Category Archives: Culture

Fake Wine

Posted on by

Early in my work life, I was at a dinner with company executives. The head guy, feeling like a king, started ordering wine for the table. I was a young man and wine was alien to me. At least the culture of it. I knew nothing about it and I had no interest in learning about it. The waiter brought over a magnum sized bottle of wine and did the wine ritual for the big boss. He told me the wine was $1500 a bottle. It tasted like every other red wine I’d tasted to that point.

Later in life I came to understand that wine is mostly bullshit.  A small group of people decide what is and what is not trendy and the prices are set accordingly. I actually got to know a guy, who is a member of the Court of Masters. His membership is all about making money in the wine business. I never believed for a second he knew anymore about the taste of wine than anyone else. He just knew all of the proper jargon that was used to impress people out of their money.

The thing is, people look at the price tag above all else. For years now I have bought my office manager a bottle of wine at Christmas. She likes to entertain over the holidays, so I go into the wine store and ask the clerk to give me a $100 bottle of French or Italian wine. I accidentally leave a price tag on it. Every year she tells me her guests love the wine.

There’s also the priest/expert factor. In spiritual matters, we rely on holy men to tell us right from wrong. There are rituals they conduct to instruct us on morality, absolve us of sin and bear us up under the weight of life. In practical matters, we look to experts to cut through the thicket of details and tell us that we need to plug the red wire into the blue socket. The wine business rolls the two together making the wine expert the arbiter of good taste and good character.

This story from America’s Paper of Record shows how high end wine is just high end bullshit.

An international wine dealer has been jailed for 10 years for fraud after selling fake vintages and cheating fellow connoisseurs out of tens of millions of dollars.

Rudy Kurniawan, 37, an Indonesian-born businessman, had been considered one of the top wine collectors in the world, becoming famed for his palate and ability to identify fine wines.

But it emerged he had been blending the contents of cheap bottles in the kitchen of the home he shared with his mother.

He then placed the blends in old bottles, stuck fake labels on them and claimed they were rare vintages, selling them for vast sums.

While selling the fake wines he lived a luxury lifestyle driving expensive cars and collecting modern art.

It is not hard to see how this worked. He is foreign so Americans naturally assumed he was exotic and international. He used the lingo so he must be an expert. His lavish lifestyle confirmed he was an international man. He presented himself as these people wished to view themselves. A classic con.

A judge in New York ordered Kurniawan to forfeit $20 million (£11 million) and pay $28.4 million in restitution to his victims.

US District Judge Richard M. Berman said: “The public at large needs to know our food and drinks are safe and not some potentially unsafe homemade witch’s brew.

“This was a very serious economic fraud, a manipulation of US and international markets.”

Prosecutors said Kurniawan had seven main victims, one of whom was the billionaire businessman and financier William Koch, who gave evidence in the trial.

After being sentenced Kurniawan said: “I’m very sorry for what I have done.”

Kurniawan had moved to the US at the age of 16 and will be deported after completing his jail sentence.

Jerome H Mooney, his lawyer, told the court Kurniawan had wanted to mix with rich people in California, where he had lived with his mother.

The lawyer said: “He was insecure, very insecure. He wanted to be them. He wanted to be part of it. Nobody died. Nobody lost their savings. Nobody lost their job.”

Kurniawan had become known as “Dr Conti” because of his expertise in the wines of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti vineyard in Burgundy.

He was found out and arrested by the FBI after trying to sell 78 fake bottles of wines for around $700,000 at an auction in London in 2012. Other experts spotted mistakes including missing French accents on labels.

I’ll just note that no one ever tasted one of his wines and said it was fake. He was caught because he got sloppy with his label making. I’ll grant that much of his product was sold to people who collect wine. Still, an expert somewhere popped the cork on one of his brews and was fooled. But, they are always fooled. There is simply no evidence to support the claims of wine and food tasters, it is a fraud.

Soy Latino

Posted on by

I always thought I may be Latino or a Latino. I’ve never been comfortable with the term to know the proper usage. Hispanic is another word that vexes me. I’ve never met a Mexican or Puerto Rican that used it. It’s always upper middle class white people. Anyway, according to this story, polls show Latinos agree with me on a wide range of issues. Either I’m Latino or they are becoming me.

Immigration is only the 6th-most-important issue for Latino voters in California when casting a vote for a candidate for U.S. Senator or for U.S. Congress, according to a statewide survey conducted by Univision.
When registered Latino voters were asked to name their most important issues, the results, in order, were: education (21%), jobs (16%), government spending and the deficit (15%), social security (13%), “how what they do will affect my wallet” (10%), health care (9%), immigration (8%), and crime and personal safety (5%).

An overwhelming 86% of those surveyed support comprehensive immigration reform. However, a majority–53%–of registered Latino voters in California also answered that they believe that, “…we should require borders to be secured before providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.”

Furthermore, when asked, “Which of the following is your major concern or complaint about the Republican Party?”, only ten percent of those surveyed named Republican opposition to immigration reform.

The number one gripe was that Republicans “care mostly about corporations and big business” (17%). Other concerns, in order, were that Republicans: care only for themselves (17%), favor the rich (14%), are against immigration reform (10%), don’t stand up strongly for their beliefs (7%), “don’t understand people like me” (6%), and favoring white people not minorities (5%).

I’ve said for years that the problem we have is both parties are sock puppets for multi-nationals and the banksters. The Democrats are better at pretending they are for the average guy, but that’s because most of them are a little nuts. Republicans, on the other hand, think being the friend of CitiCorp and Haliburton is the same as being business friendly. These are not businesses. They are fiefdoms.

The second complaint is another with which I agree. The GOP leadership has known for a long time how to turn their promises to the base into results, but they refuse to do it. They prefer the status quo as that’s where the easy money resides. They use the middle-class to lever riches for themselves from the political system. Democrats, at least, try to follow through with their promises to destroy the country.

Of course, the big take away is that immigration is meaningless to the prospects of the GOP with Latinos. As a newly minted Latino, I have a different interpretation. Like the majority of my new race, I want a secure border, expedient deportations and sensible policy about who and how many immigrate here. I DON’T WANT AMNESTY.

Documented Nonsense

Posted on by

Every once in a while you see something that you think has to be a spoof, but turns out to be serious. In the process it confirms a lot of what you suspect of the people waving the thing around. Here’s one of those examples.

Some government programs have gained hundreds of billions of dollars paid by undocumented immigrants, who have been shown to draw a smaller amount from the same services.

Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, told Vice News that undocumented immigrants pay about $12 billion a year into the Social Security Trust Fund. Over the last decade, the agency estimates undocumented immigrants have contributed $100 billion to the program.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. and the agency guesses 7 million are actively working. Of these, 3.1 million use fake or expired social security numbers and still pay automatic payroll taxes.

Let’s just peel back this onion a little bit. For starters, we have been repeatedly told for decades that figuring out who is using fake Social Security numbers is impossibly expensive. To notify employers that the number they are using to submit taxes for their employee would be impossible and the cost to employers would be onerous. Yet, the actuary of the Social Security Administration seems to have this data at his fingertips.

Now, let’s take a look at the math. $13 Billion sounds like a lot of money until your divide it by the 3.1 million. The result of that bit of math is $4193.55. Let’s call it $4195 just to keep it simple. That does not sound like a lot of money all of a sudden. Of course, Abdul from Yemen and Kwame from Ghana are not bringing this cash with them from the old country. Their employer, the guy taking the bogus social security number and fake ID, is taking the money from the wages he is paying them. Currently the employee pays 6.2% and the employer pays the same.

That bit of math means the illegals are theoretically making over $33,800 per year. Keep that number in mind. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the rest of this piece.

Goss said undocumented workers contribute about $13 billion a year in total and collect about $1 billion, leaving a net contribution of $12 billion a year. Considering their questionable legal status, it’s unlikely undocumented immigrants will benefit from their Social Security contributions.

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in May 2013 found that, in 2009 alone, immigrants paid $13.8 billion more to Medicare’s hospital account balance than they used. The U.S.-born population left the fund with a $30.9 billion deficit that same year.

Whether immigrants contribute to or use up federal services is a key issue in the immigration reform debate. The May 2013 study did not differentiate between documented and undocumented immigrants.

Experts say Medicare’s $115 billion surplus by immigrants from 2002-2009 was largely because their average age — 34 — is lower than the U.S.-born population, so most cannot benefit from the retirement service for many years. At the same time, however, many baby boomers have gone into retirement.

First of, why are illegal immigrants collecting anything from Social Security? How would anyone know, given that they say it is impossible to police the use of fake identification.

Anyway, let’s get back to the math. The second study that coincidentally claims illegals pay over $13 Billion in Medicare taxes is even more interesting. If we do the same math as we did before, we take $13.8 Billion divided by the magical 3.1 illegals paying the taxes Americans won’t pay. That gives us $4451.61 so let’s say $4450.00 just to keep it simple. Pretty much the same math as with the Social Security claim.

The difference is the tax rate for Medicare is 1.45% for employer and employee. That means either there are many more illegals paying Medicare taxes or the Health Affairs Journal thinks these illegals are making over $150K per year. That’s a lot of tomatoes to pick.

To make their numbers match those of the actuary, you have to assume over 14 million illegals are working and paying taxes. You also have to assume they are making $16/hour. How likely is that?

Sarcasm aside, the math simply does not add up. The math and simple observations says there are a lot more than 3.1 million working with fake papers. Ask anyone who is familiar with payroll software or payroll services and they will tell you there are a lot of bogus numbers in the system.

There’s also loads of these guys working for cash. I know of a dozen places around the Imperial Capital where you can get day labor for cash. Painters, landscapers, drywall guys, roofers. If you need guys to do low-skilled work and you don’t need the hassle of doing it legal, there’s a solution.

None of this really matters, of course. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is not about propping up collapsing welfare systems. If that were the case, then we should bring back slavery. After all, if bulldozing the laws and customs of a country is justified in an effort to pay welfare debts, then what is the objection to bringing back chattel labor?

The fact is these people paying the alleged taxes are doing so in lieu of Americans doing the same jobs. Open borders fanatics carry on like these people coming over the border are creating jobs that don’t exist.  The reality is something else. Employers want cheap, dependable labor. If the government says it is OK to hire foreign guys for cash or with fake papers, then they will do it if it makes sense.

Gutting the wage base with illegal labor, however, has costs. No one ever bothers to examine those costs when celebrating diversity. The millions of unemployed men collecting relief checks has a cost to society. It’s not just the taxes and welfare payments. It is the cost to the culture. Then you have the direct costs to state and local infrastructure of adding tens of millions to the system. Go into any emergency room and you see what I mean.

Scottish Independence?

Posted on by

Next month, the Scots are going to vote on whether they remain in the UK. Americans have an image of Scotland as a combination of Groundskeeper Willy, Braveheart and Rob Roy, maybe playing golf in the rain. It is the image of rugged, independent men not yielding to anyone. The truth is nothing of the sort. The Scots are mostly broke men on the dole. Like the rest of the UK, they are a generation ahead of America in their march over the cliff. Voting for independence, therefore, seems like a clever joke.

By way of example, look at this story from the BBC.

The Scottish government has defended its controversial plan for a named guardian for every child in Scotland.

Speaking to the BBC, Children’s Minister Aileen Campbell said the policy would be rolled out across the country as planned in 2016.

She said it would help families in need and save taxpayers’ money.

Conservative MSP Gavin Brown said the policy would create a “giant bureaucracy” that would not help those most in need.

MSPs approved the Children and Young People Scotland Bill, which includes legislation to create a “named person” for every child in the country, in February.

The policy is already in place in a number of areas, including the Highlands, Edinburgh and Ayrshire, but is not due to be extended to the rest of Scotland until 2016.

The Scottish government has said the legislation would stop vulnerable children slipping through the net and give families a point of contact should they need assistance.

Earlier this month, ministers announced £40m in funding for 500 new health visitor posts to meet the demands of the policy, which will cover children from birth to the age of 18.

Midwives and senior teachers could also be named guardians, depending on the age of the child.

In case it is not clear, they are planning to assign a government minder to each child at birth.

Religious groups have raised concerns around the diminishing role of parents and the Christian Institute is preparing to mount a judicial review against the move.

The group has asked the Scottish government not to implement the “named person” element of the bill until the outcome of the legal action is known.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Ms Campbell said the policy was supported by many organisations and would go ahead as planned since there was “no good reason” to delay.

She added: “This is about embedding good practice. We’ve seen [from pilots] that this reduces bureaucracy and allows professionals to intervene where families most at need require additional support. We’ve seen a reduction in inappropriate referrals to reporters – it saves money.

“The cost to the public purse of not doing these things is that problems escalate into crisis and that’s something we want to avoid. This supports parents and responds to what parents have told us they want.”

She said nothing in the legislation affected parents’ rights.

If you are wondering about those Christians, about 55% of Scots identify as Christian and about 40% claim to be irreligious or have no religion at all. The young are hardly religious and only 8% of the population attends weekly services. Those Christian groups have as much influence as Rastafarian groups.

Not that it matters. The Scots, like people all over the Occident, are throwing in the towel on civilization. The Scottish fertility rate is 1.7. More Scots die every year than are born and uncontrolled immigration will soon swamp the country in hostile foreigners. If you dig through the official figures, a country of 5 million is bringing in 250,000 foreigners each year. It is the foreign population having the babies. Simple math says the Scots are going the way of the dodo.

War on White People

Posted on by

Steve Sailer often makes the point that the Democrat coalition is held together by a transcendent hatred of white males. Women, blacks, Hispanics and the six gay guys who bother to vote have one thing in common and that is they think the pale penis people need to be taught a lesson. Specifically:

Another aspect to consider is the inherent fractiousness of the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes: the lesbian-feminists are mad at the suddenly all-important she-males, the Muslims are mad at the Jews over the Middle East, the Asians are mad at the Hispanics over U. of California quotas, the NAMs are mad at the SWPLs for gentrifying them out to the sticks, Hollywood is worried that soon they’ll have to release statistics about their lack of diversity just like Silicon Valley has had too, and so forth and so on.

How can this coalition be kept together? Simple. By getting all the Fringes to unite in hating straight cis-gendered Christian old white uncool men (add as many qualifying adjectives as needed).

The question is whether it can hold together. Charles Murray thinks it will blow apart and the result will be a tribal culture of some sort. What that is, exactly, is debatable. This story from The Hill tells me it is coming at us quickly.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) on Monday accused Democrats of engaging in a “war on whites” in the current immigration debate.

On conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Brooks dismissed the idea that the more conservative GOP bloc’s position on immigration is hurting his own party.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during the interview. “It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

A sitting Congressman talking like this is a big deal. It has been decades since anyone in the political class has been willing to say anything about race outside of the old chestnuts approved by our cultural masters.

On “Fox News Sunday,” National Journal’s editorial director, Ron Fournier, suggested the Hispanic community is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Republicans.

“This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the party of white people,” said Fournier, whom Ingraham described as being part of the “lame-stream media.”

I keep wondering if these experts are crazy, stupid or just pathological. Hispanics are not a big part of the vote. They tend not to vote in general and they have never voted in big numbers for Republicans. As a practical matter, the GOP is wise to limit the influx of Hispanics. That’s good politics and smart politics. Yet, experts keep yapping about the need for Republicans to chase Hispanic votes.

Brooks said recent polls indicate every demographic group agrees that the rule of law should be enforced and border security must be improved.

“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re a white American, a black American, a Hispanic-American, an Asian-American or if you’re a woman or a man. Every single demographic group is hurt by falling wages and lost jobs,” Brooks said.

All of the polling also shows that Hispanics are not fond of illegal immigration and favor cutting back on legal immigration. They suffer from none of the madness that has gripped the political class. They know what mass immigration means for them and they are not enthusiastic about recreating Tijuana in their new homeland.

“Democrats, they have to demagogue on this and try and turn it into a racial issue, which is an emotional issue, rather than a thoughtful issue,” he added. “If it becomes a thoughtful issue, then we win and we win big. And they lose and they lose big. ”

Brooks accused Democrats of playing a “political game” and Ingraham said they’re “playing the race card.”

This is the first time I think I’ve heard a GOP official take this approach. I have never understood why the GOP tries to do battle with the Left on their terms. Immigration should be as exciting as zoning issues. How many do we want and how do we process them? That’s it. But, it strikes me as being way too late in the day for any of it to matter. The future is going to be very unpleasant.

Data Driven Liberalism

Posted on by

The term “data journalism” as it is mostly just a marketing scheme. It is just a way to decorate popular fads with the veneer of science. The Left has always wrapped itself in the cloak of science, believing it works like garlic on a vampire. In their case it is intended to ward off Christians and “right-wing extremists.” Vox, 538, Grantland, The Upshot and others have glommed onto all of this and recast generic, boiler plate Progressive dogma as “data journalism.”

Ezra Klein is the worst example. He started out in life as a doctrinaire lefty and has now dressed himself up as a technocratic nerd boy. Ezra Klein went to school for political science and maybe took statistics for liberal arts majors, but otherwise could not count his balls twice and come up with the same number. But, the act sells to the intended audience, largely the same people who watch Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. These are people who want to hear the old time religion.

Anyway, this was posted on MR and you see a couple of gags these guys like to play on their audience. The first is the false dichotomy.

In a July 19 New York Times column, conservative economist Tyler Cowen scolded the egalitarian left for not recognizing that on a global basis inequality has been falling thanks to growth in China and other Asian countries even as it’s risen inside almost all rich countries. In a followup dialogue with Eduardo Porter on whether inequality is really a big problem, Cowen returned to the point that “the biggest inequalities are those across borders” so a laxer attitude toward immigration “should be the number one priority for anyone concerned about income inequality.”

Meanwhile, late Friday night House Republicans passed a bill to strip about 580,000 immigrants of their work permits while President Obama ponders executive action to reduce the pace of deportations and conservative columnist Ross Douthat preemptively slams the illegality of the as-yet-unknown measure.

Which is to say that while Cowen’s point about the global picture is both interesting and correct, his political stance is backwards. It’s not fans of Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.

Yglesias imagines a world of only two options, either have inequality or utopia. We either have xenophobic isolationism or borderless one-worldism. There’s never a third option or gradations between the two poles. The hive minded are obsessed with the boundaries between their team and the other team, which is defined as those not on their team. That leads them to see the world in absolutes, black and white.

In the United Kingdom where the transient political factors are entirely different, the ruling Conservative Party runs on a platform of Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration. Inside the United States, a major debate has taken place inside GOP circles as to what to do after consecutive Republican Party losses in presidential elections. An initially popular idea, especially in business circles, was that the GOP should moderate its stance on immigration and seek Latino votes. This was, of course, countered by the party’s most retrograde elements — the Michele Bachmanns and the Steve Kings. But more importantly, the pro-immigration impulse was also opposed by the most forward-thinking elements in American conservative politics. Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and other “reform conservatives” have positioned themselves as leading opponents of a compromise with the White House on immigration.

This bifurcated view of the world leads to another error. That is the belief that all issues are moral. Immigration, for example, should be a public policy issue like zoning bills or utility rates. The people, through their representatives, express their preferred polices and those are made law. As opinions change and new experiences raise new objections, the laws change.

Immigration is not a moral dilemma. It is a debate about how many people from foreign lands we would like to permit into our lands. As citizens everywhere, it is our right to set these limits for whatever reason we like. These choices will turn up in the political math of the parties. For a guy who pitches himself as a statistics maven, he sure seems to struggle understanding the simple political calculus. Foreigners vote for Democrats so Republicans will want fewer foreigners.

The hive minded can never accept that. They lose track of where their identity ends and the issue begins. Rejecting their preferred solution is a personal affront, the equivalent of telling them their kids are ugly. It is why they are so emotional and angry. You can’t be in a mass movement without being outraged.

It is this reformicon ideological tendency, not mainstream liberalism, that has embraced egalitarian nationalism.

And the cause of its rise is not left-wing worries about inequality, but the failure of traditional supply-side economics. Reagan-era conservatives could be for welfare state rollback and broadly pro-immigration because they promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Now that we’re decades into an era of wage stagnation, those kind of easy promises ring hollow. So for Cameron and the reformicons, a tilt against immigrants is the new answer. On this view, the big problem with trickle-down economics is that the bucket is too leaky. Let the rich get richer, but prevent them from hiring maids from Latin America, and soon enough wages for native-born maids will rise.

The moral math whereby this policy becomes more attractive than the win/win/win alternative of broadly freer movement of people paired with progressive taxation and more provision of public services has always escaped me somewhat. It appears to involve putting a negative value on the interests of foreign-born people. But it is a real movement. But it’s a movement on the right of politics in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Progressives, rightly, see no need to chose between equality and cosmopolitanism.

Finally, this is why Yglesias is an intellect. Tired old ideas about progressive taxation, the metastasizing welfare state and free lunch economics pretty much have no audience outside the hive. That’s been true for three decades now. Instead, the Left clutches at its skirts and bellows about the moral defects of their adversaries. Ezra Klein’s brand of data journalism is nothing more than yelling “those other guys are bad because science” over and over so no one notices he has nothing much to offer.

The Poor Door

Posted on by

Maybe landlords will label the doors “Gamma”, “Delta” or “Epsilon” and give the tenants different keys based on their social standing. Perhaps they will just make them scale a fence or navigate through obstacles to get into the building. This story is not all that clear on the details, but the “poor door” is coming to a reservation near you.

New York City has approved a developer’s Dickensian plan to include a “poor door” in a luxury apartment complex in the Upper West Side.

The prospect of a separate entrance for lower-income residents has been circulating for some time, but as the New York Postreported today, plans by company Extell Development to put a separate entrance for affordable housing tenants, who make 60 percent or less of median income, in the 33-story condo have been given the green light. The property will have 219 units, including 55 affordable units overlooking the street. Those renting and buying the apartments at the market-rate will have waterfront views.

The entrance is part of the Inclusionary Housing Program application, under which developers can build larger projects if they also provide low-income housing, either on- or off-site.

The mock outrage by the snooty writer is tiresome. Liberals have been self-segregating for years. They have driven most of the NAM population out of San Francisco. They are doing the same in DC, where blacks are no longer a majority. Similarly, gentrification in NYC is intended to drive away the NAM population so young professionals like Lucy Westcott can live in trendy urban neighborhoods.

Beyond that, it is just the natural evolution of the servant’s entrance. Before we got all of these egalitarian ideas in our heads, it was simply understood that the rich did not want to mix it up with the poor. Big houses had a separate entrance for the cooks, nannies, gardeners and other staff. For live-in staff, there were quarters on the edge of the property or maybe above the carriage house or garage. No one thought it strange or mean, especially not the servants. The poor have always known their place.

The approval of the entrance at 40 Riverside has prompted outrage, with many on social media calling it nothing more than an updated version of segregation. ThinkProgress’ report notes that issues affecting low-income tenants in luxury buildings — which include not being allowed to use perks like the gym or pools — usually fall on people of color.

Brooklyn Magazine points out that it’s “not an unusual scheme” to include affordable housing units in fancy buildings that will remain, for most people, mere real estate fantasies. But New York Magazine reminds us that the entrance will serve the purpose of  “[sparing] all the residents from the terrible awkwardness of regularly encountering people whose lifestyles differ from theirs, or something.”

The only people outraged are the credentialed urban lefties who think it is grossly unfair that they don’t get to live like the over-class. That’s the dirty little secret of the meritocracy. The truly poor now live on welfare. The dwindling working class is supplemented by indirect welfare payments like public schools, free health insurance and so forth. The urban middle lass is now the servant class to the rich. Young Lucy Westcott, is merely a servant for the rich people signing her paychecks.

That’s why the people most outraged by inequality are the urban credentialed lefties of the managerial class. They were told all along they were special little snowflakes and destined to rule the world. Now they find out that the rich are nothing like them and they will never be in that class. Instead, they will be the modern equivalent of footmen, chauffeurs and coat holders to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. They don’t like it one bit, so we get these tantrums.

Boobies

Posted on by

According to this story in the Guardian, French women are not going topless at the beach anymore. How one measures this is unsaid, but the young researchers sent off to the beach to count bare boobies probably enjoyed their work.

Is topless sunbathing over? It certainly is in France, according to French Elle, if the coverline on its new summer issue is to be believed: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” – which translates, verbatim, to “Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”

According to the magazine the answer is “yes”, and the reasons are threefold. First, an increased concern over health and the dangers of skin cancer; second, the “pornified” perception of topless women (indeed Elle suggests the death of the monokini – ie swimming briefs – was linked to the idea that topless women are seen as “loose”); and third, the rise of breast-affiliated activism – chiefly Femen, who use their naked breasts as a means of attracting attention to various causes, and Free the Nipple, a recent campaign that encourages women to go topless to end the stigma surrounding female bodies. “Topless sunbathing was seen by women as a new freedom in St Tropez in the 1960s,” says Elle. And now that they’re covering up? It’s a “worrying sign of a regression in the place of women”.

The skin cancer excuse makes some sense. Maybe people are doing less sunbathing than in the past. Too much time in the sun, especially just lying around, tends to make the skin look old. In our youth obsessed culture, that’s not good.  Alternatively, the women may be lying. In the age of feminism, not offending the homely girls is the most important thing, so maybe the homely girls are now opposed to this.

The “pornified” angle is interesting. The West is becoming more uptight regarding fun stuff like sex and looking at naked ladies. Drugs, boozing, sex, eating, smoking and jokes about minorities have been ruled off-limits to some degree. The sort of women going to St Tropez probably think it is horrible to look like a girl now. Of course, in a world with unlimited porn at your fingertips, women showing their lady parts off in public is no longer much of a statement.

The last one is the puzzler. What in the world is “femen”? It turns out to be naked protesting. This line from the Wikipedia entry is amusing:

The organisation describes itself as “fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion”[12] and has stated that its goal is “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights”

This is what passes for feminism these days. They call it Third Wave Feminism. Again, from Wikipedia:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity that over-emphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women. The shift from second wave feminism came about with many of the legal and institutional rights that were extended to women. In addition to these institutional gains, third-wave feminists believed there needed to be further changes in stereotypes, media portrayals, and language to define women. Third-wave ideology focuses on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality.[3] In “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Joan W. Scott describes how language has been used as a way to understand the world, however, “post-structuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world”[4] Thus, while language has been used to create binaries (such as male/female), post-structuralists see these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain the power of dominant groups.

Got that?

The simpler definition is we have upper-middle class white women at universities with way too much time on their hands. No one takes their courses or cares about what they have to say, so they make a nuisance of themselves chasing the white eunuchs around the faculty lounge, calling them racists.

One last bit from the story:

Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”

Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless.

It is one of the great ironies of the technological revolution. The old line about having 57 channels, yet nothing good is on TV. All of this technology that was supposed to free us from our chains is doing the opposite. Whip off your top on vacation and you end up getting fired because your boss saw your boobies on Facebook. With cameras everywhere, ready to publicize your moment of indiscretion, everyone has to stop having fun and no one gets to see boobies on the beach.

Post-Modernism

Posted on by

It used to be that “post-modernism” was said to be the artistic expression of late-stage capitalism,  at least according to Frederic Jameson. A useful definition of post-modernism came from the great philosopher Moe Szyslak. He said it is “weird for the sake of being weird.” Contra Professor Jameson, with few exceptions, post-modern art is crap made by people with no real artistic talent. On the other hand, maybe that’s a telling indictment of the flickering lights of western civilization.

Anyway, here is another definition of post-modernism. It is when a society forgets all of the lessons about human nature handed down from the previous generations and then embarks on the process of re-learning them through painful trial and error. A good example of this is right here in this story from the New York Times. It is the typical sob-story from a leftist rag about how men get away with being violent rapists and women are helpless victims.

She was 18 years old, a freshman, and had been on campus for just two weeks when one Saturday night last September her friends grew worried because she had been drinking and suddenly disappeared.

Around midnight, the missing girl texted a friend, saying she was frightened by a student she had met that evening. “Idk what to do,” she wrote. “I’m scared.” When she did not answer a call, the friend began searching for her.

In the early-morning hours on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central New York, the friend said, he found her — bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.

Later, records show, a sexual-assault nurse offered this preliminary assessment: blunt force trauma within the last 24 hours indicating “intercourse with either multiple partners, multiple times or that the intercourse was very forceful.” The student said she could not recall the pool table encounter, but did remember being raped earlier in a fraternity-house bedroom.

The football player at the pool table had also been at the fraternity house — in both places with his pants down — but denied raping her, saying he was too tired after a football game to get an erection. Two other players, also accused of sexually assaulting the woman, denied the charge as well. Even so, tests later found sperm or semen in her vagina, in her rectum and on her underwear.

Later in the story, we get some additional background.

The fraternity houses, where so many parties occur, sit high above the lake. And it was at one fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where sometime between 9:30 and 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Anna attended one of the year’s first big social events — a “highlighter party,” where students write on one another’s clothes with a marker that glows under black light.

Later there was dancing. Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together.

With so many students packed together in the basement, it became hot, and the football player escorted Anna upstairs, where smaller groups congregated in students’ bedrooms. A friend tried to stop her, but she went anyway.

Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade. She drank one beer at the dance, she said, and then the rest of an opened beer her dance partner had given her.

Around midnight, a fraternity member tried to enter his room, but found it locked. He opened the door with his key and caught a glimpse of what would become a pivotal episode in Anna’s case: The senior football player was naked, and Anna was sitting on a bed with her top off, covering her breasts. The visitor quickly left.

At this point, everyone knows what happened. A young girl got drunk and wound up pulling the train. It is a crude things to say, but sometimes it is bets to describe things using crude language to make the point. John Derbyshire has this to say about the resulting rape investigation.

Is your sympathy for this young woman draining away as fast as mine is, listener?

Yep, you heard right: the young woman cried rape. The gist of the article is that she accused the original football player and two others of raping her, but the college didn’t discipline the guys.

On her video clip Anna says the following thing, quote: “When I came forward I felt so good because I was told that people had my back, they believed me, and the right thing would be done,” end quote. Let’s pass over in decent silence the bit about people having her back … What does she mean by “the right thing would be done”?

I don’t think there’s much doubt what she means. She means that she, Anna, should be fussed over and sympathised with as a victim, and that the guys who helped themselves to her incontinently drunk body should be expelled from campus, or better yet sent down for five to ten in the state penitentiary.

What a crock.

If you are a woman and choose to get blind drunk around a bunch of horny young males, you will probably regret itt. Similarly, if you don a meat suit and rush into a lion’s den, you will get mauled. This is something humans used to know. In fact, up until the 1960’s, it was so universally understood that it was common to separate boys and girls without adult supervision. Boys want sex and will do and say just about anything to get it and girls are vulnerable and a bit gullible.

Again, we used to know these things.

We have filled the heads of young women with feminist nonsense and we’ve done the same to males. Men were taught they had a moral obligation to protect the innocent, especially women and children. If you found a vulnerable women surrounded by predatory males, you had a duty to stop it. Today, you are told you should either join in or take pics of the gang bang and post them to your Instagram account.

The worst part of it all is this thoroughly insane idea that if it is not against the law it is permitted. Again, we have an example of this in this story. The girl and some of her friends, admit to behavior that the school should never tolerate. It is not illegal, but beneath the standards of this university. The adults running the school should know that if they turn a blind eye to their coeds getting blind drunk on weekends, this is the sort of thing that will happen. They should have expelled the women involved.

Further, the boys holding the party should all be expelled. The football players who appear to admit having sex with this girl should be gone. While they are not guilty of rape, they are guilty of being loathsome, despicable human filth. A guy willing to have sex with a passed out girl is of low character and you can never trust him. It is his nature to exploit others. The men running this school should know it and throw the garbage out when they find it.

To post-modern ears, particularly those of the younger generations, this sounds like the grousing of an old man. Maybe so, but this is how we used to manage ourselves as people. Lesser people were the ones carrying on like animals. We knew that holding the line was the only way to develop young men of character and young women of virtue. Today, talking about character and virtue is a hate crime, meanwhile stupid young girls are being sodomized on pool tables at our colleges and universities.

Again, we used to know better.

The Jewish Question

Posted on by

I was in the market on Sunday morning, doing my weekly supply run and I saw something striking. Behind the deli counter, I spied a Muslim woman in a hijab. That’s not such a big deal, but the staff is required to wear uniforms. She was in what looked like a khimar. Not being an expert on Muslim clothing styles, I’m relying on the Interwebs to provide the specifics. The grocery chain, at this point anyway, does not have uniforms that meet Muslim standards so they let her wear her own.

What was striking is she was glaring at a group of customers. I mean eyes blazing full-on furious stink-eye. It was so obvious, I stopped and followed the invisible plane of her eye-lasers to their target. It was a group of Jews. I knew they were Jews because of their outfits. They were in the plain black kit of the Orthodox. We have a sizeable cluster of Lubavitchers near where I live. As best I could tell, they were just minding their own business looking at the salmon.

I stood there watching this for a few minutes, thinking maybe there was a clash of cultures about to happen at the deli counter. I was not alone. A couple next to me was seeing the same thing and probably thinking the same thing. The Jews finally went up to the deli counter and the Muslim woman just stood there glaring at them. I could not tell if they noticed here. There is an inscrutableness to the super-orthodox that makes it hard for gentiles to read them.

They stood there for a few minutes and the Muslim woman just stood there. Some other customer walked up and she waited on them, but still stealing glares at the Jews. This went on until someone else waited on the Jews and they moved on. The other employees certainly noticed the Muslim glaring at the Jews and they surely are aware of the world enough to figure out what was happening. Her supervisor certainly has noticed this behavior if casual customers noticed it.

I’m old enough to remember when even the mild-anti-Semite would check himself and say that the Jews deserves sympathy for what they have experienced. You never hear that anymore. I suspect that the Holocaust has finally moved into the mists of time or has been so overdone no one cares about it. In fact, it seems to be fashionable to be anti-Semitic in certain circles and I don’t just mean the comment section of Taki. Hostility toward Jews and Israel seems to be rising.

I think the indifference of the market employees to one of their coworkers bigotry is understandable. They don’t need the hassle. If there’s no brownie points in pointing out the Jew-hater, they are not going to bother noticing. I certainly could have said something, but I did not. The other customers did not say anything. We just shrugged and went about our business. No harm, no foul, at least for now anyway.

Stories like this from the provinces suggest the Jews are on the wrong side of the culture war roiling in the western world. Europe has imported millions of Muslims who are bringing back the old fashioned Jew hating of a century ago. Our own government is trolling the Muslim countries, using what’s called the diversity lottery, to import Muslims into America. As has been the case with Europe, importing millions of Jew-hating Muslims will have consequences, at least for the Jews in America.

What I find striking and what was on my mind at the market, is the fact Jews don’t fight back against this. If a white guy with a mullet was caught glaring at some black customers like that, the blacks would have attacked him. His co-workers would have reported him and his superiors would have fired him. Anthony Cumia was attacked and then fired for complaining about it. He was not doing anything wrong other than walking while white in Times Square.

In modern America, Jews are the most successful minority group by miles. Jews make up 30% of the Forbes 400, despite being just 2% of the population. Jews dominate academia, the media, entertainment and government. You would think they would be pushing hard to limit immigration from lands full of people dedicated to killing Jews, but, Jews are the biggest supporters of unlimited open immigration.

It is the Jewish question I find most puzzling.