Spare me the cheap, hollow rhetoric “ Dream a little dream “ For the kiddies! “ A Queer Feminist take on Trayvon Martin “ We are all guilty! “ Refugee racketeers rake in the spoils “ Press 3 for WHAT? “ Yet another hate crime hoax “ Obamanium “ Cows gone wild “ Liberia runs out of intellectuals “ Save us, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov!
The PC suppression of heretical thinking seemingly grows stronger by the day. Innocuous comments and the “wrong” scientific research findings are now often taboo. Not even Harvard’s president or the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson can escape the witch hunt.
The costs of ruined careers are considerable, as Jason Richwine will explain. Whole topics are now off-limits to public debate, with disastrous consequences. Does anybody want to tell Obama about race and IQ when he bemoans the plight of African American youngsters? When was the last time anyone in public spoke bluntly about Hispanic immigration?
Since “speaking truth to power” results in career-ending suicide, what’s to be done?
I suggest a practical solution that will also make some people very rich. Here’s how.
In the Soviet Union, spies and informers were everywhere and the only assurance that a newfound acquaintance was not a KGB agent was to split a bottle of vodka. It was assumed that nobody could totally lie when drunk, and drinking from the same bottle avoided one party faking it. This is not to say that every utterance was absolutely true; rather, the vodka loosened inhibitions and thus served as a cheap and convenient truth serum.
I propose a reality TV program called Drunks Gone Wild where inebriated guests discuss the day’s news with a special emphasis on “controversial” subjects. Think Fox News Channel’s The Five or CNN’s newly refurbished Crossfire, but with lots of alcohol. The program will open with participants fairly well sloshed and on their way to being totally bombed. A macho drinking culture will prevail with participants egging on each other to “have one more.”
Drunks Gone Wild will be a marketing bonanza for the booze industry by either sponsoring the show outright or paying placement fees when a guest requests his or her favorite brand (hangover cures may also want to advertise). To be sure, on-air boozing may violate FCC rules, but this can easily be overcome by switching to cable or pay-per-view where content rules are more generous. This would also permit cursing, swearing, and, most importantly, derogatory ethnic stereotypes and raucous racial/ethnic jokes.
Participating experts might wear masks or wigs plus use stage names. To keep matters lively, the studio would resemble an intimate comedy club with unlimited free booze. Audience members would sign a liability waiver indemnifying the show and liquor companies from all damages. A sponsor would get a free plug by providing the audience with free round-trip limousine rides and hotel rooms.
Audience participation would be via a Q&A session, but I”d guess that this formality would deteriorate after about 15 minutes. Audience drunks would soon be shouting out comments to panel members and to each other, and security might have to be called to break up fights.
Stop the presses. Call out the National Guard. Order in the tanks. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is mad and is not going to take it anymore. Especially from Vini Lunardelli, the Italian winemaker that labels some of their wine bottles with pictures of Adolf Hitler. The little Italian winemaker has been selling Nazi-themed wines for twenty years, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has had about enough. “Jewish life in Europe…[is] getting much worse,” wails Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Center’s dean and founder. Claiming that anti-Semitism is on the rise in France, Greece, Hungary, Spain, and Eastern Europe, Hier warns, “This is not a time where we can say we defeated anti-Semitism, we are being marginalized.”
I haven’t noticed Jews being marginalized. Last time I looked, the two largest yachts in the Med were Jewish-owned, the two largest chalets in the Alps were Jewish-owned, and Jewish life in Europe has never been more secure except for the anti-Semitic incidents that were and are caused by Arabs.
So why pick on a poor Italian winemaker who calls it a marketing device and says it’s history rather than propaganda? A Jewish friend of mine asked me what I thought, and I told him the rabbi and the Center have cried wolf once too often. The Italian assuaged criticism over the years by developing a range of products that have featured Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Churchill, Napoleon, and Che Guevara. They’ve also reportedly sold wine with labels of the Pope, Stalin, and Mao. Only the Jews have been complaining. The Italian winemaker sells about 20,000 Hitler bottles per annum. Goodies as well as baddies fascinate the public, and if the History Channel can make zillions out of Hitler and WWII, why shouldn’t a little Italian grape-jumper do the same?
Are his wines any good? Not bad, say the experts, some of them Jewish. At $18 dollars a bottle plus shipping and handling, Nazi-labeled wines are mostly sold to Eastern Europe. Draconian laws in Austria and Germany do not allow Nazi labels on any product, but that hasn’t stopped the Simon Wiesenthal Center from screaming bloody murder anyway.
The Italians, after all, were allies with the Germans, if not very reliable ones. They not only protected the Jews from the Nazis, they also switched sides when it mattered most to Hitler and his gang.
But some make money from the Holocaust while others are not allowed. Vini Lunardelli is apolitical and trying to make a buck. The Simon Wiesenthal Center should go after the Arabs and those Gulf-financed people who paint swastikas on walls and hurl firebombs at synagogues. And it should lay off soft targets like Italian grape-jumpers. There!
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I have no recollection of the 1963 event myself, but I have good excuses for not remembering: (A) This was not my country at the time; and (B) I was in the Styrian Alps.
Well, this is my country now, and I’m bound to respect the national totems, of which King’s speech is certainly one, so don’t be looking for any ruthless deconstruction of the thing from me. I am merely going to compare King’s time with ours.
First, that was an America supremely confident in our ability to do anything. We had come out of the 1940s bursting with pride and vigor into a world where our competitor nations lie in ruins. Everything was possible! The USA was buzzing with energy, creativity, and wealth. Heck, we could even go to the moon!
Thus Martin Luther King:
…we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.
Most of us would think it in bad taste to talk like that in a time of seventeen trillion dollars of national debt and a looming entitlements overhang. And we sure won’t be going back to the moon anytime soon. These are more sober times, with lower hopes and expectations.
Second, we are a lot less religious now than we were then. King’s biblical diction, those quotes from Amos and Isaiah, would be lost on hearers nowadays. Blacks are still more religious than nonblacks, but even black leaders”even Sharpton and Jackson”don’t talk like King anymore, not outside church anyway. Barack Obama sure doesn’t.
(American friends of the older generation tell me that even at the time, educated blacks made fun of King’s rhetorical style. Those blacks were yuppie agnostics, scornful of Bible-quoting Southern rubes. A lot of them, including some senior figures in King’s entourage”notably Jack O’Dell“were members of the Communist Party.)
Third, King made it sound a lot easier than it turned out to be. He was reaching for low-hanging fruit: segregation laws, voting tests, police brutality. King’s listeners believed that once those obstacles were swept away, blacks would rise to equality with whites.
Well, the obstacles were swept away, and then some. Not only was discrimination against blacks outlawed; discrimination in their favor was legislated across major areas of American life”in college admissions and in government hiring, promotion, and contracting.
Yet the equality didn’t happen. Huge differentials in crime, academic achievement, and wealth accumulation remained. In some cases, they increased.
The best-documented crime is homicide, where there is a corpse to be accounted for: Blacks commit homicide at seven to eight times the nonblack rate, according to statistics published by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. In academics, every measure”from NAEP to LSAT (Figure 14)”shows black mean scores a full standard deviation below the nonblack means. For median household wealth, the Census Bureau reports whites at twenty times the black level, and this gap seems to be widening.
Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books on human biodiversity in recent years.
Beyond undermining Gladwellian blank-slatism, Epstein extols the sheer pleasure of noticing humanity’s variety for its own sake. On his book’s penultimate page, he writes:
…sports will continue to provide a splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that’s human biological diversity. Amid the pageantry of the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, make sure to look for the extremes of the human physique….It is breathtaking to think that, in the truest genetic sense, we are all a large family, and that the paths of our ancestors have left us wonderfully distinct.
Epstein, a Sports Illustrated reporter, builds upon the work of journalists such as Jon Entine (Taboo) and me in taking an evenhanded look at the roles of both nature and nurture.
You might think that any sports fan with a television would testify that success in sports depends upon a mélange of genetics, willpower, coaching, character, and opportunity, a mixture that differs from sport to sport and even from competitor to competitor. Much of the fun of watching sports is seeing who will triumph: the gifted goofs or the diligent grinds.
Yet Gladwellian nurturist extremism is the respectable ideology.
Gladwell is annoyed by this new skepticism directed at his massive 2008 bestseller Outliers. In response to Epstein’s criticism, Gladwell explained at The New Yorker:
In other words, within a group of talented people, what separated the best from the rest was how long and how intently they worked.
No doubt. But what separated the best from the rest within a group of hard-working people was also how talented they were.
Seriously, is it so hard to consider nature and nurture simultaneously? Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald was right to observe
…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Because it’s impossible to think comprehensively about sports achievement while flinching from the obvious racial and sexual differences, Epstein bravely goes there. Amusingly, he cites numerous sports scientists who demanded anonymity from him before they’ll dare touch the topic.
Epstein, a former college runner, even offers a couple of novel theories of why people of West African descent make the best sprinters. He points out that several of the top Jamaican sprinters, including Usain Bolt (a classic gifted goof), are from Trelawny Parish, historically the home to Jamaica’s largest free community of escaped slaves, the Maroons. Perhaps their ancestors were just tougher, and that’s why they ran away and stayed free for hundreds of years?
Epstein also speculates that the high fraction of fast-twitch muscle fibers in West Africans might have evolved as a defense against malaria. This is not a prima facie ridiculous idea, since falciparum malaria is arguably the worst disease on Earth and produces the most Darwinian pressure to evolve defenses. (The sickle cell genetic mutation, which deals out protection from malaria to those who inherit one copy and death to those who inherit two copies, is proof of how far nature will go to slow down malaria.)
My longtime readers will find Epstein’s framework and many of his examples (such as his chapters on Kenya’s Kalenjin distance runners) familiar. But I learned much from The Sports Gene.
For example, the average man has an arm span equal to his height (as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man). Yet every NBA player except shooting specialist J. J. Redick has a wingspan greater than his already considerable height. This is especially true of African Americans.
I”ll admit it: I”m unfashionably fond of Dr. Phil.
At least early on”before he got caught up in shady stuff such as trying to brand his family as the Osmonds of advice”his folksy football-coach routine was a welcome palate-cleanser during the unicorns & rainbows “inner child” era.
Oprah Winfrey discovered Dr. Phil McGraw when she hired him as a trial consultant during her now forgotten Texas legal beef. Before she gave him his own show, he was a regular “expert” on hers, cranking out refreshingly bullshit-free one-liners.
If a troubled guest tried to excuse an extramarital affair by shrugging, “It just happened,” Dr. Phil would snap, “So you were just walkin’ down the street and your pants fell off?”
He also wasn’t afraid to bite the chubby manicured hand that fed him. During (still) one (more) episode about weight loss, Oprah opined hopefully that maybe, just maybe, some fat women really were “big boned” or had “thyroid problems.” Dr. Phil drawled back, “Yeah, well, that ain’t you.”
For a guy who specializes in helping fix other people’s problems, though, Dr. Phil gets into pretty regular trouble. Last week, however, he outdid himself.
Or rather, his chase producer did. That’s who probably Tweeted out a now-notorious question to the doctor’s million-plus followers on August 20:
If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil #teensaccused
The hashtag referred to an upcoming show topic: those high-profile cases of young women allegedly raped at booze-fueled parties, after which explicit photos of the incidents are posted on social media. After one such instance, a Canadian teen named Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life. Her mother was scheduled to appear as Dr. Phil’s guest on that particular episode. (Earlier this month, two 18-year-old men were charged with distributing child pornography in relation to this case.)
Although clearly intended to simply “crowdsource” prevailing attitudes (however politically incorrect) in advance of the program, Dr. Phil’s “drunk sex” Tweet was quickly deleted after sparking an online firestorm.
“Rad-Femme Lawyer” huffed, “You know good and goddamn well that asking when a girl ‘deserves’ to be raped is a destructive question in itself.”
“If a TV Shrink makes my daughter feel guilty b/c she was date raped while drunk, can I punch him in his dick?” one fellow Tweeted in reply.
Consensus rapidly congealed: Dr. Phil’s query had been self-evidently “shocking.” Particularly on the distaff side of the Web, where mythical beasts called “rape culture” and “slut shaming” are cited with alarming regularity, the reaction was predictably hysterical.
“Congress doesn’t have a whole lot of core responsibilities,” said Barack Obama last week in an astonishing remark.
For in the Constitution, Congress appears as the first branch of government. And among its enumerated powers are the power to tax, coin money, create courts, provide for the common defense, raise and support an army, maintain a navy and declare war.
But, then, perhaps Obama’s contempt is justified.
For consider Congress’ broad assent to news that Obama has decided to attack Syria, a nation that has not attacked us and against which Congress has never authorized a war.
Why is Obama making plans to launch cruise missiles on Syria?
According to a “senior administration official … who insisted on anonymity,” President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people last week in the two-year-old Syrian civil war.
But who deputized the United States to walk the streets of the world pistol-whipping bad actors? Where does our imperial president come off drawing “red lines” and ordering nations not to cross them?
Neither the Security Council nor Congress nor NATO nor the Arab League has authorized war on Syria.
Who made Barack Obama the Wyatt Earp of the Global Village?
Moreover, where is the evidence that WMDs were used and that it had to be Assad who ordered them? Such an attack makes no sense.
Firing a few shells of gas at Syrian civilians was not going to advance Assad’s cause but, rather, was certain to bring universal condemnation on his regime and deal cards to the War Party which wants a U.S. war on Syria as the back door to war on Iran.
Why did the United States so swiftly dismiss Assad’s offer to have U.N. inspectors—already in Damascus investigating old charges he or the rebels used poison gas—go to the site of the latest incident?
Do we not want to know the truth?
Are we fearful the facts may turn out, as did the facts on the ground in Iraq, to contradict our latest claims about WMDs? Are we afraid that it was rebel elements or rogue Syrian soldiers who fired the gas shells to stampede us into fighting this war?
With U.S. ships moving toward Syria’s coast and the McCainiacs assuring us we can smash Syria from offshore without serious injury to ourselves, why has Congress not come back to debate war?
Political correctness, that great misguided ennobler/enabler of disgruntled losers and embittered misfits, may have helped pave the way for Bradley Manning and Nidal Hasan to achieve infamy.
Before his decision to start leaking highly sensitive military information to svelte albino panda cub Julian Assange in 2010, Bradley Manning gave his Army superiors every reason to suspect he was a mentally unstable and potentially violent homosexual who was perhaps too emotionally hypersensitive to be trusted with highly sensitive documents.
Before he decided to blow away a baker’s dozen (plus a bun in the oven) with two handguns at Fort Hood in late 2009, Nidal Hasan gave his Army superiors every reason to suspect he was a jihadist turncoat gunning for his 72 virgins because he had trouble getting laid.
(Full disclosure: Not for a moment have I approved of the US military’s foolhardy forays into the Middle East. If I had my druthers, I’d bring all the boys”and they’d all be boys, meaning no girls and definitely no boys who suddenly decide that they’re girls”home to guard the true national-security threat, the one along the Mexican border. Before any of you perpetually sour-pussed pea-picking peckerwoods in the peanut gallery start grousing that I’m some sort of neocon, allow me to sternly instruct you that it’s possible to simultaneously disapprove of Islam and Zionism. It is also possible to deplore American military expansionism while being concerned about the fact that bullied loners and cultural outcasts lurking within the armed forces can throw tantrums and endanger American lives because people are terrified of calling them fags and/or ragheads.)
It appears beyond question that inadequate screening and culturally masochistic Islamo-tolerance allowed Nidal Hasan to claim American lives. Whether you view Bradley Manning as a hero or a heel is largely a matter of taste, but on August 14, he claimed his actions led to “unintended consequences” and had “hurt people.” That comes straight from the little sparkle pony’s thin lips.
By the way, his name is Bradley Manning, and he’s a guy. To claim he’s suddenly a chick is to deny biological reality. Last Thursday, the day after being sentenced to a 35-year prison bid, Manning issued a statement containing the following gems:
As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female….I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun….
NO, dude. And as a preemptive strike, I also rule out the possibility of ever calling you Bradley Womanning.
Still, several major news outlets immediately swapped out “he” for “she” and “his” for “her.” If you type “Bradley Manning” in Wikipedia’s search box, it redirects you to a page for “Chelsea Manning” that features such head-scratching passages of abject reality-denial as this one:
Manning was by then living as an openly gay man. Her relationship with her father was apparently good….
Long before he was deployed to Iraq and divulged a flood of state secrets, Manning revealed himself to be quite the fragile orchid. When he was 13, his stepmother reportedly observed him running into walls and declaring, “I’m nobody now.” In 2006 he allegedly threatened her with a knife. In August 2009 he was referred to Army mental-health counselors after reportedly crying for hours after watching the films The Last King of Scotland and Dancer in the Dark“a sure sign of mental instability by any objective standard.
In 2009, two months after being sent to Iraq with a security clearance, Manning angrily flipped over a table during a counseling session, damaging a computer. During this hissy-fit, he had to be restrained by another soldier from grabbing a gun from a nearby gun rack and was dragged out of the room. Still, his security clearance remained intact.
Before he started blowing whistles, Bradley Manning was obviously blowing other things. Despite the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that was in effect at the time, Manning was apparently telling everyone who’d listen that he was gay. Perhaps even though Manning was eager to “tell,” no one wanted to risk the appearance of having asked. He reportedly told his roommate he was gay, at which point his roommate allegedly instructed Manning to stop talking to him. Manning divulged the ins and outs of a failed gay relationship on Facebook. He was even said to have kept a fairy wand at his desk. At a pre-trial hearing, Army officials claimed they were fully aware that Manning had also created a female alter ego he called “Breanna Manning.”
The Week’s Most Insane, Profane, and Inhumane Headlines
THE DELUSION THAT MISTOOK ITSELF FOR A DREAM
Commemorating the half-century since MLK’s 1963 March on Washington and “I Have a Dream” speech that drew a crowd estimated in size from 250,000 to 400,000, a significantly smaller throng gathered in DC on Saturday to continue bitching, whining, pissing, and moaning about a country where their living standard far exceeds conditions anywhere in their ancestral homelands.
Race pimps Al Sharpton and Eric Holder stoked the eternally aggrieved audience’s sense of outrage, as did Trayvon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton. Without offering the merest evidence that thug-in-training Trayvon Martin possessed rudimentary reasoning skills or even basic table scraps of human dignity, the morbidly obese and unforgivably bald Martin Luther King III falsely argued that in modern America, “the color of one’s skin remains a license to profile, to arrest, and even to murder with no regard for the content of one’s character.”
Delving deeper into deluded fantasy and willful revisionism, TV program Law and Order: SVU has filmed an episode featuring a white Southern female chef who shoots an unarmed, hoodie-wearing black youth. Essentially, the episode features Paula Deen shooting Trayvon Martin. Left out of the plot is the fact that Paula Deen never shot anyone, but she did use the word “nigger” to describe the black man who held a gun to her head during a bank robbery. Also left out of the script was that the only evidence of a racial angle in the Martin shooting was that Trayvon allegedly called George Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”
In truth, the type of hate crimes that TV producers and leftist pundits insist are ubiquitous are so rare, they increasingly have to be fabricated. At Oberlin College, which suffered a delusional KKK freak-out earlier this year, it has been revealed that Ohio police have identified the perpetrators of a month-long spree of anti-black, anti-Islamic, and anti-Jewish hate-mongering as a pair of white Obama supporters.
THE WAR THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
In real life as opposed to MLK’s gauzy dreamland, the situation is almost diametrically opposed to what the marchers and agitators and sheltered, sneering sophisticates would have you believe.
In Oklahoma, black teen Chancey Allen Luna allegedly shot white Australian college student Christopher Lane dead in the back. Luna, who reportedly once posted a Black Power banner on his Facebook page, is being charged with first-degree murder. Also charged with murder is James Francis Edwards, another black teen who once allegedly Tweeted, “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM” and boasted having knocked out five “woods” (slang for “peckerwoods”) since the Zimmerman verdict.
In Spokane, WA, 88-year-old World War II veteran Delbert “Shorty” Belton was beaten to death by a pair of black male teens outside an Eagles Lodge on Wednesday evening. Sixteen-year-old Demetrius Glenn turned himself in to police on Thursday. His suspected accomplice, 16-year-old Kenan Adams Kinard, is still at large.
Playing chess with Putin “ John McCain promises a cakewalk “ Not being likely to become an efficient soldier “ Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia “ Exposing a hate crime hoax “ Going home is “horrific” “ The greatest North Dakotan “ Random killings by teens “ Tooth stranger than fiction
