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The Big Short: Film and Book

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I’ve never worked a day of my life on Wall Street and, in fact, have never knowingly spoken with someone who has. Still, it is child’s play to uncover the vast roles Jews play in New York’s financial district. For that matter, it is not that hard to show how Hollywood consistently covers up those roles, particularly when it comes to gross misbehavior.

This is sort of the case when it comes to Michael Lewis’s 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, as well as the film version in 2015. I say “sort of” because, first, in both stories, it is unclear whether the unfathomable sums of money lost on Wall Street was a result of fraud, stupidity, or simply not understanding immensely complex financial instruments.

Second, this time Hollywood cannot be faulted for seriously downplaying Jewish identity. Lewis has already done that for them, although it’s quite likely that he understands the Jewish nexus of the whole thing.  He describes himself as a “toy goy” — he has had close connections with Jews and Jewish institutions throughout his life, beginning in grade school and continuing throughout his professional life: “Some of my earliest memories are of playing dreidels, singing Jewish folk songs and defending myself against anti-Semitism.” This is a guy who knows how the world works and what he can and cannot say to defend himself against charges of anti-Semitism.

Author Michael Lewis

Author Michael Lewis

Plot summary: the story is about four men who came to believe that the subprime mortgage industry was slated for a big fall, so they devised ways to place bets on such a fall. To them, there was a serious housing bubble and they meant to collect when the collapse of the bubble came. Read more

The Donald Trump Candidacy: A Matter of Representation

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If we are to say that Donald Trump implicitly represents White people in electoral politics, then we can equate him to leaders of other racial groups in terms of his significance and symbolic status. Historical leaders and figureheads of other racial groups are given public holidays, and must be discussed in hushed tones of reverence. And yet no public slander is too low from certain quarters when it comes to Trump. We have all heard minorities sneer, “Make America White Again,” as though they have cleverly exposed a sinister plot that Trump will actually do something to represent Whites.

Doesn’t President Obama rather blatantly represent anyone who is non-White? As far as I can tell, his Justice Department literally refuses to prosecute any minorities. The IRS, under the leadership of the detestable Lois Lerner, has targeted tea party groups who represent tax paying citizens, with provocative names like “Patriot.” We’re obviously under siege from our own government.

Really, how did we get to this place where it takes a certain daring to leave the house with a Trump t-shirt on? If you want to know who has power, they say, look at who you’re not allowed to criticize. That is true, and if we are to ask who cannot be criticized, we would have to say everyone (except us). Incidentally, the extent to which these groups are worthy of criticism may perhaps go some ways as to explain why it is verboten. But if you ask who is not allowed to have representation, you would get the inverse response. Read more

A Review of “The Mighty Dead” by Adam Nicolson, Part 3 — Indo-European Population Genetics

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Part 1
Part 2

Indo-European genetics

A major weakness of The Mighty Dead is a lack of any discussion of findings from population genetic studies. In her 2015 book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings, Jean Manco notes that while it has been widely assumed that the shift to Indo-European languages was triggered “by Indo-European speakers establishing themselves as elites among other peoples,” the genetic evidence points to them having a “much larger impact on the population.”[xi] The earliest sample found of the Y-DNA haplogroup R (the one that today dominates Europe) is from a boy who lived 24,000 years ago in Siberia. Manco notes that this boy “carried a genetic component omnipresent in Europeans today, but found only on the eastern fringes of Europe before the Late Neolithic.” This component, named Ancestral North Eurasian (ANE), was also present in a sample from a 17,000 year old male from much further West, and

most significantly, ANE is strikingly present in a group of [the Indo-European] Yamnaya people buried in the Samara region (all of whom carried variants of the R1b haplogroup). A sample of Corded Ware people in Germany has been modeled as approximately three-quarters Yamnaya, clear evidence of migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. Bell Beaker people in Germany also carried ANE.[xii]     

Another striking fact is the very strong correlation between the distribution of the Y-DNA haplotype R1 and the distribution of the Indo-European languages. Manco notes that “the dramatic genetic heritage of the Indo-Europeans was first suspected from the modern distribution of Y-DNA R1. R1a1a (M17) dominates northern India and is also found in Eastern Europe, particularly in Slavic and Baltic populations, while R1b1a2 (M269) dominates the rest of Europe.” While not the only haplogroup that spread with the Indo-Europeans, R1 is the “part of the picture that leaps to the eye.”PopGen

Another clue to the genetic impact of the Indo-Europeans pastoralists from the steppe is the fact that most European adults can drink milk as a result of a helpful genetic mutation that confers lactase persistence. Manco observes that: “It has been proposed that lactase persistence was the genetic edge that allowed the dairy pastoralists to spread.”[xiii] Evidence of the aggressive demographic expansion of the Indo-Europeans, and the consequent displacement of other ethnic groups in Europe is revealed by the fact that non-Indo-European Y-DNA haplogroups like G2a are today found almost exclusively in mountainous regions of Europe. One source makes the point that:

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Low Propaganda: “Report” Claims Illiterate Refugees Will Net Europe Big, Big Profits

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The Guardian has coverage of a new report by an NGO arguing that, while the bringing in of African and Muslim refugees into Europe will worsen budget deficits, this will be more than offset by rising GDP growth.

The migrants, we are invited to believe, are quite the bargain:

Refugees who arrived in Europe last year could repay spending on them almost twice over within just five years, according to one of the first in-depth investigations into the impact incomers have on host communities.

Refugees will create more jobs, increase demand for services and products, and fill gaps in European workforces — while their wages will help fund dwindling pensions pots and public finances, says Philippe Legrain, a former economic adviser to the president of the European commission.

Simultaneously refugees are unlikely to decrease wages or raise unemployment for native workers, Legrain says, citing past studies by labour economists.

Most significantly, Legrain calculates that while the absorption of so many refugees will increase public debt by almost €69bn (£54bn) between 2015 and 2020, during the same period refugees will help GDP grow by €126.6bn — a ratio of almost two to one.

“Investing one euro in welcoming refugees can yield nearly two euros in economic benefits within five years,” concludes Refugees Work: A Humanitarian Investment That Yields Economic Dividends, a report released on Wednesday by the Tent Foundation, a non-government organisation that aims to help displaced people, and Open Political Economy Network, a new thinktank.

A fellow at the London School of Economics, Legrain says he hopes the report will dispel the myth [sic] that refugees will cause economic problems for western society. [. . .]

While their absorption puts a short-term strain on public finances, Legrain says, it also increases short-term economic demand, which acts as a welcome fiscal stimulus in countries where demand would otherwise be low.

In the longer term, refugees will increasingly contribute to tax revenues — and also create jobs.

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Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump (4): Neocon Angst About A Fascist America

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noitisnt

Previously posted at VDARE.com 

The reactions of anonymous people on Twitter criticizing Jews are now fodder for news stories by both “right wing” Jews like Ben Shapiro and more liberal journalists like Jonathan Weisman.  [Trump’s supporters unleash anti-Semitic attack on New York Times editor, by Sophia Tesfaye, Salon, May 20, 2016] Somehow, all the death threats,  vulgar criticism, and actual violence  conservatives have received over the years never become  a source of sympathy from the Main Stream Media!

One of the more spectacular examples of an MSM frenzy over supposed anti-Semitism: the reaction to the attack by David Horowitz against his fellow Jew Bill Kristol, leader of a campaign to destroy Donald Trump [Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew, May 15, 2016] The headline, written by Horowitz, alluded to Kristol being Jewish.

As Jonathan S. Tobin [Email him] notes in Commentary,

[T]he real offense here is … his attempt to wrap him in the Star of David and to somehow brand his opponents as traitors to the pro-Israel cause. …

[H]is invocation of “America First” and the use of a term like “renegade Jew” in the headline (though not in the text of the article) seems to echo the smears of the pro-Trump alt right racists who have attacked conservative critics of the candidate with an avalanche of anti-Semitic invective.

[Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace, May 16, 2016]

Horowitz’s offense was not simply criticizing Kristol’s campaign against Trump. Lots of people have done that without incurring the wrath of Commentary. And even saying that Kristol’s views are not good for Jews and Israel is commonplace:  Mondoweiss, J Street, and Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby argue that neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby have a tragically mistaken view of Jewish and Israeli interests—also discussed in Charles Bloch’s and Steve Sailer’s VDARE posts. Read more

Dreams of Eurocide: Non-White Immigration as a Weapon of Race-War

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Martin Luther King had a dream. So did Europe’s compassionate and caring Jewish community. After the Second World War, they thought that importing millions of Muslims would give them staunch allies against the White Christians who had persecuted them so unfairly for so long. With Muslim help, they hoped to bring about Eurocide: the death of White Christian Europe and its replacement by a rainbow continent firmly under Jewish control.

This dream of a progressive alliance was still alive in 1995, when the radical Franco-Jewish director Matthieu Kassovitz released a searing indictment of France’s racism and xenophobia:

The film was called La Haine (Hate) and was the story of three young men in one of the wretched housing projects outside Paris, commonly referred to as la banlieue. The three lads were a north African, a black guy and an eastern European Jew/ … They were cheeky, funny and likable — a gang of what the French call “branleurs”, which is literally translated as “wankers” but really means young guys who mess about. The core of the story was, however, that they were also full of rage — against the police, but ultimately against a society that has pushed them to the margins. Much of the film’s comedy as well as its social comment comes from the gang’s misadventures in central Paris, a world as distant and alien to them as America.

la haine

The plot is relatively simple, centring on the fact that Vinz, the angry young Jew, has got hold of a gun stolen from the police. He threatens to use it against them if his mate Abdel dies from his injuries after being held in police custody. When Abdel does die, Vinz’s moment for revenge comes when he has the chance to kill a neo-Nazi skinhead. He backs away, however, and finally hands the gun over to Hubert, the black boxer who is the most philosophical of the gang and totally against violence. The film ends with Vinz being accidentally shot dead by a policeman, who is taunting him with a gun. The shocking and powerful final scene is a standoff between Hubert and cop pointing guns at each other; the scene is framed by the traumatised face of Saïd, the north African member of the trio, and a voiceover saying that this is the “story of a society falling apart”. (La Haine 20 years on: what has changed?, The Guardian, 3rd May 2015)

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Kooky Qatar — More dough than you can sheikh a stick at, Part 2 of 2

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1220x500-qatar

Part 1.

Minorities have no chance to become refugees in the Gulf Arab states since they have scapegoated sectarianism from the start. With Druze you lose and what about that Alawite privilege? Christians and Yazidis have had their skin in the game from the beginning, and if a Tunisian report is to be believed, have had some of it forcibly removed. For the BBC, presenting views that express concern for Arab security, identity and social harmony when the same but proportionately greater threats of terrorism and non-integration exist for Europeans beset by the immigration nightmare, must be their idea of “speaking peace unto nation.”

Qatar however reserves refuge for very special individuals, like last year’s break-out hoaxer, “Islamophobia clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed, whose bomb-looking clock in a suitcase provoked a reaction by authorities deemed racist and Islamophobic. Ahmed was uncooperative and passive-aggressive with police investigations, likely instructions provided by his Muslim activist father, who has previously been part of a media circus set up with Florida reverend Terry Jones of “Quran on trial” fame. Still, Ahmed became the improvised martyr for President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard and even NASA — perhaps envisaging a career in ballistics.

Striving for social justice in America appears not to have meant much to Ahmed’s family, who promptly pulled up stakes in Irving (Texas) and left for Doha in an undisclosed arrangement. However, the Texan predilection for everything bigger seems to have rubbed off on the Mohameds, as they are suing the school and city of Irving for $15 million. Read more