Richard Spencer

Ben Bernanke is an odd member of our Power Elite, in that he seems to innocently believe in all the lies of postmodern financialism. It's probably wrong to imagine any malign intention in the heart of this gray-bearded professor.  In the following clip, Ben demands a pat on the back for charging interest on money he created out of thin air and on a whim. (The Fed is the U.S. government's "profit center," he informs us, as if he's hoping to get a raise from his supervisor.) The fact that every state of every kind has held gold reserves for the past six millennia is, in Bernanke's mind, a quaint "tradition," not too different from the White House Christmas tree.

It is the True Believer in an ideology that will push his ideology towards its ultimate implication--and thus bring about its destruction.

We should be thankful for Ben Bernanke.

They have renounced electricity, but they still got the message.

Amish group travels to Israel to ask forgiveness of Jew

By Nina Amir, Jewish Issues Examiner

November 30, 2010 1:45 pm ET

When most of the news we hear involves killing, lies and denial, here's news story that stands out as unique: Members of the Amish community from the United States and Switzerland paid a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem for the express purpose of asking the Jewish people’s forgiveness for their group’s silence during the Nazi extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.

Their action is noteworthy not just because they stood up and took responsibility for their actions, asking for forgiveness for something that happened long ago, but also because they travelled all the way to Israel to make their request. The Amish, a sect of the Mennonite Church that largely rejects modern technology, do not normally use contemporary forms of transportation, such as airplanes and cars, necessary to make the journey to the Holy Land. When they do use such forms of transportation, they must employ a driver. At home in their own communities, the Amish typically use a horse and buggy for transportation.

According to an article written by Johan Mandel and published in The Jerusalem Post on November 28, an announcement issued by the office of Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, with whom the group met, “the Amish delegates saw great importance in coming to Israel and expressing their contrition, as well as declaring their unreserved support of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” The delegation members stressed that they weren’t seeking any kind of gesture from the Jewish people. They also were not seeking to proselytize. They simply wanted to support Israel because they had not done so in the past.

Thus, they got in cars and planes and made the journey to Israel despite the fact that this meant doing something that goes against their basic beliefs. They had to embrace modern technology long enough to get them to Israel and then back to their own communities. They also had to be willing to admit they as a people, as a community, had done something wrong; this makes most people pretty uncomfortable in general.

The group presented Rabinovitch with various tokens at a ceremony, including a parchment with a request for forgiveness in the name of the entire Amish community. This document included a commitment that from now on the community “would loudly voice its support of the Jewish people, especially in the wake of the expressions of hatred by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his extensions,” reported The Jerusalem Post.

How many of us are willing to move outside our comfort zone to ask for forgiveness or to support another group we feel is being persecuted in some way? Unfortunately not many. The Amish should be commended for taking a trip that requires them to do just that—to employ means outside their comfort  zone, to ask forgiveness, thereby admitting a wrong, and to support an oppressed group for no other reason than that they feel it is the right thing to do. That truly makes them a righteous people. In Judaism, we call one such person a tzaddik—a righteous person. A community of righteous people are called tzaddikim, righteous ones. The Amish have earned that title.

The alternative Right was way out in front spotting "The Diversity Depression"--that is, the role that affirmative-action lending played in the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis. (The term was coined at Takimag in June, 2008, and developed mostly at VDARE). The idea has since been integrated into a number of post-crash books. Even Walter Russell Mead, the establishmentarian's establishmentarian, has caught on. And he suggests that the GOP run on "The Diversity Depression" in 2012 as a proxy for the need to end the evils of affirmative action and the Nanny State. (That is, Mead advises Republicans to dedicate themselves to matters that might improve the lives of the White people who vote for them. Fancy that?)  

Democrats, watch out.

The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction — and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener’s rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle — a big if — then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981.

The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If the GOP can make this narrative mainstream, and put this picture into the heads of voters nationwide, the Democrats are toast.  The party will have to reinvent itself (or as often happens in American politics, be rescued by equally stupid Republican missteps) before it can flourish.

If Morgenstern and Rosner are to be believed, the American dream didn’t die of old age; it was murdered and most of the fingerprints on the corpse come from Democratic insiders.  Democratic power brokers stoked the housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the increasingly rampant corruption and incompetence at Fannie Mae and the associated predatory lenders who sheltered under its umbrella; core Democratic ideas may well be at fault.

This is catnip to Republicans, arsenic to Dems.  If Morgenson and Rosner are right, there is someone the American people can blame for our current economic woes and it is exactly the cast of characters that a lot of Americans love to hate.  Big government, affirmative action and influence peddling among Democratic insiders came within inches of smashing the US economy.

Do you think they might do it?  

Nah, better to make noises about invading more Middle Eastern countries!

The "America" immigration restrictionists were defending no longer exists. 

Associated Press:

For the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies.

Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women - made up of mostly single mothers - now exceeds African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers.

The findings, based on the latest government data, offer a preview of final 2010 census results being released this summer that provide detailed breakdowns by age, race and householder relationships such as same-sex couples.

Demographers say the numbers provide the clearest confirmation yet of a changing social order, one in which racial and ethnic minorities will become the U.S. majority by midcentury.

"We're moving toward an acknowledgment that we're living in a different world than the 1950s, where married or two-parent heterosexual couples are now no longer the norm for a lot of kids, especially kids of color," said Laura Speer, coordinator of the Kids Count project for the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Ramzpaul:

Ideas that were discussed a year ago at AltRight (and which have also been developed at places like Zero Hedge and by independent libertarians like Peter Schiff) are now being put forth by über-Establishmentarian Bill Gross. 

Tyler Durden: 

A few weeks ago we pointed out what may be the most troubling (and Marxist) observation in America's labor arena, namely that the labor's share of national income has dropped to the lowest in history as a record number of Americans now focus on wealth creation through assets (i.e. owners of capital) instead of labor. In his just released latest letter (below) Bill Gross piggybacks on this observation in what is one of the most scathing notes blasting the traditional of higher education, and in essence claiming that college, as means of perpetuating a broken employment status quo whcih redirect labor to a now-expiring Wall Street labor model, is now worthless: "The past several decades have witnessed an erosion of our manufacturing base in exchange for a reliance on wealth creation via financial assets. Now, as that road approaches a dead-end cul-de-sac via interest rates that can go no lower, we are left untrained, underinvested and overindebted relative to our global competitors. The precipitating cause of our structural employment break is both internal neglect and external competition. Blame us. Blame them. There’s plenty of blame to go around." And why college graduates have only a 6 digit loan to look forward to: "American citizens and its universities have experienced an ivy-laden ivory tower for the past half century. Students, however, can no longer assume that a four year degree will be the golden ticket to a good job in a global economy that cares little for their social networking skills and more about what their labor is worth on the global marketplace." And some very bad news for the communists in the White House and the chimpanzees in the San Francisco Fed who continue to believe that unemployment is anything but structural: "The “golden” days are over, and it’s time our school and jobs “daze” comes to an end to be replaced by programs that do more than mimic failed establishment policies favoring Wall as opposed to Main Street."

So, Anthony Weiner has resigned… I usually don’t find much use in discussing scandals like this, but I’ve noted that Pat Buchanan has suggested that a blow was struck for the “old morality” by the public’s expressed disgust and the political class’s unanimous condemnation of the Congressman:

The national reaction to Anthony Weiner, the clamor that he get out of the House now, to which the Democratic Party is yielding, testifies to the enduring moral health of the nation.

The culture war is not yet wholly lost.

The truly remarkable thing that the Weiner episode—along with countless other leaked photos and accounts of DC sexual escapades—reveals is the large percentage of lying, sociopathic perverts who are currently governing the country. This strikes me as far more significant than the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz washed her hands of a congressman who was no longer useful.

In the ‘90s, Buchanan and the Religious Right defined the “culture war” as one primarily over morality (or, more accurately, over moral hot-button issues that could be voted on). Yet one wonders whether this is the battlefield on which the real war was and still is being fought. First-generation Latino immigrants are overwhelmingly Catholic, and according to a Pew study, 75 percent of them self-identify as “Pro-Life.” One can thus easily imagine a United States that is “virtuous” (as the conservative movement (mis-)defines the word) as well as poor, non-Western, and brown.

To be more blunt, if America’s historic majority is to be dispossessed on this continent, then who really cares if the public gets grossed out by a Cognressman’s Twitter feed?

Via Gawker. 

According to the video's description, the woman was being loud and using profanity on the train. When the conductor told her to quiet down, she flew off the handle and started telling her, repeatedly, about how "educated" she is and how the conductor doesn't know "what schools I went to."

The fictional "Gay Girl in Damascus," who, it turns out, was actually a married White man in Scotland, is a capstone of sorts on what I've called the Narcissism Revolution—that is, the Left-liberal continuation of George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" by other means (or more specifically, by means of the gay crap Left-liberals are into: Twitter, Muslim feminists, and personal liberation, etc.) 

The "Gay Girl"'s novelistic blogging must have been like catnip to Andrew Sullivan: "Borders mean nothing...when you have wings."

A Facebook poster was one of many online campaigns triggered by reports that a Syrian blogger called Gay Girl in Damascus had been kidnapped.

19 February 2011

"Almost every time I speak or write to other LGBT people outside the Middle East, they always seem to wonder what it's like to be a lesbian here in Damascus. Well, I always find myself answering, it's not as easy as I'd like it to be but it's probably easier than you might think."

21 February

Why I am doing this. I live in Damascus, Syria. It's a repressive police state. Most LGBT people are still deep in the closet or staying as invisible as possible. But I have set up a blog announcing my sexuality, with my name and my photo. Am I crazy? Maybe.

22 March

Syrians moving beyond fear

The cry of "God, Syria, Freedom!" is on everyone's lips, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Alawis, Arabs, Kurds, everyone … and we are even hearing some people chanting for an end to the dictatorship".

10 April

My hijab, my choice

I consciously considered myself as a feminist and as someone who believes in human rights and the equality of all. But I'm also an Arab and a Muslim. And I covered. And no one made me do it; I chose it.

28 April

A Syrian Romance

It wasn't very long after I'd arrived here, that things got interesting. I met a woman (I'll call her 'Zina') who was a few years younger than me at a reception … We hit it off at once.

8 May

What do I want?

I want to travel and be with the one I love … I want to grow old together …

I want to be happy. I want to live in a free country and I don't want to have to move.

6 June

Dear friends of Amina,

I am Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari's cousin and have the following information to share. [While with a friend in a Damascus street] Amina was seized by three men in their early 20's. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known),the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

6 June

Update on Amina

I have been on the telephone with both her parents and all that we can say right now is that she is missing. Her father is desperately trying to find out where she is and who has taken her.

Tom MacMaster, the "Gay Girl's author, said something interesting in his apology: 

I do not believe that I have harmed anyone—I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism. [emphasis added]

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Best,
Tom MacMaster

The Gay Girl's gesture to the ubiquitous "post-colonial studies" term "Orientalism" is apt in more ways than he knows. When your average pro-American, Left-liberal blogger or policy-maker looks at the Muslim people he seeks to "liberate" and "democratize," he sees only a fantasy of himself.