A blast from the past “ Fruit punch “ Brits poke a finger in the elite’s eye “ Political Euro-quake “ First World under siege “ Despair of the social retard “ The London derrière “ A great American self-promoter “ Tomorrow’s elite
New York—Here’s a question for you loyal readers: If a fellow asks his wife to cook him a hearty meal of goat meat and she serves lentils instead, is he within his rights to beat her to death with a stick, as a New Yorker who is on trial this week did?
Mind you, Noor Hussain is not a native Noo Yawker; he comes from Pakistan, but he’s as American as, I guess, not apple pie but the lentils that got him in this spot of bother to begin with. Once upon a time immigrants had names that ended in vowels, like Cuomo or LaGuardia; now they’re called Hussain, Hamid, Rodriguez, and Hernandez. The hubby’s defense is that he comes from a culture where it is appropriate conduct to savage the wife if she gets the menu wrong. His lawyers are busy digging up similar cases in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Africa, where women have been murdered for less. Like serving goat meat done medium rather than well, perhaps? Oh, I almost forgot, the victim also had it coming to her because as Noor was beating her to death she “disrespected” the defendant, calling her hubby a motherfucker. In Saudi she would have been stoned for her language alone.
The couple met in Pakistan and they married before immigrating to the great city of New York. The husband, I hear, was unemployed, but kept himself busy beating his wife regularly and rather viciously. After years of abuse she was confused and served lentils instead of goat. It was as good a reason to be killed as one can think of among the animals being allowed inside the U.S. nowadays. One omission I noticed was the total absence of any protest by the sisterhood, those feminists crying foul over the dismissal of that Keira Knightley look-alike beauty Jill Abramson as executive editor of the Big Bagel Times. (More about this later.)
Although I come from such a patriarchal society as the Hellenic one, I hate to admit the fact that I don’t think I have ever raised my hand in anger toward a woman. Murder has crossed my mind, but hitting is a no-no. Last week something funny happened concerning a lady I once stepped out with. A book that had been sent to me by Knopf and which I had misplaced surfaced among the mess around my desk. Seven years later. It was the memoirs of Leo Lerman, a writer, critic, editor at Condé Nast, and man about town when going around the city was a glittering experience. Here’s his journal for February 25, 1984: “Lee Radziwill rang Tina Brown, saying, ‘I can’t be on a magazine that has Taki on its staff.’ Alex Liberman instantly concluded that I had told Jackie the news of Taki in Vanity Fair, which has been told in newspapers, even on television.”
Now for the life of me I can’t imagine what all this fuss was about. I used to make fun of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s tendency to prefer very rich and powerful men, but I was always close to Lee, her younger sister. I had left Esquire after five years to join VF, then struggling badly with a Tina Brown at the head who didn’t yet know the difference between a Dickie Mortimer and a Mortimer Zuckerman. Lee trying to get me fired reminded me of my older brother, who tried something similar with a large advertiser at Esquire. Both attempts failed as they have since at the dear old Spectator.
Economics can be a misleading subject. When it comes to devising useable theories on boosting economic growth, its professional gurus often pretend to be a step above the political class; as intellectuals, they fancy themselves to be in a superior position to advise. If the economy is sluggish, it’s the fault of the politicians. Elected officials are weak-willed and unable to listen to the recommendations of those who know better. Unlike legislators, economists claim to not bend to the will of ideology”they only pursue the truth.
That’s the portrait the science fathered by Adam Smith likes to paint of itself, anyway. In real life, economists can be just as biased and politics-driven as the folks who sucker the little people for votes. Ivy League credentials don”t magically erase the inner ideologic bent we all have. If anything, having Harvard or Princeton on your resume only emboldens a false sense of objectivity. Professional economics then becomes an echo chamber of either liberal tropes or conservative proselytizing. That’s why a hefty dose of skepticism should be paid to any new theory or theoretician who is celebrated by econ pundits in major media.
The latest rock star to emerge from the dismal science is Frenchman Thomas Piketty. His magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is being celebrated as a magnificent work of data-driven theorizing. The book dominates the best-seller list on Amazon.com. Progressive hack Paul Krugman calls it the “most important economics book of the year”and maybe of the decade.” Nobel laureate and rich-hater Joseph Stiglitz says Piketty’s massive collection of empirics is a “fundamental contribution” to the profession. The Nation‘s Eric Alterman praises the “Marxism-tinged treatise” as “intellectually rigorous, historically grounded, culturally nuanced and, in important respects, politically visionary.” One gets the impression Alterman just discovered a new book of the Bible.
In many ways, Piketty has written a new Gospel, one that reinvigorates the insatiable and quasi-religious need of progressive economists to eat the rich, asserting that capitalism cartelizes wealth in the hands of society’s most well-off. And too much owned by too few is bad. He uses a vast array of data to show that wealth inequality is on the rise, much like in the late 19th century; unless governments jump in to shake down the moneyed, we”ll all go back to the days of indentured servitude. Or something.
For the simpleminded, the reasoning sounds all well and good. As Taki’s own Theodore Dalrymple points out, the Piketty pathology finds its root in envy and resentment. There’s nothing noble about wanting to rob those richer than you. It’s a base instinct reliant on a childish understanding of what constitutes moral behavior. A large portion of the economic profession has spent the past century rationalizing government theft from the wealthy. That means a great number of economists are overgrown brats unable to accept the truth that some people are just more productive than others.
It turns out Piketty’s appeal to thievery isn”t all that’s corrupt about his work. Chris Giles of the Financial Times recently discovered that some of the data trends in Piketty’s book may have been fudged. “Some numbers appear simply to be constructed out of thin air,” he writes. As regards his data on the distribution of wealth in the United Kingdom, the info Piketty presents is not on par with official statistics. As Giles notes,
Professor Piketty cited a figure showing the top 10 per cent of British people held 71 per cent of total national wealth. The Office for National Statistics latest Wealth and Assets Survey put the figure at only 44 per cent.
The chicanery doesn”t stop there. According to Giles, after “FT cleaned up and simplified the data,” the stats on Europe “do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970.” To make matters worse, Giles also points out that, aside from some apparent transcription errors, Piketty “simply adds 2 percentage points” to an Excel formula in order to fulfill his predisposition. Giles claims there’s “quite a lot of this sort of thing in his spreadsheets.”
For the United States, Piketty yet again appears to make up data to fulfill his theory that wealth inequality increased at the end of the 1900s. Even for the modern data available, the French economist can”t help but adjust the numbers to make things appear worse than they actually are. Under Piketty’s reasoning, America is once again experiencing a dangerous burst of wealth inequality. But as economist Bob Murphy shows, the “U.S. is currently hovering near the lowest level of wealth concentration in the hands of the 1% in recorded history.”
Piketty at first responded to the FT findings in a rather congenial manner, admitting his collection of empirics may be lacking. But then in an email to Bloomberg News, he doubled down on his obviously flawed statistics and claimed “there’s no mistake or error” in his work. I guess you can respect the man’s persistence.
Data debauchery aside, there is something more fundamentally wrong with Piketty’s approach to economics. Anyone brought up on post-New Deal economic science has been taught that positive methodology is the only legitimate means to interpret market phenomena. Aggregate data is viewed as the guiding force for all economic trends. Both the Keynesian and Monetarist schools look to empirics to derive cause and effect. They call this method “scientific” as it corresponds nicely to the scientific method. Piketty’s work was at first largely commended precisely because of its reliance on historic figures which were used to draw conclusions.
It’s hard to get Americans to care about Britain but it’s worth checking in on those fannies once in a while to see how their social experiments are going, because we tend to follow close behind. Political correctness is leaking into American sports and it’s already completely drowned British football. Now that Adam Silver is a hero for publicly humiliating his Jewish coworker, we are going to see a lot more rules being implemented from off the field. Yesterday, we learned Obama and his imaginary son have decreed an end to “suck-it-up“ sports. This is very disturbing news because The Game is the last bastion of meritocracy in this country. It’s the one area of true American fun that hasn”t been ruined by the thought police.
“Who is best for the job?” used to be at the top of America’s priority list. Sometime in the past quarter-century, however, it was assumed white males were cheating, so the rules were changed to enforce the same pie chart of equality on absolutely everyone. Now that racial and gender diversity are the top priority, the best choice has slipped down to third and a fun game is plummeting toward last place. It’s not like this in MLB. If you can throw a baseball at 100 mph, you”ve got the job. The teams don”t care what race you are, how old you are, or even if you”re an American citizen. They only care who can do the job.
This is what makes American sports so great, but PC is threatening it. Commissioner Bud Selig recently complained that there weren”t enough black players, saying he was “sickened“ by the dwindling numbers. Yeah, Bud, someone is saying no to a record-breaking fastball because it was thrown with a black hand. How brainwashed can you be? Baseball is such a rare skill set, it was a perfect place for blacks to break through racial barriers. Jackie Robinson was met with derision at first but when the fans saw him play, the game erased their prejudice.
It was like that in Britain too. Soccer was about the game, and the fans were free to be as violent and offensive as they wanted to be. I won”t deny there were some rude words but it was all in good fun. I was born in Britain in the 1970s, and all I remember about race and soccer was that EVERY kid wanted to be Pele. In the 1980s, when black players such as Mark Chamberlain and Viv Anderson came on the field, the revisionists tell us they were met with bananas on the pitch. This is a myth. I think I remember my grandfather saying, “Darkies don”t have the mettle for football. They lose their nerve,” but their skill was undeniable and the tiny group of curmudgeons like him was soon proved wrong. Soccer was already such a global game, seeing nonwhites on the field didn”t look unusual to us. Britain was tolerant considering the circumstances. We”d recently received a huge influx of “Yardies” (Jamaicans) and everyone was still figuring it out. Today, London is as cosmopolitan as New York, and outside of extremist Islam, they”re all British. The British football league must be about three-quarters darkie by now. There are still yobs waving huge Union Jacks in the crowd. There are still fierce English nationalists who would gladly murder the foreign teams. But what the elite don”t get about soccer hooligans is that they are also black. Even members of the EDL are black. They”ve assimilated and they”re now proud Englishmen but the media class won”t leave it alone. They don”t get the game.
Tottenham Hotspur is a team from Stamford Hill, which is also home to the largest Hasidic Jewish population in Europe. Fans need taunt content so they call them Yids. When I was a kid the chant was “Does your rabbi know you”re here?” because the games were usually held on Saturday. Liverpool supporters are always particularly harsh because scousers are trash. At Spurs games they”d make a hissing sound to mimic the gas chambers. I don”t know if you”ve heard 50,000 people go “Ssss” but it’s pretty scary. That’s what British football is about, though. It’s about conflict. The Spurs” opponents also used to yell “Yidooo” at them for being a Jewish team. It’s really fun to say and once you start, it’s hard to stop. As with rappers taking back the word “nigger,” Spurs fans soon started yelling “Yido” about themselves. They even started calling themselves the “Yid Army.” Black player Jermain Defoe is one of their best and they invented a chant for him which goes, “Jermain Defoe, he’s a yido.” Unfortunately, the PC police have decided the term is racist even if you”re saying it about yourself or a non-Jewish black player whom you adore, so they have instituted a ban on it. The fans are fighting to keep their co-opted insult and the PC police are literally arresting them for it. Is this what we have to look forward to in a post-Sterling America?
In Glasgow, the two teams are Celtic (Catholics) and Rangers (Protestant). The managers” kids still have to go to school with police escorts. I”m a Celtic supporter because that’s what my cousins told me I am. After IRA activist Bobby Sands starved himself to death, Rangers fans would chant, “Can you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?” to the tune of “She”ll be Coming Round the Mountain.” If you walked into a Celtic pub today and sang that song, you”d have a bottle smashed on your head before you finished the word “chicken.” This conflict has largely gone unnoticed because it’s white trash fighting white trash. Liberal arts profs don”t study nonminority oppression, so they don”t bother investigating it. If they did, they”d discover that bananas on the pitch and rabbi questions are tame in comparison to the rest of the game’s rabble-rousing. In 1958, when a plane full of Manchester United players were killed, Manchester City fans cheered and began singing this unbelievably offensive song at games:
Who’s that lying on the runway?”¨
Who’s that dying in the snow? “¨
It’s Matt Busby and his boys,”¨
Making all the fucking noise,Ӭ
Because they can”t get the airplane to go!
After all these years of bloviating, I still can”t tell in advance what will get people riled up. I”ll spend hours in research for a good deep thumb-sucking piece on Pacific theater geostrategy, and it falls dead-born from the press. Another time I”ll procrastinate until an hour before deadline and then, half drunk and yearning for sleep, knock out 1,000 words about the fluff in my navel”and next morning my inbox is bursting with impassioned readers saying “Yessss!!!” or “Are you serious?” or “You are insane and should be locked up.”
Thus it was with a passing mention of CEDA 2014 in the May 3rd podcast of Radio Derb. Those few offhand remarks got my biggest email bag of the year so far.
CEDA is the Cross Examination Debate Association. It describes itself in its constitution as “a national intercollegiate debate organization” with a mission to “create and support a community of scholar-advocates within the larger; [sic] institution of higher education who [sic] respect one another as seekers of knowledge and agents of social justice.”
Well, CEDA has an annual tournament where schools from around the country field teams of debaters, two persons per team, to debate some issue of moment before a panel of judges.
For the CEDA 2014 Nationals, held at Indiana University in Bloomington this past March 21-24, the motion before the house was that the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted.
Here is an extract from the argument against the motion, presented by two young black women from Baltimore’s Towson University. I haven”t been selective; it’s all like this. You can watch the entire final debate here. This extract begins at 1:55:05 on that video.
They only re-create what it means to be an authentic nigger because we, ah, we are not allowed to read, ah, we are not allowed to read, ah, certain things and speak in a certain way because we, ah, are seen as natur … as naturally speaking, ah, as truly speaking to niggers, but there’s a question, ah, of who even wrote, ah, of who even wrote this shit …
To these weighty arguments, the motion’s defenders, two young black men from the University of Oklahoma, responded thus (extract beginning at 2:14:37):
Before death is eternity. After death is eternity. There is no death, there is only eternity, and I ride the wings of eternity like Yah! Yah! Yah! Shee”clack, clack. See, my time is … my [incomprehensible] doesn”t go undisturbed because time makes dreams deferred, and I”m a times turning my days a daymares and my nightmares [incomprehensible] my passion. Click, click! The nigger tom beating my ass, and yo, I be having dreams of chocolate-covered watermelons …
The judges ruled that the Towson ladies had won the debate. The emcee, a middle-aged white guy in a suit”I think it’s CEDA President Paul Mabrey”announces the decision at 3:47:43. The people in the debate hall, mostly white, academics and students from the look of them, burst into applause and cheers.
The enthusiasm of the white spectators and supervisors was shared by the press. Carrie Wells of the Baltimore Sun wrote a respectful story about the winners.
Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, both from Baltimore, bested a team from the University of Oklahoma in the final round. … The team spent untold hours poring over books, articles and other publications to craft their arguments, then took more time to practice their delivery strategies, she said.
The local Fox channel was even more respectful, with hostess Megan Gilliland”white, of course, like Ms. Wells”swooning over Mss. Ruffin and Johnson as if they were not the barking savages they had presented themselves as in the tournament, but victors in a genuine battle of wits with opponents deftly deploying the figures of classical rhetoric in the service of reason. The debaters simpered back winsomely at Ms. Gilliland.
Denunciatory reviews of Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History have typically fallen into two general categories:
“¢ Well, nobody believes that race has no biological reality and is just a social construct, so the first half of the book, while accurate, is unnecessary.
“¢ Race has no biological reality and is just a social construct!
It’s characteristic of the dumbing down effect that race has on intellectual discourse that it occurs to so few that race can be a biological reality that has been constructed by social decisions.
Advocates of the dogma that race is merely a “social construct” point to the artificiality of the traditional American “one drop of blood” rule for defining blackness. Yet it’s likely that the one-drop rule itself helped construct the American genetic reality of a bimodal distribution of black and white genes, in contrast to the more evenly blended Latin American populations.
The essential intellectual shortcoming is that Americans have largely forgotten that the essence of race isn”t skin color but genealogy. Races are extended families of individuals who are more closely related to some people than to other people. Skin color and other visible traits should not be seen as an end in themselves: instead, they are of interest in inferring ancestry. Charles Darwin made this point in an 1857 letter to Thomas Huxley:
I knew, of course, of the Cuvierian view of Classification, but I think that most naturalists look for something further, & search for “the natural system”,””for the plan on which the Creator has worked” &c &c.”It is this further element which I believe to be simply genealogical. …
Grant all races of man descended from one race; grant that all structure [i.e., physical features] of each race of man were perfectly known”grant that a perfect table of descent of each race was perfectly known” grant all this, & then do you not think that most would prefer as the best classification, a genealogical one.
Race isn”t just skin deep; it’s about who supplied your genes. In horse racing, for instance, where a full genealogy going back 20 generations is common, membership in the Thoroughbred breed is not a question of color but of pedigree. An awareness of genealogy has largely disappeared from American intellectual life, but it is omnipresent in high culture (Oedipus Rex) and pop culture (“I am your father.”)
It’s widely assumed by race-does-not-existists that there is no correlation between race and anything real, but as Darwin noted to Huxley:
Generally, we may safely presume, that the resemblance of races & their pedigrees would go together.
Although Wade’s critics claim that race is too hazy to be scientific, pedigree is the most clear-cut thing in the biological world. Every single human being’s family tree has space for one mother and one father, two grandmothers and two grandfathers, and so forth. Ten generations ago (roughly in the 18th century), your family tree has openings for 1024 ancestors, twenty generations ago a million ancestors, thirty generations ago a billion, and forty generations ago (roughly a millennium) a trillion ancestors.
Of course, there weren”t a trillion individuals alive in 1000 A.D., so your ancestors had to double up. To put it in neutral family tree terms: you are descended by multiple pathways from many of your ancestors. To put it in a yuck-inducing way: you are inbred. Or, more positively: your ancestors didn”t mate randomly with the whole world.
Who reproduces with whom is course a social question. Indeed, it may well be the social question. Relatively endogenous breeding clusters are socially constructed by the creation of all sorts of barriers to panmixia, such as language, religion, and class.
One of the simplest is geographic distance.
Consider the creation of one of the world’s great continental-scale races, the Amerindians of the New World. Although there may well be complexities, the basic story continues to be that toward the end of the last ice age, Asian hunters in Beringia finally found a path open to the southeast. Some of them decided to leave behind the lands and relatives they knew and follow that opening into a new world.
This realm proved immensely favorable to human habitation, as the expansion to the tip of South America by 11,000 years ago (and the near simultaneous extinction of most large, tasty land mammals) proved. In The Third Chimpanzee a couple of decades ago, Jared Diamond tried to imagine that epochal choice:
It must have been a dramatic moment when, after entering the ice-free corridor from an overpopulated, overhunted Alaska, they emerged to see herds of tame mammoths, camels, and other beasts. In front of them stretched the Great Plains to the horizon. As they began to explore, they must soon have realized … that there were no people at all in front of them, and that they had truly arrived first in a fertile land.
Oddly enough, the “Race is just a social construct” crowd seldom notice all the effort they themselves put into constructing races. For example, George Zimmerman, who is triracial through his Peruvian mother, was strenuously declared to be a “white Hispanic,” even though when Zimmerman put on a suit and tie for his trial he looked rather like the son Obama never had.
Because Latin America didn”t have a one-drop rule for defining who can marry whom, it has lots of people much like Zimmerman who don”t fit all that well into American racial categories. The current racial makeup of Latin America was socially constructed by the Iberian system of mestizaje, which creates a color continuum rather than a color line. But that system doesn”t exactly make for a racial utopia: Brazil probably leads the world in black juvenile delinquents getting gunned down by rent-a-cops as it tries to get its act together for the World Cup.
Conversely, to push for “a path to citizenship” to add to their electoral base, Democrats are constantly trying to construct an Angry Hispanic Race out of a mostly apathetic ethnicity.
Within my lifetime, The New York Times will close its doors for good. “It’s not even a newspaper anymore,” Dennis Miller likes to say. “It’s just a building acrobats climb.”
So adding to the thousands of words already written about the dismissal of its first female executive editor Jill Abramson (allegedly for being “bossy” and/or demanding the same compensation as her male counterparts) seems as peevish and pointless as picking apart a condemned man’s last meal.
Especially because we can never really know what goes on behind closed doors, of either the bedroom or the office variety. Reading articles about places I”ve worked, people I”ve known, and events I”ve attended helped convince me long ago that journalism is mostly bunk.
The Times itself contributed to my skepticism. This is, after all, the newspaper that won a Pulitzer for intentionally lying about Stalin’s starvation of a million Ukrainians; that manufactured and marketed the socially toxic urban legends surrounding Kitty Genovese’s murder; that ran hundreds of Jayson Blair’s fabricated stories”and got the dates of the moon landing and Martin Luther King’s assassination wrong (among many other things) in the paper’s Walter Cronkite obit.
That’s one of my favorites, because the writer’s excuse was that when she double-checked those dates, she wrote them down wrong. See, I once had this wacky idea that to get a job at The New York Times“the so-called “paper of record””to begin with, you”d have to be the kind of person who wouldn”t need to look up dates like that in the first place.
Yet Alessandra Stanley still works”and makes mistakes“at The Times, and Jill Abramson does not. Not even her tattoo saved her.
Abramson has four tattoos, something you”d never guess by looking at her. One of them is”her words“”the amazing “T” in The New York Times newspaper,” one of the “institutions I revere.”
While I”m no oil painting myself, being female, I can”t help but add that you”d also never guess by looking at her that Jill Abramson is, too. Wouldn”t it be hilarious if it turned out she technically wasn”t “fired for being a woman” because she wasn”t a woman to start with?
For the first time in 100 years, a British national election has been won by a party other than Conservative or Labor. Conservative: 24%; Labor: 25%; UKIP: 27%. It’s an historic result.
Let’s not get too excited. This isn”t the General Election, which decides the national government for the next five years or so. This is the election of our representatives to the European Parliament: that joke institution of faceless tax-and-spend bureaucrats who can issue 20,000-word directives on correct practices concerning hazelnuts. (No, I”m not making this up.)
Most people have traditionally taken little notice of the EU elections, since the European Union is so remote, incomprehensible, and boring. But this election has become a mighty protest vote, a cry of anger from the people, against the EU. And it’s the same story across Europe. The anti-EU, anti-immigration French National Front won 26% of the votes, the Danish People’s Party another 26%, Austria’s Freedom Party 20%.
The victors in Britain are UKIP”the UK Independence Party. They are led by the charismatic, beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking Nigel Farage, who likes to portray himself as a man of the people. He’s actually an ex-commodities broker, from a background as smart and privileged as that of most smooth-suited professional politicians nowadays. But he is in touch with what the plebes are thinking, an instinct that eludes most of his peers.
Farage does everything that politicians shouldn”t do. He dismissed a previous manifesto by his own party as “486 pages of drivel.” He refused to sack one of his members who referred to Africa as “Bongo-Bongo Land.” And he recently said that if he had to have a foreign family living next door, he would rather they were German than Romanian.
Shock, horror! He was suggesting that not all foreigners are equal! The liberal lapdog media declared him finished”but people supported him all the more. They agreed that some foreigners are likely to be more civilized than others, but were too scared to say so out loud, for fear of hate crime charges from the thought police.
But people do have a hierarchy of preferences: always have and always will. They prefer people like them. Most English people would rather live next door to their own. They can converse over the garden fence in English, the wife isn”t hidden under a burqa, and they get the allusions to Monty Python sketches. So those who can afford it live in areas of Britain where this is likely to be the case.
If not English, Dutch or Danish neighbors would probably be OK”or German, despite one or two little misunderstandings over the past century. They behave much as English people would behave. This isn”t prejudice. Prejudice means pre-judging, without evidence. This is informed opinion. If the family is Romanian, they may well be gypsy too”or “Roma,” as we are now obliged to say. And they are factually more likely to steal. Romanians are now the fifth largest group of foreigners in our jails, squeezing in between Jamaicans and Pakistanis. The cost of our Eastern European prison population is now £73 million a year, kindly paid for by the British taxpayer whom they went to jail for robbing in the first place.
If our next-door neighbors are Somalian, Afghan, Nigerian, or Pakistani, they are statistically more likely to remove their wives” clitorises, to murder their daughters for being seen with a white English boy, to think that 9/11 or our own 7/7 bombings were a fine idea, or to behead a British soldier in a London street (see “Drummer Lee Rigby, death of”). Not all Muslims are terrorists, no; but almost all terrorists these days are Muslims.
The people of Britain do not feel, on the whole, that these new features of our national life have “enriched” us. And certain stripes in our happy-clappy multi-culti rainbow are directly at odds with each other. Our left-liberal establishment is pressing ahead with gay marriage, for instance: two gentlemen will walk up the aisle, and walk back down again as husband and wife. How is a traditional Muslim family supposed to “integrate,” to feel at home, in such a society? Have our leaders quite thought this one through?
UKIP has risen to the top because of all of this. Their triumph in the elections isn”t essentially anti-EU as such”although there are plenty of reasons to be anti-EU, for sure. To take an example: the European’s Union’s financial accounts have failed their annual audit for 18 years in succession. So many billions of pounds of European taxpayers” money go missing each year”into Mafia motorway scams, wind farm skims, and olive oil scandals”that the accounts don”t add up. The EU admits it “loses” around £100 billion a year, although it may be much more.
A vote against the EU is the only way a European voter today can vote against mass immigration, because the EU is all for it. Of all the dangerous pipe dreams of this this sclerotic, undemocratic, toxic socialist superstate, none has been more destructive than its Open Borders policy. “Henceforward there is neither Jew nor Greek, Pole nor Spaniard, Welshman nor Romanian gypsy, for ye are all one under EU directive!” And we can move into each other’s countries with instant benefits, free housing, and health care.
It’s a disaster. The flow of white English people to Bulgaria (annual GDP per capita around £4,000) is noticeably sluggish. The other way, it’s pretty lively. The population of Britain, a country much smaller than France or Germany, is approaching 70 million. We”re full up, and we”re fed up. The buses are full, the shops are crowded, our green and pleasant land is being concreted over rapidly thanks to the “housing crisis”: a crisis created by successive pro-immigration governments.
Our celebrated National Health Service we now refer to as the International Health Service, in our droll way. If you”re a white English native, and have law-abidingly paid your taxes for the past forty years, can you get an appointment to see your doctor? Yes, if you quietly take your place in the three-week-long queue behind the obese, wheezing Bulgars, the wall-eyed Estonians, the tubercular Turks and pregnant Nigerians …
Whoa there”surely not even the EU is as one-world and dumb as to think Nigeria is part of Europe? Well, not yet, no. But if a Nigerian, or Somalian, or Kurd can get into one country in the EU”like Malta, or Portugal”he or she can then walk straight into any other. And if a Nigerian lady gets on a plane in Lagos in an advanced state of pregnancy, and times it so her eighth or ninth little darling is delivered just as she reaches British soil, then the baby gets instant British citizenship. Brilliant!
Writing in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates”you can thank his Black Panther dad for giving him that self-segregating first name”recently penned a sprawling essay called “The Case for Reparations.” It rings all the familiar bells the race-baiters have been clanging in our ears for generations now, insisting that the “income gap” and “wealth gap” between white and black Americans is solely due to that evil enduring shadow institution known as “white supremacy,” which apparently slipped up when it allowed Jewish people and Asians to earn more on average than non-Jewish whites do.
The essay also dredges up all the tiresome hate-crime porn from ages ago, possibly because it’s uncomfortable to talk about stats regarding modern interracial violence. The words “lynch” and “lynching” appear six times, as does a nearly century-old photo of a Texas lynching. We are informed that “Mississippi lynched Emmett Till” rather than what actually happened, which is that three guys in Mississippi lynched Emmett Till. We are not informed that every single year, twice as many black Americans murder one another than were lynched throughout American history. “Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves,” Coates alleges, despite the fact that at best, 7.5% of white Southerners owned slaves in 1860.
After endlessly bemoaning the fact that blacks haven’t reached economic parity with whites in America, he writes:
In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good”and enduring twice as much.
I’d like to believe that, but first I’d have to see Barack Obama’s school records while ignoring the fact that he was raised by relatively affluent whites.
Coates cites a statement by LBJ that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” Maybe not, but African-American poverty is not African poverty. (More on that in a minute.)
Toward the end of the essay, Coates dredges up the Holocaust and how Israel wrangled reparations from Germany. He quotes a “Meir Dworzecki” as saying, “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews.” Sleep tight, Herr Dworzecki”7 to 9 million Germans died in World War II.
Writing for Slate, Jamelle Bouie”he of yet another self-segregating name”rides Ta-Nehisi’s Coates-tails and alleges that even the lowly Irish have unfairly “reaped the fruits” of American prosperity. He claims that “America stole wealth from black people” without acknowledging that modern low-income blacks are net tax consumers rather than taxpayers and are therefore doing the stealing. Bouie speaks of an “unequal playing field” apparently without pausing for a nanosecond to consider whether we may be dealing with unequal players.
The estimates I’ve seen regarding what the net value of black American slaves in 1860 would translate to in current dollars range from $1.75 trillion to $10 trillion. Writing in Forbes, some white guy reckons America’s net wealth is somewhere around $80 trillion, adding that “Even if slavery reparations are righteously due they would amount to around and about the current cost of food stamps.” Since total American annual welfare spending is now around $1 trillion, and since the country has spent trillions in welfare since the 1950s, and since blacks chew up a disproportionate amount of welfare expenditures, it’s possible that the “reparations” may have already been paid”with interest, even.
Discussions of reparations tend to hinge on black Americans’ economic conditions relative to white Americans. Such discussions never seem to look across the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to compare their conditions relative to Africans. (Speaking of crossing the Atlantic, despite the sinister ghost of white supremacy that looms over America, around 20,000 Africans move here yearly, while apparently very few black Americans repatriate to Africa.)
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “reparation” is derived from a Latin word meaning to “restore” or “repair.” So if you want to get literal and borderline Aspergery about it, real reparations would consist of returning African Americans to roughly the state they’d be in if they’d never been plucked from their ancestral homelands. If ex-Africans have truly been damaged by being transported to America and increasing their numbers a hundredfold in the process, it would stand to reason that they’d currently be doing better in Africa.
The Week’s Most Rotten, Forgotten, and Misbegotten Headlines
HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A PAMPERED YOUNG MAN SCORNED
On Friday evening in the small coastal town of Isla Vista, CA, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger stabbed three of his male roommates to death. He then went on a shooting and reckless-driving rampage that killed three others and injured 13 before he apparently shot himself to death.
The day before the massacre, an icy, smirking Rodger filmed himself sitting in his BMW and announcing his plan for the attack:
Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. … I’m 22 years old and still a virgin, never even kissed a girl. … You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. … On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there.
The entire transcript of that seven-minute video is printed here.
Allegedly diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, Rodger had a YouTube channel featuring videos that alternated between boasts of how “awesome” he was and laments of how women refused to pay attention to him. Elliot was the son of Peter Rodger, a second-unit director on The Hunger Games, and his videos led alarmed family members to notify police a few weeks ago. According to a family attorney, an interview with Elliot led police to conclude he was a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human.”
This perfectly polite, kind, and wonderful human had written a 100,000-word manifesto called My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger, in which he claimed that “the ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female.” He also had designed a chart posted on Facebook blaming the sexual revolution for the breakdown of monogamous relationships. The chart foresaw an “Elliot Rodger Revolution” that would kill all females.
Rodger had also planned to slay his stepmother and younger brother, but this never came to fruition due to his apparent suicide. He openly blamed his killing spree on romantic rejection. Others have blamed it on guns, video games, the culture of instant notoriety, Asperger syndrome, misogyny, and the effects of being a child of divorce. But in the end, Rodger may have been nothing more than the spoiled little victim of affluenza.
PAT SAJAK’S WHEEL OF OUTRAGE
Conservative game-show host and impenitent Polish American Pat Sajak has been amusing himself over the past few months by taking potshots on Twitter at progressive sanctimony. In April he mocked “Equal Pay Day” by claiming he had spent the day distracting his Wheel of Fortune letter-turner Vanna White and that she had “especially loved the puppet show.” He also openly proclaimed his heterosexuality regardless of the “career consequences.” His latest Twitter brushfire came last Monday when he Tweeted:
I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.
The ensuing uproar later led him to clarify that his “original Tweet was intended to parody the name-calling directed at climate skeptics.” Then on Thursday he announced: “Leaving now for meeting of Flat Earth Society.”
SO SIOUX ME!
Yet another tedious scalping expedition erupted in the Great Plains after pictures were released showing University of North Dakota students wearing T-shirts “featuring an image similar to the university’s retired Fighting Sioux Indian head logo drinking from a beer bong, with the words ‘Siouxper Drunk.’” At a hastily assembled powwow”sorry, a summit“titled “Creating an Atmosphere of Respect,” North Dakota University System Chancellor Larry Skogen called the T-shirt debacle an “appalling incident.” School chancellor Larry Skogen referred to it as a “terrible occurrence.” Standing Rock Tribe chairman David Archambault refused to offer a peace pipe and said, “Expel them. Expel the students. Zero tolerance.” Still, after the smoke signals clear, quit speaking with forked tongue”the fact remains that Injuns have higher rates of alcoholism than Paleface does.
FEMALE VIAGRA AND SEXISM IN THE THYROID INDUSTRY
A North Carolina pharmaceutical company is struggling with the FDA to gain approval for Flibanserin, a “little pink pill” designed to alter brain chemistry and enhance female sexual desire. So far the FDA has rejected their applications, leading “sexual health crusader” Lauren Streicher to insist that “There’s absolutely some sexism at play.” Cory Silverberg, a self-described “sexuality educator,” “sexual media consultant,” and “co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability, claims that “the FDA is sexist (also racist, classist, homophobic, transphoibic, [sic] ableist, and more)….But all science is political.” Would it be indelicate to suggest that Silverberg should blow it out of his grammatically disabled ass?
Mary Shomon, who finds thyroids so fascinating that she has written several books about them, claims that “sexism is unfortunately far too common in the thyroid world,” women face “rampant sexism…throughout the endocrinology world,” that there is a concerted “effort to degrade, demean, dehumanize, and otherwise dismiss women with thyroid disease,” and “I regularly hear the term ‘crazy’ used in reference to thyroid patients, and myself.” Gee, one can’t imagine why.
