It started innocently enough. People on the right wanted something a little stronger than National Review-style conservatism. As the most extreme elements of the racist left ballooned, metastasized, and became an intractable part of the “mainstream,” many rightists felt hamstrung by the rules of engagement forced upon them by the conservative establishment. Leftists were all over the media railing about how whites are the root of all evil. “Whites are genetically malignant! ‘Whiteness’ must be stamped out! Nonwhites are good and noble! Any supposed harm they do is merely because whites made ’em do it!” And what type of response did the right’s “intellectual leaders” allow? Only the safest, softest, most GOP-approved talking points. “The Democrats are the real racists! We’re the party of Abe Lincoln and Jackie Robinson! We despise white ‘identity,’ and any supposed harm black Americans do is because the Democrats made ’em do it!”
In other words, responses that didn’t actually challenge the core claims of the left’s racist ideologues. Yes, you’re not responsible for your own problems! But don’t blame whites, blame Democrats! Don’t blame slavery, blame Democrat slavers!
Immigration? “Come one, come all! Just please sign in at the border before helping agribusiness keep the price of celery low. Oh, and here’s the form for public assistance. We have no problem with immigration! We just want to make sure the bouncer stamps your hand on the way in. And if the nightclub gets too cramped, the fire hazard will be our strength!”
Some folks on the right wanted a little more elbow room to fight back. They wanted to be free to counter leftist extremism on race with honest debate and factual arguments rather than sanitized, party-approved answers. They wanted to be able to cite things like black-on-white crime stats. They wanted to be able to suggest that maybe not everyone should be welcomed into this country simply because they can fill out a form. They wanted to be able to say, “White isn’t bad.”
The “alt” in alt-right was supposed to refer to an alternative to Conservative, Inc. Throughout 2015 and 2016, mealymouthed National Review, with its “fire John Derbyshire for his ‘racist’ satire” attitude, saw its influence wane. Establishment conservatives failed to stop Trump, and all of a sudden there we were, November 8th and victory. The rightists who longed for a bit more red meat in their diet seemed poised to be sated.
Of course, almost immediately, things started falling to shit. Alt-right “leaders” turned out to be narcissistic sieg-heiling morons who soon enough became obsessed with internal purity tests (“Yer a Jew-lover! No, YER a Jew-lover! Yer a faggot degenerate! No, YER a faggot degenerate!”) and bullshit issues that don’t matter one bit to the average American, let alone the average blue-collar Trump voter (“In 1784, Mayer Rothschild entrusted the father of Adolphus Solomons with the Grand Medallion of Zion, which Adam Weishaupt stole to bury the truth about the Kol Nidre”).
So, sure, the alt-right never became what a lot of people wanted it to be—a braver, more honest, and more effective voice for the right on matters of race. And now, I would argue, we’re seeing its final death throes. Because these days the alt-right is actively trying to bring back the greatest and most devastating plague of the 1980s. And no, it’s not AIDS (yeah, I used a bit of misdirection in the title). Sure, AIDS was bad (this is why people read me—I take bold stands), but I would present the honor of “worst ’80s plague ever” to the “satanic ritual abuse” hysteria that swept the nation throughout the decade. With AIDS, you could at least protect yourself by taking rudimentary safe-sex precautions. But there was no way for ordinary, law-abiding Americans to protect themselves from the “satanic ritual pedophile” madness. The targets were usually random and arbitrary, and once you were tagged, your life was ruined.
Most millennials have no knowledge of this monumentally destructive witch-hunt that ruined the lives of thousands of innocent people. Families destroyed, careers destroyed, childhoods destroyed. I don’t have the space to provide a complete history lesson, but I can supply a few links (and here and here). And if you’re too lazy to click, here’s the gist of it: In the early 1980s, America (and, worst of all, American law enforcement) became convinced that there was a massive hidden network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles stretching from one end of the nation to the other. Anyone could be a member of this infernal cabal. It could be your neighbor, your child’s teacher, your pastor, your grocer, your mailman, or Chuck Norris. Law enforcement took the existence of this network as fact, and, as a result, anyone who didn’t see it (like the children who’d supposedly been molested) was subjected to CIA-style interrogation techniques (including hypnosis, intimidation, and outright threats) designed to extract “the truth” from those too blind to know they’d been satanically abused.
Legal proprieties were flaunted, and defendants were deprived of their most basic rights. Only the narrative mattered: The network exists, it must be crushed, and anyone who suggests caution or argues for due process is a (they didn’t use this word back then, but it fits) “cuck.”
Today, the alt-right (or what continues to feed off the moss under the detritus) has decided that this is once again the most vital issue facing the nation. The alt-right has become obsessed with the idea that there’s a massive satanic ritual pedophile network crisscrossing the country, comprising the rich, the powerful, everyone in Hollywood, and anyone who dares to ask for hard evidence (“That just proves you’re part of it, man”).
In fact, just last week some alt-right anti-Jewish conspiracy ninny named “Vox Day” accused me of being an accessory after the fact to the satanic Hollywood pedo ring, because according to him I know the names of those involved but choose to remain silent, because Jew. (“Vox” was butthurt over last week’s column, in which I argued that “edgy” comedians who make kiddie jokes are not necessarily pedophiles.) I looked “Vox” up, and apparently he’s a failed garage-band musician and “elves and ogres” fantasy author (amazingly, this guy couldn’t hack it in two of the least demanding professions known to man), and now he’s supposedly some kind of alt-right honcho. Big deal. Being a VIP on the Pizzagate fringe is like being the most handsome muselmann in the terminal ward.
In just two years, the alt-right has gone from “Can we admit that there’s nothing wrong with being white?” to “Our prime directive is to hunt down the secret cabal of satanic ritual abusers that only we can see.” In a cruel irony, the disillusioned rightists who fled establishment conservatism for the alt-right have now fled the alt-right because its most lunatic elements have changed the mandate.
Here’s another irony: One would think that the alt-right would be the last group in the world to want to resummon the satanic ritual abuse genie of the ’80s. Why? Well, let’s take a look at the case of Bill and Kathy Swan (one case out of hundreds). The Swans were an ordinary white Christian couple living a normal suburban life outside Seattle…until the state seized their 3-year-old daughter and put them on trial for being ritual molesters in 1986. Why? Well, the day-care center to which they sent their little girl had recently hired a new teacher, Lisa Conradi. And very shortly after being hired, Conradi called the cops from her workplace. Apparently, according to her, the Swans’ daughter had decided, for reasons never explained, to confide in this total stranger and unburden herself of a terrible secret: The Swans were ritual abusers who’d been raping her and other neighborhood children for years.
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law.
Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language.
Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came swift.
Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism calls the law a “retreat from democracy” as it restricts the right of self-determination, once envisioned to include all within Israel’s borders, to the Jewish people. Inequality is enshrined.
And Israel, says Brownfeld, is not the nation-state of American Jews.
What makes this clash of significance is that it is another battle in the clash that might fairly be called the issue of our age.
The struggle is between the claims of tribe, ethnicity, peoples and nations, against the commands of liberal democracy.
In Europe, the Polish people seek to preserve the historic and ethnic character of their country with reforms that the EU claims violate Poland’s commitment to democracy.
If Warsaw persists, warns the EU, the Poles will be punished. But which comes first: Poland, or its political system, if the two are in conflict?
Other nations are ignoring the open-borders requirements of the EU’s Schengen Agreement, as they attempt to block migrants from Africa and the Middle East.
They want to remain who they are, open borders be damned.
Britain is negotiating an exit from the EU because the English voted for independence from that transitional institution whose orders they saw as imperiling their sovereignty and altering their identity.
When Ukraine, in the early 1990s, was considering secession from Russia, Bush I warned Kiev against such “suicidal nationalism.”
Ukraine ignored President Bush. Today, new questions have arisen.
If Ukrainians had a right to secede from Russia and create a nation-state to preserve their national identity, do not the Russians in Crimea and the Donbass have the same right—to secede from Ukraine and rejoin their kinsmen in Russia?
As Georgia seceded from Russia at the same time, why do not the people of South Ossetia have the same right to secede from Georgia?
Who are we Americans, 5,000 miles away, to tell tribes, peoples and embryonic nations of Europe whether they may form new states to reflect and preserve their national identity?
Nor are these minor matters.
At Paris in 1919, Sudeten Germans and Danzig Germans were, against their will, put under Czech and Polish rule. British and French resistance to permitting these peoples to secede and rejoin their kinfolk in 1938 and 1939 set the stage for the greatest war in history.
Here in America, we, too, appear to be in an endless quarrel about who we are.
Is America a different kind of nation, a propositional nation, an ideological nation, defined by a common consent to the ideas and ideals of our iconic documents like the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address?
Or are we like other nations, a unique people with our own history, heroes, holidays, religion, language, literature, art, music, customs and culture, recognizable all over the world as “the Americans”?
Since 2001, those who have argued that we Americans were given, at the birth of the republic, a providential mission to democratize mankind, have suffered an unbroken series of setbacks.
Living as we do in a racist society that acts like white people are the greatest thing since sliced bread—even though everyone knows George Washington Carver invented sliced bread—we are often left with the impression that sub-Saharan Africa is a backward land of hopeless poverty and toddler-level superstition. Sure, if you want to get technical, the average IQ of a sub-Saharan African is a cognitively impoverished 68, but that can all be easily blamed on colonialism and white supremacy. Before the white man came and destroyed their advanced civilizations, sub-Saharan Africans were so smart that they didn’t even need things such as written languages and technology.
Sitting here as a white man in a white land on a shiny-bright summer afternoon, I was struck with a deep stabbing pain in my soft white underbelly to realize that my impressions of Africa had been spoon-fed to me by other white people and not by Africans—and I’m not talking about American blacks, because they don’t count.
“Why not let Africans explain Africa without the oppressive filter of Western constructs such as logic?” I thought to myself with a smug smile. “Surely Africa has a vibrant and thriving media that portrays African life in an authentically African way.” I smiled again, overwhelmed with my cleverness.
During my intensive research of African media—a process that took at least a couple hours—I realized that more than any other continent, Africa is a land of magic.
I didn’t pay too much attention to that ravaged continent’s political landscape, because African politicians seem to be the same as politicians everywhere else—one accuses the other of having a small brain, while the other counters that with all due respect, his opponent is the son of a dog.
I also sidestepped all the debunked and discredited tropes about Africa being a crime-ridden hellhole, because there isn’t a place on earth where women don’t gang-rape men at gunpoint, where toddlers aren’t found with their tongue and penis severed, where triplets aren’t born in a mall toilet and all of them die, and where men don’t chop their grandfathers to death with an ax for daring to suggest they get an education. We are all imperfect human beings, and not even Canadians, as wholesome as they may be, are immune to such foibles. Everywhere from Edmonton to Cape Cod to Harare, when men suspect their women of cheating, they smash out nine of their rival’s teeth with a log. From Manchester to Oslo to Nairobi, when lovers quarrel, they squeeze or bite their partner’s genitals in a moment of unbridled passion.
Speaking of passion, a stereotype about Africans that is often unfairly lodged against them is that they have very high sex drives and enjoy having sex with everything from hippos to tree stumps. What’s wrong with enjoying sex? Is somebody a little jealous, perhaps?
Via the inscrutable wonders of electronic media, Africans are able to reach out to one another and offer help and advice with their multifarious sexual dilemmas.
African journalists offer loads of sexual tips—both figuratively and all too literally—that may help you avoid becoming one of the 25 million or so Africans that are walking or hobbling around with HIV. We learn that “Vaginal odours are easy to treat,” that compulsive masturbation can be a problem for young African men, that you shouldn’t be alarmed if you have “painless swollen lumps” on your vagina, that it’s wise to keep your “hymen intact to avoid being labeled a ‘whore,’” and that, as Hillary Clinton famously reminded us, it takes a village to provide “Succour for baby without anus.”
But sometimes even Africans get carried away with their healthy sex drives, which leads to politicians busting through underage girls’ hymens with their fingers, criminal cases over forced vagina-shaving, and a preacher who calls himself “Jesus One Touch” denying that he could have possibly ever molested his daughter simply because his busybody of a wife was always snooping around. Yes, sad as it may seem, sometimes even African men of the cloth yield to the temptations of the flesh, resulting in regrettable headlines such as “I Sucked Pastor’s Dick” and “Pastor Taps Vagina.”
One thing I learned to my shock and awe while perusing African journalism is that when African men allow their enviably powerful sex drives to run riot, that’s when they start defiling people—whether it’s a 50-year-old man using biscuits to defile a 7-year-old girl, an adult male driver who defiles a ten-year-old girl on her way home from church, or a man who gets a long prison sentence for defiling an “imbecile,” African males in full rutting season are prone to defiling others, which is why more often than not, you may find them walking around with a “filthy penis.”
But what separates African journalism from the roving light brigades of reporters and truth-seekers worldwide is its unflinching, unquestioning, and deeply uncomprehending sense of magic and wonderment. Viewed through the eyes of Africans, Africa is one murderous, sprawling Disneyland.
Mamas, Don’t Let Your Theybies Grow Up to Be Cowqueers
Here is the full definition of “gender” from Merriam-Webster, the edition that came out about 16 years ago. Not only is biological “sex” found in the first definition, there is no mention at all about “cultural constructs.” It’s safe to say that this revised definition and usage of gender is a new phenomenon. The amazing thing is that the left treat words they find inconvenient as if they’re THINGS in themselves rather than signifying markers, so that if they change the definition they change the reality. It’s pure psychosis.
1 a archaic : KIND, SORT b : SEX *black divinities of the feminine gender— Charles Dickens*
2 linguistics a : any of two or more subclasses within a grammatical class of a language (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, verb) that are partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics such as shape, social rank, manner of existence (as animate or inanimate), or sex (as masculine, feminine, or neuter) and that determine agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms *Latin has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter* *French has two genders, masculine and feminine* b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass *a Latin noun has gender, number, and case* *an English noun has, strictly speaking, no gender* c : an inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass *a Latin adjective agrees in gender with the noun it modifies.
Andrew MacEwen
Queens, New York
I’d imagine this conversation going as follows:
“Hey, I heard your pregnant. Congrats! Do you know the gender?”
“Ugh, hate when people ask me this. My theyby will get to choose xer own gender when zee feels like it.”
“Theyby?”
“Yes, the non-gender version of the bigoted word ‘baby.’”
“But the word ‘baby’ is already gender neutral…”
“Scram, Nazi!”
Chad Bradson
“In the tiny sheltered pampered enclaves of coastal American cities, some parents are refusing to reveal their children’s biological sex to anyone—including relatives and the infants themselves—until the toddler is old enough to decide for himself or herself.” As the grandfather to triplet toddlers (two girls, one boy), allow me to observe: that’s easily the dumbest thing I’ve heard this century. What do they do? Dress them in empty flour sacks like the dustbowl denizens of old and pray they get verbal skills before they start preschool? Utterly, preposterously moronic.
Kent Rebman
Plainfield, Indiana
The specter of well-off White Leftist parents engaging in do-it-yourself psychological experiments with their innocent offspring reeks of whack-o woo-woo theology and proves once again, that even the smallest eggs can be used in an omelette. Mr. Goad’s speculation that these morons have too much time on their hands is bang on. If the parents involved were engaged in subsistence farming or some other labor-intensive endeavor, there would be no place for these uniquely modern delusions to take root. Hopefully, this trend will pass before too much damage is done.
William Peters
Rochester, New York
Mr. Goad, thank you. Your “Mamas” article is a powerful work of truth bathed in reality. We all think this, we all know these truths to be self-evident (where did that come from?), but most of us are too weak to speak up. In a way you did that for us. Moreover, you did it for the innocent children who are having their brains scrambled by their Silence of the Lambs parents. Your last paragraph says it all.
Your article gives me courage to speak up for the children of these abusive parents and not concern myself with what anyone else thinks of me. Child abuse is child abuse. Insanity is insanity. Both situations demand protective measures, restorative treatment, correction, compassion, and a message to these little ones that they are not God’s mistake.
Gary Magistrelli
Hampstead, North Carolina
XX or XY, we are one or the other.
Child abusers deny this.
Eric Mack
Fuck.
Jim Goad.
I have all issues of Answer Me! (personal best is the suicide issue, so many faves offed it. Doodles Weaver!) bought off the rack at the time of release.
Tried following him on twitter but couldn’t take the daily barrage of shit.
I found Taki due to Joe Bob. Shocked to see Jim Goad as well.
His Theybie article, while hateful as always, makes sense to me. I tell my boy every day he can do whatever he wants, paints his nails all the time, dyes his hair(short), is theatrical and musical, he’s 10 but we rarely discuss gender.
Until he says he has a boner. He’s well aware he’s male.
I don’t necessarily agree with Jim at all times, but goddess has blessed us all w/ his incendiary writing. The Red Neck Manifesto is one of my favorite, what I consider truth, books. But then so is the Illuminatus Trilogy and the Book of SubGenius.
You are on the right track. Joe Bob & Jim Bob? More, please.
Peace.
Paul Hill
I sincerely hope that this fad, and it really is a fad, kinda’ like the Nehru jacket of the 60’s, blows over soon. When I listen to the sherpa of political correctness on the Tucker Carlson show, I both laugh and want to toss my cookies at the same time.
ENOUGH, ALREADY.
Timothy McCollum
Marshfield, Wisconsin
Shouting “Pedo” In a Crowded Twitter
The Gunn story is another reminder of how the media creates and manipulates events, and strategically times the release of news stories based on them, to fit its predetermined and utterly predictable narrative. Being sublimely uninterested in the entertainment business and its inhabitants, I lazily formed my opinion of this guy solely from mainstream press reports. On that basis I figured the guy actually was a pedophile. None of the news stories I skimmed suggested that his tweets were made tongue-in-cheek or were in any way schtick. The paths to fake news are many and varied.
Angelo DePalma
Newton, New Jersey
I believe David Cole is correct in his conclusion that condemning our political enemies for the words they say or write tightens the no-free-speech noose around our own necks. However, David Cole misses (or ignores) the underlying issue.
When Lenny Bruce got famous using blue language in a nightclub act, the people who went to see Lenny Bruce’s act probably didn’t care what he talked about. They were there (I believe) to be titillated by the sound of dirty words being spoken by a grown man in public. It was a turn-on then but not anymore. Nowadays the very same kind of language that used be so exciting has morphed into a double-edged linguistic bludgeon.
People who use blue language and perverse sexual innuendo in public use it to show they are in with the in-crowd. Now the only in-crowd I can see are the faceless millions of bureaucrats who make up the increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy. Who is in charge of this well thought out strategy against free speech? The bureaucrats? The college professors and administrators? Vladimir Putin? L’il Rocketman? This kind of oppression against free-speech does not arise spontaneously.
I remember well (from more than a decade ago—how time flies!) the first time I heard the word “triggered” used against freedom of expression. An anonymous college administrator was on-camera complaining long-and-loud about how something on her campus had “triggered” her. I listened long enough to hear the woman give a careful definition of what “triggered” means and knew that would be the next big thing.
John L. Jordan
Vernon, Alabama
Well said, I’d agree with you sentiments about 99.99% of the time. Off color jokes, making fun of retards, I love it all and undoubtedly agree with your assessment that the left’s goal is complete censorship of anything they deem offensive. But then, there’s that 0.01%. More specifically, that 0.01% is the pedo jokes Gunn is guilty admittedly guilty of. Just look at the stock picture from your article, do you mean to tell me your pedo radar doesn’t go off when you look at it? The only people who would joke about pedophilia are probably pedophiles, that’s my theory and after looking at this guy, I’m sticking with it.
Think about this for a moment, America’s prisons are filled with the worst that humanity has to offer. Serial killers, murderers, rapists and all manner of other types of subhumans. Yet, in the midst of all this, there’s still a code, pedophilia isn’t tolerated in any form. Pedo’s in prison are routinely attacked and murdered by the rest of the general population and have to be kept in segregation because of it. I unabashedly agree with our nations prisoners, pedophilia should always be off limits, particularly from guys that look like pedo’s. Gunn should be ruined at best by being so retarded as to even joke about it.
Sean Stickler
Richmond, Virginia
Is Putin’s Russia an “Evil Empire”?
One frequently learns things not mentioned in other media on the pages of Taki’s. Who knew about Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo where, apparently 1400 US soldiers are stationed not doing much of anything? The Balkan military conflict (wars are, of course so passe) ended in 1999, so the American taxpayer has been shelling out a few hundred mill a year for God knows what reason. Just in case? A jobs program for Slavs? A General’s delusional real estate speculation? In any case, the bill is already past due and this kind of thing is low hanging fruit to pick when we cannot add to the tab any longer.
Lee Krantz
Frederick, Maryland
In August 2008 when President Bush was at China’s Olympics, President Putin flew abruptly home to supervise a “war” with Georgia over encroachment into Ossetia. Simultaneously a Syrian General was killed at range from a precise long gun. Once that was done, President Assad flew to Moscow for several days of meetings with Putin, GRU & FsB whereupon he flew back to Damascus. Upon his return, near simultaneously, several Russian warships docked at Tartous and Banias. This culminated in sealing aRussian maritime goal dating back to the Crimean War whereby Russia gained a permanent anchorage in Syria. They have been there in force ever since.
As Steve Earle says in his song “You Know The Rest”… .Moses went up the mountain to see what he could see,
He came down with the stone tablets and said ,
This is how it’s going to be.
He was scared to death.
You know the rest.”
Grant Leslei Hopkins
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A high-school friend of mine had her unwanted child at this home for unwed mothers. Many years later she tried to locate her daughter but the agency stiff-armed her. Asked what year she bore the child, she did not remember.
I suspect that Steve is overlooking the to me obvious fact that the triplets were born to an unwed mother and were placed by adoption into 3 families. The brainiacs at the Louise Wise home chose not to inform the families that the children were separated triplets. Perhaps they were having trouble finding a family willing to adopt all three. If so, there was no pressing need to complicate matters further by informing the adopting families that their adoptees were triplets and that they should arrange play-dates. The main consideration of the Louise Wise home was charity: provide supportive housing and medical care for unwed Jewish women, effect the birth and get the children adopted by Jewish families.
For the record, Cynthia P. (now an Alzheimer patient in a French asile) and Marty N. deceased, were living together on Ave. S in an apartment in Brooklyn, both precocious high school students not legally married so far as I know. Cynthia aged 16 got pregnant and decided not to keep the baby.
Mike Eisenstadt
Probiotics: Here Drink Some Gut Slime
My favorite inebriate ichthyologist, W.C. Fields, once made a comment about water being an element suitable only for fish fornication. One wonders what wisdom he could shed on the probiotic craze that is consuming certain people. That said, if you want to experience the wonders of a happy gut, three apples per day will bring true enlightenment. Just be sure to keep a stack of magazines next to the hopper…
William Peters
Rochester, New York
Most health supplements may be useless, but Hormesis is real – the idea that a little bit of a toxin makes one immune to that toxin – that’s the action of vaccines and drug tolerance. Hormesis also includes many beneficial stressors like fasting, weight-lifting, and exposure to ionizing radiation.
Taking a Cipro kills all gut bacteria at once, including the bad kinds like Candida – the sugar-crazed bacteria that can make people sluggish and fat. After the Cipro, it’s good to eat some yogurt to populate the gut with benign, friendly bacteria.
Bacteria are proto-animals, our little cousins, who play a big role in Evolution – their mysteries and charms are not fully understood.
BTW – there were ads for Probiotic products at the bottom of the page – AI is pretty stupid
CJ Michiels
Kimchi isn’t left out in the sun-it’s buried in pots.
Speaking of which, I can’t remember the name anymore but there’s a Middle Eastern “delicacy“ made by mixing yogurt and Bulger wheat, putting it in a pot and burying it for a few weeks. Would’ve been a good example for your story.
Carter Harbaugh
Central Park Rapists: Trump Was Right
Thanks for the follow-up on this horror story.
It is ghastly from beginning to end and no sane human could avoid vomiting at the outcome. I have five daughters who naively stroll through parks at midnight thinking they have only drug-dealers and perverts to deal with. God help them.
Helena Conrad
Marin County, California
Nothing is Safe From Resentment
Obviously, to be fair and representative, AI has to then include people with marginal IQs. The demand for a machine unable to do what it’s designed for without constant supervision and that is difficult to impossible to program will be very high among virtue signalers. Then again, including every subgroup into the specs may make the machine unworkable by definition and no special care will need to be taken.
Sherman Watkins
Smoking in Montana’s Banana Belt
Anyone who’s spent much time in ‘the helping professions’ will have noticed a paradoxical phenomenon: where those who are receiving help— rather than expressing the gratitude one might expect— often react with a sense of resentment, anger, and passive-aggressive hostility.
The explanation is fairly straightforward: those being helped resent the fact that they need help in the first place. It doesn’t seem “fair” that those who are helping them are successful, while they themselves are not. Finding themselves in a position where they require help, reminds them of their dependency, their position of relative inferiority; which they deal with by generating feelings of anger and resentment.
It feels better to be angry and resentful— to blame others for their plight, even if those others are the very same ones who are helping them— than to admit that they themselves might be partly to blame for their circumstances.
The insistence on achieving “equitable performance across different subpopulations” which De Groot describes is an outgrowth of the legal concept of “disparate impact,” which was first imposed on the American people by “America’s first Black Attorney General” Eric Holder; whose expressed desire to help “my people,” it soon became clear, did not refer to the American people, but rather, to Black Americans only. Under this doctrine, unequal outcomes are seen as proof that “discrimination” is taking place; and only when all outcomes are equal, we’re told, will “justice” and “equality” have finally been attained. And until then, disaffected underperforming “minorities” have every right to feel resentful; and to act that resentment out, whenever and wherever they can get away with it.
So yes: the result these progressive AI scientists and others of their ilk want to see, is not the faithful replication of American society as it now exists; but rather, the re-making of American society into the sort of place that folks like Obama, Holder, Zou, and Schiebinger would like it to be: a society in which “underrepresented” peoples’ resentments drive all that happens, and conditions are manipulated until everyone “performs” exactly alike.
Surely we’ve all noticed the current over-representation of Blacks in TV commercials. An uninformed observer might be led to conclude that Blacks make up half of American society; or that a law has been passed stipulating that every commercial must include at least one smiling inter-racial couple, or Black female doctor in a white lab coat, or smiling Black banker in a three-piece-suit sagely advising his White clients.
Social programming at it’s finest… aimed at bringing about the world our “elite” “leaders” “know” to be best for us, whether we want it or not….
Navigating this new world should be no problem, as long as one keeps in mind this simple rule: the resentments of favored minorities are to be taken as sacred imperatives for the rest of us; while the resentments of Whites represent intolerable racism, hatred, and bigotry, to be publicly ridiculed and scorned at every opportunity.
William M. Stell Jr.
In the product development process that evolution is, better versions of the species “human” are supposed to replace those versions that are not as good in the area of survival and procreation. The deciding “customers” in this are men and women in the process of choosing a mate. This selection process has brought us out of the caves and onto the moon. As to be expected, the revolt against this natural selection is coming from those versions of the human species who can’t cut it and are a DNA strand about to be discontinued.
The big problem with so called “progressives” is that they are actually against progress, because they hate the idea that those who are better equipped to survive and prosper and raise their offspring, will determine the composition of the next generations. One look at the nerds and fuglies protesting against “inequality” will prove my point.
Werner A Hoermann
Fallbrook, California
It was sad enough to see Nature, a once respected and respectable source of knowledge capitulate to the leftist orthodoxy of Global Warming/Climate Change. It should be no surprise then that they have capitulated with the leftist orthodoxy on “gender inequality” as well. At least Scientific American seems to be backing away (if only slightly) from Climate Change alarmism.
Kelly Harbeson
Choice and Cost. There is a cost to everything. As long as Government is able to punitively tax its citizens at the point of a bayonet there will be (no cost to them) free milk by God. The only way to rationalize this is to understand that we are serfs to the state and in reality have no choice. Consent is the illusion the leftists put out there to help the medicine go down. How much longer must we put up with this? All I know is “It’s for the children.”
John MacDonald
Keller, Texas
Hemingway’s desire to be seen as a super tough guy has always been a turn off for me. His credentials for such a pose, in my way of thinking, were always suspect. The turning point, for me, was in an article published by Sports Illustrated, some years ago.
The Brooklyn Dodgers were holding their spring training in Cuba, and Hemingway invited some of the players to his home where he had a boxing ring set up. To show his prowess he asked a few of them to spar with him. Instead of sparing he started throwing hard punches, not wanting to offend him because he was providing food and drinks, plus his celebrity status was intimidating, they went along with him. That is until their star relief pitcher Hugh Casey got in the ring. He was a true tough guy and proceeded to give Hemingway a good thrashing. His team mates quietly applauded Casey because they could see through Hemingway’s act.
I read that article many years ago, and I feel quite sure that I have gotten the details right. Hemingway did do some courageous thing in his life, but to my dismay, like Mailer, he spent his life bragging about them. Real tough guys are usually fairly quiet.
Tho Sweeney
The Week’s Most Kissable, Transmissible, and Impermissible Headlines
“PROUD BOYS” FALSELY DRAGGED INTO OAKLAND STABBING MURDER
Last Sunday night in Oakland, an 18-year-old black female named Nia Wilson was approached from behind as she stood on a BART platform and slashed in the throat, killing her. A 27-year-old white ex-con named John Cowell has been arrested and charged with Wilson’s murder.
And that is all we will state definitively because we’ve been trained in the rules of journalism and know it’s dangerous and illegal to spread false rumors without verifying them.
But if you were to listen to black activists as aggressively stupid as Tariq Nasheed, or white activists who pretend they’re black and are as balls-to-the-wall mentally handicapped as Shaun “Talcum X” King, you would have been led to believe that Nia Wilson was probably murdered by a member of the “Western chauvinist” group the Proud Boys, founded by former Taki’s Mag writer Gavin McInnes.
Despite being listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Proud Boys go to almost comical lengths to explain that they are anti-“racist” and pro-Semitic and very eager to spotlight their nonwhite members, especially if they’re gay. Naturally, in today’s climate of carcinogenic hyperbole, they are routinely portrayed as “white supremacists,” “fascists,” “Nazis,” and especially “white supremacist fascist Nazis” regardless of how they define themselves.
We’ve noticed of late that the term “white supremacist”—which has a quantifiable definition and literally applies to almost no one these days despite how frequently it’s lobbed like a poison dart—is being used recklessly as a way to dehumanize someone and therefore justify, say, punching their teeth out or getting them fired or having them run out of town by a torch mob.
Due to equal measures of irresponsible insinuation and outright lies, word quickly spread online that John Cowell was a member of the Proud Boys who sought out Wilson in a deliberate Hate Murder. Then during a vigil two nights later, the narrative proclaims that the Proud Boys showed up Westboro Baptist Church-style and started harassing the humble attendees, who had no other choice but to select one member of the group and beat the snot out of him in a 20-on-1 attack.
This ruthless mob beating—far more violent than any footage you’ve ever seen of Alabama cops with firehoses and dogs—was seen as entirely justified by Shaun “Talcum X” King, easily the dumbest white man ever to pretend he was black. King and the 10-watt lightbulb inside his head ran with the narrative that most justified his brand of mental incapacitation:
There is a vigil in Oakland last night thousands of people show up. They’re grieving, including the family. They’re there and they’re grieving.…White supremacists in Trump hats calling themselves proud boys, a new white supremacist group. It’s like the new KKK….They’ve just put on nicer shirts but it’s just the KKK in a different form. With Trump hats, [they] show up to disrupt the vigil. Like, show up to interrupt people grieving. How sick do you have to be to show up and interrupt people during their moment of grief?
How stupid do you have to be to think that’s what actually happened? The answer, my friend, is “as stupid as Shaun King.”
As it turns out, the white man who was mobbed and beaten on suspicion of being a Nazi was the stepfather to two black daughters and had attended the vigil as a sign of sympathy for Nia Wilson. And according to a series of text messages from Gavin McInnes, the whole debacle kicked off when the owners of a local bar mistook a group of Trump supporters for Proud Boys, who are universally mistaken as violent, predatory Nazis:
Meeting was for a Trump Reddit group. Nothing to do with us….The original bar heard “Trump” and started this whole retarded narrative….Then girl gets stabbed….Big vigil. They assume it was a PB because Tariq Nasheed said it can’t be a coincidence. Meanwhile, we never tried to have a meeting at that bar!….Vigil happens. They start beating up random white dude because he had an American flag shirt (he has 2 black stepgirls BTW)….They thought we went to stab a random black girl and then go celebrate and they were protesting that!….Meanwhile there are 100 homicides a year in Oakland. Not Nazis. Blacks….The guy who did it is CLEARLY a transient lunatic ex-con whose neighbors had a restraining order….This whole story has been the stupidest news story I’ve ever seen and I was convinced nothing could top the women’s march.
McInnes says he plans to sue certain parties for libel over the whole flagrantly ridiculous affair. As much as we hate civil law, we approve of this move—not because we think there’s anything wrong if you personally believe white people are the bee’s knees, but because in the current climate, being labeled a “white supremacist” is akin to having a target painted on your back. It’s an invitation to have violence rained down upon you.
TEDx TALK SPEAKER: PEDOPHILIA IS A LEGITIMATE SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Remember during the whole knock-down-drag-out debate over gay marriage when people were gaslit for suggesting that the next stage for the deviant left was to normalize pedophilia?
Ta-da! Here we are!
At a recent TEDx Talk in Germany, a visually unobjectionable and sexually normal-looking woman named Mirjam Heine gave a speech titled “Pedophilia is a natural sexual orientation.” Standout nuggets from her soliloquy include:
According to current research pedophilia is an unchangeable sexual orientation just like, for example, heterosexuality. No one chooses to be a pedophile, no one can cease being one….The difference between pedophilia and other sexual orientations is that living out this sexual orientation will end in a disaster….Abusing children is wrong without any doubt, but a pedophile who doesn’t abuse children has done nothing wrong….We shouldn’t increase the sufferings of pedophiles by excluding them, by blaming and mocking them. By doing that, WE increase their isolation and WE increase the chance of child sexual abuse.
Although Heine was mildly reprimanded for her comments, it wasn’t as if she was personally destroyed for uttering something as patently false and heinous as, say, alleging that Turkish immigrants might not be the best thing for Germany.
THE (FECES-COVERED) STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO
London Breed is the token black woman who serves as San Francisco’s mayor to largely distract from the uncomfortable fact that Frisco is only 6% black—which is less than half as black as this entire racist country is, including all the remote hills and hollers of flyover country—and is instead dominated by disproportionately wealthy whites and Asians.
Ms. Breed is one of perhaps ten to twelve black women who grew up in San Francisco and says she can’t remember a time when there was so much feces on the streets.
I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here. That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs—we’re talking about from humans.
San Francisco’s Department of Public Works recently received at least four complaints about a bag containing “20 pounds of poop” at the corner of Polk and Cedar Streets.
Although the city she leads will fork out an estimated $280 million dollars this year just to feed, clothe, house, and wipe the posteriors of its ample homeless population, the mayor says she doesn’t want to penalize these street-shitters. She just expects them to clean up after themselves like any self-respecting Tenderloin derelict would.
Let us know how the honor system goes, Miss Mayor—that is, if you aren’t swept away under a tidal wave of human waste.
Last week I was invited by internet to sign a petition asking the British prime minister, Mrs. May, not to snatch free milk from the mouths of British children under the age of 5. The full machinery of outraged sentimentality is being geared into operation.
What here does the word “snatch” mean? In everyday parlance, we think of a robber snatching the purse of a passing woman, or perhaps of a child trying to take hold of a slice of cake when he has been told to wait his turn. Needless to say, the word is not employed in this sense here. What it means in this context is the withdrawal of a privilege granted more or less arbitrarily by a government that thinks itself entitled both to give and to withhold.
The use of the word “free” is also of interest. No tangible good in a monetary economy can be free to everyone. Only hail and volcanic ash are free; someone has to pay for everything else. The milk may be free to the 5-year-olds, and even to the mothers of the 5-year-olds, but it is not free tout court. In this case, the taxpayer has to pay for it, admittedly only a minuscule proportion of what is extracted—snatched—from him under threat of prosecution, but it is not free to him nonetheless. If I were dictator of the world, which fortunately I am not, I would outlaw the use of the word “free” in the sense of “free milk” on penalty of hard labor for life.
But let us now turn to more substantive matters. Why should children under the age of 5 in a country like Britain be in receipt of free milk, mostly through the intermediary of their mothers? Milk, after all, is one of the cheapest of commodities, so cheap that its producers are constantly complaining of its price, and the problem seems to be that of overproduction rather than of scarcity. At any rate, you could easily drown a fair-size infant in the quantity of milk you can buy for the price of a packet of cigarettes, to make only one comparison of prices.
What kind of mother, then (of fathers one dare not speak these days), really cannot afford to give her child milk from her own pocket? It is true that no visitor to the British shores, and who ventures beyond the most obvious destinations, can fail to be struck by the number of gormless, slatternly, and often very fat mothers (so fat, indeed, that insemination seems a miracle, though it is wonderful what they can do with syringes these days) pushing their fractious offspring in elaborate wheeled contraptions, while generally attending more to what is on their smartphones than to the unhappy squalls of their infants. Indeed, they often have earphones like earplugs in their ears, though whether this is more to prevent them from hearing their children than to attend to the moronic drivel the enjoyment of which is the main aim of their existence, it is difficult to say. But it is certainly possible that, without subvention, these mothers would forget all about milk and its advantages for children.
Do people who mostly possess televisions whose screens are the size of many found in art cinemas really need to be given free milk? And if they do, because they have expended whatever money they have on subscriptions to cable television, what does this say about their sense of priorities, and the culture in which they developed their priorities?
Moreover, one might have hoped that women who really could not afford the cost of milk (than which practically nothing is cheaper) would hold off having babies until they could scrape together the price of a pint or two. After all, sex education and contraception are almost the only subjects taken seriously in our schools, so we are not back in the days when 20-year-olds could still believe that storks brought babies or that they were born under gooseberry bushes.
Reading is the best antidote to debauchery I know of, and I’ve been hitting the books lately. History, mostly. Once upon a time I used to read novels. Back then I found real magic embedded in the prose of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Maugham, Leo T and Fyodor D, Waugh, Greene, and John O’Hara, with his potboilers about upper-class swells. I was friendly with Irwin Shaw and James Jones, of The Young Lions and From Here to Eternity fame, and read both men assiduously. Shaw and Jones were tough guys, army vets, and Hemingway types. Yet it was Fitzgerald, with his indelible stamp of grace, who haunted my youth. Dick Diver and Tender Is the Night and the Riviera and all that. His romantic imagination transfigured his characters and settings to people and places I knew well. When I wasn’t chasing some girl or hitting a tennis ball, I was curled up reading Papa and the tragic Scott.
In 1965 Norman Mailer’s An American Dream discombobulated me. The hero throws his wife off a terrace, killing her, and then buggers the maid. Not much tenderness on that particular night. I had already met the author, and he was a full-time job; his curiosity was endless and he was an intellectually and physically demanding friend. Mailer thought fiction the highest calling there is, but ironically it was his nonfiction that procured him endless literary prizes. He fathered a technique he called the true-life novel, a work of fiction based on the lives of actual people.
I never met Papa Hemingway, but this briefest of examples will show you what I mean. It is the opening lines of A Farewell to Arms: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains…. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.” I used this passage to illustrate perfection nearly thirty years ago, and an Eton beak wrote that it was the worst writing ever. I challenged him to a fight, but he was pulling my leg and we had a drink instead. Hem’s description when only 19 years old of a prostitute walking her beat under a dim streetlight was shattering in its sadness, and it was done by simple description of time and place. His was a great talent, pure and simple.
Fiction supposedly represented an escape, however fleeting, from the grimness and despair of many peoples’ lives. Yet the novel had been in crisis and dismissed since Charlotte Brontë’s rejection of Jane Austen, not to mention Le Figaro’s dismissal of Flaubert. Never mind. The novel died when craftsmanship and hard, intelligent effort in which every sentence “is unostentatiously lapidary” ceased and was replaced by the stream-of-consciousness modernist bullshit practiced by the talentless solipsists of recent times.
Nothing, however, had prepared me for what I read in a New Yorker article last week. The New Yorker was and continues to be a well-written weekly, one that has always published extremely boring, much-too-lengthy articles about subjects no one cares about except the person writing them. Since becoming a stablemate of Vogue and Vanity Fair, however, the magazine has bent over backwards to be trendy where race, sex, and religion are concerned. White males, Christians, and heterosexuals need not apply. The piece that caught my eye was by one Ariel Levy about the female Jewish-Iranian writer Ottessa Moshfegh, whose novel Eileen won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker. The female heroine is an ugly and disgusting person, self-pitying, resentful, and angry. She snubs a rape victim because she herself has never been raped.
The grim corollary of what I have called human nature’s difficult need for esteem is that nothing is safe from resentment. For so vital is human pride, and so powerful our concomitant urge to be esteemed by others, that there is no area of human affairs to which people will not apply their resentment-driven reasonings, evaluations, and judgments.
Indeed, as traditional sources of deep meaning—religion, the family, fulfilling work—all dissipate, men and women, in their boundless ennui, come to scrutinize things that in previous eras seemed either unimportant or else not worth the trouble.
It is chiefly resentment that motivates this new scrutiny. We must understand, however, that resentment is as subtle and insidious as the devil himself. A deft and incomparable liar, both to others and himself, the resenter smuggles in his poisonous aims under various lofty notions: fairness, justice, equality, rights, diversity, inclusion…
Thus, “AI can be sexist and racist—it’s time to make it fair,” claims an article in the current issue of Nature, which is the world’s preeminent scientific journal. The authors, James Zou and Londa Schiebinger, bizarrely ask: “Should…[artificial intelligence] data be representative of the world as it is, or of a world that many would aspire to?” The curious and highly questionable logic employed in much of the article leaves us with no doubt about where the authors themselves stand on this question.
“Steps should be taken,” they write, “to ensure that…data sets are diverse and do not under represent particular groups. This means going beyond convenient classifications—‘woman/man,’ ‘black/white,’ and so on—which fail to capture the complexities of gender and ethnic identities.”
Is sexual dimorphism (‘woman/man’) merely a “convenient classification”? Do the authors mean to endorse the view that gender identity is altogether subjective, determinable by one’s shifting feelings or inclinations? If so, that would be quite dubious, particularly for Zou, who, unlike Schiebinger, is a scientist. It is one thing to understand that a certain kind of prejudice—for instance, “nursing is a woman’s job”—is nothing but a social construct. It is quite another to hold that gender identity does not, in many fundamental respects, derive from sex or biology, a view that no credible scientist or scholar maintains.
And how are the complexities of people’s identities to be better represented? Let’s suppose for argument’s sake that AI is to represent me, Christopher DeGroot. For though a white man is certainly not what the authors have in mind by “under represent[ed] particular groups,” my example suffices to show the difficulties Zou and Schiebinger face. Would it be sufficient for AI to “know” that I’m American? Yet my last name denotes my Dutch ancestry. My ancestors were also French and Italian. Should all this complexity be represented? If it’s not, would I be wronged in some sense? What makes the representation satisfactory? And who gets to decide?
The authors’ “solutions” don’t address the insuperable problem here; namely, that there are no objective criteria to which I and those who disagree with me can appeal to settle our dispute. In other words, there is free rein for the most arbitrary judgments, and for endless resentment. Although Zou and Schiebinger seem well aware of the epistemic opposition between AI data and moral value, judging by their rather leftist article, they have devoted little thought to justifying the latter.
Little wonder, for at bottom they are typical academic frauds. Accordingly, they advocate “essentially nudging the machine-learning model to ensure that it achieves equitable performance across different subpopulations.” Just what does that mean? Let me quote from the article Zou and Schiebinger reference here: “the demographics of the set of individuals receiving any classification are the same as the demographics of the underlying population.”
Called “statistical parity,” in many instances this practice would “be [most un]representative of the world as it is,” but it would certainly represent “a world that many [resentment-pipers] would aspire to.” For this entails that the subpopulation blacks, for example, not be represented as committing more than half of all homicides, because otherwise their classification would not be “the same as the demographics of the underlying population.” Truth is to be subordinated to “equitable performance across different subpopulations.”
The absurdity of this should now be clear. Let us make it clearer still. Most homicides are committed by men. Should AI representation of homicide be manipulated “to ensure that it achieves equitable performance” with women? Would such manipulation preclude the resentments of men, and therefore be just? Following the authors’ logic, or rather, moral values (as I understand them), let’s suppose the answers are yes and yes. Well, now the problem is that AI can hardly represent homicide at all.
To be sure, AI is essentially utilitarian. Its practical purposes require accurate representation of reality. How can this be done if science is corrupted by ideology, namely, resentment?
“Our societies have long endured inequalities. AI must not unintentionally sustain or even worsen them,” Zou and Schiebinger write. But having shallow minds, they assume that disparity in itself demonstrates moral evil (“inequality”). So, they are vexed that
Wikipedia…seems like a rich and diverse data source. But fewer than 18% of the site’s biographical entries are on women. Articles about women link to articles about men more often than vice versa, which makes men more visible to search engines. They also include more mentions of romantic partners and family.
Now, it may well be true that Wikipedia has not given sufficient space to noteworthy women. In any case, it is not evident that “statistical parity” would ensure “equality” here, for it is not evident that women deserve to be as equally represented as men. Needless to say, in this context, the idea of deserving depends on achievement or some other form of noteworthiness. Nobody is noteworthy because of his or her gender.
Likewise, that “articles about women link to articles about men more often than vice versa” is not obviously wrong, because again, for all Zou and Schiebinger know, men may simply be much more noteworthy than women. I don’t claim men are; the point is that only thorough inquiry can establish a reasonable position either way. Zou’s and Schiebinger’s facile assumption of “inequality” is worse than useless.
NEW YORK—Is probiotic a real word or did somebody make that up just to be a smart-ass?
I mean, antibiotics I understand—pesticides for the body, they slide down your throat and napalm anything in sight until every germ is exterminated.
But when did everybody and his ugly sister start popping probiotics every day like they know what that stuff is?
You ever read the ingredients on a box of probiotic capsules? Men have died trying to lift those words. Admit it, you have no idea what fermented Streptococcus thermophilus is, but you will ingest it in spite of it sounding like a Greek social disease.
“Oh yeah, Joe Bob, gotta have my probiotics. Everybody needs probiotics.”
If everybody needs probiotics, why had I never even heard the word until about ten years ago? Why do we have 97,000 probiotic foods and medicines for sale when apparently we didn’t need these products during any of the previous 10,000 years of civilization?
And yeah, I get it, I’ve heard the explanations. “Your body needs germs, Joe Bob. Probiotics are microorganisms—friendly germs. One reason Americans are so sick is that we don’t have enough bacteria in our systems.”
“Our children don’t play in the dirt enough, Joe Bob, they don’t get dirt bacteria into their systems. Chinese children get down in the mud with shovels. And Russian children, they’ve got dirt under every fingernail and their pores are filthy. That’s why we’re falling behind. Our children are too clean.”
And yet you want me to think you’re not insane.
If you go to the internet and search under “How did this probiotic thing get started?” you get the name Elie Metchnikoff.
Elie Metchnikoff was a Russian scientist who noticed, in the year 1907, that yogurt-drinking Bulgarian peasants live longer than everybody else.
Okay, I don’t pretend to be an expert on Slavic goat farmers in sheepskin hats, but how did Elie know it was the yogurt? Maybe the Bulgarian peasants were also scrubbing their bodies with peat moss and slathering poison mushroom fungus over skin reddened from birch-bark flogging. After all, they still do that stuff in Coney Island hothouses, so I have to assume that the yeomen of Old Plovdiv had all kinds of gross body rituals.
Because let’s start with that—the grossness.
Everything probiotic starts with fermentation.
And what is fermentation?
You put leftovers in a jar, leave the jar in a ditch, then check it once a week to see how much acid, gas, foam, slime, and green outer-space bubbles have formed on the surface of it, and then you drink it.
Gross. I can see why peasants were into it, because (a) time on their hands, (b) they never throw away food, and (c) they don’t think in hours, they think in seasons, as in, “I wonder what’ll happen if I pour some calf milk into a bag made out of a sheep intestine and dump some wild boysenberries in there and just leave it nailed to this tree until spring?”
Fast-forward a hundred years and gay bodybuilders in Miami Beach are sampling probiotic dairy concoctions to try to get that perfect mix of little micro-monsters that live inside your large intestine and eat stuff.
“I’ve got kombucha with 300 million living organisms inside it, and I down three of those before every workout. That’s almost a billion active cultures invading my gut.”
“Yeah, but all that stuff is Lactobacillus. I’ve got pure Bifidobacterium in a 60-gram power bar that stays active past the stomach acids all the way to the scrotum.”
I mean, people are actually having these conversations.
I really think that someday very soon we’re gonna discover a professional bicycle racer split in half on the side of the road, his purple Spandex body stocking littered with intestinal organs that have exploded due to some probiotic power drink imported from Norway.
His fellow racers from Team Quadriceps, based in Salem, Oregon, will gather around their disemboweled comrade and say, “He shouldn’t have taken that last KeVita out of the fridge.”
Now. Knowledgeable probiotic gut-swill consumers will instantly recognize the brand name KeVita as the most massively concentrated army of live stomach creatures that can be forced into a single bottle. The following is a true story:
I was staying at a friend’s house, and just before I left for my journey, I opened the door of his refrigerator and saw what I mistakenly believed to be some kind of morning fruit juice. I screwed off the plastic cap, guzzled a third of the bottle, and was a little perplexed by the fizzy eye-popping buzz that filtered down through my sinuses and made it impossible to take a second drink. I replaced the cap and stuck it in an outside pocket of my backpack.
Four hours later, climbing out of a taxi at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the glass bottle with the fizzy stuff inside exploded, shattered into a thousand pieces, frightened the bell staff and quite a few pedestrians, and left so much glass on the street that even the doorman admitted, “That’s one I’ve never seen before.” I gave him two twenties—it was that bad. I’m surprised nobody called the bomb squad.
My presumed “fruit juice” was, in fact, a bottle of KeVita Sparkling Probiotic Drink, which is described in their advertising materials as a “fermented proprietary kefir culture.”
Quick digression: Kefir, which comes from the Caucasus Mountains and is favored by Chechen terrorists living in caves, is a sort of super-probiotic drink that features calf milk, goat milk, grains, and stuff that only 107-year-old grandmas know about, and it’s basically for people who want to mainline yogurt. Supermodels in Aspen consume it by the gallon.
The particular type of “water kefir culture” that I had gulped contained “billions of live probiotics”—not millions, not hundreds of millions, but billions—and had been “naturally flavored” into a Mojita Lime Mint Coconut cocktail. (You think I’m making this up, but I have pictures.)
The city of New York released thousands of documents from the 1989 Central Park rape case last week, provoking more weeping and gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump’s full-page ads in four New York newspapers taken out soon after that attack with the headline:
“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.’
“BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
His ad never mentioned the Central Park rape, but talked about New York families—“White, Black, Hispanic and Asian”—unable to enjoy walks through the park at dusk. Of muggers and murderers, he said, “I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. … They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
According to the media, the five convicted boys were INNOCENT—and Trump would have executed the poor lads! Apart from the “innocent” moniker, the rape victim miraculously survived, there was no murder, so this is nonsense.
But let’s look at how “innocent” they were.
On April 19, 1989, investment banker Trisha Meili went for a run through Central Park around 9 p.m., whereupon she was attacked by a wolf pack looking for a “white girl,” dragged 100 yards into the woods, stripped, beaten with a pipe and a brick, raped and left for dead.
By the time the police found Meili, she’d lost three-quarters of her blood. Her case was initially assigned to the homicide unit of the D.A.‘s office because none of her doctors thought she would make it through the night.
Of the 37 youths brought in for questioning about the multiple violent attacks in the park that night, only 10 were charged with a crime and only five for the rape of the jogger: Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Korey Wise. All five confessed—four on videotape with adult relatives present and one with a parent present, but not on videotape.
Two unanimous, multicultural juries convicted them, despite aggressive defense lawyers putting on their best case.
But the media have a different method of judging guilt and innocence. They don’t look at irrelevant factors, such as evidence, but at relevant factors such as the race of the accused and the victim.
Unfortunately for Meili, she was guilty of white privilege, while her attackers belonged to the “people of color” Brahmin caste. So, after waiting an interminable 13 years, the media proclaimed that the five convicts had been “exonerated” by DNA evidence!
DNA evidence didn’t convict them, so it couldn’t exonerate them. This was a gang attack. It was always known that another rapist “got away,” as the prosecutor told the jury, and that none of the defendants’ DNA was found in the jogger’s cervix or on her sock—the only samples that were taken.
While it blows most people away to find out that none of the suspects’ DNA was found on Meili, the whole trick is that they’re looking at it through a modern lens. Today, these kids’ DNA would have been found all over the crime scene. But in 1989, DNA was a primitive science. The cops wouldn’t have even looked for such evidence back then.
The case was solved with other evidence—and there was a lot of it.
On the drive to the precinct, Raymond Santana blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s t—s.” The cops didn’t even know about a rape yet.
Yusef Salaam announced to the detective interviewing him, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.” Even if true, under the law, anyone who participated in the attack on Meili is guilty of her rape.
Two of Korey Wise’s friends said that when they ran into him on the street the day after the attack, he told them the cops were after him. “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night? That was us!”
Taken to the scene of the crime by a detective and a prosecutor, he said, “Damn, damn, that’s a lot of blood. … I knew she was bleeding, but I didn’t know how bad she was. It was dark. I couldn’t see how much blood there was at night.”
Wise also told a detective that someone he thought was named “Rudy” stole the jogger’s Walkman and belt pouch. The jogger was still in a coma. The police did not know yet that a Walkman had been stolen from her.
Wise told a friend’s sister, Melody Jackson, that he didn’t rape the jogger; he “only held her legs down while Kevin (Richardson) f—-ed her.” Jackson volunteered this information to the police, thinking it would help Wise.
The night of the attack, Richardson told an acquaintance, “We just raped somebody.” The crotch of his underwear was suspiciously stained with semen, grass stains, dirt and debris. Walking near the crime scene with a detective the next day, Richardson said, “This is where we got her … where the raping occurred.”
Santana and Richardson independently brought investigators to the precise location of the attack on the jogger.
Recall that, when all these statements were made, no one—not the police, the witnesses, the suspects, or their friends and acquaintances—knew whether Meili would emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers.
Sarah Burns, who co-wrote and co-directed the propaganda film “The Central Park Five” with her father (whose reputation she has now destroyed), waved away the defendants’ confessions—forget all the other evidence—in a 2016 New York Times op-ed, explaining: “The power imbalance in an interrogation room is extreme, especially when the suspects are young teenagers, afraid of the police and unfamiliar with the justice system or their rights.”
