As part of the ongoing government shutdown, the feds evicted a number of homeowners from their houses located on federal land.
National Park Service officials cited the government shutdown as the
reason for ordering an elderly Nevada couple out of their home, which
sits on federal land.
"Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is
passed and the park can reopen," an NPS spokesman explained to KTNV.
Ralph and Joyce Spencer, aged 80 and 77, respectively, own their home, but the government owns the land on which it sits.
One wonders if persons living in this type of housing will get the same treatment. Soon, I would guess. It would be a nasty tactic, and a good way to hasten the slow-brewing societal chaos. TPTB merely haven't thought of it yet.
Just months after he gave a speech earlier this year that challenged America’s leadership in President Obama’s presence, Dr. Ben Carson was targeted by IRS agents who requested to review his real estate holdings and then conducted a full audit without finding any wrongdoing.
“I guess it could be a coincidence, but I never had been audited before and never really had any encounters with the IRS,” Dr. Carson said in an interview Thursday with The Washington Times. “But it certainly would make one suspicious because we know now the IRS has been used for political purposes and therefore actions like this come under suspicion."
From the moment President Obama was inaugurated, it was plain to the discerning that his administration would wage war against those who refused to get with the program of Fundamental Transformation, especially prominent refuseniks like Dr. Carson.
I'm not exactly prominent, but I do have an ostensibly familial link to the president. So, yes, I was afraid of reprisal. But...
...God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV)
The administration sells fear. I'm no longer a customer.
Of course, this prospective project won't be my first.
Back in 2008, when Kenya was experiencing a civil/tribal war and when a man of Kenyan Luo descent was running for president of the United States, I put forth a series of posts under the heading of Kenya Happenings and composed a page entitled Kenya: The Basics. These posts and pages were meant to dispel several misconceptions about the country, its people, its history and the conflict that it was experiencing. Of course, I had a vested personal interest aside from that which all Americans had; as many know, my biological father, Philip Ochieng is also from Kenya and is Luo like Barack Obama, Sr. (On top of that, the two men were friends.)
Because President Obama's African family is Muslim, many observers suspect that he himself is a Muslim. (I do have an opinion on the matter, one that has changed over the years. But that's for another post.) Leaving aside whether he is or not, because of his family's faith, it was and still is often assumed that the Luo tribe itself is primarily an Arab Muslim tribe. Nothing could be further from the truth or more ridiculous. Roughly ninety percent of the Luo are Christians: Anglicans, Seventh-Day Adventists and, increasingly, Evangelicals.
And Arab? Please. The spreading of this fantasy has been caused by a man named Kenneth Lamb, who claims to have done extensive research into the background of President Obama's African family but failed to take this cultural curiosity into account: that black African converts to Islam often begin to call themselves Arab and that governments go along with this fiction. Lamb's conclusion was that President Obama is only 1/8 black African, which means than Barack Obama, Sr. Was 1/4 black and 3/4 Arab.
Does this look like a man who is 3/4 Arab?
Mr. Lamb has since deleted the page containing his conclusions, but they are still being passed around, something that demonstrates the truth of this aphorism. (Here's a fine 2008 take-down of Mr. Lamb's assertions.)
This Great Lie has, in turn, served to distort the existential reality of the entire Luo tribe and of Kenya itself.
As for the war in Kenya, it was primarily tribal in nature, as is often the case where many ethnic groups co-exist within a single nation-state. But the fact that war was started by the political machinations of one Raila Odinga, Kenyan presidential candidate in 2007 and, ostensibly, cousin of Barack Obama, gave it a singular appearance in the eyes of many. (Odinga was appointed prime minister in 2008, which ended the conflict. He was the first prime minister since Jomo Kenyatta held both offices of president and prime minister in the wake of Kenya's 1963 independence. Kenyatta's son, Uhuru Kenyatta, is the current president of Kenya.) And there was additional controversy regarding former Prime Minister Odinga in the run-up to Kenya's 2013 presidential election, during which he was again a candidate. He doesn't seem to take losing well.
And there were these things: the 2008 church burnings and the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding--a document allegedly composed by Odinga in which he promises to share power with Kenyan Islamic Leaders and push for Sharia Law. There is much back-and-forth about its authenticity. (In my opinion, the document is real, considering the fact that Kenyan Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Odinga in the 2007 election. But if it is real, I think Odinga signed it because he is power-hungry, not because he's a Muslim. In any case, Odinga did not push for Sharia Law during his term as prime minister, nor did he grant the Muslims a certain number of seats in Kenya's parliament, as promised in the real/fake MOU. In return, the Muslims abandoned him in his 2013 bid to become president.)
Connecting these items--proven and disputed--with then-U.S. Senator Obama's 2006 visit to Kenya, when he appeared to be campaigning for Odinga--even though Odinga didn't officially launch his presidential candidacy until the following year--many saw a pattern forming.
Of course, I'm one who likes observing patterns and coming to conclusions as well. But the American reportage I read during that time--from both traditional and new media sources--almost always left pertinent details out. And, as I said at the time, both types of media seem to not want to get information from the plentiful Kenyan sources. I don't know what that was about, but it seemed, well, stupid.
Now in 2013, as in 1998, Kenya finds itself reeling after a Islamic terror attack in its capital city. Al Shabaab, a Somalian offshoot of al Qaeda, attacked and brutally murdered patrons of Nairobi's Westgate Mall during a three-day siege. The particulars of it are all over the place, so I won't go into it here.
But when I began to read crap from my fellow Americans like " I didn't know they had malls in Africa," I knew it was time to start writing about Kenya again. This time, the focus will be to explore the foundational enmity between Kenyans and Somalians--in addition to the religious one.
And this time, I have the blessing and knowledge base of family members--not so much to correct any info I put forth, but to give it proper context. That was something that was difficult to come by in 2008. Additionally, after five years of a president of Kenyan descent as POTUS, we have even more context, both for ill and good.
I want to run this project concurrently with my other project, the completion of my second novel, Arlen's Harem. I'll run it as a series for two weeks, to see if there's any interest. If there is, I'll keep going. And I still means that I'm going to need financial help. Donors who are willing can Go Fund Me or, if your want to get my Typepad bill paid right now and coffee in me early tomorrow morning, you can hit my Paypal tip jar.
For whatever reason, Kenya's fate seems to be bound up in ours--Americans. As a Christian, I know that nothing in the lives of the servants of Jesus the Christ is coincidental or accidental. Why God the Father would connect the fates of the Superpower and the tiny African country on the continent's east coast is beyond my ken. But, in the exploration of a political connection between the two countries, I believe that a spiritual connection will be revealed. I can feel it.
So it is that I wish to explore the history and present-day occurrences in my father's country. I am no historian, no do I have any educational credentials. All I have are will, faith and an Internet connection and, in my opinion, the faith is of the highest import.
A wise guy named Solomon asserted that reverance for the Lord--faith in Him--is the beginning of wisdom. That's my lone credential. May it be enough.
A few days back, as al Shabaab--an offshoot of al Qaeda—was
carrying out the Westgate Mall terror attack and torture fest in Nairobi,* Daniel Greenfield
pointed out that Islam, as practiced since its inception, has
all the attributes of a gang.
Islam may have become a religion, but it began as a code. Like the Pirate Code
or the Thieves Law of Russia, it was a set of rules that allowed a select group
of bandits to choose leaders, plan attacks and divide the loot.
The code invested their actions with meaning, it kept order in their ranks and
allowed the members to believe that dying for the gang was more than a martial
ethos, but also contained a spiritual element. Similar attempts to invest gang
life with spirituality can be found in the tattoos, rap songs and graffiti
memorials of every street gang in America.
…
After over a thousand years, after
its own empires and conquests stretching around the world, after endless
religious schools, reform movements, theological debates and splinter groups,
Islam is not able to leave its gang roots behind. It is still at its core a
gang religion. That is why it appeals so well to convicts who recognize that
they are interacting with something far more ancient than Kingism.
That is also why Islam, like most street gangs, degenerates so readily into
internecine violence. No matter how much its devotees dream of conquering the
decadent West and planting the black flag of Islam everywhere, they can't help
turning their guns on each other, because gangs are naturally primed to fight
amongst themselves. The gang code never suffices to settle disputes among men
who live by violence. They may fight to impose Islamic law on the world, but
they can't live by it.
…
If Islam stands for anything, it's killing non-Muslims. Islam can't really
think far beyond that. Its mindset is that of a dime store Alexander who
doesn't want to even think about the prospect of not having any more lands to
conquer, towns to sack, women to rape, homes to rob and libraries to torch.
Interesting, this observation. It
has long been known that Islam has high conversion levels in American prisons
among black men and, increasingly, other men. The fact is, however, that such
men—often members of street and prison gangs—are merely accepting the
protection of an older and stronger gang when they convert.
Even after all of the violence we’ve
seen perpetrated by various factions of Islam in the name of their deity and
their prophet, it was difficult to reduce an ideology which had always held the
status of ‘belief’ or ‘religion’ to mere ‘gang.’ But, all it took was for
someone, like Mr. Greenfield, to point out the obvious.
And, as is so with other gangs, Islam’s adherents don’t like
it when you call them out. They like it even less when you fight back—as Kenya
did; the terror attack was a result.
These gangs live to injure, kill and most of all, strike
fear; but, remember, they are not our main adversary. The powers and principalities
ruling in spiritual wickedness--about which Paul speaks in his letter to the Ephesians--are.
The various gangs, small and large, new and old, are merely
servants.
Answer: Both Kerry and the Virginia Beach middle school officials are "driving outside of their lanes," as it were. Neither has the authority to make such decisions.
Something else about these situations: they are two levels of a squeeze manuver. One is local; the other national/international and they seem unrelated. Both are born, however, of ideologues who can't achieve their goals unless the people--all of them--are disarmed. Even toy guns must be banned and your children must be discouraged from playing with them. Why? Because, one day, toys won't be enough for them.
I have trouble blogging about politics in the manner that I used to before 2008: as if there were any politicians who might have the peoples' best interest at heart.
Every move made by any politician earns the side-eye from me. Today it's Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who is filibustering the US Senate with the ultimate goal of dismantling Obamacare.
Now, I don't have any problem with Cruz personally; it's his profession that invites my skepticism. Call it bigotry, if you must. And while I'm happy to see a member of the GOP finally step out against the socialization of this country without fear of being called a racist--as happens to every non-black person who opposes any project of President Obama's--I have to ask, at this point, "what different does it make?"
Because of this skepticism, this cynicism, it's no longer possible for me to separate earthly matters from spiritual matters. If I thought they were separate, I'd shut down this blog and make a run for some border. But there's no safety to be found behind what will soon be non-existent borders. Fact is, I think this world is about to see how crooked and evil most of its politicians and rulers really are. It is my belief that safety can been found behind another type of border, however; one not drawn by men.
Events in the world are lining up the way God revealed to His servants as detailed in the Bible. We can no longer ignore it and I can no longer separate the two spheres in my writing and observation. Fair warning.
I notice patterns, more so now than back when I was a young
woman--likely because my head was filled with fruitless things with which, all
too often, young, single women occupy themselves. It was too crowded in there.
Too bad. The ability to recognize patterns could have done me some good back
then, both professionally and personally. But, it was what it was. And now, the
patterns of life are pretty much all I think about. Allow me to expound on at
least one.
Many people subscribe to subjective truth--that each person
possesses his/her own truth that may be different from another individual's
truth and I have noticed how normalized this way of thinking has become.
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a man, a friend of a friend,
on the definition of earning money. For whatever reason, he thought that any
money that a person legally possessed was automatically earned--that legal
possession and earning were synonymous. We went back and forth about this until
I put forth the following scenario: a man is walking down a street and sees a
dollar on the sidewalk. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Is it legally
his? We agreed that it was. But did he earn it? I'd like to think I won the
argument. But I found it alarming that, somehow, the gentleman I was talking
to--a reasonably intelligent man--had bound up earning and the legal possession
in his mind.
Then there was another conversation with another person about the
ethnicity of Jesus the Christ. This lady was adamant that Jesus in the flesh
was not a "white European" in the manner in which He is often
rendered. I agreed, but in the conversation, the passage in The Revelation
describing Jesus' hair was cited. Here it is:
His head and his hairs were white
like wool, as white as snow…
--Revelation 1:14 (KJV, emphasis mine)
The lady contended that this passage was describing the texture of His hair; that it was like
wool, and, therefore concluded that Jesus was "black." When I
countered that the passage only described the color of His hair and nothing
about the texture, she said that I wasn't "interpreting" the passage
correctly. This particular conversation did not end as hopefully as the
previous one. (As for Jesus' "race," I am...ahem...agnostic on the subject.
Moreover, I don't think it matters.)
But whatever one thinks about the truth of the Bible or the proper
translation from its original languages into English, it's fascinating to note
that even an English description of a thing is open to "interpretation" in the minds
of some; that an explicit mention of a color has many meanings outside of its
scope.
And, by fascinating, I mean scary.
I don't think this type of thinking is an anomaly and I certainly
don't think that the widespread inculcation of this type of thinking is
accidental.
A few years back, I coined the term Coconut Treatment. It didn't
catch on but it's still useful for the purpose of recognizing this particular
pattern:
Take a coconut, slice it in half, scoop out the
meat from both halves and toss the meat—the substance--into the garbage
disposal. Then take a pile of dog manure that Fido deposited into your yard,
fill both halves of the coconut shells with it and glue the halves back
together. What do you have now?
A "coconut."
This is what has happened to words and concepts in the minds of many
and it is the fruit of primary, secondary, and collegiate education also known
as the Great Dumbing Down. The fruit has been emptied of its nutrients and then
painted over or glued back together and called "fruit." At some
point, individual words and concepts became subjective. That is, they became
fluid and not set in stone. My old blog friend, Jeff Goldstein, has
a series of posts on this phenomenon, and a lot of people didn't get
that he was talking about this very thing.
(I was going to say that the idea of subjective definition is more
common among those with bachelor degrees or higher, but, in the past few years,
I've noticed that many who don't have much formal education also subscribe to
the notion. The difference between the two groups is this: the latter are less likely
to believe in subjective meaning and, even those who do will shake off this
idea once it is pointed out and explained. The former tend to be too well
indoctrinated.)
Being one of those with less formal education, I had long observed
this phenomenon, but until I read Jeff’s intentionalism series, I didn’t know
how to articulate it. Then, in last week’s Sunday Morning Book Thread at Ace’s place,
OregonMuse, the book thread master, added to my informal education by posting
the following
Postmodernism is a complex
of concepts that asserts that all our constructs are just that, constructs;
that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand
narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is
necessarily a limited and local one.
and said, jokingly, that
One year of free AoSHQ Premium
content goes to the first [person] who spots the giant logical hole in this
worldview.
So, being insufficiently indoctrinated with the
Coconut Treatment, I was the first one to point out
the hole.
According to postmodern
logic, postmodernism itself is a construct and, therefore, limited and local.
And, of course, that means that postmodernism,
itself, is false, illegitimate and a mere power move, by the postmodern narrative’s own logic.
I started writing this post weeks ago, and, after
reading OregonMuse’s post, it occurred to me that postmodernism is the very fecund
parent of subjective definition. Oh, I’m know that I’m not the first person to
come to this conclusion, but, keep these things in mind: I have only a two-year
degree and, what little I do know and think about comes from volitional
reading, observation and from thinking ideas through to the end. (I had heard
of postmodernism, but whenever I began to read anything written by its
adherents, my eyes began to close.)
Something else that occurred to me about
postmodernism, besides its logical fallaciousness, is that its advent has been
long predicted. Speaking of the perilous times in the Last Days, Paul in his
second letter to his protégé, Timothy, writes this:
But evil
men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
--2 Timothy 3:13 (KJV, emphasis mine)
Lying and being lied to.
Postmodernists like to make their written offerings seemingly complicated, but such are really quite simple, and I mean that in both senses.
It is but one big gigantic lie, negating
itself even. Above, I likened postmodernism to a mother with countless children and those who
read the Bible know who the father is. Subject truth and definition? The Lie-baby.
It’s up to each individual to see
the lies for what they are, to shake off the indoctrination.
Originally posted at Ace of Spades HQ a week ago. Re-edited. And, do me a favor: please check out the links.
A few weekends back, I made my way from my home in South Central Los Angeles to Albuquerque--where my parents and the vast majority of my family reside--for the wedding of my oldest nephew. During the twelve-hour drive, I contemplated the personalities of my nephew, his brother, his sisters, his male and female first-, second-, and third-cousins and his male cousins by marriage. All--18 to 26--are great young people.
Something that remains perennially in the news is the rate of unemployment for black teens, just over 40%. But here's a thing about my family: my five nephews and my six first- and second-male cousins are all employed! (My nieces are all under sixteen and my three female cousins are over thirty. An additional male cousin--married, degreed and employed--is over thirty as well.) How could that be?
Well here's one thing: only one of them lives in a blue state. So much for the alleged racism of Republicans. But their states of residence--New Mexico*, Texas, and Oklahoma--aren't the only factors; the others are more personal.
All are high school graduates.
Three are attending two-year colleges, two attend a four-year university, one attends a technical college, and two are four-year university graduates.
All are literate, well-mannered and well-spoken They don't even speak patois to their friends.
None have criminal or misdemeanor records.
All are prompt and know how to dress for employment. None have adopted the saggy-pants style.
Only one has a child and he is in his mid-twenties.
So what is this about? Only four of the young men have been raised by political conservatives. Two are illegitimate. Several are children of divorce--like me. All of them, however, have been raised by actual conservatives. So it is that they would not shame their families by failing to be responsible men.
My oldest nephew--the one who just married--is probably the most taciturn of the group. But he's not so shy that he was unable to woo, win, and marry a smart, accomplished, and very beautiful young woman to be his wife. And here's something about the two, my nephew, and my niece-in-law: both of their sets of parents are married to each other. And one thing about my nephew's parents--my sister and my brother-in-law: both of their parents are still married to each other. (My mom and stepdad have been married for 42 years and my brother-in-law's parents have been married for over 60 years.) And each generation consists of hard workers who have always wanted more for their children than what they had. This is what is known as a pattern.
But illegitimacy need not be a factor in producing children of poor character. Several months ago, I posited that illegitimacy by itself isn't what has caused the breakdown of the black family and the consequent breakdown of black moral character. The cause? Government subsidy of illegitimacy. When a child, especially a boy, grows up without a father, he will often run wild if there is no other male authority to which he is answerable--an uncle or grandfather, for example. But when children grow up in communities in which there are no male authority figures, when they grow up in communities in which there are few to no married couples, a people run wild.
The widespread (over 70%) illegitimacy among black Americans can be likened to the biblical fall in the Garden of Eden. Satan talked Eve into eating the fruit that God had forbidden and she talked Adam into eating it. This original sin will destroy most of humankind. The government talked black women into having babies without benefit of marriage and this phenomenon has nearly destroyed black Americans. Yet another pattern.
But just as there is redemption to be had in the heavenly realm, there is a way for black Americans to keep themselves from been destroyed here on earth.
Recently, CNN's Don Lemon--no political conservative, to be sure--was called a "turncoat mofo" for agreeing with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that black people need to clean up their act with respect to being 'good citizens'--a phrase used because that is what I was exhorted to be when I was growing up in the much-maligned 1960s.
Mr. Lemon's seemingly simple prescription is powerful.
You want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they're acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English. A high school dropout makes on average $19,000 a year, a high school graduate makes $28,000 a year, a college graduate makes $51,000 a year. Over the course of a career, a college grad will make nearly $1 million more than a high school graduate. That's a lot of money.
And number one, and probably the most important, just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should. Especially without planning for one or getting married first. More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison and the cycle continues.
And there was this on Twitter:
dress nicely. use appropriate language. keep ur surroundings clean. go to school. be responsible, involved parents. That's offensive? SMH
"Turncoat mofo?" No. The turncoats are those who urge other black Americans to keep doing the same things over and over again while, each time, expecting a different result. The turncoats are those who exhort black Americans to keep riding that express train to poverty, illiteracy, prison and ruin. Like the feral teens that are a plague on our society, pattern-recognition is foreign to those who screech ‘turncoat mofo’ to a man who imparts the tried-and-true wisdom that black Americans used to impart to their progeny.
* * *
I have been called a conspiracy theorist--not to mention the equivalent of a ‘turncoat mofo’-- a number of times. However, if most political and social conservatives can acknowledge that there are forces consisting of more than a single individual which conspire to destroy America-as-founded and the ideals on which she was founded, then it is plausible that such forces have used and are using strategies—by definition, long-term plans--to achieve their aims. It is for this reason—and for the vision of my lying eyes—that I put forth the following ‘conspiracy theory.’
For many decades, black Americans hoped and prayed to be considered equal to other Americans under the law--federal, state, and local. Well that goal has been achieved. It has been long past time for black Americans, as a whole, to do their part. What happened there? It’s this: too large a number of us have become prey to those who have always wanted to keep us down, keep us enslaved, and, ultimately, destroy us.
I submit that the Organized Left and the Democrat Party—now one and the same--have long been trying to rid our country of her black citizens. That goal is now almost reached. Think about it: blacks are vastly outnumbered by whites, Hispanics, and others. And blacks have been purposefully splintered in this way: we have been duped into nearly destroying the one earthly and seemingly unshakable foundation we had. That foundation is known as the family.
The feral teens we see today are the fruit of the splintering; they are angry and they know not why. They never learned fatherly discipline--and the compromised education system never bothered to inculcate in them the desire to think through their existential situation or any other situation. Often the only "men" in their lives are other mindlessly angry little boys wearing the bodies of men. Multiply this by millions.
So now, they are beating and killing innocents of all races out of boredom or avarice or whatever excuse they want to give. But the real problem is mindless and pointless anger, stemming from the lack of proper parenting by both mother and father.
But here's the thing. Non-black people are already tired of their loved ones being raped, shot, beaten, etc. for merely walking around, for the crimes of others or simply for not being black.
And when some set of white or other non-black persons begin to retaliate; it will go badly for the splintered minority—both the guilty and the innocent--for numerical reasons alone. As a result, the Leftist-infiltrated government will come in and "save" however many black people are left, but goal will be reached: black people will be almost exterminated in the USA and whites and other non-blacks will be the slaves.
That's been the plan all along...to kill all of us and to enslave all of you.
I am grateful to God that the young men in my family are fine, upstanding citizens. But I tremble for my people—Americans--as I watch the fruit of the rotten and satanic tree called Leftism poison us all, one way or another.
That’s why I pray to Lord who provided us with the Lamb who took away all of our sins. It’s our only hope, and I submit that it always has been.
*Yes I know. NM isn's all that red. But, to this Californian, red is relative. One can open-carry in NM.
Biblically described, there are three types of love: agape, phileo, and eros; aka godly love, friendship, and sexual desire, respectively. Somewhere along the way, a new definition of love was added to the language, one which has a single outward feature: giving a person what s/he wants. With this type of "love," one must give a person anything s/he wants or approve of the gift. Anything less becomes the opposite of love: hatred. And when a group wants a thing for the sake of some characteristic of that group, opposition to the giving becomes hatred of that group.
Thus, when a white person won't give a black person what he wants or disagrees with him, it's racism on the white person's part. When a man won't give a woman what she wants or disagrees with her, it's sexism on his part. When a heterosexual won't give a homosexual what she wants or disagrees with her, it's homophobia on the heterosexual's part.
And when a black person, woman, homosexual, etc. disapproves of this gift, that person is ousted from the group by the group’s recipients. After all, a few naysayers have the potential to cut off the giving, so any other potential naysayers must be discouraged. Ostracism has potential to keep the others silent.
The bestowal of this new type of love is required from those who are perceived to be in a position of worldly power, but reciprocity is not required of the perceived powerless recipients of that "love." Additionally, and of the most importance, the new type of love has pride as its foundation. The "powerful" giver is proud to have given the gift and the "powerless" receiver is proud merely on the basis of group membership to have received that gift. No gratitude is required on the part of the latter. That group is only getting its just due.
It matters not if the giving will hurt the giver or the recipient. It doesn't matter if the giving of said gift will hurt any aspect of society. It doesn't even matter if the gift will wipe out the lineage of the recipient. All that matters is that the recipient gets what s/he wants. (It's interesting to note that the German word for the noun 'poison' is das Gift; the verb 'to poison' is vergiften. The last also means 'to pollute.')
So it is that actor Ken Wahl--a white man-- is called a racist by a black man. Wahl's alleged crime: hoping that the abortionist Kermit Gosnell gets the book thrown at him for being a small but egregious part of the self-genocide of a people.
Black guy called me racist due to my stance on #Gosnell.I said,"Don't u care that the babies he killed were black!? U should,G! I do!" #tcot
But the discerning know what Wahl’s real “crime” is: not wanting to give a designated black person what that person wants, and, thus, refusing to show his “love” for the black race. Gosnell wants freedom, but Wahl wants him to be imprisoned. Therefore, Wahl is "racist."
You know, it’s almost as if most of the world has become populated by billions of narcissists.
For certain, Kermit Gosnell does not consider the babies he murdered to be human beings, much less fellow black Americans. Here's a little secret that not too many non-blacks know: there is a certain segment of the black population--an elite--that looks down on the majority of blacks and believes that the world would be better off without them. This elite has existed for a long time and what they think about the vast majority of blacks would make a Klansman blush. (One white person who does know: Anne Rice. She outlined the culture in her excellent, non-vampire novel, The Feast of All Saints.) From his courtroom and jailhouse demeanor, I suspect that Gosnell is one of these self-styled elites.
It's said that many of his clientele were young black drug addicts and prostitutes. Someone like Gosnell would believe that he was doing the black race a favor by "culling the herd," that is, getting rid of the inferior members of his race. That he didn't even allow his victims the dignity of proper sanitary conditions and that he kept trophies of his youngest victims are just symptoms of his singular psychopathology...and actually, the former makes sense given what I suspect about Gosnell. Puncturing uteri, over-drugging and passing along diseases through dirty instruments would--and did--cause many of the women to become sterile.
But he had accomplices! No, I'm not talking about the creatures who worked in his office; I'm referring to the Pennsylvania authorities who knew since 1993 what kind of charnel house Gosnell was running and did nothing about it. The only reason that we know about Gosnell is that he happened to over-drug one of his patients, the patient died, her husband alerted the authorities and, as a result, the DEA--a federal agency--swooped down on Gosnell's clinic. And, here's something pertinent: neither that patient nor her husband are black. One wonders how many black people complained to the state authorities about this man over the past twenty years.
Now, most of you know I'm not wont to play the race card, and, in a way, I'm not doing it now. You see, I think that the Pennsylvania authorities thought they were "loving" Gosnell and his mostly black patients. How? By giving them what they wanted--in spite of the complaints from some black people about Gosnell, black women kept going to him to have him murder their babies.
This is where the new type of love has brought us: all taking, all appetite—and easy disposal of an inconvenience like children because children require adults to do more than just take, be more than just appetite. (And, remember, just because most women who have abortions do so early enough within the legal limit doesn't make their children any less murdered. I know.)
UPDATE (May 15, 2013): In the comments, uptownsteve--the infamous troll of black conservative sites and pages--unwittingly demonstrates the truth of the premise of this essay. Thanks, Steve!
In the very recent past, the two YouTube videos below have become popular in conservative circles. Other than the obvious fact that both videos feature black people, the videos have nothing in common--or so it seems. Specifically, the videos demonstrate something interesting in their contrast.
If you haven't already done so, please watch both of them before continuing with my commentary. The second one comes with a language and violence warning. [UPDATE 2014: The account of the second video's owner has been suspended. Many did not like the truth being told.]
And, just in case you missed it the first time, the following video comes with a language and violence warning.
The first video features Dr. Benjamin Carson speaking before President and Mrs. Obama at the annual National Prayer Breakfast.The second features a woman being stunned by a taser-wielding security guard. The woman and her friend became belligerent with the security guard after he presumes to correct their wayward children and one of them physically attacks him after he corrects the children a second time. (And what wayward children these are! During the verbal part of the confrontation between the women and the guard, the children--none of them any more than five years old--begin to repeatedly call the guard 'gay.' Leaving aside the implications of whether such a thing is an epithet or not--and, to people like these, it is--when I was that age, I didn't have any concept of heterosexual sex, much less anything else.)
With regard to the first video, many commentators have noted the unabashedly conservative content of Dr. Carson's speech. It was, indeed, well-done and one might contrast the two videos in terms of how to and how not to disagree. But that isn't my purpose here.
By now, Dr. Carson's origins and background are well-known. Like all too many Americans, black and otherwise, he grew up without his biological father. But then so did President Obama. And so did I.
And so did Former President Bill Clinton, actor Pierce Brosnan and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas--whose excellent autobiography, My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir, I'm reading right now. And so did singer/musician Eric Clapton, economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, media titan Oprah Winfrey, NBA great Shaquille O'Neal and many, many other successful, responsible and law-abiding Americans of various races, famous and unknown.
As I began to reflect on the two videos and what I know from personal experience and observation, I realized that it has never been all that unusual for children in America to grow up without their biological fathers or even their biological mothers. Many times, such children are without one or both of their parents because of divorce or death and, in the case of growing up without the father due to divorce, the fathers often exit the lives of the children entirely, as was so with me. But just as often, the father is not in the child's life because he and the mother were never married. Such was the case with Jobs (who was adopted by the couple who gave him his last name).
But what makes a Jobs, Thomas, O'Neal, etc. different from the many children we see in this day and age-- who grow up the same way but who are disobedient and disrespectful like the ones we see in the second video?
Could you imagine behaving toward any adult in the manner of those children? That beautiful lady in the post before this one would have beaten me down had I acted like that. But of course, she trained me early not to run wild in public in the first place.
I suspect that none of the children in the second video were born in wedlock. Oh sure there's a man at the end of the video who appears and threatens the guard in the name of his woman and his alleged children. But, I suspect that, at maximum, only one of the children is his biological child and that he and tasered woman are not married. Call it a hunch.
On the other hand, consider the upbringing of Dr. Carson. He and his older brother were raised by his divorced and then illiterate mother. Growing up, the Carson brothers never saw their father. But their hard-working, and, frankly, brilliant mother wanted more for her offspring than she had. From Biography.com:
Both Ben and his brother experienced difficulty in school. Ben fell to the bottom of his class, and became the object of ridicule by his classmates. He developed a violent and uncontrollable temper, and was known to attack other children at the slightest provocation.
(...)
Determined to turn her sons around, Sonya [Carson] limited their TV time to just a few select programs and refused to let them go outside to play until they'd finished their homework. She was criticized for this by her friends, who said her boys would grow up to hate her. But she was determined that her sons would have greater opportunities than she did. She required them to read two library books a week and give her written reports, even though with her poor education she could barely read them. She would take the papers and review them, scanning over the words and turning pages. Then she would place a checkmark at the top of the page showing her approval.
At first, Ben resented the strict regimen. While his friends were playing outside, he was stuck in the house, forced to read a book or do his homework. But after several weeks of his mother's unrelenting position, he began to find enjoyment in reading. Being poor, there wasn't much opportunity to go anywhere. But between the covers of a book he could go anyplace, be anybody, and do anything. Ben began to learn how to use his imagination and found it more enjoyable than watching television. This attraction to reading soon led to a strong desire to learn more.
It's the type of upbringing I recognize.
But what made a Ben Carson or a Steve Jobs different from the children in the second video? What makes the children who grew up in the early 60s and prior without one or more parents different from the menaces to society we've seen all too often in the past four decades?
It's this: individuals--individuals who step into the breach that mother and/or father vacate voluntarily or involuntarily. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, stepparents, adoptive parents. And the individual biological parents, like Sonya Carson, who step up to the task appointed to them. People like her shape a Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon and leader of the surgical team who first successfully separated conjoined twins. People like the tasered woman--and the man--shape drug-dealers, gang members, welfare mothers and prisoners.
Such people like the latter know nothing of hard work, true education, order, responsibility. The reason this is so? Because neither they nor the other parent(s) of their offspring care about their children being better than they are. They don't have to care about this because they know that the government will subsidize all of their "needs" and the "needs" of their offspring.
When individuals are the parents, the child will most likely do well. When government is the parent, the child will most likely do poorly and become dependent on government as well--either taking on government as one parent (illegitimate children) or both parents (going to prison). This isn't rocket science or neurosurgery. From time immemorial, children, with some exceptions, follow in the footsteps of their parents.
This is becoming a problem in America as a whole, but it is primarily a problem among black Americans, a huge one. Since the beginning of the Great Society, black illegitimacy has skyrocketed and hovered in the seventy percent area for some time. Though many black women who have been having children illegitimately are self-sufficient, all too many rely on government to feed, clothe and house themselves and their progeny and the result is demonstrated in not only the second video, but many of the other videos that the security guard, Darien Long, has posted on You Tube. And I see the result nearly every time I step outside my South Central LA home...
The progeny of human mothers and government fathers are doing what chattel slavery did not...ruining a people.
Not as splashy as the one from eleven years ago, but there is a body count, giving members of the Religion of "Peace" the comfort of saying that they stayed true to the orignal intent of very first "celebration."
Not wanting to be outdone in celebrating, Libyans burn down the US Consulate in Bengazi, rocket the vehicle containing the US Ambassador and other fleeing personnel. Then, they murder all of the occupants of the vehicle--Ambassador John Christopher Stevens was reportedly "suffocated." The very recognizable body of Ambassador Stevens is then paraded through the streets. (WARNING: VERY GRAPHIC PHOTOS.)
All of these events were supposedly done in response to a youtube film about Muhammad, one made by an American pastor--Terry Jones--in conjunction with ex-pat Coptic Christians from Egypt.
All occurred yesterday, the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. And all are acts of war.
The Embassy
of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided
individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts
to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are
honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to
the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of
American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the
universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.
If you think such public moral equivalence didn't have approval from the White House, you're still in deep denial about the person who "leads" our country.
Remember what Barack Obama said long before he became president. On page 261 in Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama pledged to "stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." He was talking about detention camps, e.g. the FDR-approved camps designated for Japanese-, German- and Italian-Americans during World War II.
But what other "ugly political directions" does the president have in mind? The hurting of religious feelings, perhaps? If you hurt a Muslims's feelings about his theology and/or his prophet, what is he allowed to do to you and on whose side will the President of the United States of America be? With whom will he stand when those ugly winds blow?
Will he allow your body to be paraded through the streets of, say, Dearborn, MI?
So many unanswered questions. Here's another: when will there be a reckoning?
CORRECTION REGARDING THE EVENTS IN LIBYA:
Wanis al-Sharef, a Libyan Interior Ministry official in Benghazi,
said the four Americans were killed when the angry mob, which gathered
to protest a U.S.-made film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad,
fired guns and burned down the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
He
said Stevens, 52, and other officials were moved to a second building -
deemed safer - after the initial wave of protests at the consulate
compound. According to al-Sharef, members of the Libyan security team
seem to have indicated to the protesters the building to which the
American officials had been relocated, and that building then came under
attack.
Stevens, 52, was the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979.
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Libya's interim president has apologized to the United States for the attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three of his staff.
Mohammed el-Megarif described the attack as "cowardly" and offered his condolences on the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens
and the three other Americans. Speaking to reporters, he vowed to bring
the culprits to justice and maintain his country's close relations with
the United States.
It's good to see an apology from some other entity besides an arm of the US government.
This was originally a Facebook note, but I think it needs to be said at as many places as I can say it. It is slightly edited from the original.
*****
Recently, I had a misunderstanding with a Facebook friend about a comment I left on her page. My comment wasn't directed at her and the particulars of the misunderstanding aren't important, but I've seen the idea floating around for some years now--especially since it has become well known that there are a lot of black Americans who still hold a grudge against white Americans for slavery and Jim Crow and especially since a certain person became President of the United States--that black Americans ought to be grateful for those white Americans who died "for" our ancestors' freedom.
Let's get something straight.
I'm quite grateful to God for planting me in this country, in spite of the means of how it was done. It delivered me and mine from idolatry and Islam. God makes all things work together for the good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.
This country was founded on freedom for all and, it took some time, but America has lived up to its foundation. I hate the fact that Americans had to walk in the wilderness to make that happen: to kill each other in a Civil War and to make some of its citizens live in quasi-citizenship for 100 years after that. But it happened, nonetheless.
Here's the thing: did those who fought for the freedom of my ancestors 150 years ago and for the true citizenship of me, my parents and grandparents fifty years ago (my lifespan) do it to earn the gratitude of black Americans or did they do it for God and/or the honor of our country? One wonders if black Americans' freedom could have been accomplished without the bloodshed. Perhaps not, but black slaves certainly did not make white Americans kill each other over the bondage of the former.
If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are gifts from the Creator granted to all human beings, then those who defend the same should not care about gratitude from other human beings. As far as this matter goes, any gratitude which the likes of me might offer only serves to engender pride in the recipient. Pride is a sin; all types of pride.
True freedom fighters have the clean conscious of God. May that be enough for them.
I've lived a relatively long time and I've never known or heard of anyone who "demanded gratitude" for the sacrifices made to free the slaves in this country. Has anyone? That's a straw man...
Some people are quick to call you a liar when your experience doesn't match theirs. Humans...
As most of my readers know, like Barack Obama, my biological father is Kenyan and my mother is American. Mom--no fan of the president’s, to be sure--does not believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya either. Her reasoning makes sense.
Mom went to Germany as a young teen—she’s a military brat—and, as a result, is familiar with the international transport procedures of the 1950s and 1960s. (Coolness factor: she returned to the United States by sea.)
Additionally, Mom gave birth to me in the same month and year that Stanley Ann Obama gave birth to Barack Obama. Armed with intimate knowledge of travel and child-birth in the Dark Ages, Mom says that there is no way that Stanley Ann Obama could have given birth in what was then British East Africa, gotten papers, immunizations, etc. in order, and made it back to the other side of the world in time to apply for extension courses from the University of Washington (state) two weeks after her son was born.
Assuming that the details surrounding the president’s birth and his mother’s actions during that period are accurate (yes, I know), I don’t think the birthplace was a mistake by his literary agent as that agent claims.
Barack Obama has a history of dissembling—much of it designed to make himself look better than the average American, especially the average black American. It wasn’t enough for him that his father was Kenyan; he had to make himself even better by claiming to be born there. “Better?” I hear you ask. Yes, better, from the perspective of a person long-simmered in hatred of this country.
Allow me to give a little insight to the mindset. Often, when I mention that my biological father is Kenyan, people assume that I was born in Kenya as well, usually in the context that it is better to have been born somewhere other than in the United States. The assumption is an irritant for two reasons: 1) I am “proud” and grateful to have been born in the United States of America, and 2) If I had been born in Kenya, there would be no reason whatsoever to mention the birthplace of my father.
If Barack Obama did lie on his literary bio, did this bit of lying in the service of pride of self and hatred for this country back-fire on him? Can't say that it has. That bio has been in the public domain for all to see since 1991, but no entity of the mainstream media saw fit to present this very pertinent fact to the American voting public. Fancy that.
Dedicated to the memory of the fearless Andrew Breitbart.
Note: I began composing this essay some months before the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman shooting, but, in its wake, I felt that it was time to finish it and post it.
Usually I’m reading several books at once and using Kindle for Blackberry iPhone has exacerbated this low level of ADD.
One of the opened books on my device is Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. The subject matter is obvious; however, in the preface and the first few chapters, Harris barely mentions Islam at all. Instead, he does two very valuable things: he defines his terms and lays the ideological foundation for those terms as they relate to his subject. The two sets of players in the scenarios that Harris describes are: rational actors and tribal actors or fanatics. All of the following excerpts are taken from the book’s preface.
Throughout most of human history, men have not behaved like rational actors but like tribal actors; and in many cultures of the world today, they continue to behave that way. They have no choice. When everyone around you is a member of a tribe, you must either belong to a tribe or be an outcast. Whereas the rational actor asks himself, “What is best for me,” the tribal actor must ask himself,” What is best for us?”
*****
[W]hat limits [the tribal actor’s] freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe.
*****
The rational actor has the luxury of appealing to his conscience in order to condemn the behavior of his own community.
*****
The tribal actor, on the other hand, cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: “My tribe, right or wrong.” The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems right, and wrong as whatever the tribe deems wrong.
So let’s see how these observable truths relate to black Americans.
We have seen black Americans like former presidential candidate Herman Cain (R-GA), Rep. Allen West (R-FL), and Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC)--people who are obviously black and of African descent, using the eyeball test and known heritage--be deemed "not really black.”i Men like the foregoing are those who are not Democrats, who oppose the policies supported by the Democrat Party and who do not politically support Democrats of any race or color, not even the present President of the United States of America. But how can black Americans who are not Democrats or Liberals or Leftists become not themselves? And what gives Democrats—even white ones—the authority to determine who is black and who is not?
The following videos have a common theme.
The pride/shame dynamic is what is on display here. This feature is used rein in members of a tribe who step outside of pre-defined tribal boundaries.
Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we look into the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.
Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were bought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: the Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery, Americans of African descent were confined to a certain level of society. A few managed to break the barrier, but the vast majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.
But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as a tribe within a nation and they harkened to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.
These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.
Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.
So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-won goals-- educational, personal, etc.; we are proudof cherished relatives and friends who do the same.
The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.”
Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but the idea of “Black Pride" served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially a good thing, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.” Many (most?) black Americans believe that blackness is a way of thinking and a political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't really black. This idea stems further from the Left co-opting "black pride" and using it to keep anger and grievances alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. We've seen it happen many times. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.
Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt calls it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride--a sin--to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us--the things which we should be ashamed of--we have deemed inherent to blackness and called them good. We call the chains of the New Slavery--bastardy, illiteracy, mis-education, self-genocide, etc.—our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. (Harriett Tubman would understand.) Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out. ii
In addition, we deem the New Slavers--the modern-day Democrat Party--to be our friends even though their forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression and they have lured all too many of us into contemporary bondage. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.
Herman Cain was dead on when he called it brainwashing and it has been a decades-long process, coinciding with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.
Here’s the thing: I think that certain types of tribalism are beneficial to those within and even without some sets of tribal boundaries. Some years back, Bill Whittle famously expounded on the tribe of Sheepdogs, those rough men—and, sometimes, women--who make it their business to protect sheep from the wolves of this world. “You choose your tribe,” said Bill, and allowing oneself that choice is the province of rational actors. This isn’t to say that one should separate self from one’s racial, ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. However, it is to say that blindly following each one of the presumed norms of the tribe into which one was born is folly and it is the province of tribal actors. That is the place where into which all too many of my fellow black Americans find ourselves locked, mentally and emotionally.
Through this mindset, black Americans have become the organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame. I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand—to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence--and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War. And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.
I submit that the Obama Administration, representing black Americans and no others, declared a tribal war against white Americans when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party after the latter's blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department of Justice’s inaction sent a message mirroring that of the US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (1857): that the white man has no rights which the black man is bound to respect. Leftist ideology has been inculcated into black Americans for quite some time now and one of the strategies of this process has been to keep alive racial anger and the desire for tribal vengeance for past oppression. The Obama Administration's inaction in the above matter was merely a formal declaration, but the anger has long been simmering and, all too often, it boils over. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. And I think that many Americans have gotten the message.
Assuming that the above is true, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this declaration strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that these two features are merely the aforementioned ‘shame and degradation of being black’ re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)
So we black Americans murder ourselves within in womb and without, assert the former as our right, and ignore the latter. These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.
It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing, to a quick and devastating conclusion.
Turning back to conscience and morality, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance. You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I…
Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.
Harris points out that rational actors can only live as rational actors if those around him—those in his society—continue to behave as rational actors as well. He also says that, when a rational actor finds himself surrounded by tribal actors—fanatics—it becomes rational for a rational actor to revert to being a tribal actor. The alternative is to perish.
We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated and the Muslim world still demonstrates the truth of this. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity? Everyday, I pray not.
[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.
[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.
(Re-edited.)
UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus: Democrats Responsible for Black Culture of Anger. More precisely, Leftists are. Read the comments, tremble for your country and, most importantly, pray to The Living God for mercy and deliverence.
Donald Trump has been making President Obama's failure to release his long-form birth certificate a huge public issue for several weeks now, though it has been much discussed in Internet political circles for the last three years. But now that the president has finally made the birth certificate public, I have a few thoughts about it.
The timing of the release is a strategic blunder two-fer.
Trump has said that he would run as an independent in the 2012 presidential race if he didn't get the GOP nomination. Such a race would ensure President Obama's reelection. However, since the president released the certificate today, he has effectively deflated a Trump spoiler candidacy and neutralized a potential weapon against the GOP candidate (it would have been far more damaging to the GOP candidate had the president released the certificate, say, in September 2012).
I don't think that was what the president intended to do. But, thanks anyway, Mr. President!
A Vermont man shot his television set after watching as Bristol Palin, daughter of Former Governor and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (R-AK) lived to dance another day on the television program Dancing With the Stars.
[Sixty-seven year old Steve] Cowan “jumped up and swore, saying something to the effect of “the —-ing politics.”The complaint added, ”Steven was upset that a political figure’s daughter was dancing on this particular show when Steven did not think she was a good dancer.”
I keep saying that the unhinged hatred that Leftists have for Bristol and her mother is spiritually-induced, from the bad side-- which is why it's illogical--and here's what it's about: abortion.
The label "pro-choice" is pure BS; most of its proponents should properly be labeled 'pro-abortion.' And for those who have successful convinced all too many women that abortion isn't really murder; for those who have fooled women of the "wrong genetic sort" into believing that they aren't doing the elites' bidding when they cut off their succeeding generations, Sarah and Bristol Palin are two of the most dangerous women in America.
Both Palins chose to let their children live under two of the "adverse" circumstances which are usually used to justify abortion. By doing so, the two set examples for other women and may plant the idea in other women that they need not murder their own children under similar circumstances. This is why the Palins often cause a full-blown, foaming, freak-out in many of those who adhere to Leftist ideology or who have been brain-washed by it, even when something as inconsequential as winning favor on a reality show is the subject at hand. (Then there are the women who are still playing out their high school-engendered neuroses, but that's a separate issue.)
I bet this Cowan has marched in a pro-"choice" rally or two, probably because his wife nagged him into doing it.
A spiritual battle? Yes. The force of evil--Satan--wants us all destroyed and those who justify the murder of the unborn are merely his tools. This is why the pro-abortionists are so rabid about those who defend innocent life. "Noooo, don't take away my right to commit genocide again myself, you brute!!!!"
To Leftists, Sarah and Bristol Palin made the "wrong" choice--life--and for that, the morally bankrupt must demonize them, inverting wrong and right as such people--and their Father--are wont to do. That this genius only hurt his TV is something for which to be thankful.
UPDATE: Thanks to Booker Rising for the link to this post and for the many others. And it's always...erm...interesting when one of Shay's guests drops in for a visit. ;)
UPDATE: In the comments below, a un-medicated visitor freaks out as well:
Negress, what fornicating evidence do you have that Steven Cowan or anyone else who disagreed with the Dancing With the Stars, finals decision is a leftist?
Well, I did say that this murderer of TVs was either a Leftist or indoctrinated by lefist ideology (as almost all of us are). As it turns out, my first conclusion was correct.
Larry Ziemer, a fellow town supervisor, said he has known Cowan for about 20 years.
"I have nothing but good things to say about Steve," Ziemer said. "It was totally out of character for this to occur. He just does an excellent job on the town board and in his private working life."
Ziemer said Cowan is a talented carpenter and is well-respected in the area. Ziemer said he had never heard Cowan speak ill of Sarah Palin or her family before.
“He and I agree pretty much on politics,” Ziemer said. “We would probably lean both to the liberal side.”
The unhingement was a big clue--both with Cowan and my charming guest.
After I posted Discover the Networks’ “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Goal for North America” on my Facebook page, one of my friends--a friend in real life--pointed out that Christianity has history of conquest and forced conversion as well.
I don’t mean to pick on my friend, but I felt it necessary to reiterate my response here (edited):
[In order for an individual to examine the tenets of his/her faith], one must look at the foundational work establishing that faith.
Before the Bible was made available to the everyday Christian, the Church leadership--meaning the Catholic Church--dispensed doctrine interpreted in whatever manner it saw fit. After Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible was made available to all who could read it. It is no accident that Christianity was radically transformed and Reformed after that.
The same is happening to Islam with respect its adherents and its doctrines.
One of the Founders of these two religions commanded his followers to love God with all one's heart, soul, strength and mind and to love one's neighbor as self; the other commanded his followers to convert non-believers at the point of the sword or make them pay the unbelievers' tax.
As each set of followers have become more and more familiar with the foundational doctrines of the two sets of religious belief, they have begun to behave more and more in accordance to those doctrines: one set has become less totalitarian almost to the point of zero and the other more aggressive and violent.
The Bible and the Koran are objective documents with historical contexts readily available in this information age. It is up to the individual to make himself/herself familiar enough with both--if desired--in order to come to a cogent conclusion.
My friend mentions the genocides committed in the name of Jesus. Of course, the crimes of the prior millennium’s Christian missionaries are well-known and acknowledged:
Christian missionaries of Europe fell into error and sin back when they were bent on converting the natives of all lands--not by the act and desire of leading others to Christ, but by making Christianity about something other than Him, His Sacrifice, Resurrection and the purpose thereof. The missionaries bound up Christ in themselves and their own ethnicity.
[Edited also. I can’t help myself.]
Those crimes do not take anything away from the quality of the Gospel; they only speak to the quality of the human beings preaching it. Again, were such missionaries following the Bible or ignoring the inconvenient parts when they trampled non-Christian cultures?
This subject reminds me of my assertion that it’s necessary to be able to analyze information rather than simply to gather it. The will and ability to do this has become essential—not just to "win" an argument, but for personal and national survival.
Two days before Christmas, Politico reported that
White House officials believed [the health care fight] would last until
February -- after which Obama would make a "very hard pivot" to the
jobs issue.
But health care dragged on even longer; the bill
didn't pass until March 21. Even then, with his No. 1 priority accomplished,
Obama did not execute the long-awaited pivot and go full-tilt on the economy.
In fact, at times it was hard to tell just what he was doing.
(…)
Then came months during which Obama sometimes talked about the economy and
sometimes talked about energy and sometimes about immigration and sometimes the
Middle East and sometimes about other stuff. Watching the polls, Democrats
squirmed, seeing their hopes for November grow dimmer and dimmer. Republicans
looked on, bewildered.
"I don't get it," GOP pollster David
Winston told me at the time. "I don't understand what he is doing. He's
not addressing the No. 1 issue that Americans want him to address.
(…)
In a flurry this week, he's
proposing spending $50 billion on the nation's roads and railways. He's
proposing a $100 billion research tax credit for businesses.
Who will be the first mainstream personality of either party to come out
and say that the destruction of the American economy and, therefore, America
herself has been the entire purpose
of the Obama Administration and the leading lights in the Democrat Party from
the beginning?
That some are confused about the Administration’s strategy
speaks merely to the inability to accept a hard and distasteful truth: that the
majority of voters elected a man as POTUS who has this country’s demise at heart and who has repeatedly demonstrated this in word, deed and
associations well before the election.
Around the right side of the political blogosphere, one can
read the posts and comments of many who excoriate President Obama for his “stupidity.”These people don’t get it either.Those who look at the Obama Administration’s
policies and programs and observe President Obama’s obliviousness
and lack
of empathy in the face of acute and on-going national crises and make a
summary low judgment of the president’s intellect do so with the premise that
the man really is trying to improve the economy and other conditions in the
USA.
That premise is wrong.
This is what people need to realize about destruction: it is
the total opposite from building/improving.This seems like an obvious truth, but when comparing the concept, we
must take it further.Construction of
anything requires carefully ordered planning and implementation.For example, when constructing
a solid, stable building, the architect recommends proven construction methods and using
the right materials. But before doing these things, the builder gains certain knowledge of future purpose of the building and, from there, makes his decisions on how to proceed.
Destruction, however, is not only opposite in purpose; it is
so in methodology. (We’re talking malicious destruction here.) Using the building analogy again, think of
what happens when someone blows up a building—or flies an aircraft into it.Are any orders or rules to be followed for
the goal to be achieved?No.In fact, the more chaos perpetrated by
malicious destruction, the faster a building disintegrates. The same is true for a nation.
President Obama, the Democrat Party, and whoever sits behind
the scenes sow method after method of chaos—and, in some cases, inaction is the chaos sowed.They stab the giant repeatedly, hoping it
will finally fall, hoping for utter destruction.
In light of this conclusion, it seems that establishment
Republicans and reasonable Democrats do not want to acknowledge--possibly not
even to themselves-- the demonstrable bad intentions of the Socialists
presently in charge and, therefore, they don't have to think about what may follow should the Republican Party
fail to take back one or both houses of the Legislative Branch.
To be honest, I, too, don’t want to think about what kind of
country the USA may become in the aftermath of a GOP failure.
Were the people with whom this lady was arguing on something? Were those who were walking away from iron-clad logic on some sort of drug? Yes. It's call Evil.
More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of
nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through
May. The program has grown steadily for three years.
The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance
between compassion—providing for persons temporarily without work—and
efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program
subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and
levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the
increases in taxes required to pay for the program.
The recovery is a creature of confidence, or its absence.
"In normal times, psychology doesn't matter much. It reflects economic
conditions," says Zandi. "But in abnormal times, it's the reverse.
Psychology determines economic conditions." What the boom and bust left is
a massive case of collective doubt.
[President Obama gave] a stirring Sunday secular sermon [in New Orleans on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina] on the value
of the federal government—and on the idea of national community that, in its
best incarnations, it does or should represent to us all.
He wanted to prove not only to the people of the [Louisiana] but the people of the
nation that the feds can be a source for good.
Two years into what had been sold as a new politics and a new approach,
the 70 percent are fully aware that they have been conned, suckered, and
taken to the cleaners by a hyper-ideological amalgam of leftist public
intellectuals, snarling bloggers, career politicians with limited
abilities who are often corrupt, and a president wholly inexperienced in
the management of complex problems who is in way over his head and
prisoner to slogans and schemes that make for great campus debates --
but for disaster in the real world.
The Total Outstanding Public Debt as of today: 13 trillion
dollars and change. (See what I did there?)
It’s a High-Tech Looting of We, the People; it’s reparations to the "deserving" from the "undeserving." Forget about the injustice and the
immorality of it all and follow the mass dependence on public funding to its logical conclusion:what happens when there are no jobs to
service this debt via tax revenue?What
happens to all and sundry who are fed, clothed and sheltered by American treasury monies when the treasury money is gone?
Speaking of unemployment, I’ve been laid off from my
position as Social Media Consultant at Carmel Coast Publishing Enterprises—no
worries; it’s a friendly parting andbut
a sign of the times.And even though it
was only a part-time job, it was sufficient for my needs.But now, my only source of income is…you
guessed it, my novel.
I’ll get right to the point: I need to raise $10,000 to pay
my bills and my taxes.So far, I’ve sold
23 books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, 15 via Kindle and 150+ via my novel’s
website.Here’s what I need:
I will accept any combination
thereof and, of course, donations will
be much appreciated.
You can do so here:
It’s tough for me to get out and
do the hard-core, in-person marketing I need to do because I’m the sole
caregiver for my great-aunt.(My inability
to be away from home for long periods stands as one of the reasons that I
finished the novel and took the chance on self-publishing.Therefore, nearly all of my marketing has
been online, word-of-mouth and reputational.)All
of the reviewers have judged Tale of the Tigers to be an exceptional work
and I am grateful to those who have bought, read and commented.But now I need more.
About the national debt: many observers conclude that it is impossible
for the United States to recover from such a crushing weight.I’m not sure that I believe this, though.Oh, it isn’t that I don’t believe that the
debt isn’t lethal or isn’t meant to
be so.It’s merely that God-inspired human
inventiveness and ingenuity always seem to save the day.Sometimes we
see through a glass darkly as to how, but, with faith, hope, love—and work—the
light can be turned on.
God gifted to me an allotment of talents and I chose to invest them rather than bury them. I know for a fact that I am far from being the only recipient.
UPDATE: To the fine gentlemen at the RoadRaceAutoX.com message boards: I would say that my work isn't "chick book," but others might be a better judge. There's no bodice-ripping and there's some cussing and violence, so there's that. :) At any rate, welcome and thanks for the link! I think you will enjoy it; my reviewers are mostly men.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit and Ace of Spades HQ readers! I'm humbled by your purchases, donations and good wishes. As for the tally: 37 additional Kindle Editions sold and $1,100 in sales and donations! As for Amazon, I have to get a report from my publisher but I can tell that the book is selling when my rank drops. More report--and blogging tomorrow. I'm very grateful!
After you give your life to God, when He commands you to
stand, you have no choice.
--Glenn Beck
It was a joy and a privilege to watch Glenn Beck, Marcus Lutrell, Alveda King, Bishop Harry Jackson, and hundreds of thousands of others
as they stood to remind the government that our rights are a free gift from God
and that no man or government of men may insert its being in between that
providential connection.Like all who
love liberty, I would have found it a blessing to have attended, but other responsibilities
took precedence.
However, during my morning reading and prayer, it “occurred”
to me—again--to ask God what His will is for my life.I wanted to know what I was or wasn’t doing
that is against His will.Was there
something I needed to do more of?Had I
failed to say ‘how high’ when God told me to jump?Every person still breathing has an assigned
mission, whether it be great or small.
After admitting publically that I had had an abortion, I received
many compliments for my courage and honesty, but I felt neither courageous nor particularly honest.It wasn’t false humility; it was simply a
feeling that there was more—as if there was something else I needed to face.And there was.
The accolades I received for that admission were watered
down by a very sobering state of affairs in my life.The one person from whom I needed love and
support has, because of my confession, repeatedly ridiculed me for it--seeming
to want to induce shame in me for being so public.The irony contained therein is that, prior to
my admission, I had avoided blogging about abortion due to the shame I had felt
for doing away with my own child.Admitting it publicly was an attempt to free myself from that shame and it was
done in the hope that at least one young woman reading would realize that she
did not have to be the fool that I had been.
Abortion was my
greatest shame and, though my eternal guilt has been washed away by the
acceptance of Jesus Christ as my Savior, its earthly effects have been
extremely painful, spiritually and emotionally—the consciousness of sin and the regret at committing a form of suicide.
The interesting part is this: when God opens your eyes, your
spiritual vision is 20-20.The person
who wants me to feel shame for my admission once claimed to love me.But, my being continues to be shaped by God
and when He says, “Stand,” I have no choice.And what I’ve had to face is this: anyone who would ridicule me and attempt to provoke
shame from me for my obedience to the Lord cannot possibly love me.
Even more interesting is the realization that when you are
doing what you know is morally correct in the sight of God—when you take a
stand in the name of Jesus Christ—any chastisement you receive is an indication
that you are on the right path.Additionally,
the source of that chastisement will give you a clear window into the soul of that source.Be sure to pray for that soul,
however.
In Glenn Beck’s decidedly pastoral address on the
Mall in Washington, DC, the emphasis was on Restoring Honor.The primary recipient of our honor as
individual human beings is to God and is simply outlined in Mark
12:30-31; each human being is commanded to love God with an entire heart,
and with full mental power and to love one’s neighbor as self.Love is the variant of honor that should
constantly pour from our being—the highest
type of honor.
For the longest time, I did not understand what it meant to
love God, this incorporeal being.But
how does one love a sentient earthly being?We communicate.We talk to that person and, most importantly,
we listen to them and when we do this, we trust that the communication consists
of truth—we extend good faith to our beloved.(And
we show love by rejoicing in our beloved’s happiness and comforting him in his pain.And we never, never, never ridicule our
beloved when he reveals his soul.)
With God, loving Him has an extra component, of course.Since He’s omnipotent and omniscient, we show
our love to Him by doing what He commands and trusting that the commandments of a loving God
are meant for good.We extend to God
the ultimate in Good Faith.
After talking to Him (praying in the name of Jesus Christ)
and listening to Him (reading the Word), we do what He puts in our hearts, in
spite of any earthly consequences.We
take a stand.
So my eyes are open and my vision is clear.I will continue to stand for the unborn and
the murdered.
And I will remember that true love is (Holy) spiritual.
UPDATE: Though the story seems sad, I feel set free; very happy and peaceful. Peace is what I prayed for. It's a great birthday gift.
What have Republicans/conservatives done for black Americans? I hear that question constantly when I disclose that I am a conservative Republican. Often I will provide the usual facts that seem to be missing from the historical lexicon these days: freed the slaves, were 90%+ in the majority in the votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, something about the question sets steel to my nerves and I’ve been meaning to articulate the reasons for it here for some time now.
Implied in the question is that a political party must “do something” for blacks. Not merely the usual “something” that a government entity does for all of its constituents, e.g. provide utilities, regulate commerce, etc., but something special.
That word ‘special’ has taken on a new meaning in recent years and I think that it applies to the special items that liberals/leftists believe that the government should provide for the ‘special’ people, the “congenitally retarded” folk.
Yes, we ‘special’ people--with ‘special’ needs--require special handling: special education and special employment. You can’t expect black people to live up to the standards of ‘normal’ people. Like paraplegics or the blind or the deaf or those afflicted with Down’s syndrome, singular accommodations must be made for the great handicap of being born with black skin. To liberals/leftists, black people are a crippled class that can never be made whole just as long as they can never be made not-black. What’s this notion called?
And if anyone tries to treat us as full, competent adults, the liberals/leftists will scream in righteous anger and protest about the unfairness of it all. And if some of us ‘handicapped’ verbally express the desire to be treated like full, competent adults and act in a manner that demonstrates that desire, we are deemed as traitors by those who share the same racial makeup, but buy into the ‘handicap’ philosophy. Yes, we are “traitors,” because if some of us refuse to take advantage of the special needs offered and succeed anyway, the vast majority of America will begin to think that we don’t really require the “handicap slot.”
The vast majority of Americans will begin to think that we’re not really inferior after all. (Optimistically speaking, I believe that the vast majority think this anyway.)
"You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity," said [Rod] Paige [to NAACP leaders], who rose from segregated Mississippi to become President Bush's education chief.
(Thanks to reader Wesley J.)
Or, as I might put it, who died and made you the head of the Brutha/Sista Card Registry?
This idea of our race-wide ‘handicap’ is so ingrained in the mindsets of some, however, that it has morphed into the very existentiality of black identity: a black person who believes that black Americans need extra help to succeed is “authentically black.” Conversely, one who doesn’t buy it “isn’t really black” and is, therefore, a traitor to black identity.
In short, blacks who believe in their own inferiority are the real deal and those who don’t, aren’t. How's that for twisted dogma?
(This is why Condoleezza Rice comes in for special scorn among the liberals/leftists, especially black ones. Having been born with not merely one, but the proverbial two strikes against her, her very existence gives lie to the entire notion of black inferiority: she has succeeded through innate intelligence, raw talent and hard work. I’m sure that white supremacists hate her just as much. Now there's a marriage made in...somewhere.)
So when some black people find out that Republicans don’t want to “do anything” for them except to encourage them to take part in the American dream of prosperity, stemming from work and ingenuity, they’re like, “WTF? Where’s my money?”
So it is that white Republicans/conservatives, those whose ideology purports to treat blacks as equals are considered Devils. We blacks who agree with this are merely the Devils’ minions.
Those that have wondered why the vast majority of the Republican party don’t spend time on “minority outreach” miss the point. Republicans do outreach already. They just don’t do handicapped outreach, not unless you're really handicapped.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the campaign trail in his native Nevada:
REID: "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?"
How the Left stirs racial discord between Americans of Hispanic decent and other Americans is a topic I want to address in detail in the third part of my "Herding" series. But the assumptions in Senator Reid's short assertion need to be addressed right now.
Leaving aside the 2007 Republican establishment's push for amnesty for illegal aliens already living in the United States, most conservatives are for strict border enforcement first and decisions about illegal aliens already present afterward. In Harry Reid's statement lies the assumption that, Americans of Hispanic descent must naturally be in favor of
allowing any and all Hispanics from Mexico (and other Spanish-speaking
countries) into the USA without any controls at all--that, to Hispanic
Americans, it's better to have more Spanish-speakers in the country,
than it is to enforce the federal and state immigration laws.
A more important Reid assumption is this one: because conservatives want the borders of the country secure--because the Republican base does not want to give Hispanic Americans what he presumes they want-- Republicans and conservatives hate Hispanics.
My father [who had been political prisoner of Castro's Cuba] looked at the platform of the republican party that endorsed
small government, lower taxes, and strong defense, while the democrat
party embraced Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, murderers and tyrants, as
some sort of folk heroes, and endorsed larger governments taking power
away from the people.
...
Sweet justice for me, would be to see Marco Rubio enter the senate as you exist your way out to hand the keys to Sharron Angle.
Heh. I guess I'm so used to Democrats, Liberals and Leftists treating conservative non-whites, women, etc. like their intellectual runaways slaves, I don't even get mad at this stuff anymore. But it's nice to see Harry get a chewing. The only problem is this: I'm not sure that the senior Democrat senator from Nevada has enough marbles to comprehend what Cubachi or Marco Rubio or the good folks at African American Conservatives or LtC. Allen West are saying to him and his party.
Perhaps, in November, we will be able to explain in terms simple enough for even Senator Reid to understand.
Over at Ace’s, there’s a commenter who continually tells Ace’s presumably mostly white readership that it’s pointless to go on about the history of race relations in this country and that white Americans should simply join the battle which the Obama Administration and the organized Left are trying to provoke. When I responded with a condensed version of how black American social and political allegiance has been manipulated over the past ten decades, he stated that a people who could be so easily (sic) manipulated must really be inferior.
This man demonstrates the type of limited perspective that I sketched out in Part One and, actually, his type could have furnished me with an additional bullet point; not only is he unable to think strategically, he actually rebukes the notion that such analysis has any value. Moreover, such a person is blind to how his own thinking and emotional state have been shaped and molded by Leftist ideology in a much shorter time span than was so for black Americans.
In this second part, my purpose is to detail another tactical weapon of the Left, the purpose of which has been to instill a set of attitudes in the minds of the American populace; in this case, the mindset is meant for white Americans.
If the Left has been successful at keeping racial grievance in the forefront of black American agenda—in indoctrinating black Americans into believing that retaining racial anger at whites is inherent in being black and essential for black survival--it has also been successful in later years of producing a certain mindset in white Americans. Actually this seems to be two mindsets, but it is really a singular one—a two-headed beast. The first is guilt-fear and the second is unproductive anger.
White Guilt-Fear
From one of my political progenitors, Shelby Steele:
What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America's historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative--that they are not racist--to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.
Institutions especially must be proactive in all this. They must engineer a demonstrable racial innocence to garner enough authority for simple legitimacy in the American democracy. No university today, private or public, could admit students by academic merit alone if that meant no black or brown faces on campus. Such a university would be seen as racist and shunned accordingly. White guilt has made social engineering for black and brown representation a condition of legitimacy.
It’s a “read the whole thing” kind of essay.
The phenomenon of white guilt doesn’t merely mean that many white Americans feel guilty for the actions of pre-CRA America. It also means that all white Americans must pay for the sins of their fathers and pay for a system from which they are perceived to still be the beneficiaries and to still have advantages over all other Americans simply due to being white. Stemming from that premise, all whites are guilty until proven innocent.
Why are some of you so afraid of being called [labeled] 'racist' when you know that you aren't?
Little did I comprehend the near mortal terror in which the white American of goodwill and good-faith lives at being labeled as racist. What I discovered was that white Americans are being systematically made to pay if they step outside the ever-shifting boundaries of Political Correctness. If a given white person does cross one of these boundaries, he/she is “payed-back,”: often by losing employment which is usually accompanied by being driven into bankruptcy. Therefore, avoiding the label of ‘racist’ ( or ‘sexist’ or 'homophobe’) has been a matter of economic survival for white people—especially for heterosexual men.
Here are excerpts from some of the responses to the "Question" post. (The comments have been re-opened there, by the way. Also, keep in mind that the responses were given back in December 2009--before the Tea Party Movement and before the wanton slinging of the racist label had begun in earnest. It seems such a long time ago.)
It isn't fear, it's just a healthy respect for the consequences. If you work for a Fortune 500 company in a right-to-work state, being labeled a racist is going to get you an unpleasant visit to HR, a poor rating, and the beginnings of the process that is going to get you fired. These companies have all instituted mandatory diversity training, and no deviations from the usual company policy of denigrating white men and elevating blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and GLBTs will be tolerated.
The 'Racist' epithet and label are being used as a wedge to keep the races at one another's throat, in my opinion, because harmony threatens the occupations of so many people. And divisiveness is profitable. So those of us who are clearly not racist will not speak up as a general rule because the "race card" trumps all others, in the courts and in the court of public opinion.
The Left, including their politicians, much of the news and entertainment industries, and much of academia and the public schools have been in the process for decades of sedating, dumbing down, and propagandizing the American people.
I lived and worked in Mountain View, San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto for thirty-plus years. I never bought into the "white guilt" thing, and made no secret of my non buy-in, and it cost me at least one substantial rise in income…So yes, being labeled "racist" can cost you.
[A]busive race-mongers and their disingenuous ideals must be challenged by and removed by their racial/intellectual peers. Why? Because they are in control of the conversation. As long as their peers allow them to remain unchallenged in their control and limning of the innocent, I don't think it will go away[…]Just as fear breeds resentment, unchallenged abuses breed ever-bolder tyranny.
One person described the labeling process in the following manner: once the white person has been tarnished with the racism label, all the others turn away from him rather than come to his aid—even if they believe he is innocent. (That reminds me of a book; several, in fact.) The reason? Such aid rendered will result in the defender being tarnished as well. This makes sense because of the Leftist premise, again: whites are always guilty of racism or are the beneficiaries of it. Who wouldn’t be afraid knowing the probable outcome?
(When I suggested that whites en masse refuse to play the racist game, one rocket scientistimagined that I was saying that, because white Americans often wouldn’t fight back when accused of racism, the persecution was their own fault. That sort of faulty reasoning is a subset of the white guilt-fear-anger axis. It’s also Rapist “Logic”: “she was asking for it and it was her fault that she was raped because she didn’t fight back.”)
Individual guilt can be a positive thing: a motivator to get clean and make restitution to the wronged party. (And this Christian asserts that the identity of the wronged party is always the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel [nee Jacob].) However, when group guilt is the matter at hand, there exists no actual defendant or plaintiff in reality. Under such a fantasy, the "plaintiff" can never be made whole and, obviously, the "defendant" can never be made to pay enough. And that brings us to...
White Anger
Dr.Steele again:
People often deny [a better verb, I think: disavow] white guilt by pointing to its irrationality--"I never owned a slave," "My family got here eighty years after slavery was over." But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism's power to contaminate by mere association.
Persons who use this cogent logic are exactly right; however, they forget about the Leftist premise regarding beneficiaries—that even if, say, a Russian immigrant arrived in 1995, he/she still gets a perceived advantage over the black American, simply by being white.
Where the anger comes in should be obvious to anyone who has been on the receiving end of wrath for acts they have not personally committed, but it goes deeper than that. The idea of group or generational guilt stems from the biblical notion that the “sins of the father are visited upon the son.” However, when the Left builds upon this notion, they are forgetting who the visitor—the inflictor—is. (Hint: it’s someone in whom much of the Left does not believe.) This should lead us to the conclusion that group or generational guilt is something that the political Left doesn’t believe in either. Sowing the need for it and reaping the resultant white guilt-fear-anger is just a tactic…toward the goal.
The white person who feels unproductive anger at blacks as a group is in just as manipulated as the black person who feels this way toward all whites whether either is justified or not. Why? Because blanket anger toward group for things which an individual of any group cannot change—such as skin color or race--leads to the Vicious Circle of un-washable guilt and anger that I've already described and it gets the Left what it wants—the goal.
Properly targeted, productive anger, however, is where moral and valuable solutions lie--not to mention absolution.
A Certain Justifiable Anger and How the Left Uses It
That Leftist politicians and shapers of the mainstream media content are labeling the Tea Party Movement as racist is a fortuitous example (for them) of how to use the indoctrination which they have implemented. Oh, they know that the Tea party movement isn’t actually racist in its foundation, principles or goals. They do, however, know this: in the mind of the black on-looker who sees the Movement’s mostly white makeup and who does not recognize that he/she has been indoctrinated with an incomplete view of American history or that his anger/vengeance is being purposely inflamed, all the Leftist conditioning will spring up at the first flinging of the epithet ‘racist.’
As a result, whites who know that their opposition to the policies of the Obama Administration and the Democrat-controlled Legislative Branch of government is totally based on principle are even further angered. The Left uses this conditioning and the anger of being unjustly accused to paint the Movement as anti-black, shaping it in their own image as the fruit of the Racial Discord tree which they have planted and so diligently have fed and watered.
Conclusion
White and all other Americans—some who are keen observers of the history of Leftism, of Statism and who understand how and why this country was founded; others who merely want to provide for their families and live as free as possible--are easily able to visualize the path on which this country has its footing and are justifiably angry with those in our government who are purposely leading the United States of America toward tyranny. This is not “white” anger; this is American anger.
The tactics educated into both sets of the American populace are designed to do two things: 1) dis-empower both to the point of believing that their fellow citizens are their enemies, and 2) inflame negative and violent emotions to the point at which actual violence will take place. Fear, anger, and--the progenitor of the two—covetousness; the Left’s long-stoked Race War cannot begin without these. (I am purposely leaving out the equation of Americans of Hispanic descent and the illegal alien question; things to address in Part Three. ) [2014 note: I changed my mind about Part Three's subject matter, but, considering what has happened in 2014, a Part Four is needed.]
The Left sows and inflames Racial Discord in order to eventually style itself and its chosen representatives as the solution to the Discord it continues to sow. And the “solving” of that problem brings us back to my conclusion, stated in Part One, the Fundamental Transformation.
Power is the Left’s goal; power over all areas of each individual American life, regard of race creed or color of the particular American. The good news: the Left has over-played the Race Card with President Obama’s face on the suit. And it has stirred up righteous anger of we who recognize that Leftist Ideologues have long been actively targeting the goal of permanently impeding the Pursuit of Happiness and depriving all Americans of Liberty, Property and, ultimately, Life.
The proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this tendency to plunder instead of work. The law should protect property and punish plunder. The law, whether made by one man or one group of men, operates with the sanction and support of a dominating force, and this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws. Legal plunder occurs when the law takes from one person and gives to another. The law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. If such a law is not abolished, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
Have you noticed that there are some people—many people--who have no concept of time?No, I’m not referring to the chronically tardy, though I do suspect that many of them fall into the categories of which I’m about to outline.
Those to whom I’m referring do not have a concept of the following; they are
Unable to consider individual events from the past as anything but singular and isolated occurrences, e.g. unable to connect those events with each other and—further--with contemporaneous, on-going events,
Unable to use known, available and pertinent information/ideas to analyze the sum (or, to use a better mathematical term, the product) of events in order to come to a plausible conclusion as to what is going, and
Unable to take that conclusion and reasonably project what may happen in the future.
The ability to do this is called strategic thinking—the ability to recognize patterns and figure out what is true and what is false.Most of the time, this inability has nothing to do with IQ and can be selective and temporary.I believe that, in the latter two types of cases, the inability is due to a syndrome to which almost all of us are prone: wishful-thinking.
Many do not want to or cannot put together the events which have lead this country to its present state, much less come to a reasonable conclusion. However, I don't fall into either category. Believe me, sometimes I wish I did.
But the more I learn about the history of the twentieth century, the more I consider it against what is known about human nature, the more I observe the state in which this country finds itself in at present--the more I believe that the peril anticipated by all too many observers, was planned by the Left.
Many black Americans are waking up to the fact that the proliferation of Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood and its promotion of abortion were planned to succeed where more overt forms of oppression against black Americans could not and did not.
God bless Maafa21 for being obedient to Him by opening eyes and ears.
Isn’t it interesting that Europe finds itself in financial straits and that some on the continent are lamenting the gradual incursion of Islam in very many of its countries?
From reading Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (I read it years before Glenn Beck recommended it), I discovered what a death toll World War One had taken on the population of its European participants. Present-day protesters against the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have committed serial seppuku over the type of casualties taken in any single battle of the Great War—the great numbers of dead being caused by contemporaneous weapons combined with American Civil War-era tactics. Then there were the civilian casualties. Overwhelming to ponder at the time, no doubt, but small potatoes compared to what was to come a few years after the “War to End All Wars.”
Europeans murdered each other thoroughly in that war, in World War Two, in between the wars and afterward. They did so via gas chambers, ovens, starvation and government prison camps and most of them viciously turned on the Jews using the means stated. Because of that--and abortion--there have not been enough indigenous Europeans left to reproduce and, thereby, fund the welfare states in which they so desperately believe and which are become their undoing. So they had to invite in immigrants from Africa and Asia--mostly Muslim.
And therein lies the interesting part. Murdered Jews—the monetary experts and culture of Europe--who would have reproduced to populate a far stronger and more admirable Europe, IMO--have been replaced by those who hate both Jews and non-Muslim white Europeans and who reproduce at a far greater rate than do their hosts. And the kicker is that the white post-Christian Europeans invited in their would-be conquerors.
The children and grandchildren of those who coveted Jewish possessions will soon be in a struggle with those who simultaneously claim that there was no Holocaust and who long to perpetrate the next one. No, hatred doesn't have to make sense.
That struggle will be over possession of a land which is covered with the ashes of the Jews.
You don't think God doesn't keep his promises? Think again.
An old friend sent me these photos of the Sonoran Desert--just south of Tucson, Arizona, just north of the Mexican border.
And here are some photos of the oil on the Gulf
Coast (Louisiana), a result of the British Petroleum oil platform accident over a month
ago.
Now, my purpose in posting these photos is not to cast blame for these catastrophes
in any direction--at least not today--nor am I inclined to advance any environmentalist agenda.
What strikes me is the symbolism of the location of the
spillage, dirt and detritus.All of it
lies on the borders, on the edges of the United States of America, seeming to be poised to
overflow this nation and overtake it.
And at the same time, there seem to be other forces—seen and
unseen—poised to consume the USA and, indeed, the West.
I'm not trying to induce fear and, since fear has a sinister source, its sole use is as a focus agent. But one can merely juxtapose the trash and the slime with the less tangible dangers and see the fork in the road, both literally and metaphorically. Do we let the refuse wash over what we hold dear? Or do we fight it off and fight back?
And if we choose to fight back, is it possible to keep from getting dirty ourselves?
We'll find out soon enough.
(Thanks to MaryG and to Ace; oil spill photos belong to the Boston Globe)
Marie and Sebastian Stroughter of
African American Conservatives and Kevin Jackson of The Blacksphere have collaborated to form the Black Conservative
Census, urging conservatives who happen to be black to “stand up and be
counted.”Of course, this is in response
to the Big Media-driven notion that racism is indicated in the facts that most
black Americans are liberal Democrats and that most of those who protest
in/sympathize with the Tea Party movement are white.
An absurd notion, is it not?As my friends Mike and Sonja T. mentioned, if all-white groups over two in number were
automatically racist, they became an official racist mob when their first-born entered
the fray.(They have four.I'm scared!)
Deeming a group 'racist' which labels itself by race/ethnicity or incidentally consists of mostly one race isn’t an idea exclusive to Big Media, however.I recall that, back in 2005, when Jay Tea of Wizbang! was
kind enough to publicize the efforts of another black conservative online alliance--the Conservative Brotherhood--a lot of assumptions were made regarding the nature of that group; assumptions which existed solely because we billed ourselves as a 'black' group. Many of us who belong to CB waded into
the comments section and tried to dispel erroneous notions about the group, some of which were astonishingly stupid and racist themselves.
As it often goes, however, when people are on the side of the angels, one of the most
eloquent defenders of the concept which produced the Conservative Brotherhood was Jeremy
Pierce—the husband of one of CB’s members, Samantha.Jeremy is white.
The point of the CB is so more
black people will be exposed to their ideas, because those are the people whom
these ideas will most directly affect and the ones most commonly ignoring the
CB members as Uncle Toms who are in Whitey's pocket.
(…)
It's a matter of connecting with
those who have similar views from the same background, a group who tends to be
ostracized and marginalized merely for being both black and conservative.
(…)
As they [band together], they
haven't isolated [themselves]. They've just taken note of each other and become
allies, with a central location that links to all of them. Then someone comes
along and calls them racist, and others say it's immoral and against
conservative principles. Why? Because they care about race. If we say it's
racist or immoral in some other way to care about race, then we're not going to
care about race, and that's going to feed into all the problems that come when
you ignore the real racial problems in this country. That's catering to
institutional and residual racism. It's thus part of the complex social forces
that perpetuate racial problems. It's thus racism.
One of the ways in which discord and distrust have been sown
for years by racists of all colors and persuasions is by accepting as valid the
perception in which any group which formed on the basis of ethnicity is
automatically racist, especially if the group is white—no if, ands or buts. So it is that Wizbang! guests applied the same standard to a black group--ignoring the nuance inherent in the adjective ‘conservative’
and ignoring the CB members' displayed words and actions up to that point in time. These people decided to see something sinister (no pun intended) in anything
labeled black or composed mostly of black people.
(It doesn’t feel too good, does it, fellow Tea Partiers? And now
you know why I posted the message
about my affiliation with the social network, The Professional
Black
Writer.)
It’s the flip side of identity politics. It replaces thinking. And in acknowledgment that some people don't want to think these concepts through, Jackson and the Stroughters have provided a not-black
affiliation field for the census. Understandable.
Admittedly, however, President Obama’s racialism—indicated both
before and after his election—has made mere “pride” in one’s heritage even more suspect.That racialism started on the very day of the
election and has been officially condoned by the Obama Justice Department. The Obama Administration has
planted and continues to plant the seeds of mistrust and discord among American
brethren.Simply put, it has painted a target on each of our backs.
I assert that it’s up to all of us to think things through and
to recognize the administration's strategy for what it is—a means to destroy the United States of America—and not
to buy into the mutually-assured destruction this president offers.
I don’t feel like
writing to convince anymore.I’m sure many have
figured that out by now.
The problem, however, is that my “conscience” (read: the Holy
Spirit) continuously reminds me that one should not be complacent or fearful
when advocating a just cause.That just
cause? Keeping the people of America free and, to that end, adding one more
small voice to the millions who are angry and fed up at the daily encroachments
on that freedom—daily since January 20, 2009.
So I’m going to ignore my feelings and put something up here
every single day—even if it’s an Instapundit/Twitter-like one-liner.That’s my pledge.
UPDATE: "Obama snubs Leader of the Free World" --Darmon Thornton
UPDATE: It's a safe bet that Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson Sr., Jeremiah Wright(!) and Louis Farrakhan (!!!) were treated far better than the heads of state of two of America's staunchest allies and the Dalai Lama. Fair warning to Canadian PM Stephen Harper.
What a disaster Barack Obama has turned out to be.
UPDATE (March 30, 2010): Little did I know that President Obama had insulted our Canadian allies months ago. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adds a fresh, healthy dose of disdain.
By now, Stevie Wonder could see this pattern: cut America off from her friends and destroy her.
described then-candidate Barack Obama during the presidential campaign as a black candidate who could be successful thanks in part to his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."
For as much respect as I do not have for the senate majority leader, I have to say this: he spoke the truth.
I have met hundreds of handsome black men--light-skinned and otherwise--who are able to speak with no discernable “Negro” dialect and who are able to turn the dialect on and off—an ability with which I have no problem. (Know your audience.) In fact, many such men exist who are far more gifted in the two of the three stated areas than is Barack Obama and in some areas which were not stated by the senator—demonstrable leadership ability being the most important one.
However, I think that many white voters were more familiar with the NBA player/Jesse Jackson attitude and method of elocution as it applies to black American politicians. In short, liberal white voters (and even some not-so-liberal ones) got fooled by Barack Obama's semi-slick surface. I’ve said so before, others have said so. Even Obama himself has acknowledged that some white people can be fooled in the manner specified.
It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: [White] People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved - such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.
Dreams from My Father, pp.94-95
People forget that the ‘effective tactic’ mentioned used by now-President Obama was being used to calm the fears of his own mother on the occasion mentioned. (BTW, he shows particular contempt towards her in the passage.) Ann Soetero may or may not have been fooled by this tactic--Obama was her son, after all. But, many years later, a lot of other white Americans were.
Of course, many are calling for Senator Reid’s political head in the wake of his telling of this particular truth, especially in light of the statements made by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) back in 2002 regarding the retirement of the late Senator Strom Thurmond and the Democrat reaction thereto. Former Senator Lott was forced to resign as majority leader for saying that
...[w]hen Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.
Thurmond ran in 1948 and was an avowed segregationist at the time. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele wants the same fate that befell Senator Lott to befall Senator Reid.
While there is no question that Senator Reid did not select the best word choice in this instance, these comments should not distract America from its continued focus on securing healthcare or creating jobs for its people [sic]. Nor should they detract from the unquestionable leadership role Senator Reid has played on these issues or in the area of civil rights. Senator Reid’s door has always been open on hearing from the civil rights community on these issues and I look forward to continue to work with Senator Reid wherever possible to improve the lives of Americans everywhere.
What does that mean? It means that those who align themselves with the “correct side of history” are allowed leeway to say what’s on their minds without having to pay a political price in public.
This is the deal: if you’re assisting in the redistribution of wealth to its “rightful owners,” you get a pass on telling an unflattering racial truth. If you’re “doing something to for black people,” you get to let a “racist” thought slip through your lips or out of your word processor. It’s why old Klansmen like Senator Robert Byrd can even use phrases like “white n*gger” and still sit in the US Senate.
You're allowed to "abuse" black people with one hand if you’re giving them things out of the other.
And when the inevitable uproar from the other side is heard, you, a Democrat, are allowed to say “sorry” and move on. The Republicans can’t do anything about it, and, as the Reverend Sharpton implied, a few words are meaningless when measured against the importance of the Juggernaut known as Hope-and-Change and its destination—even so-called racist words.
So even though Senator Reid is telling the truth (for a change), he won’t suffer for it.
And while I'm Bitterly Clinging to my Religion, I might as well complete the stereotype--well, as much as is possible, at any rate.
Preliminary statistics released by the FBI for the first half of 2009 show that violent crime continues a downward trend that began in 2006. The figures show crime falling in all categories--robbery, aggravated assault, motor vehicle thefts, etc.--with murders down a remarkable 10 percent from the previous year.
This occured "oddly enough," at the same while people have been stocking up on guns and ammunition for fear that the Obama Administration might crack down on gun ownership nationally.
More guns, less crime. Hmmmm.
So does this mean that violent felons are smarter than gun-ban activists?
Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit puts up a video
of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being interviewed by David Gregory on
NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday
morning and notes that she appears to at least give lip service to agreeing
with the Obama Administration’s decision to try admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid
Sheikh Muhammad and his cohorts in civilian federal court--in a venue located within walking
distance of the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood.Not really a surprise.
SEC'Y CLINTON: … I'm not going to second guess any decision
that the attorney general made. But I think it's important that Mayor
Bloomberg, that our law enforcement officials in New York, you know, all
believe that New York City not only can handle this, but that it is appropriate
to go forward in the very area where these people launched this horrific attack
against us. You know, I was a senator from New York, and I, I want to see them
brought to justice. The most important thing for me is that, you know, they pay
the ultimate price for what they did to us on 9/11. And if the attorney general and, and veteran prosecutors think this is
the best way to achieve that outcome, then I think that, you know, they should
be given the, the right to move forward as they see appropriate.
(Emphasis mine.)
The outcome is the most important thing to Secretary Clinton
and to the administration for which she works.The appropriateness of jurisdiction and venue doesn’t matter.The rules of evidence don’t matter.Nothing matters except for the outcome and
the outcome which Secretary Clinton claims to want is death for KSM and his
boys.So if it isn’t important that the
proper process be followed when determining the fate of these…these…thesehuman beings…if the process is secondary to
the outcome then why are they bothering?
Because I think we all know of an even better way that the “ultimate
price” outcome can be achieved.
However, isn’t proper and due process supposed to be of the utmost
of importance when an individual find him/her fate under review by a given
court?Aren’t the rules, rather than the
outcome, supposed to be at the crown jewels of the legal edifice of this
country?
If these Jihadis get the death penalty in this court, our
problems are not over but are just beginning and not just those which will be
caused by their brethren.
Once the process is
thrown out, once the rules are thrown out, once the outcome becomes the most
important factor in making legal decisions, all bets are off.Americans will be just as subject to
outcome-based jurisprudence (again) as it appears that KSM will be.That’s one of the most important reasons that
President Obama and Attorney General Holder want GITMO closed and the prisoners
thereof subject to US law and granted the rights which all those on American
soil enjoy.
Another thing: Secretary Clinton, et al. are also giving
lip service to wanting a guilty verdict.One word: Miranda. That's proof in a nutshell that they have other endgames in mind.
President Obama decides to throw out the advice of US military commanders and make no decision about the way
forward in Afghanistan—thus making a decision. This no-decision decision will appear one way
to our enemies, especially the enemy known as Islamism: President Obama is,
once again, making the United States look weak.Someone at one of the many sites I frequent called the president’s
now-familiar tactic “baring one’s jugular to a wolf.”I almost added “…hoping that the wolf will
show compassion,” and, thereby, falling into the trap that so many do when
discussing President Obama’s actions and motives: assuming that the man has the
best intentions toward the country he was elected to lead.
And today, the decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh
Mohammedand four other Soldiers of Allah in civilian federal court
located in New York City comes to the fore.Aside from the jumble of legal jurisdiction problems of putting military
combatants before a civilian court and providing them with the rights that
Americans and other civilians enjoy while in this country, it will be necessary
to publicize classified material and methods.And, in addition, bringing these enemies from Guantanamo Bay to NYC will
endanger New Yorkers.If you don’t think
that other Soldiers of Allah are champing at the bit for this process to begin,
you’re not paying attention.
President Obama means to bring this country to its knees so
that he can consolidate power over it. And these two decisions are meant to
embolden our enemies to act.
Attorney General Eric Holder is set to make a statement about
this decision this morning.I can’t wait
to hear his usual quality of logic.
We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for
defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for
their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put
the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media)
spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what
is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for
al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense,"
the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about
interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations
targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what
judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The
administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the
administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets.
And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the
war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press
its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of
international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the
intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
[Emphasis mine. More added to the McCarthy quote, which needs no further commentary.]
If there is such a thing as a 'moderate Muslim'--a term used often by the everyday press--and a 'moderate Muslim' is a good thing to be, is it good or bad to be and extreme Muslim or even a regular, normal everyday Muslim? And after it is determined whether it is good or bad to be an extreme Muslim or a normal Muslim, it would be nice to know why either is good or bad.
Put this another way: if being a Muslim is good then why be a moderate one?
This is what he has planned for all those who love and
protect America and, ultimately, for America itself: failure…
KABUL – Eight American troops were killed in two
separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the
deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban.
In one of the insurgent assaults, seven Americans
were killed while patrolling in armored vehicles, U.S. forces spokesman Lt. Col.
Todd Vician said. He said an Afghan civilian died in the same attack. The
eighth American was killed in a separate bombing elsewhere in the south, also
while patrolling in a military vehicle, he said.
[L]ast month, in a move that has sent ripples all
the way to the White House, [Foreign Service Officer Matthew] Hoh, 36, became
the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which
he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence
in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan,"
he wrote Sept. 10 in a
four-page letter [pdf] to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts
and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my
resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what
end."
Mr. Hoh is also a former Marine captain who served in Iraq.
When President Obama stated that he would continue until November
to dither about General McCrystal’s request for an additional 40,000 troops, a
child could have predicted that such an announcement would embolden both the
Taliban and al Qaeda.
Does anyone remember that we went into Afghanistan to clean
out the nests of terrorists who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11?
It’s easy to see that the president is trying to lose
Afghanistan.But the loss would simply
be another stab at the old America that the president wants to smother and would assist in making
way for the America he wants to shape in his own image.
President Obama has already floated
the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more
than two centuries.
Helmeted, body-armored feds knocking on American doors—would
that do it?
How much more foreign policy leg-spreading and domestic
forging of tyranny does the president have to perpetrate before we see that we’ve
been had?
Wait a minute.
If we
flake out in Afghanistan, it won’t just embolden Islamists overseas…it will
embolden those living here.
When the Mumbai terrrorist attacks happened, most observers concluded that such a
thing would never occur here because too many American citizens go about armed—even
in leftist utopias like my home state.In Mumbai, armed Islamists ran wild for days.Here, the duration would be roughly eight hours,
max (about two in places like Oklahoma).
But what if Islamist did
try a Mumbai-style attack here?Would
that give President Obama the excuse to create his SA…er…National Police Force? (Godwin can bite me.)
Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to
test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna have to make some really
tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it
will occur. [snip]
[I]t's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be
apparent that we're right. Because all these decisions, all these
decisions, once they're made if they work, then they weren't viewed as
a crisis. If they don't work, it's viewed as you didn't make the right
decision...
(Maybe it's what the then vice president-elect only thought he was talking about.)
Pretty soon all such questions will have their answers.I think that most of them do already.
UPDATE: One supposes that this is mere coincidence:
KABUL – Gunmen with automatic weapons and suicide vests stormed a guest
house used by U.N. staff in the heart of the Afghan capital early
Wednesday, killing at least seven people including three U.N. staff,
officials said. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying it was meant as an assault on the upcoming presidential election.
Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.
--Ecclesiastes 7:9 (KJV)
Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.
--Romans 12:19 (NIV)
Black Cop: "If I told you once to take [poster with Obama-as-Joker] down and you put it back up then I can charge you with whatever I want to charge you with, okay?" [snip]
White Male Protester: "This used to be America."
Black Cop: "Well it ain't no mo', okay?"
When I asserted that the above-documented incident was evidence of racial discord that is being sown in the minds and spirits of Americans since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, some people didn’t believe me (and copped an attitude in their disbelief as well, which is always fun).
As the aphorism goes, there are some things that cannot be defined, but we know them when we see them. However, I will attempt to explain to my readers and guests why that incident was emblematic of the racial Sign of these Times. Fair warning: I’m thinking that this will take at least two posts.
Last year when those who were paying attention discovered the I-deology called “Black Liberation Theology,” many black Americans—including me--had the proverbial light bulb come on over our heads. You see, we had heard the rhetoric before. Not often in churches (though sometimes it is--as I’ll demonstrate below) and not holistically, but piecemeal--from various organizations within the communities in which we often live; organizations designed to “help” black people or “uplift” black/African heritage. (Side note: Often, the celebrators of this “African” heritage do not have the smarts or discipline to immerse themselves in the scholarship of any singular existing African culture. Knowing this to be a fact, a certain enterprising individual saw the value in fabricating a hybrid of African cultures and marketing that hybrid to a black populace who was mostly ignorant of what they were really embracing. Thus do we have Kwanzaa.)
Most black Americans have long been familiar with the Nation of Islam, their wacky theology, their assertion that the white race is Satan incarnate, etc. As a matter of fact, I’ve never hidden the fact that my immediate family--mother and stepfather--were members of the NOI when I was a teenager. (We’re all born-again Christians now.) But what most of us did not know was that smaller, almost unknown organizations had sprung up in the 1960s with its messengers and its rhetoric, most of it similar to that of the NOI; revolving around hatred of white people and the innate supremacy of black Africans--a counter to the white supremacy under which most black Americans were subject prior to that time—and predicting that the superior African would ultimate triumph over his “natural” enemy, the European/Caucasian/white.
Most black Americans did not join these organizations; most didn’t even know that they existed and if they did know, they held them in contempt. However, if the formal structure was unknown, the rhetoric was not. “God-d*mn Amerika,” “US of KKKA” and much worse ersatz curses could be heard coming out of the mouths of every father, uncle, brother, grandfather, etc. who had ever been stopped for the sin of Driving While Black or whose progenitor had been formally if unjustly executed by the state…or had disappeared into the night, only to be found in a river…or buried in a shallow grave. Such curses were often heaped upon a country that once adhered to the separate-but-equal legal doctrine and once looked the other way as local government entities heaped oppression on American citizens of African descent. (Side note: not part of the Lynching Narrative were those black Americans known as “crazy n*ggers”--that is, black Americans in the South who took their right to bear arms seriously. Those white Southerners inclined to terrorize blacks wouldn’t bother such men. I’m told that my great-grandfather, Lucius Jenkins, was such a man. Dr. Condoleezza Rice says that her father was yet another.)
In the fifties and sixties, things began to change—not all at once, but gradually, as is typical of societal upheavals. (In reality, the “gradual” change happened pretty quickly.) But by that time the anger was already brewing and the impatience with the work of the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob had already caused many to abandon Him—as often happens when humans operate by their own time rather than God’s.
That’s an overview of why organizations like both the old and New Black Panthers exist. But there's something special about Black Liberation Theology: many if not most black Americans knew of its fabric but did not know that it existed as a coherent package of principles and tenets with a label. Black Liberation Theology has long walked covertly as underlying current snaking its way into the thinking of Americans who are black and who fail to keep up their spiritual guard. This previously unnamed ideology would pop up its head in various venues and unlikely sources. Example: several years ago, my great-aunt claimed that somewhere in the Bible there existed a prophecy predicting that “the black man would rule the earth.” Having read the Bible back and forth, I heatedly disputed this notion—not because I cared whether black people would rule the earth or not, but because I was disgusted that someone would lie to her about the Word of God. Of course, she couldn’t cite the quote.
Several years later—last year to be specific—after the name of Reverend Jeremiah Wright became infamous and the tenets of Black Liberation Theology became well-known, I asked my aunt to think about where she had heard about the notion of world-wide black rule. She didn’t have to think too long. She’s Catholic and the assertion had come from a priest who was visiting her church; a Liberation Theologian--one of Sowers of the currently and continuously sprouting sapling called Racial Discord.
So what does all this have to do with the incident that occurred on August 25, 2009? Hint: go back to the beginning.
This is the deal: if we leave Iraq prematurely, bailing out of
Afghanistan will shortly follow. If that happens things will get worse
here—and I’m not just referring to the terrorists. Because if the
terrorists either follow us home or the ones already here get the
signal to act, the Left—who continues to ignore all the
precursors to 9/11 and, therefore, has never believed Islamists when
they say that their only goal is to kill, convert or subdue the world
to Islam--will find a way to blame that on Bush and, yes, on the
military.
Don't forget, both Senators Clinton and Obama want us out of Iraq
immediately and I contend that they're building up to calling for the
withdrawal from Afghanistan--that's what Obama's contention regarding ammo shortages in Afghanistan was about. He heralded the beginning of a narrative.
[T]he anti-war Left is building up to the point at which it can
characterize Afghanistan in the same manner as it has done with Iraq—as
a lost cause. I’ve seen the rhetorical beginnings of it here and there
(and I think [AP chairman Dean] Singleton's aborted question was part of that) but no one
prominent is ready to say it straight out. The foundation hasn’t been
sufficiently laid yet.
I say that the overt denigration of our efforts in Afghanistan is on
the way (and, no, it won’t have to make sense). Why? Because every Bush effort must be demonized and scrapped--every single one, even the so-called righteous War.
The Bush edifice must be torn down. Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong.
Feigning support for a mission launched in response to 9/11 to win an
election is one thing; shrugging about it afterwards is another, and
goes way, way beyond “blithe” unless you’re a stalwart dove or the type
of see-no-evil sucker who laps up leftist canards about how Sunni and Shiite jihadists would never work together. But save the outrage: The lesson to draw, especially if you’re an independent, is that
Democrats can’t be trusted to prosecute even a “good war,” even if it’s
one that they explicitly promised to prosecute. Internalize that point, because I promise, it’s being internalized in Iran and Russia as I write this.
God love Senator Jim Demint (R-SC). I never thought I'd say that about a U.S Senator.
UPDATE:Live Webcam. And Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) can't seem to find the word 'Czar' in the U.S. Constitution.
(Thanks to Ace of Spades HQ who has a couple of breathtaking photos.)
UPDATE: From VodkaPundit:
That's pretty much the case. Once you folks who object to the government redistributing your money to others realize this, you'll be truly free.
UPDATE: A NYC firefighter who responded to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 reminds us that people are still dying from the diseases that come from inhaling the remains of two disintegrated office buildings and two destroyed jet aircraft.
UPDATE: I think we've just heard a coinage: Million Patriot March.
UPDATE: I can't wait to see what the ground covered looks like afterward--certainly no worse than did the National Mall following Presidential Inauguration Day 2009.
My great-aunt is 88-years-old. Today some sort of representative from her Medicare-assigned HMO called her and asked her a boatload of questions, including things like whether she has ever considered suicide. When I found out about the call, I was apoplectic. She has a few ailments and she is becoming less and less mobile due to a very bad back.
This company has never done anything like this before.
My aunt says that they want to come look around the house but they didn't make an appointment. No flocking way if I have anything to say about it. What do you think I should do?
[Edited for accuracy]
BACKGROUND: Aside from the invasive questioning and the taking advantage of a trusting senior, this is why I'm outraged--and apprehensive--about the call.
This week, President Obama’s health care overlord launched a taxpayer-funded initiative to recruit an Internet Snitch Brigade that will combat “disinformation about health insurance reform.” As the White House explained in a special online bulletin:
“These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag[-at]whitehouse[-dot-]gov.”
What will health care czar Nancy DeParle do with this information? Where will it be stored? Who has oversight of the czar’s powers, budget, and personnel? Concerned citizens, alas, will have a hard time tracking down the “Office of Health Care Reform” created by executive order in April. There is no central website for the office, no direct channel for transparency, and no congressional accountability.
At least one member of Congress has started asking questions. Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn sent a letter to President Obama demanding that he disband the Internet Snitch Brigade immediately: “By requesting citizens send ‘fishy’ emails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, email, addresses, IP addresses and private speech ofU.S.citizens will be reported to the White House,” Sen. Cornyn wrote. “You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program.”
By take the authoritarian action of asking others to rat out their friends and acquaintances and enemies merely for having a different opinion than he does, President Obama has put himself in a bind. Stemming from the debacle that was Watergate, it is illegal for any agency of the federal government to maintain personal data on personswho are merely exercising their God-given (not government-given) rights.
(e)Agency Requirements.—Each agency that maintains a system of records shall—…
(7)maintain no record describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity;
However, since Drop-a-Dime was implemented days ago, the White House has likely been gathering countless bits of data on countless citizens and guess what? It is also illegal for the White House to dispose of correspondence data.
Well. Now that I think it through a bit more, the White House isn’t in such a bind after all. See, it should be obvious by now that this Administration can, has and will override law and protocol without having to brave the protest of the institutions designated to constrain it, Senator Cornyn notwithstanding.
Because our leaders have failed us or have been rendered nearly powerless, it has been up to the People to push back against the Great Burglary of theU.S.economy, its latest incarnation being Healthcare Reform or Health Insurance Reform or whatever it’s being called today. But like any other thief, these Thieves get angry when you don’t just allow them to mug you or snatch your purse. They will try to beat you down.
Kenneth [Gladney] was attacked on the evening of August 6, 2009 at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s town hall meeting inSouthSt. LouisCounty. I was at the town hall meeting as well and witnessed the events leading up to the attack of Kenneth. Kenneth was approached by an [Service Employees International Union] representative as Kenneth was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags to other conservatives. The SEIU representative demanded to know why a black man was handing out these flags. The SEIU member used a racial slur against Kenneth, then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground. Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other male SEIU member and an unidentified woman. The three men were clearly SEIU members, as they were wearing T-shirts with the SEIU logo.
Kenneth was beaten badly. One assailant fled on foot; three others were arrested. Kenneth was admitted toSt. John’sMercyMedicalCenteremergency room, where he was treated for his numerous injuries. Kenneth was merely expressing his freedom of speech by handing out the flags. In fact, he merely asked people as they exited the town hall meeting whether they would like a flag. He in no way provoked any argument or altercation, as evidenced by the fact that three assailants were arrested.
Krav Magahere I come. The Israelis always make good stuff.
A physical attack by Union thugs may seem vastly different from the collection and holding of data about peaceful dissenters by the highest government official in the land but the difference lies only in scope. The two concepts spring from the exact same ideological origin: the origin of entitlement. The Obama Administration is entitled to all the power that it can gather and wield, the will of the People be damned and the law of land be damned. Oh and God-bestowed rights? Well "god-d*mn them" too.
Is it clear to all what we’re dealing with here? No, I don’t think that it is. But one day, sooner than anyone can imagine, no one will be able to deny what’s been right in front of their eyes all along.
UPDATE: "I don’t want the folks who created the mess [sic] to do a lot of talking" --President Barack Obama
With all due respect, Mr. President, when it comes to the redress of grievances by American citizens to their government, what you want is irrelevant. These questions remain, however: what will you do and how far will you go to get what you want--in this and all other matters of gaining and holding onto power?
Haven’t you all figured it out by now? It’s been six months of Groundhog Day with a twist: everyday we wake up to some new piece of jaw-dropping news regarding the short-term tactics and/or long term strategies of this Administration with all having one objective in common.
There have been strategies like
The Stimulus—ballooning the national debt to ten trillion dollars.
Cap and Trade—making it more expensive for energy companies to use coal, which, in turn, will make it more expensive for individuals to use energy;
President Obama’s decision to insert himself in Cambridge,Massachusetts police business and further stir the racial pot.
And the last two examples have occurred in only the past few weeks. President Barack Obama’s January 20, 2009 Inauguration found an America that was financially staggered by a slow-acting congressionally-induced poison called the Community Reinvestment Act and, since that date, the Democrat president, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate and Democrat-controlled House of Representatives have done everything in their power—and some things far outside of their scope of power--to slip America its death blow.
Oh, you don’t believe that? You think that I’m talking out my nether regions, right? After all, why would anyone hate this country enough to want to destroy it—especially those who are in charge of running it?
This is why. It is obvious that the Left hates freedom and the choices inherent in the concept of freedom—the freedom to chronically lose.
As I’ve said before (heh), losers cannot behave like winners even when they win. They still covet those God-given blessings with which winners are endowed and still must make winners pay for ever having won—for there being such concepts as ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ in the first place. For such people—for President Obama--the God-blessed America is the ultimate villain. ("Naw, naw, naw...God-d*mn America!!!")
I receive an email yesterday from the president’s old campaign site, the title being “This is the Moment.” (Hmm, is there an echo in here?) It is President Obama’s moment indeed: to see if the will of the people can be overridden and if direct access to a blood vessel of the American economy can be opened up by government; direct and legislated access to your money and mine, direct access to our very lives—in order to bleed us.
And if the we the people resist being jacked by the government, if we speak out, we will be ignored first (April 15 and July 4 Tea Parties), then ridiculed with particularly crude sexual references, then demonized. Then come the threats. What will come after that?
Know this: this government wants to control everything about the lives of all American citizens. All of us. And it has set forth the means to do this in all of the legislation that has come before the Senate and the House in this session. (I’m guessing that many of these schemes had long been composed while the authors waited for the right climate to dust them off.) The HealthCare/Health Insurance “Reform”— ObamaCare--is the crowning jewel of government-sanction larceny, however. That’s why the president and his allies in the legislative branch are trying to get it done so fast.
But too many American citizens are objecting to having their pockets picked for this government’s taste. All over the country, people are very vocallyobjecting to—and even laughing derisively at-- proposed thievery and government-sanctioned tyranny and doing so via more Tea Parties and in Townhall meetings in the face of their shocked Democrat congressional representation and at least one executive branch honcho, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
How dare the serfs not hand over our money and our lives without backtalk!
And, as a result of the vocal assertion of the First Amendment Right to redress the government for grievances, the government has taken its most chilling step yet—at least for today. The White House has created a special informant email address: flag-at-whitehouse-dot-com. About whom are correspondents to inform? Why, about all those who publicly oppose government-run health care and who transmit oppositional information via email or via blogs--which covers almost all Republicans and, judging from the polls and from some videos of townhall meetings, not a few Democrats. See, many of the latter draw the line at their own pockets as well.
I guess what I’m wondering is this: what is the White House going to do with all of the information it gathers from the informants?
What comes next?
(Thanks to Instapundit, to Hot Air and to Jim in Fremont)
The Obama administration is considering an overhaul of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would strip billions in bad loans and create a new home-loan organization, according to a report from the Washington Post.
Government officials told the Post that the firms' bad debt would be given to new government financial institutions that would then be responsible for collecting on the debts.
It's the Community Reinvestment Act Revisited. If you're not convinced that Barack Obama is trying to destroy the US economy, you will be. Here's hoping that it isn't too late.
So U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is pondering an investigation of the CIA and of Former Vice President Dick Cheney for some sort of crime when the man possibly directed the organization to even ponder making a direct hit on America’s enemies? And the particulars of said program were made public by the New York Times in 2002?
But didn’t this same Department of Justice decline to prosecute blatant voter intimidation perpetrated by the “New Black Panther Party” in Philadelphia—the exact same sort of voter intimidation which was practiced in the South against black Americans prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
I guess it really does come down to who is doing the crime with these people. Any sort of principle or morality is never even considered. Such must, of course, be grounded in truth.
And don’t forget the revenge motive, because these “inconsistencies” are always about that.
One more pattern observed: AG Holder pretends that his putative investigation is against the wishes of President Obama in the same manner that U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi pretends that her own crusade to show photos from the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Program and from Abu Ghraib are against the president’s wishes. Bull cookies. The two are merely acting on the president’s orders and taking the heat which he doesn’t have the stones to shoulder. These actions—and all the others—are done with President Obama’s approval, make no mistake about that. Delegation of authority isn’t part of a Leftist philosophy.
Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful."
The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.
Just so.
With President Obama, it’s to the point where his groveling to and rewriting history for our enemies and frenemies has become so frequent that we are beginning to become complacent in refuting his fantasies. Good thing that pundits like the fearless progeny of Darth Cheney have not.
(Thanks to Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ. Drew thinks that Miss Cheney and her father should be on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket and, to that end, has a most excellent slogan.)
New York State Senate Democrats refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States. And when one of their number tries to stand, he is pulled down.
So does that mean that this particular group has no allegiance, no loyalty--no Fidelity--toward this country? Just wondering. It would be instructive to know.
This Father’s Day has me thinking particularly of God the
Father—the Good Shepherd who leads his flock down the right path.
It’s obvious that our earthly fathers choose us, whether
they are conscious of it or not.But don’t
forget:our Heavenly Father consciously does the
same thing.But He won’t compel you to
follow.You, the individual, must
answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It’s a life-and-death issue to choose whom you will serve—whom
you will allow to lead you.
Simply, I’m thankful to have been called and even more
thankful for the grace to say ‘yes.’
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, I'm reading right now. And so did singer/musician Eric Clapton, economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, media titan Oprah Winfrey, NBA great Shaquille O'Neal and many, many other successful, responsible and law-abiding Americans of various races, famous and unknown.
inveighing against socialized medicine in 1978.
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