Jewamongyou.com is now online

Dear readers,

Some of y’all, notably Sincerity.net, have been bugging me for years to set up my own jewamongyou domain, so that I wouldn’t be at the mercy of WordPress. Indeed, the most likely explanation of why I haven’t yet been cancelled is my low readership. If millions of people read this blog every day, it would have been removed a long time ago.

But now jewamongyou.com is online – still using the open-source WordPress software, but not hosted by WordPress. So please adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

It’s a work in progress; I’m still figuring out how to add some of the features there, such as the blogroll. Aside from that, everything that is here should also be there…

… with the exception of the most recent comment, by 370H55V on my post about lynching. So, if it’s not too much trouble, could 370H55V please repost that comment at jewamongyou.com? Thank you.

This blog will remain online until such time that WordPress decides to remove it, or something else unforeseen happens.

Lynching in the Old South

Years ago, there was an excellent blog by the name of Radish (previously known as phinehasfury.com). I used to link to it. Alas, it has disappeared, and with it some outstanding articles. One of those articles was about lynching in the Old South. I wrote about it on these pages. Unfortunately, I didn’t copy the entire article. If anybody knows where to find it, please let us know in comments.

Today, somebody on Quora shared my answer to “How do White People Feel when they See Pictures of Old Lynching Postcards?” My answer was:

I’ve been asked to answer this question, though I’m not sure what the point is.

In the vast majority of cases, lynching victims were criminals – and since the courts wouldn’t/couldn’t administer justice, the people took things into their own hands.

I’m not sure why white people would feel any differently about this than people of any other race. People of all races participated in lynchings, and people of all races were lynched as well. It’s not a racial thing… except for a few cases – and the question doesn’t specify this.

The share was to illustrate “examples of prejudice,” and I wanted to share my comment, in that thread here; there’s a likelihood of it being removed:

Before I present statistics, I’ll point out a couple of general historical facts, and my primary source here is from Prof. Dwight Murphey, who did extensive research on the topic (www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/mono/mono1.htm (dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info):

Even today, black Americans have much higher crime-rates than those of white/Asian-Americans, but during the Reconstruction era in the South, things were much worse:

“Of course, one cannot overlook the fact that the defeated South contained the millions of newly-freed blacks, who at first maintained the habits of discipline that had been inculcated into them during slavery, but who, as time went on and a new generation emerged, began to lose those habits. E. Merton Coulter, in his The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877, writes that “slavery left the Negro illiterate and untrained for the responsibilities of freedom, with such weaknesses as lying and thieving exaggerated. He loved idleness, he had no keen conception of right and wrong, and he was ‘improvident to the last degree of childishness.'”32

A concomitant, of course, was an overflowing of black crime, much of it petty but a great deal of it so serious as to amount almost to a reign of terror…”.

The fact of the matter is that any time there’s a visible demographic that’s responsible for disproportionate violent crime, human nature is to treat criminals of this demographic more harshly. This is probably why men are punished more severely than women for similar crimes. It’s not justification, but explanation.

Secondly, I’ll point out what should be obvious: Every major news organization, school, government agency, NGO and corporation in America has prioritized the emphasis of anti-black racism – to such an extent than NONE of those organizations can be found to highlight instances (of which there are many) of anti-white racism in any consistent manner. This is why a search for “lynching” in Google will yield page after page of results that highlight such crimes against black people as the first results. So, I’m not saying such things never happened, but that there’s a massive industry in place to capitalize on such crimes. This makes it difficult to gain a balanced view of the topic.

I’ll quote Prof. Murphey once again, for his refutation of the notion that Southern lynching was a primarily racist phenomenon are rather strong. I recommend that you take the time to read it. If you’re truly interested, perhaps you should read the entire article:

Do the critics of the South do this? One searches the very extensive literature in vain looking for it. The literature is polemical, occasionally scientistic in the context of the social sciences, sometimes even analytical about peripheral issues, but it never questions or seeks to justify its central supposition: that blacks were lynched because of their race. The dialogue about these things is not over, so it is not too late to issue a scholarly invitation to others to argue the point and provide the evidence. The burden of historical persuasion, however, is on the person who asserts a causal connection.

There is, of course, a major alternative explanation for the lynching of blacks, and that is the crime that was so widespread and outrageous. I won’t repeat the facts cited earlier. It is sufficient to notice that Cutler, who is even one of those who asserts the racial hypothesis, quotes with favor a statement that “the worst instincts of the negro came to the front; the percentage of criminals among negroes increased to an alarming extent; many were guilty of crimes of violence of the most heinous and repulsive kind.” Arthur F. Raper, another who asserts a racial linkage, gives the comparative murder rates: “In 1921-22, the homicide rates in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans per 100,000 Negro population were 103.2, 97.2, 116.9, and 46.7 respectively, while the corresponding rates for the white population were 15.0, 28.0, 29.6, and 8.4.” These figures are eloquent testimony that serious crime was the primary provocation for lynching.16 If those murder rates had existed in the post-Civil War West, the perpetrators, whatever their race, might well have expected to swing from the bridge over the Neosho river.

The only linkage to racism that is persuasive, albeit only in part, is in the cases where a lynching occurred without an outrageous provoking cause. Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, in Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, refer extensively to the Chicago Tribune statistics and point out that cases are cited of negroes’ having been lynched for “violating contracts, unpopularity, testifying in court, or shooting at rabbits.” Cutler makes the same point to explain why the Tribune listed some lynchings as caused by “race prejudice”: “The probable reason…is that no offense had been committed which was considered worthy of mention as a cause.” It seems sensible that if there was no genuine provocation (although we should keep it in mind that the local community may have perceived the preceding events differently than a Chicago Tribune compiler did), the lynching must have been caused by the other main potential motivating factor, race prejudice. This is persuasive to a point. The weakness in it lies, however, in there having been whites who were also lynched for “minor offenses.” If race was the cause, how is that to be explained?

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This doubt is deepened when we take into account all of the counter-evidence that militates against the racism-as-cause explanation. Here is the rebutting evidence I have noticed:

1. Some may not credit it because it can be taken as a self-serving statement by a white southerner, but to me there is significance in what Henry W. Grady, perhaps the major exponent of the white South’s perspective during the last decades of the nineteenth century, was able to write in Century Magazine in 1884. What he wrote must have rung true to his readers, at least from their perspective, since if it were known to them to be nonsense his article would have had little persuasive value. He was talking about the treatment blacks received in southern courts, but it has a bearing on the nature of the “prejudice” that is said to have animated whites: “There is an abundant belief that the very helplessness of the negro in court has touched the heart and conscience of many a jury, when the facts should have held them impervious. In the city in which this is written a negro, at midnight, on an unfrequented street, murdered a popular young fellow…The only witnesses of the killing were the friends of the murdered boy. Had the murderer been a white man, it is believed he would have been convicted. He was acquitted by the white jury, and has since been convicted of a murderous assault on a person of his own color. Similarly, a young white man, belonging to one of the leading families of the State, was hanged for the murder of a negro.”18

2. It is especially worthwhile to notice the last sentence of the quote just given from Grady, which tells that a white man, even one of prominent social standing, was executed for killing a black. This is inconceivable to the proponents of the racial thesis. It also runs counter to a Marxist class analysis.

3. The lynching in the South was not limited to blacks. Whites, and even white women, were lynched, too, obviously not for reasons of racial prejudice. Cutler’s statistics show 567 whites lynched in the South between 1882-1903, inclusive. When other parts of the country are included, Zangrando’s statistics indicate 1,297 whites between 1882 and 1968. A famous case of a white man’s being lynched is the August 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia after he was convicted of rape-murder. Wright tells how in eastern Kentucky in 1868 nineteen supporters of the Republican Party, apparently all white, were murdered within a four-month period. He says that even though a number of whites were killed for this reason relating to the aftermath of the Civil War, murder was the most frequent provocation. He mentions a white who was lynched for murdering his mother-in-law, another for killing his wife. In 1877 five members of the Simmons gang, all white, were taken from their jail cells and lynched. In the 1880s, several vigilante committees were formed to catch and lynch outlaws. We recall that the Bald Knobbers in southwest Missouri involved white-on-white vigilantism, including lynchings. Richard Maxwell Brown tells of the White Cap movement (another of the many names for vigilantism) that “first appeared in southern Indiana in 1887, but…spread to the four corners of the nation…[W]hite capping was the most prevalent as a sort of spontaneous movement for the moral regulation of the poor whites and ne’er-do-wells of the rural American countryside. Thus, drunken, shiftless whites who often abused their families were typical targets of White Cap violence.” This was a movement directed at what in those days respectable society called “white trash.” If all of this went on and was not racially motivated, why are we to conclude that blacks were lynched for a totally different reason?19

4. In Tennessee in 1911, according to Shay, four white men “lynched” a black and his two daughters with no known provocation. “Two of the white men were ultimately hanged for their part in the lynching.” [In light of the meaning of “lynching,” what Shay is talking about is a case of murder and not of lynching, since the act was not done as an expression of community sensibility and did not receive community approval.] If indiscriminate anti-black racial brutality had been part of the community ethos, the white men would not have been executed.

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5. Wright says “there were cases of blacks being lynched by whites for the murder of blacks” (emphasis added). This is totally incongruous if one accepts the racial hypothesis, since according to it whites would have welcomed blacks’ murdering of other blacks.

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6. Blacks did some of the lynching themselves, sometimes of other blacks, sometimes of whites. Shay says that “in 1908, at Pine Level, Johnston County, North Carolina, it is recorded that an unnamed Negro entertainer was lynched by Negroes for putting on a poor show.” [Notice, too, that the lynching here was for insufficient provocation, which when done by whites is taken as evidence of their racial motivation.] Another case cited by Shay occurred at Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in 1934 when “a thirty-year- old Negro was beaten to death by members of his own race because of an alleged insult offered by [him] to a colored girl….” Most significant is the case in Clarksdale, Tennessee, in 1914, “when Negroes…lynched a white youth for the rape of a Negress. The coroner’s jury, believe it or not, brought in a verdict of justifiable homicide and freed the blacks” (emphasis added). Shay’s exclamatory “believe it or not” underscores how greatly the white coroner’s jury’s action contradicts the conventional wisdom. The historian E. Merton Coulter tells how “in Chicot County, Arkansas, in 1872 armed negroes took three white men from jail, riddled them with bullets, and went about burning and pillaging.” This shows that it wasn’t just white mobs that succeeded in getting people from the custody of jailers.

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7. We might surmise that someone propounding the conventional theory that “racism was the cause” would suppose that there would have been more lynching of blacks in Mississippi, considered a notoriously “racist” state, than in Kansas, where at the beginning of the Civil War anti-slavery forces prevailed over the pro-slavery faction. It is surprising, then, that Donald L. Grant tells us that “the number of lynchings per thousand Blacks in Kansas during the 1890s was practically the same as in Mississippi.”

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8. The most important refutation of the racism explanation lies in southern lynching’s place as just part of a much larger mosaic of turmoil and popular justice, such as occurred in colonial America, in the entire country before the Civil War, in the West, in the Northeast, and in the world at large whenever society is unsettled. It is extremely arbitrary and selective to consider the lynching of blacks in the South just by itself, dropping the larger context. Seen just by itself, the racial hypothesis seems plausible, which is why readers quite gullibly accept the charge; but seen as part of a larger phenomenon occurring at exactly the same time, it comes to share in the explanations that are appropriate to the phenomenon as a whole.

Is Mayor Ted Wheeler Finally Showing Some Backbone?

As far as I can tell, my Back the Blue friends have moved on to greener pastures, and are now concentrating their efforts in Salem. It doesn’t look like they’ve been meeting in downtown Portland recently, and they haven’t returned my calls and texts.

It’s just as well for me; it’s no fun standing in the cold and rain for two hours, and my cough hasn’t yet completely disappeared. But this means my only source of information, for the goings on in Portland, is “The News.”

It seems the usual trouble-makers were at it again on New Year’s Eve, smashing windows and otherwise making life even more miserable for our long-suffering business-owners.

This time, the historically spineless Mayor Ted Wheeler has been talking tough. From The Hill:

Portland, Ore., Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) condemned antifa and anarchists following a night of riots in the city on New Year’s Eve.

Speaking at a press conference on New Year’s Day, the mayor said protesters caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage by breaking windows, starting fires and spray-painting property in downtown Portland late Thursday evening, local CBS affiliate KOIN reported.

Wheeler asked during his press conference, “Why would a group of largely white, young and some middle-age men destroy the livelihood of others who are struggling to get by?”

According to law enforcement, some protesters allegedly used Molotov cocktails Thursday night, causing thousands of dollars in damage to properties around the downtown area…

“My good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical antifa and anarchists,” Wheeler said. “In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end.”

Wheeler committed to three counterapproaches for handling violent protesters in the city, including asking federal, state, county and local law enforcement “to convene to deal with anarchist violence as soon as possible.”

He also called on the state legislature to increase penalties for repeat offenders, adding that he believes people who are convicted of criminal destruction should be “required to meet with those whose businesses they damaged.”

The Portland mayor’s comments mark a drastic change in tone from his remarks throughout 2020, when demonstrators ravaged a nearby courthouse for more than 100 nights, partially prompted by outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May.

It’s about time, but my respect-ometer will only move past zero, for Mayor Wheeler, when the police actually start cracking some skulls, and prosecutors actually start meting out long sentences to the hoodlums.

At the end of the article, the reporter points out that Wheeler had previously refused offers of Federal help from President Trump. It’s possible that Wheeler actually desired such Federal aid in quelling the riots, but was fearful of associating himself with President Trump prior to his own election. Now that Wheeler has won the election, and he will not have to worry about President Trump much longer, he’s free to seek Federal aid in the near future.

If Wheeler follows through with his tough talk, and allows the police to do their jobs, then he will suffer a lot of push-back from the Far-Left. Let’s hope he’s able to ignore it, and work toward making Portland pleasant again.

For what it’s worth, my suggestion is that, along with stiff sentences for rioters, they also be forced to clean up BLM graffiti, repair damaged streets, and work for the small businesses they damaged as community service.

For a New Year – Something from the Past

Happy New Year everybody! Let’s start the new year with a little history.

In 1492, the Jews of Spain were given a choice between apostasy or exile. Many escaped to neighboring Portugal, where they fared little better; in 1496, the Jews of Portugal were given the same choice.

Nobody knows how many Jews lived in the Iberian Peninsula prior to the expulsions, but it was at least in the hundreds of thousands. We have documentation of a Jewish community in Spain since late Roman, or early Medieval, times. Over the course of centuries, the Jewish community had grown wealthy and influential. It also produced many literary works, which included various topics aside from religion.

These expulsions gave birth to the Sephardic (Hebrew for “Spanish”) diaspora, which continued to speak Spanish until our own time, though speakers of Judeo-Spanish (“Ladino”) are few these days, and mostly old. It’s a dying language.

Many of the Jews who had fled to Portugal ended up in Amsterdam, where there was a thriving Sephardic community until recently. From Wikipedia:

Permanent Jewish life in Amsterdam began with the arrival of pockets of Marrano and Sephardic Jews at the end of the 16th, and beginning of the 17th century; their first Chief Rabbi was Rabbi Uri Levi. Many Sephardi (Jews from the Iberian Peninsula) had been expelled from Spain in 1492 after the fall of Muslim Granada. Those that moved to Portugal were forced to leave in 1497, where they were given the choice between conversion to Catholicism or death penalty on the grounds of heresy.

From 1497, others remained in the Iberian peninsula, practising Judaism secretly in their homes. The newly independent Dutch provinces provided an ideal opportunity for these crypto-Jews to re-establish themselves and practise their religion openly, and they migrated, most notably to Amsterdam. Collectively, they brought economic growth and influence to the city as they established an international trading hub in Amsterdam during the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age. Perhaps the most notable example of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam are the Curiel family, namely Jeromino Nunes da Costa (alias Moses Curiel),^[4] son of Jacob Curiel.^[5] Curiel was the single largest financial contributor to the building of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam.^[6]

In 1593, Marrano Jews arrived in Amsterdam after having been refused admission to Middelburg and Haarlem. These Jews of Converso descent were important merchants, and persons of great ability. Their expertise, it can be stated, contributed materially to the prosperity of the Netherlands. They became strenuous supporters of the contender House of Orange, and were in return protected by the Stadholder. At this time, commerce in Holland was increasing; a period of development had arrived, particularly for Amsterdam, to which Jews had carried their goods and from which they maintained their relations with foreign lands. Quite new for the Netherlands, they also held connections with the Levant, Morocco and the Caribbean Antilles.

The formal independence from Spain of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (1581), theoretically opened the door to public practice of Judaism. Yet only in 1603 did a gathering take place that was licensed by the city. The three original congregations formed in the first two decades of the 17th century merged in 1639 to form a united Sephardic congregation.

When visiting Amsterdam, I dropped by the Portuguese synagogue:

It was built in 1672.

Amsterdam was a major Hebrew printing hub, and I own several old tomes from its heyday. One of them is from 1722, and it includes a short treatise on the Hebrew calendar. Although Ladino was written in Hebrew characters in much of the Mediterranean region, it seems that the Roman alphabet was used in the Netherlands. Even though some of Amsterdam’s Jews spoke Portuguese, Spanish was the language of prestige, and this is why it was used here.

Now, for probably the first time ever, you can see this treatise online. Those of y’all who know Spanish should be able to understand most of it. The book is in poor condition overall, and the calendar tables, which follow the treatise, are ragged, but I’m including several pages of those anyway:

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You might notice the Hebrew date 5424 and 5423 in the text. Those are 1664 and 1663 in the Gregorian calendar.

Spanish speakers, please share your thoughts on this text in comments.

The Importance of Color Part 2

I’ve been negligent about writing recently, and honestly a bit apprehensive about publishing this particular post; it may come across as “out there” to many people.

But then I saw that I have a new follower, and it appears that she likes philosophy. So… feel free to tear this post apart Saania. There will be no hard feelings on my part.

I concluded part one by writing:

Color is a quality of light, which is a form of energy. Light is an elemental component of our universe, and it even sets the maximum speed with which space can be traversed. I think this is because light and space are intricately connected.

What about light and time?

So it’s time to elaborate on that with some unscientific, grasping-at-straws random thoughts that wandered into my mind, and convinced me to liberate them onto this blog. I’m neither a philosopher nor an astrophysicist… but I watched some documentaries on YouTube. Same thing, right?

I think there’s probably more to light than just a group of subatomic particles (photons) or energy waves. It appears that it plays a role in defining our universe.

As far as time, it doesn’t seem to exist in its own right – but we perceive it, and everything that exists, exists only within our own perceptions as far as we’re concerned. By definition, we can’t experience anything outside of ourselves. So, in that sense, time is as real as anything else.

The past is gone, the future isn’t here yet – and the present is simply a transition from one non-existence into another. It seems that time doesn’t exist by itself, but that it’s simply a property of our existence – a dimension.

The same might be said about space; it only has meaning when describing physical materials, but cannot be comprehended outside of that framework. We can imagine a finite area that lacks any matter, a perfect vacuum. That space, having limits, might constitute “space without substance.” However, there are two problems with this: Firstly, that space would have no meaning without the surrounding material, and secondly, it’s doubtful that there even is such a thing as an area without any substance in our universe.

When we perceive space, we do so in three dimensions. This was necessary for our survival, and that’s why our brains evolved in such a way. A creature that exists only in two dimensions would find it impossible to imagine a third dimension.

But there was never any such necessity for humans to perceive any more than two dimensions in time (past and future). It wasn’t necessary for our survival, so our brains are incapable of comprehending such things.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that other dimensions of time don’t exist. It’s also possible that, just like there is space-light, so too is there time-light. We can’t perceive it, because, as far as we’re concerned, there are only two dimensions to time; we can’t sense light in only two dimensions. If our minds were capable of sensing a third dimension in time, then time-light would illuminate a whole new plane of existence.

This time-light would regulate the speed of time.

Time is perceived to pass at widely varying rates. When we’re young, one hour seems like an eternity. By the time we’re old, even the years seem to go by in a snap. Imagine how time is perceived by a tortoise that’s centuries old. Imagine how a mayfly perceives it.

When we die, we’re freed of the shackles of time, and even a million years is nothing to us…

Or is it? Not if time-light has any say in the matter.

I recently spoke to a relative of mine. She’s 93 years old, and she’s very much at peace with the fact that death will come for her in the near future.

I asked her what she thinks about the next time around, and I pointed out that she will pop into existence some time in the future, that this is inevitable.

I explained to her, in a nutshell, the infinite cycle of universes, as theorized by Professor Roger Penrose. I pointed out that there might also be infinite parallel universes – and that there might be both infinite universes and Penrose cycles at the same time. In any event, the very fact that we exist proves that we CAN exists, and that we WILL exist again – even if it takes a trillion trillion cycles to make it happen. It’s only a matter of time.

I was shocked that she’d never thought of this. Doesn’t everybody?

But as I said, it’s only a matter of time until we pop into existence again… and let’s remember that not a single one of us is exactly the same person today as he was yesterday. Each day, when we wake up, we’re only approximations of what we were yesterday.

So whatever set of circumstances must align to create another “me,” they will occur, in some approximation, an infinite number of times. Of course, it’s questionable if any of these future individuals will remember his own past.

Let’s say a murderer suffers a severe case of amnesia, and he can’t remember anything from his previous life. He wakes up somewhere, and builds his life from scratch… learns everything anew, gets married, buys a house, has kids. And then one day, he’s informed that he committed a murder so many years ago. Do we hold this individual liable for the murder?

There’s more than one reason to punish a murderer, a need for justice, to protect the public from future violence, peace of mind for the victim’s survivors, a deterrent to others. But, aside from all that, is it the same person?

If you’re on your death bed, and the doctor tells you there’s one way to save your life, but the operation will erase ALL of your previous memories, and you’ll have to start life from scratch. All of the people you knew will be strangers to you, including your closest loved ones. Would you do it? How would your family feel about it? I’d venture to say that, given an alternative of certain death, almost everybody would undergo the operation; they see some sort of continuity in such an existence.

So yes, there certainly is life after death. But does it happen instantaneously, or is there a lapse? I think that in the Penrose scenario, it might be subject to the speed of time, as regulated by time-light.

Why We Need Well-Armed Citizen Militias

Thanks to Andy Ngo, whose tweet led me to this story from The Willamette Weekly:

Between 7 and 9 am on Dec. 8, a large crowd of individuals started to build after they got the news about the eviction. And it grew and it grew. The police were slowly drawing down. That crowd came through the backyard of an adjacent house, and they were throwing bottles and rocks and bricks and paint balloons at the police and screaming at them and threatening them about the eviction.

Police backed down the hill because they were outnumbered by the number of protesters. They pushed the police down into the street, down by the Mississippi Triangle, and they surrounded them.

I thought they were going to beat the cops in the street, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen in real life. I had never seen anything like that in America. At that moment, I was like: This is completely spun out of control, and this is really dangerous.

Then the large group went back to the Red House, and more people came in and they began to rip down the fence on the property. They went inside the house themselves and started pulling stuff out to build the barricades. They started carrying out refrigerators and washers and dryers.

They blocked the alleys and they blocked the side street of my house. They wouldn’t allow us to move our cars because they had fully barricaded us in. They said they had basically claimed the area and we weren’t able to leave.

On Saturday last week, an individual went around and broke the Ring cameras off of people’s front doors, on their doorbells, with a crowbar.

It was just a huge, huge, raging party occupation: giant bonfires on the hill, bonfires everywhere in the street. They built the barricades. They had weapons behind it. They had bottles and rocks and Molotov cocktails and all that stuff.

They had sentries, essentially, that are posted up there. They had an individual with an assault rifle positioned right next to our driveway. They have people regularly back at their station, but they also patrol around the block with weapons and tactical gear and bulletproof vests. They watch us, you know, and they’re regularly standing around as we move in and out of our backyard.

I could go out front on foot, but there were several people outside, and they were armed and they would watch us. They’d follow us around the block. And they were very suspicious that we were coordinating with the police. Like I said, they had guns up front, too, in addition to everyone inside of the zone.

They had bonfires on and adjacent to our property next to the gasoline-soaked tires. We were asking them to put it out—and they refused to do so and would yell at us.

They got really hostile and told me to fuck off and that we were part of the problem, or that we were just another gentrifier. We were scared they were going to attack us in our house.

If you had a problem, or you were scared for your safety or that you were going to be attacked, you had to negotiate with the individuals or the leaders themselves, because the police would not come out proactively because of concerns about security and the situation escalating. If you wanted them to stop, you had to go down and negotiate with them yourselves.


There’s this notion that the neighbors generally were happy about this, or thought it was cool or were OK with it. Everyone who was directly surrounded by this was really, really scared and nervous. And people kept their mouths shut because they were worried about their safety and protecting their homes.

Each time something like this happens, it becomes ever more clear that Antifa (or whatever you want to call them) can get away with this sort of conduct. It also becomes abundantly clear that citizens are expected to allow the insurrectionists to destroy their property, trespass, threaten them, restrict their movement, and prevent emergency services from accessing their homes.

What would happen if, as the Antifa agent was in the process of breaking a homeowner’s ring camera, the homeowner confronted him with a gun, and demanded that he leave his property? Antifa would react with force. Sooner or later, somebody is going to get killed as a result of these actions.

People have a right to protect their property, and to avail themselves of public emergency services, which they’ve paid for through their taxes. They have a right to use public roads, and to travel freely to and from their homes. If government refuses to protect these rights, then citizens must take matters into their own hands.

The only way to do this is to create well-organized militias, which will be ready and able to respond in force to such threats. It’s not enough for individual homeowners to have high-capacity weapons.

The Willamette Weekly is a left-leaning news source, but they still have a comment section. I encourage y’all to visit the site and read the comments; they contain more information.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all you celebrators of Christmas!

The Importance of Color

There have been a few philosophical journeys that have been percolating in my mind for a long time. It’s time to pour some of these thoughts onto the pages of this blog, in several parts.

Back in 2015, I wrote:

What I found interesting about Amharic is that none of the names for colors bear any resemblance to those of other Semitic languages – except for one: Blue. The word is semayami, and it’s clearly derived from the word for “sky” (semay, which is essentially the same in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic).

Whenever Ethiopia became Semitic, all the other colors were already known, but not blue. The color blue was not known to the ancients. I’ll quote Radiolab:

Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.

See also here and here. The lack of blue, among the ancients, presented a challenge for Orthodox Jews; the Torah calls for a “thread of tekheleth” to be worn on the corners of one’s garments. Though tekheleth is often translated as “blue,” the matter remains a mystery.

Yes indeed; humans have been discovering colors since our very beginnings. As a matter of fact, it’s likely that our primitive ancestors only recognized dark and light. Over time, as we crawled out of the seas, and encountered other land-dwellers, we learned to recognize new colors – as required for survival. Red, yellow and green would have been important, even in the early days.

Please take a few minutes to watch this video about the color brown:

In a nutshell, brown is actually a shade of orange; through new contexts, we learned to recognize it as its own color. Red gave birth to orange, and orange gave birth to brown. The ancients would have seen brown as simply a shade of red – if we go back far enough, and depending on the culture.

In the video, we’re told that color is determined by a combination of hue and brightness. The Photoshop color wheel is used to identify various colors – and that’s it. Of course, in any finite space, such as a color wheel, there are infinite points. Therefore, there are infinite color possibilities…

… except that, in my opinion, there is yet another element to color: Luster or sheen.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to discover a new color? A color that nobody has ever seen before? Wonder no longer; I have the answer.

In recent times, we have witnessed the discovery of new colors, based on luster. “Silver” is simply gray with more luster. “Gold” can be yellow with more luster. We are in the midst of a color-revolution, and most of us don’t even realize it. Can “Shiny Brown” be its own color? I think that future generations, in the not so distant future, may recognize it as such.

Is it possible that there are a multitude of other variables to color – which we haven’t yet discovered?

Bear with me, and watch this short video, which explains that our perceptions of color actually influence the way we see colors:

Like everything else we experience in our world, it’s mostly in our minds. We “see” more with our minds than with our eyes.

From our earliest beginnings, until the modern age, our progression has been a story of making finer and finer distinctions, of seeing differences that our more primitive forebears couldn’t see. Those who seek to erase distinctions are actually regressive.

Our color-evolution may be part of a deeper evolution, and evolution that takes us closer and closer to a more comprehensive understanding of The Universe, and our place within it.

Color is a quality of light, which is a form of energy. Light is an elemental component of our universe, and it even sets the maximum speed with which space can be traversed. I think this is because light and space are intricately connected.

What about light and time?

Updating my Travel Blog

Greetings dear readers! I’ve been taking a break from this blog, and spending some time updating my travel blog – which I’d been negligent about recently.

Anyway, if you’re tired of politics, and want to see something more lighthearted, feel free to visit my travel blog.

I was going to first post about my cruise to Alaska and Canada, from a few years ago – but I lost the darned photos! Dominican Republic was a bit more interesting anyway.

This is Why They Hate “The Jews” #3

We recently learned, from American Renaissance, that Black Rock is pushing racial upon its client companies:

BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, plans to next year push companies for greater ethnic and gender diversity for their boards and workforces, and says it will vote against directors who fail to act.

The money manager, which oversees more than $7.8 trillion of assets, is asking U.S. companies to disclose the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of their employees — data known as EEO-1 — as well as measures they’re taking to advance diversity and inclusion, according to a stewardship report released Thursday.

“We are raising our expectations,” New York-based BlackRock said in the report. “An inclusive, diverse and engaged workforce contributes to business continuity, innovation, and long-term value creation.”

Companies are under increasing pressure from investors and advocates to address diversity. State Street Global Advisors, which manages about $3 trillion for clients, has said it will ask companies about their metrics and goals to boost racial diversity within their ranks, while Nasdaq Inc. announced that most companies listed on its U.S. exchange will have to include at least one director who identifies as female and one who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has said the firm will no longer take a company public in the U.S. and Europe if it lacks a director who is either female or diverse.

Black Rock’s CEO is Larry Fink. He and I have a couple of things in common: We’re both from California, and we’re both Jewish.

The descendants of immigrants should be grateful to their host countries. This is especially true of Jewish Americans, whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe, and were welcomed with open arms into this great country. The least we can do is show some respect for the founding stock of America.

Through his aggressive Diversity initiative, Flint is essentially spitting in the face of the country that gave his family refuge, and allowed him to amass billions. He is using his money and influence to disenfranchise white people from American businesses.

Such shameful conduct will be noticed, and add fuel to anti-Jewish sentiment. Nice work Fink.

The Mad Jewess just posted about new guidelines from Pennsylvania. From the Gateway Pundit:

Pennsylvania Health Department Issues Preferred COVID Orgy Regulations: Wear a Face Covering, Avoid Kissing, Wash Hands Often

The Pennsylvania Department of Health led by Dr. Rachel Levine issued new rules for large gatherings “where you might end up having sex.”   These large gatherings “where you might end up having sex” are also commonly referred to as orgies.

When I saw Levine’s face on the Mad Jewess’ blog…

… I thought to myself, “That’s a DUDE!” Sure enough, it’s a transgendered dude.

But hey, to each his own, right? Whatever floats your boat. It does irk me a little when such individuals try to mold traditional faiths into the “progressive” agenda, so that they accept transvestism as “kosher.”

From The Jewish Chronicle:

As a Jewish youth growing up in a Jewish household in Wakefield, Mass., having a bar mitzvah, attending Hebrew school and attending a conservative shul, Levine said the rabbi did not talk about LGBTQ issues. It was the late 1960s, early 1970s, she said, and things are only now getting better.

“Overall, our society is open to different gender norms, not just in Jewish culture,” she said, adding that Reform Judaism is a space where acceptance is happening, even if not in more Orthodox spaces, where constituents may be “less open to variation of gender.”

Her mom’s shul in Harrisburg, Temple Ohev Sholom, is headed by Rabbi Peter Kessler, who identifies as gay and who is greatly respected in the community and by Levine and her family.

“Change takes time,” she said, “and it’s happening in my lifetime.”

There’s a big difference between these two Jews. Fink is doing something shameful; he’s contributing to the disenfranchisement of white Americans.

Levine is simply expressing his inner sexual fantasies. I won’t begrudge him for that, regardless of how distasteful it is to me, and cringe worthy. It does bother me that we Jews have earned a bad reputation for contributing to the debauchery of America. We’re prominent in Hollywood, in the porn industry, in leftist politics and in banking. In short, in all the major players of team Let’s Destroy America.

If you feel the urge to be a transvestite or transsexual, then that’s your business – but you’re not helping America by being a high-profile role model. If you happen to also be Jewish, then you’re adding fuel to anti-Jewish sentiment. Nice work Levine.

Shameless Discrimination Against White Strippers

Soviet Men writes:

Oregon grants aid to strippers doing it tough so long as they’re black, native or trans.

Are Indian strippers a big thing there? Do they perform just wearing a feather headdress and high moccasins? Asking for a friend.

Strip clubs are very popular in the Portland area, but I’m not experienced enough to answer Mr. Vladivostok’s query. I don’t frequent those establishments, not that I object to them. No doubt that, for the right price, a dancer would be willing to dress up for this fetish.

The Oregonian fills us in a little more:

Nearly $600,000 in federal COVID-relief funds is available for Oregon strippers and sex workers of color who have been financially impacted by the coronavirus pandemic…

Priority will be given to Black, Indigenous and transgender applicants, those with minor dependents living in the household and those experiencing homelessness…

The funds are part of $45 million in health equity grants distributed by the Oregon Health Authority to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in tribal communities and communities of color, which have been disproportionally affected by the virus.

The grants will allow Haymarket Pole Collective to provide financial assistance to 75 people, who can receive up to $1,600 in rent assistance, $500 in utility assistance and $150 toward internet services.

Our slide into a racial caste system has been going on for decades, under the guise of “leveling the playing field” and “helping the disadvantaged.”

I hope somebody sues them for racial discrimination, since this appears to be a blatant violation of Federal law. From the ACLU’s webpage:

The Constitution prevents the government from subjecting you to worse treatment because of your race, ethnicity, or national origin in any situation.

State and local laws may also provide protection against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.

Obviously, if this grant is subject to a racial hierarchy, then racial discrimination is taking place. Will the ACLU support white strippers in a lawsuit against the State of Oregon? I doubt it.

It’s frustrating that government openly discriminates against white people, but it’s even more frustrating that white advocacy groups are not allowed to exist in the United States except as persecuted, marginalized, underground movements. No powerful organizations, and no wealthy individuals, are willing to fight for equal rights for whites. If there ever was a “marginalized” group in the United States, it’s working-class whites.

If I ever do visit a strip club, I’ll make it a point to only tip the white strippers. “Strippers of color” don’t need my donations; they can go to the government.