is a popular on-line lecturer for Torah in Motion and often writes for the Seforim Blog.

Shapiro received his BA at Brandeis University and his PhD at Harvard University, where he was the last of the students of the late Prof. Isadore Twersky. His father is Edward S. Shapiro who has published books on American Jewish history.

[edit]Books authored

• Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884-1966 (London, 1999)
• The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides' Thirteen Principles Reappraised (Oxford, 2004)
• Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox (Scranton, 2006)
• Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters (Scranton, 2008)
• Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (scheduled for 2013)
• Ed. Kitvei Ha-Gaon Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, 2 vols (Scranton, 1999, 2004)

[edit]External resources

• Shapiro posts at the Seforim Blog
• Shapiro lecture at Yeshiva University - A Non-Orthodox Traditional Approach: Reflections on the Authority of the Moroccan Rabbinate
• Shapiro lecture - Sephardic and Ashkenazic Approaches to Halakhah
• Shapiro lecture - Eliezer Berkovits' Halakhic Vision for the Modern Age
• Shapiro lecture - Some Recent Discussions of Jewish Dogma
• Shapiro lecture - Some Recent Discussions of Jewish Dogma (video)
• Marc B. Shapiro lectures at Torah in Motion
• Marc B. Shapiro archive at YU Torah Online
• "Response to a Hagiographer's Review"
• "The Moroccan Rabbinic Conferences"
• "Glatt Kosher is Not All It is Cut Out To Be"
• "המחלוקת על הרבנות בפרנקפורט"
• "Mi-Yosef ad Yosef Lo Kam ke-Yosef"
• "?האם יש מקום להתיר את הפלגש"
• "Talmud Study in the Modern Era: From Wissenschaft and Brisk to Daf Yomi"
• "נשים במרוקו - עדותו של הרב שלמה משאש זצ"ל"
• "'Confrontation': A Mixed Legacy"
• "The Lithuanian Yeshivot: Yesterday and Today"
• "Of Books and Bans"
• "בענין לימוד תורה בליל ניטל"
• Review of David Zohar's book on R. Hayyim Hirschensohn
• "אודות הפולמוס בענין אתרוגי קורפו"
• "Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg on the Limits of Halakhic Development"
• "Maimonides Thirteen Principles: The Last Word in Jewish Theology?"
• "Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer's Program of Torah u-Madda"
• "Rabbi David Zevi Hoffmann on Torah and Wissenschaft"
• "Scholars and Friends: Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg and Professor Samuel Atlas"
• "Torah im Derekh Eretz in the Shadow of Hitler"
• "Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Friedrich von Schiller"
• כתבי הגאון רבי יחיאל יעקב וויינברג, חלק א
• כתבי הגאון רבי יחיאל יעקב וויינברג, חלק ב
• "אגרת בקורת על ישיבת אייזנשטט"
• "Rabbi Joseph Messas"
• "האם מותר להכנס לכנסיה"
• Review Essay of Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, Transforming Identity
• Review of Shaul Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education
• Review of Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider, Crown of Aleppo
• "האם יש חיוב להאמין שהזוהר נכתב על ידי רבי שמעון בן יוחאי"
• Credo 13 television series
• Jewish Press interview
• Luke Ford's excerpts from Shapiro's lectures and blogs
• Yiddish site devoted to Shapiro
• Marc B. Shapiro's website