Blog — October, 2008

Last week the Pennsylvania GOP sued Acorn, charging that "allowing unqualified individuals to (vote) undermine(s) the voters' confidence in the electoral process." ACORN responded with an accusation of—wait for it—racism, and other Democrat supporters are also using that same red herring counterattack technique: "The shrill Republican witch-hunt to demonize ACORN signaled the launch of their insidious endgame strategy. The current charges against ACORN are frivolous distractions..." Say that in a Maoist accent if you can...

His claim that the mere act of calling out wholesale electoral fraud is insidious, racist behaviour is not atypical.

Remember Steven Pinker's warning that section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act "could outlaw any criticism of a practice that is statistically more common in some groups than others, such as slavery, polygamy, child abuse, ritual torture, gay-bashing, and so on"? The voter fraud in this U.S. election (not in previous ones) is statistically more common on the black/Obama side. Therefore, criticism of it is being framed as "racist," by the very same "persecuted minorities" who have their fingers in it. Racist practices are hateful and must be stopped! That's what the CHRC is here for! And with a couple more Obama-appointed SCOTUS judges in the USA, interpreting a "living Constitution" in terms of "fairness," you Yankees will be in the same "hate speech" mess as we are before you know it. (We have ACORN in Canada too, though they don't seem to be involved in electoral fraud as much as down south.)

So Pinker, as usual, was absolutely right. And the mouthy Dr. Dawg is a total fucking idiot. If I ever need to take an Intro Anthropology class, I now know what prof to avoid....

Ezra Levant is also right:

There are petty tyrants in every walk of life. But we can avoid or ignore them—or fight them. Not so when they have the power of the state behind them.

Let me give you my own example. If some unknown, untalented, untrained, inexperienced literary critic like Pardeep Gundara had criticized the Western Standard magazine that I published, I could have ignored him (which I would have done). But Gundara ... suddenly had the power of the state behind him to weigh and measure our magazine's efforts, as the Alberta HRC censor assigned to adjudicate my case.

Nobody gives a damn what Gundara says, when he says it on his own. At least I don't, and I was the publisher. But when he says his bit as a petty tyrant of the state, people have to listen to him. Or at least I did. That, no doubt, gives him great pleasure, and a feeling of great power, power that he surely lacks in every other aspect of his life. He couldn't earn my respect for his laughable literary and political views. So what—he could extract obedience from me, by virtue of his position in the Alberta government....

[H]uman beings are no different today, in Canada, than they were fifty years ago in the Soviet Union or seventy years ago in Nazi Germany....

I believe that many of the people who work for Canada's human rights commissions, in a different place or time, would have been attracted to the Communist Party or the National Socialist Party, working to ensure political hygiene in the Motherland or Fatherland.

And, The Riots Next Time? Racial Violence Looms If Barack Obama Loses—Or Wins:

In the ["Barack Youth"] video, about a dozen black teenagers dressed in military fatigues parade and chant about how Barack Obama has inspired them to be the next architect, doctor and so on. [With, of course, not the slightest comprehension of how much work and intelligence is actually required to be even minimally competent in those fields: they honestly think that the only reason whites and Jews succeed where blacks fail is because of favoritism, and for us having "our people" in power. And how have Asians and East Indians succeeded in North America? Aye, there's the rub. But really, that's not something that even goes through a sub-85-IQ head, meaning that half the black population in North America won't have even put that much thought into it.]

It is clear from the stony stares of these boys that Obama does not so much inspire their admiration as reinforce their anger. How do you expect they will react if Obama loses the election?

White liberals have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is one of them, or nearly so, because of his articulate English and elite education. What would an Ivy League educated, half-white man from Hawaii have in common with incendiary black leaders like Louis Farrakhan?

Quite a bit, actually. Obama's spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a good friend of Louis Farrakhan and even accompanied him to Libya to meet with General Muammar Gaddaffi in 1984. And in 1995, Barack Obama himself flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to attend Farrakhan's [sexist] Million Man March....

The unsettling truth is that Barack Obama is not some bridge between black and white, but a man who is obsessed with the perceived injustice of growing up black in a white-run world. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes of how, as a teenager, he would closet himself in his room and absorb the works of black [racist] radicals like W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X, withdrawing "into a smaller and smaller coil of rage."

Indeed, the one idea Obama most identified with then was Malcolm X's wish that "the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged."

It does not seem to matter to Barack Obama that ... he has never personally experienced any of the injustices we typically associate with black Americans.

Clearly, Barack Obama has far more in common with the angry young black men who are devoted to his candidacy than most Americans realize....

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Fatima Ali, a fervent Obama supporter, recently wrote that "If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring [black-perpetrated] crime, homelessness—and hopelessness."

But what about Alex Haley, and his epochal book, Roots?

After a trial, Haley settled out-of-court for $650,000, having been accused of plagiarizing more than 80 passages from The African by Harold Courlander. Haley claimed that the appropriation of Courlander's passages had been unintentional....

In his report submitted to the court in this lawsuit, Professor of English and expert witness on plagiarism, Michael Wood of Columbia University, stated: "The evidence of copying from The African in both the novel and the television dramatization of Roots is clear and irrefutable. The copying is significant and extensive"....

After a five-week trial in federal district court, Courlander and Haley settled the case, with Haley making a financial settlement and a statement that "Alex Haley acknowledges and regrets that various materials from The African by Harold Courlander found their way into his book Roots."

During the trial, presiding U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Ward stated, "Copying there is, period." In a later interview with BBC Television, Judge Ward stated, "Alex Haley perpetrated a hoax on the public."

During the trial, Alex Haley had maintained that he had not read The African before writing Roots. Shortly after the trial, however, Joseph Bruchac, an instructor of black literature at Skidmore College, came forward to swear in an affidavit that in 1970 or 1971 (five or six years before the publication of Roots) he had discussed The African with Haley and had, in fact, given his "own personal copy of The African to Mr. Haley"....

In addition, the veracity of those aspects of Roots which Haley claimed to be true has also been challenged.

But hey, even if he stole a good chunk of the book, at least he didn't get Bill Ayers to rewrite the rough draft....

So, "Happy Obamaween."

P.S. Obama's Thug Lawyers Intimidating Student Journalists Who Exposed Voter Fraud. And "Dem Playbook Shows Dirty Tactics". And The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama's Khalidi Bash Tape:

Let's try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let's say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

So, Demand The LA Times Release The Obama Video. And, "Lawyers who supervise voting rights are Obama donors":

[H]as it really become somehow out of bounds to ask if attempting to steal an election through voter fraud is motivated by politics?

Because from where I'm sitting, that's just crazy talk.

Oh, and remember what I was saying about a backlash against Obama's blatant racial favoritism, etc.? Neo-Nazi Assassination Plot Discovered.

A couple of fantastically insightful posts, on the Protein Wisdom blog: "Government computers used to find information on Joe the Plumber" (see his commentary) and It's good to be the king.... And one from Bernie Planck: Give a Muslim an Inch:

The peoples of Malaysia before the 15th century could practice whatever they wanted, Buddhism, Hinduism, or their native Animism. Then one day they let in one Muslim and so today, if you are a native Malay, by Law you must be Muslim, there is no choice [Article 160 of the Constitution of Malaysia] if you want to remain a Malay citizen. Malays who convert out of Islam are no longer considered Malay under the law and lose their favored Bumiputra privileges....

Let one Muslim in and in a matter of years your country turns out to be 99.98% to 100% Muslim.

And Melanie Phillips hits many of the documented problems with Obamanation intimidation, and the mainstream media's deliberate ignorance of the same:

The sacrifice of truth to power.

And, turns out Obama was already yakkin' about "redistribution" back in 2001.

And a practical test of the redistribution of wealth. And Shame, Cubed. And Furious Spinning from the Left on Obama's Racially-Motivated Redistributive Change:

[T]his story is not about simple redistribution from the haves to the have-nots, which is the norm from Democrats and therefore unsurprising. Obama's redistribution is in the context of the civil rights movement. In other words, from everyone else to blacks, based on nothing so much except skin color.

Many people will need to be gently reminded: this is not about helping the poor. Many, many, Democrats and independents (and Republicans) aren't bothered by a little redistribution to alleviate poverty. I think for many it is considered a public good, something that, of course, governments should provide. So when this is couched in those terms, people will think "no big deal, we already do this."

They can spin, but they can't hide.

Kathy Shaidle:

And of course, Obama frames his socialist policies as the natural outcome of the Black civil rights movement, effectively putting his policies beyond the realm of criticism in polite society.

And something for the "12 and under" crowd, too: Obama Robbing the Cradle for Votes.

And Surprise! Obama Found Palling Around With More Terrorists. And Death Threats Sent to Pollster. You know, for publishing polls showing McCain leading in Ohio and Florida.

And, some good old zydeco, to make a point:

And, more on the Obama campaign's deliberate campaign donation fraud:

AVS is default. It is not an arcane option you can choose. It is the default. To turn it off requires deliberate, intentional action.

And Barack Obama cannot offer any plausible legitimate reason for doing so....

One thing they did get, though, is important: an Obama spokesperson confirming that they do not keep credit card numbers.

This confirms that with AVS also turned off, there is no way for the Obama campaign to know how many times someone has donated, and how much, even if a donor uses the same credit card each time.

Of course, you shouldn't ever have customers'/donors' raw c/c numbers in your database regardless. What you do is store a hashed (i.e., encrypted) version of the number, which is just as unique as the original number, but can't be unencrypted back into a usable number if the database is ever compromised (i.e., hacked). That's how we did it back at Advantex which, believe me, was hardly run by geniuses....

And Palintology will dominate the post-mortems:

It's hard to make a reasoned and fair judgment about the Alaska Governor because she has been the victim of one of the nastiest, most sustained and comprehensive slime-jobs ever performed by a hyper-partisan national and global media....

Palinphobia is so shot through with condescension and ideological incomprehension on the media's part that trying to cut through to the reality of her political message is not easy....

There's still a better story to be told about her record as politician in Alaska, where she has achieved more of substance than Barack Obama has in Washington.

As for the anti-intellectualism she seems to represent, this is a favourite old saw not only of the Left but also of the whole Establishment crowd. There's an unshakeable view among the coastal elites that real wisdom is acquired only by circulating between the ivy-encrusted walls of scholarship and the Manhattan and Hollywood cocktail set.

P.S. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?. And Rashid Khalidi Ranted About the 'Zionist Lobby' on Al Jazeera. And Petty Obama Camp Cuts Off Access For TV Station After They Make Biden Look Like An Idiot. And "A Few Bad Apples" (i.e., 30% of ACORN voter registrations). And From cop-killer to cop-caller. And Joe Biden: We Haven't Paid ACORN "A Single Penny", in which we learn that "Ayers bragged of babysitting Obama's children."

And, Palin allies report rising campaign tension and Palin's 'going rogue,' McCain aide says. Good for her; I wouldn't have lasted half as long "towing the party line" while being given atrociously bad advice and being blatantly mishandled by "PR experts."

Bernie Planck, predictably hitting another nail squarely on the noggin:

I am not surprised that the author [of the moronic, paranoid, socialism=codeword-for-black article] is black. I am sure that comrade Diuguid earns more money than 99% of all blacks outside the US but still feels as if blacks are oppressed in this country. The only people oppressing blacks are other blacks like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al.

And you wonder why the none-too-bright blacks think the Jews are out to get them! "How could Sharpton and Jackson be oppressors [or racists]? They're part of the oppressed group! Haven't we learned anything from Karl Marx?!"

But seriously: You tell 'em, Bernie. You're such a mensch. Really.

P.S. Gov't Computers Used to Find Info on Joe the Plumber. And Obama to Cut Military Spending By 25%. And The Blurb That Never Was. And Whatever You Do, Don't Mention Obama's Girlfriend. And Was Biden talking about Obama's plan for unilateral disarmament? And, The modern left. And an interesting Letter To John Perry Barlow From A Pot-Smoking Deadhead Bush Voter ... though if Bush didn't know there were no WMDs in Iraq, he could and should have known. And Is America really going to do this?:

McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America's original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west's fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted....

McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America's fault.

Oh, and apparently sex with minors is hunky dory ... as long as you're an unhappily married, middle-aged woman. Who knew?

From Prejudice Revisited, Again:

Dr Caprice Hollins, the Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support for Seattle's public schools, has previously criticized individualism, long-term planning (or "future time orientation") and the speaking of grammatical English as "white values." The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organizational standards is, according to Dr Hollins, a form of "cultural racism."

Admit it: You thought I was way overboard with the idea that blacks won't ever get ahead in this world without (re-)adopting "white values." But really, how far can you get in life without individualism, long-term planning, and being able to speak coherent, middle-class English (among other "white values" like punctuality and responsibility, etc.)?

Blimey....

And, the fantastic Steven Pinker, on Kanada's kangaroo kourts:

It's truly shocking that a supposedly democratic government has arrogated to itself the power to censor speech because some judge or bureaucrat thinks it may "expose a person to contempt." This could outlaw any criticism of a practice that is statistically more common in some groups than others, such as slavery, polygamy, child abuse, ritual torture, gay-bashing, and so on. [Part of the CHRC complaint against Jim Pankiw appears to involve his criticizing of the "sentencing circles" which our aboriginals are the primary or only users of. Regardless, you'd have to be pretty daft, in a world where socialism=black (so you better not criticize socialism!), to not see Pinker's scenario coming true.]

It allows haters to decide who gets to say what—all they have to do is say, "So-and-so's essay made me show contempt," and So-and-so gets fined or jailed. And it opens the door to the government banning speech that upsets anyone, anywhere—as all-important speech is bound to do.

This is an atrocity against the ideal of free speech, and will make Canada a laughing stock among lovers of democracy and enlightenment.

Yes, a laughing stock. Ha-ha. Thanks to our easily offended Jews, feminists, gays ... and hermaphrodites. (Pinker himself is, of course, Jewish; and originally from Montreal.)

In recognition of that accomplishment on the part of those priests and priestesses of PC, here's something from everyone's favorite hairy cunt and feminist asshole, Germaine Greer.

Why, what did you think I meant?

P.S. I Am Bill. And FEC Rules Leave Loopholes For Online Donation Data:

In an Oct. 19 article for the news Web site Newsmax, [Kenneth] Timmerman argued that the FEC database lists up to 37,000 foreign contributors to Obama. These unverified donors made 60,000 contributions, worth a total of up to $63 million, he said.

That's a lotta fried chicken and collard greens.

And, Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions. And Obama's Kenyan Pal—Killer, Despot.

And, omigod, you have to read this: Open Letter to Richard Dawkins. And the Oxford Cheese Ode. In fact, there's this whole motherlode ... or cheeselode ... from James McIntyre.

Blimey, I'm feeling better already, wot? "License my roving hands and let them go."

From Typhoid Mary and Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan:

[A]s the Muslim population increases [in the USA], there will be Muslim schools and eventually Muslim Universities and assimilation will not be possible for future Muslims. There will be fewer and fewer parents teaching their sons American ideals.

As we get stuck with more and more Muslims it will be impossible for young Muslim men to go to places like Iraq and kill fellow-Muslims. When we reach 10% or more Muslims in this country, any person who kills a Muslim for our side will get a fatwa of death against his ass.

Once a critical point is reached, we won't be able to protect ourselves against attack by Muslims because our Congress will be too frightened to even vote to attack another Muslim country no matter how much danger they present.

And Charles Krauthammer, on McCain for President:

The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers....

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism.

And Unserious Voodoo:

So far as I know Palin is not a Young Earther. But if she were, her belief would be no more at odds with science than is Obama's stated belief that Christ is Lord. I suspect those who mock Palin's belief without mocking Obama's do so because in their hearts they imagine that Obama does not actually believe. He just says what he has to say to attain power. And they're ok with that. They mock Palin because they imagine she means what she says.

I do not see how belief in the Resurrection or in the Young Earth theory has much practical bearing on fitness to execute the responsibilities of office. I do think it would be gross dishonesty to claim to believe in Christ, if one does not so believe, merely to gain office. The man who would lie about that would [or at least could] lie about anything.

And via David Thompson, Insatiable Delusions:

"Radical" academics aren't driven to greater extremes and grander, more lurid claims because society is becoming more sexist, racist or whatever. The caricatures they become are a result of their own narcissism and a need to be oppositional, or be seen as oppositional. As mainstream society in general becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc, so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out—or invent—something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

It's the same outside of academia, though: black racists and feminist leaders, for their own job security, have to keep screaming about discrimination against them and their in-group, even if the unfairness doesn't really exist, outside of their own fevered, scattered minds. Same thing for the official thought police: if they can't find a "speech-offender under every bed," they'll be out of a job. And yes, scum that our species is, these fuckers will sell the future of entire countries out, just for a fat paycheque; which they'll proceed to blow, not on "bread for their starving children," but on shit they don't even need.

And Daphne Patai, on Want to Teach Here? Then Tell Us Your Politics:

Potential faculty are thus being pressured to adopt and embrace—or merely pretend to do so—the requisite "attitude" toward minorities, political activism, and social issues, and to provide evidence that they have acted on these supposed commitments. And, scarier still, these questions by implication are presented as legitimate requirements for employment, though they have nothing to do with either education or intellectual and scholarly accomplishments. And, even worse, the questions are designed to weed out the merely formal assenters from authentic true believers.

Ah, and Ezra Levant enlarges on the effects of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on Great White [Racist!] North politics:

If Pankiw can be prosecuted for spreading "discrimination," every MP is at risk. Not a day goes by when MPs [i.e., Members of Parliament] don't offend one group or another. We allow it; we expect it; in fact, we give MPs more freedom than any other Canadians, even exempting their debates from defamation law, on the liberal theory that all ideas should be heard, and in the clash of views, the truth will emerge and the country will be better off. It's called parliamentary privilege, and it goes back centuries. It's one of our ancient civil rights, designed to protect the people's representatives from political interference from the King.

Whether or not Pankiw "wins" his trial is irrelevant. He's already lost, and so have we. The message is loud and clear: The CHRC has ended parliamentary immunity.

P.S. Obama Hindered by 'Sudden Drop' in Fundraising. And Remember Those 1.3 Million New Voters? Uh, Never Mind. And An Army of Press Secretaries. And America on the precipice. And What's $5.3 million divided by $150,000?

Oh, and it turns out that not only have neo-Nazis infiltrated the anti-Islam movement in Europe, but also Muslims with close terrorist connections are leading anti-war rallies in Canada.

Whose side are you on? "You're either with us, or you're against us."

From "Hatin' Palin":

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?

My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians....

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko's bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Because, lest we forget, Barack The Inexperienced is also learning it all as he goes along.

And Diuguid's Decoder Ring:

Over the years I have known many people in my life who are quick to interpret ANY perceived slight from white folks as a form of racism. Deal with a white bank teller with a bad attitude? Racism. White person cuts in front of you on the highway? Racism. Deal with a disgruntled customer representative that is being short with you on the phone? Racism. Don't say "hi" to you? Racism. Get pulled over for speeding by a white cop? Racism....

I wish we could use the same over-analysis of whites to figure issues like "why do certain individuals stay in poverty even after providing them with a slew of opportunities to move ahead"....

Is Obama a Socialist? I come to believe that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Not only has he proudly associated himself with Socialists, but many of his policies are firmly rooted in that ideology. There is no difference between his "spread the wealth" comment and Karl Marx' now famous quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

A wise and courageous man, there, who just happens to be black, just like I happen to be white and male (and therefore a member of the only group which you can still openly discriminate against, and get away with it).

And, from Boortz's To The Undecided Voter:

I cannot fault a black American for voting for Obama. It may turn out to be a negative vote insofar as their dreams and goals are concerned. It may not work out all that well for their children, especially if they're ambitions and talented....

[L]et's consider the next four years under President Obama. He is certainly going to introduce ideas and pursue policies that are pure poison to many Americans; especially achievement-oriented self-sufficient citizens. Whenever anyone dares to utter a word in opposition to any Obama position or initiative you can be sure that there is going to be someone waiting close by to start screaming "racist!" By the end of Obama's first year in the White House virtually every white American will have been called a racist for one reason or another....

If Barack Obama was applying for a security clearance as a government employee, [his associations with Ayers, Wright and Rezko, et al.] would disqualify him. We are, my friends, about to have a president who doesn't qualify for a security clearance. Pretty pathetic. If Barack Obama becomes president, he would not even qualify to be his own bodyguard....

There's a quote that's been floating around since I began my talk radio career. This quote is most often attributed to someone named Alexander Tyler writing in 1787 about the fall of the Athenian Republic...:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Wait, there's more:

[T]he very people that Barack Obama wants to nail with these tax increases are the people who create most of the jobs in our economy; America's small business owners....

Fact is 70% of all jobs in our economy come from America's small business owners. The Small Business Administration recently reported that 80% of all new jobs are being created by these small business owners. These are people who report all of their business income on their personal income tax returns. As such, they are squarely in the crosshairs for The Chosen One's tax increases....

If the small business owner(s) who employs you has his taxes increased by Barack Obama he is going to look for a way to replace that money. So where does he go to replace his income lost to Barack's tax increases? The best way would be to cut expenses. Well guess what? You're an expense! Will it be your job that is cut to compensate for the increased taxes? Maybe you'll be lucky and just have to forego your next raise. Maybe there would just be a cut in your pay or a reduction in benefits....

Let me tell you what is going to happen as soon as Barack Obama is elected. Employers are going to look at the so-called Employee Free Choice Act [which will eliminate the secret ballot in union recognition elections, making it easy for union organizers to intimidate employees into signing up] and they're going to be very afraid. They know what a union can do to their business and their profitability. Just look at our auto industry. So employers are going to immediately start working to minimize the damage. How do you do that? Well, automation is one way. Go ahead and buy that machinery you need to automate much of your workplace. That will allow you to get rid of these employees before they can unionize. You might also want to consider the possibility of moving some of those jobs overseas where union intimidation might not be such a negative factor in your business operations.

When Obama gets his unionization by intimidation thing in place—and he most certainly will—jobs are going to be lost and businesses will fail. This is the price Obama is willing to pay to pay back the unions who have supported him....

It is quite possible that Barack Obama will get to make one, maybe two Supreme Court appointments before he's through in Washington. It is also possible that he will have a filibuster-proof Senate to help him ram those choices through....

If Barack Obama gets those two nominations, and if the Democrat Senate rubber-stamps them, then we are going to have a Supreme Court making decisions based on their liberal definition of "fairness" with some consideration to foreign court decisions tossed in. This is perhaps Obama's greatest opportunity to do permanent damage to our Republic; permanent and irreparable damage.

And, Ayers Republished His Revolutionary Manifesto in 2006. 'Cause truly revolutionary ideas never really go out of style....

And Obama's (white) grandmother, "Toot," is sadly ill in Hawaii, leading the Compassionate Royal Wealth-Spreader to make an "exhausting journey across the Pacific" to see her ... after an inexplicable three-day delay.

"Grandma Toot." She's the one who introduced the teenaged Barack to cocaine, right?

Now I man don't
Toot with no coke
De only ting for me
Is de Custard pie!

—Dread Zeppelin, "Black Dog"

P.S. Biden: Obama Ready for Armageddon Showdown He Will Provoke. And Biden Clarifies Earlier Remarks on His Dread of an Obama Administration. And As long as the Palin family's wardrobe budget is on the table, how about Obama's iffy donations? And, Hippie apes make war as well as love, study finds:

Despite their reputation as lovers, not fighters, of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and kill monkeys, German researchers said Monday.

Their findings, the first direct evidence of monkey hunting by the so-called "hippie" apes, show that such behavior is not linked to male dominance as females rule bonobo society and also go on hunts.

From Bernie Planck's The Arab Contribution to Civilization: Nothing Lately:

The real problem with the lack of Arab invention and discovery is that so much of he modern world's inventions, discoveries, art, entertainment, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, economics, are, to use their dirty word: Jewish. Perhaps this is why they hate the Jews so much. Not because Jews took 1/167th of Arab land away, but because they make Arabs with 167 times as much land look so impotent and ignorant.

Yes, I should add that to the existing "tall poppy syndrome writ large" list. It's also a good rejoinder to people who point to the natural wealth of America, etc., as being to credit for the "white man's" accomplishments here (with the implication being that, had any other group been so imperialistic, colonial and ruthless, they too could have ruled the world). 'Cause the Jews didn't get to where they are in the world via their land! No, they got there via brains and hard work, in spite of being truly persecuted and discriminated against by just about every other group they came into contact with. No affirmative action for them!

And, from Planck's Tax Cuts Should Favor the Rich:

People who are poor tend to have too many kids, fill up too many classrooms, consume too much emergency health services, commit most of the crimes, and rarely if ever pay income taxes [not to mention having proportionately low IQs: smart people tend not to be poor—present company excepted].

Now is it fair that those whose contribute the least and burden the state the most pay nothing in taxes? Is it fair that those who burden the state least and contribute the most (by their enormous consumption which sustains businesses and generates jobs) should pay the most in taxes?

Is it fair that people who pay nothing in income taxes can vote for more and more oppressive taxes on the wealthy so that they can get more and more in government handouts and services?....

The progressive tax system has failed. Taxing corporations more than every other country in the world except for Japan has certainly killed us as an industrial nation. Any state that allows Unionism damages its economic health. Look at what unions have done to Michigan: it's an industrial basket case. Meanwhile, states that spit on unions have vibrant auto industries.

I really like the way that man thinks. And it's not that I've ever been rich enough to care about how much I pay in taxes: it's just a question of fairness and meritocracy, and of recognizing that human nature is such that if we don't have to work for what we get in the world—i.e., if there's no incentive to work—we simply won't. (Anyone who doubts that truly doesn't know shit about human psychology.)

And then there's this interesting interview with Kate McMillan—one of the group of six who's being sued for speaking her mind about goat-fuckers and whatnot here in "Yes We Can-ada":

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > I actually host a Carnival of the Newbies from time to time, and as part of the last one, several bloggers offered their tips. This was mine: Push the envelope, even if it means being wrong from time to time....

What do you like doing in your spare time? > People who know me would laugh out loud at that question. My lifestyle is a loose arrangement of doing what I like in my "spare time," including working. It's all spare time....

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I think I can safely say it wouldn't change my life in any major way. I already do pretty much as I please—though I could do it more comfortably if I were to enjoy a financial windfall.

It really is the only way to live: Doing work that matters, and that you'd be doing even if you weren't getting paid for it, without having to answer to any Pointy-Haired Boss—napping at 2 in the afternoon if you feel like it, and then equally working at 2 am while the rest of the world slumbers. Long live us free spirits! (Kate's a very talented artist.)

Plus, having all this "spare time" allows me to read things like William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire:

Ayers was not simply protesting "against" the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn't against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn't against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Underground as the justifications for their violent acts.... Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings—their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat," in Ayers' own words.

Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers ... may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers described himself as "guilty as hell, free as a bird."

Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn't mean that he wasn't a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And ... Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers' contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.

And Bill Ayers' definition of "socialism"?

Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed. Socialism creates the conditions for a decent and creative quality of life for all.

All of which leads to the following conclusions:

[T]his country and its foundational principles are at a crossroads. And it is simply willful blindness to believe that Ayers and co. have changed their radical stripes—or that Barack Obama wasn't recruited, nurtured, trained, packaged, and marketed by Ayers and his fellow travelers—many of whom were active in the New Party, just as before that they were active members of the New Left.

Remember, these are people who spent years studying the inglorious defeat of their beloved "movement" of the late '60s (culminating in the 1972 reelection of Nixon), concluding not that communism or anti-Americanism is wrong, but rather that the way forward for their agenda was to undermine our institutions and the very epistemological paradigm under which we operate, and—by way of Alinsky—to consolidate power by cultivating a bright "clean," articulate, "progressive" candidate with the proper identity politics credentials to act as their national Trojan Horse.

We are only a few weeks away from potentially electing the chosen candidate of Bill Ayers, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and the remainder of the moldering radicals whose last political efforts will be in the service of the glorious cause—the handpicked protege of a man who at one point plotted, along with his fellow WU members, the elimination of 25 million stubborn capitalists who refused their proper re-education.

For us here in Canada, it would be a shame for the USA to be the first "domino" to fall. We sorta rely on you guys for protection from the rest of the world, y'know?

Meaning that if you are so foolish as to throw your country down the toilet, we can't help fix it.

Maybe call several hundred million plumbers....

P.S. Who is John Galt? And One International Crisis, Coming Up. And Ayers' New Book: America is a White Supremacist Nation. And Kirchick: Left-Wing Hatred Out of Control for Years. And Study: Coverage of McCain Much More Negative [i.e., more than 3x] Than That of Obama. Big surprise, there. Even Dan Rather gets it. As does Kirsten Powers. Who'da thunk it?

And, other Arab "contributions" to civilization: 25 Years Later, America Fails Lessons of Beirut Marine Barracks Bombing.

Bernie at Planck's Constant, on taxes:

I've written before that high corporate taxes have caused me to move some of my operations overseas because the business tax environment is much kinder. So it is citizens of other countries that get employed, make money, pay their bills and buy their groceries. High taxes, instead of helping the country, penalizes it. If taxes were lower, I would hire more Americans, pay more rent in America, and spread the money I am making among more Americans. With lower taxes, fewer Americans would need welfare, food stamps, and other services. They would have the money to pay for what they needed and without the indignity of getting handouts. And with less handouts, it is easier to lower taxes even more.

Those who ridicule trickle down economics obviously have not thought about no-trickle economics. Tax me enough and the money you tried to steal from me gets spent in other countries....

If those who pay no taxes keep on voting for more and more benefits and higher and higher burdens on those who do pay taxes, this country will be left with non-tax paying parasites asking for benefits which cannot be supplied since there will be no one left to pay the taxes for them.

Which is exactly how liberal democracies die. Observe:

Barack Obama says he plans to cut taxes for 95 percent of American workers. That sounds terrific, but there are three problems. One, it is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan: proposed increases in every major federal tax. Two, the structure of the cuts will create perverse incentives. And three, many of the people receiving "tax cuts" don't pay taxes to begin with, meaning they'll be in effect getting welfare....

Obama argues that only higher-income workers and rich corporations will suffer these tax increases, and they can afford it. But tax and economic policy is not about who "can afford it." Increasing these marginal tax rates greatly harms the economy—when more of the money earned goes to the government, there's less incentive for "the rich" to work, save, invest, and create and expand businesses. This affects people trying to start businesses with investment money from wealthy folks. Not to mention people looking for jobs, which usually come from businesspeople with money....

Obama's tax increases will not produce nearly enough revenue to finance all his lavish spending proposals, as shown by a brilliant new paper from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute.

I take this as being the paper in question:

Many studies find that an increase in marginal tax rates on capital gains or high incomes causes income reported from those sources to drop significantly. Economists call this "the elasticity of taxable income."

If the tax rate on dividends is increased, investors will shift many of their dividendpaying stocks into tax-exempt pension funds or sell them to tax-exempt domestic and foreign investors and hold more tax-exempt bonds. If the tax rate on capital gains is increased, investors will hold fewer shares in taxable accounts and avoid selling winning stocks unless they have offsetting losses. If the highest individual income is raised far above the corporate tax rate, thousands of professionals and businesses currently filing as partnerships, Subchapter S corporations, and LLCs will reincorporate to shelter income under the corporate income tax.

Because of such well-documented responses, income tax data provide incorrect information about income distribution when tax rates change. A large body of evidence finds large and sustained increases in reported income among high-income taxpayers in the wake of major reductions in tax rates on salaries (1988) or capital gains (1997) or both (2003). It follows that we could expect sustained reductions in reported income among high-income taxpayers if there were major increases in marginal tax rates on high individual incomes and/or capital gains. Such defensive moves by targeted taxpayers would indeed appear to reduce before-tax top incomes reported on individual tax returns. But it also means the higher tax rates would be largely or entirely ineffective in reducing after-tax income or in raising additional revenue.

Observe further:

[I]f you have been following this so far, you have learned that people who pay no income tax will get an income tax refund. You have also learned that this check will represent relief for the payroll taxes these people do pay. And you have been assured that this rebate check won't actually come out of payroll taxes, lest we harm Social Security.

You have to admire the audacity. With one touch of the Obama magic, what otherwise would be described as taking money from Peter to pay Paul is now transformed into Paul's tax relief....

"It's interesting that Mr. Obama calls his plan 'Making Work Pay,'" says Mr. [Andrew] Biggs, "because the incentives are just the opposite. By expanding benefits for people whose benefits exceed their taxes, you're increasing their disincentive for work. And you're doing the same at the top of the income scale, where you are raising their taxes so you can distribute the revenue to others."

Even more interesting is what Mr. Obama's "tax cuts" do to Social Security financing. As Mr. Biggs notes, had Mr. Obama proposed to pay for payroll tax relief out of, well, payroll taxes, his plan would never have a chance in Congress. Most members would look at a plan that defunded a trust fund that seniors are counting on for their retirement as political suicide.

And that leads us to the heart of this problem. If the government is going to give tax cuts to 44% of American based on their Social Security taxes—without actually refunding to them the money they are paying into Social Security—Mr. Obama will have to get the funds elsewhere. And this is where "general revenues" turns out to be a more agreeable way of saying "Other People's Money."

And from Left-wing and a prayer:

Barack the Spreader wants to spread Joe the Plumber's wealth around. In fact, every American does that for himself every day of the week, every time he swings by Joe the Butcher, Joe the Baker, Joe the Candlestick Maker, Jolene the Waitress, Jolene the New York Gubernatorial Prostitute, whatever. The question is whether 300 million Americans spreading their wealth around can do it more effectively than Barack and Barney taking it unto themselves to spread it around.

I don't find that hard to answer. If you disagree—if you believe in socialist redistribution from the dynamic sector of the economy to the sclerotic, incompetent and corrupt—then fine: lots of folks in European welfare states and African basket-case dictatorships do as well.

From How many will pay no federal income taxes in the next administration?

We need to seriously consider Steve Forbes' flat tax plan soon if we don't want to turn the US into a welfare state. Our tax policies will drive capital out of our markets and into other arenas for investment if the capital class winds up funding all of the federal government, and the electorate continues to demand services for which they don't pay. These graphs show a disaster ahead even if we didn't already face two with Medicare and Social Security, which largely have the same origin.

Oh, and it turns out that "socialist" is a codeword for "black." And "wealth spender" is code for "pickpocket" ... which is also code for "black." Or "half-black." Or maybe for "uppity nigger." Or "Messiah." The text is not clear.

Hey, if they're going to call you a racist no matter what, why not tell the truth?

Well, now we're getting somewhere!

P.S. Obama Supporters Attack Sarah Palin's Motorcade. No doubt it's all whitey's fault....

And If I were black I would be offended. And Koranic toilet paper. Right where the "religion of peas (and corn)" belongs. And Palin Runs with Biden's Test Warning. And Speaking of Obama's clothes....

And, Effective Interactions With African-American Males 101. For college credit ... my niggaz.

And, in the latest episode of You Can't Say That In Canada (Thursdays at 9, right after Warman of the Mounted): Censoring Pankiw's Pamphlets. 'Cause really, the Injuns don't go for the firewater, commit crimes, or benefit from special race-based privileges any more than us racist, white settlers do. Or, if they do, we mustn't hurt their aboriginal feelings by pointing it out. Even if you're a politician addressing the issues you're supposed to address as part of your job. "Outrageous slings and arrows" have no place in Canuckistan. And yet—

Here's a Statistics Canada study that shows that while Aboriginals make up only 9% of Saskatchewan's population, they were 52% of the province's criminal accused.

Oops. That's the kinda thing that gets the CHRC on the warpath....

From Silly kangaroo! Don't you know the rules? Convict first, then censor! in which Mr. Levant's reply to Kangaroo is censored by Baby Roo before Kanga can read it:

[H]ere's where Dagenais becomes a symbol of everything that's wrong with the CHRC and its censorship fetish: she blacked out portions of my defence before passing it on to the commissioners. Seriously—she censored what I wrote in my own defence, before she passed it along to the people who will sit in judgment of me. She's only allowing me to say things in my defence that she approves in advance....

Silly kangaroo, don't you know the rules? You're not supposed to censor me until after the show trial. Remember: convict first, then censor!

And, For Want of a Nail:

I do not feel threatened by Islamic terrorists since most people, except Michael Moore and idiots like him, realize that they are indeed a danger to our country and our Government rightly is on the lookout for them. The problem is with moderate Muslims who, although they currently do not pose any physical danger to our republic, nonetheless are a greater threat precisely because of their seeming innocuousness. They will slowly but surely force mature, respectful, and polite citizens of this land to remove, change, and modify every thing that makes this country what it is.

P.S. The Real Threat Posed by Bill Ayers. And Liberal Colin Powell Was Advising Barack Obama Since June 2007:

Both Bushes—father and son—also engaged in the Powell treatment, giving this lefty a lot of power over military and foreign policy for no good reason other than, frankly, affirmative action. There are plenty of smart, accomplished black men in the military, the policy analysis arena, and government—conservatives—who'd have been far better.

But rather than reward conservatives who put them in office, both Bushes rewarded liberalism by choosing Powell—a promoter of Arafat and a man who has worked especially against Bush, the son, despite the prominent positions the current Prez gave him. (I'd love to see Independent Conservative, La Shawn Barber, Thomas Sowell, or Larry Elder in a power position in this or any Administration. Then, America would be in much better shape. They're far better than anyone currently in the Bush cabinet.)

And Powell repeatedly plays the race card. As SecState, for example, he told MTV that the Bush's picked him because he has light skin and looks white. If a white person had said that, they'd have instantly been forced to turn in a resignation. But not Colin Powell.

And The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama. (Do skip over the abortion part, which was the weakest possible way of starting the piece, oy.)

And US intelligence: Iran will be able to build first nuclear bomb by February:

The most obvious interpretation of [Biden's] ramble is that an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran.

Victor Davis Hanson:

It's easy to say, as Obama says, it's a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That's intolerable. What he's not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don't have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade [because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour] or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, [will] be hated by people in Berlin. There's no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There's no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It's going to be hatred from those people. I'm going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I'm going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I'm willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he's going to be willing to do that, or John McCain?

And that, you see is why an effete, race-card-playing metrosexual versus a nuclear Iran and the soft jihad in America itself is such a bad idea.

John Derbyshire:

The mental map that I formed in my head quite early on in life—after reading Wittfogel's ORIENTAL DESPOTISM in the mid-1970s, I think, though reading a lot of Chinese history contributed too—is of a world divided into civilization and barbarism. There is a civilized zone, and a barbarous hinterland. I want to see the civilized zone defended, every damn inch. Israel is a civilized country; the Arabs are barbarous. There is nothing dogmatically biological about this, and I do think that civilized peoples can slip into barbarism, and vice versa. The Vikings were very barbarous; but they developed into the pale, hygienic Scandinavians of our own time. The Hungarians did the same thing very quickly, in a couple of generations, from the terrifying Magyar horde to the Christian kingdom of Stephen. The present state of the world is what we have to deal with, though, and I want the ramparts defended. It doesn't mean hating anyone. If the Arabs "got" civilization tomorrow, I'd be the first to rejoice. Don't see any sign of it, though.

The paleo response is that it is no skin off our nose what happens in the Levant, that we should mind our own business and look strictly to our own national interests. I am quite strongly sympathetic to that, as an instinctive nationalist, but I think it bespeaks civilizational overconfidence, and my sympathy is over-ridden by my affection for Western civilization at large. Civilization is, according to me, a very fragile thing, needing constant maintenance and unblinking, vigilant defense at every boundary. If forced to retreat to the borders of the USA, it would not survive.

Speaking of which: Neighbour "carried head on bus". In London, no less. "Animals" is far too polite of a word for such fecal barbarians.

"Step away from the severed head ... Mohammed."

Oh, and for anyone who thinks that open-source software is preferable (i.e., less buggy, etc.) to Microsoft products, I've got two words for you: Firefox 3. I've been trying to use this inadequately QA'd piece of crap for the past month or two, and it just won't stop crashing.

From Sony Corporation Caves After one Muslim Complaint:

[T]he threat to Western Civilization is not from violent radical Muslims but from peaceful moderate Muslims. It is not the radical Muslim who asks for accommodations to their religion. The radicals are easy to fight because the average American realizes they are dangerous. Moderate Muslims, because they do not swing scimitars in the air, do not seem as if they are a danger to Western Civilization, however the assumption is mistaken.

More insidious than Osama Bin Laden is Mohammed Bin Ordinary. Because of political correctness, because of misplaced tolerance of those who think differently than we do, because of fears of being called racists, bigots and Islamophobes, because of these reasons we allow moderate Muslims in our midst.

It is moderate Muslims who ask us not to insult their religion because it is a blasphemy worthy of death. It is moderate Muslims who ask us not to criticize the culture they come from; who are we to condemn Honor Killings, stonings, vaginal mutilations?

And By Law, Groups Like ACORN Will Get Money When You Take Out A Mortgage. And ACORN'S White Horse:

Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is complaining to the Justice Department about the attention being focused on the determined effort by ACORN, Obama's wholly owned vote-fraud division, to steal the 2008 election. Adding ignorance to gall, the campaign demands that what it calls a "Special Prosecutor" must investigate not ACORN but—you guessed it—the McCain campaign and the Bush administration....

ACORN is not just carrying out voter fraud in the here and now. Over the years ... several [of] its operatives have been convicted for these activities. And how could it be otherwise? What voters need to understand is that ACORN is a revolutionary Leftist organization. It was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a former member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)—the Communist organization from which Bill Ayers' Weatherman terrorist group split off in the late Sixties. It is adherent to the radical principles of Saul Alinsky, of whom Obama is a disciple....

Under the aforementioned heading of "direct action," ACORN has made fraud, extortion, harassment, and menacing core parts of its modus operandi. As a matter of principle, ACORN believes that the established bourgeois American order is racist, materialist, imperialist and illegitimate. ACORN no more cares about election laws than about other laws it decides must be circumvented in the service of the higher purpose it reveres: "Change."

And "New" Nation of Islam, Farrakhan are Same Ole/Same Ole:

Since last week, a number of people have been sending the story of how there are an alleged "new and improved" (and supposed more tolerant) Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan.

To quote one of the most anti-Semitic and pro-Farrakhan rap groups—Public Enemy—Don't Believe the Hype....

Calypso Louie still holds the same racist, bigoted, anti-White, anti-Semitic—and frankly, anti-American—views he's always held. He's just not announcing them to the world. But he won't take them back or apologize for them. And he still believes them....

It's the same old racist, separatist, supremacy crap we've been hearing from Farrakhan since he transformed himself from Calypso singer and dancer to the nation's looniest black racist.

That's interesting about Public Enemy, because a week and a half ago I happened to get a ride home from Mississauga with ... no, not with Public Enemy's Chuck D. It was just with a local rapper who has worked with Chuck D. The front-man for The Dope Poet Society, as it happens, who's currently doing a Ph.D. in political science at the U of Toronto, and will be transferring to Northwestern (where Bill Ayers' "Dig it!" squeeze Bernardine Dohrn currently "teaches"), because they have a better African-American library (plus more prestige than the U of T, even though the latter is the best university in Canada).

So I'm thinkin', as smart as politically concerned as that affable and interesting hip-hoppin' guy was—he was the one who told me about therealnews.com, as we drove past the building where its content is produced—it's unlikely that he was unaware of the anti-Semitic and pro-Farrakhan sentiment of Chuck D's work.

But again, as Woody Allen would say, "It's from the Left, so it's okay."

Anyway, being a "radical" these days isn't quite what it used to be: At ProfessorD.us's instigation, we actually stopped for breakfast at McDonald's. Generally, I don't believe in supporting those "multinational, anti-union corporate pigs," but he seemed to be really hungry. (It was the first time I had eaten there in half a dozen years, though more for nutritional than political reasons, since I really didn't care about politics [and immigration laws, etc.] until it started directly affecting me as a disadvantaged minority [i.e., a white male]. The yogurt/fruit parfait is actually surprisingly edible.)

As I said to him: "Saving the world on one Egg McMuffin a day."

As anecdotes go, it's not as quite bad as when a young and unknown Meat Loaf gave a ride to a straggly, hippie hitchhiker, in the hills around L.A. ... only to realize later, after the Tate murders, that the man he had driven home was Charles Manson.

And, Powell/Obama: Race rules. Get used to it:

Some ... welcome the prospect of an Obama Presidency, anticipating that the abrasive ethnic favoritism inevitable in such an Administration will finally enlighten the traditional American people. This will make things awkward for what appears to be currently the dominant intellectual force in the current GOP leadership. The Democrats, by so openly appealing to ethnocentrism, could well be unleashing forces lethal to themselves.

Yes, but it's not just the Democratic Party or the Republican leadership that's going to suffer from the backlash at Obama's blatant racial favoritism: It's race-relations between American whites and blacks in general, when the white population gets appropriately and very justifiably "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore" about all the money, guns, and First Amendment rights which Barack-in-the-Hood will be trying to take away from them, to "give to the poor."

You remember what the "old, senile crazy woman" Doris Lessing said back in February, right? (Yeah, crazy like that other "racist," Geraldine Ferraro.) It's only about Obama's skin color if he makes it about that ... which is exactly what he's been doing. Otherwise, his "spread-the-wealth-around" socialism is already more than enough for even a former hippie-leftist like myself to have no use for the man or his policies, regardless of his race. I can only imagine how the "gun-clinging" rednecks in backwoods Texas must feel.

And, while I haven't been able to find any online/searchable versions of Obama's Audacity of Hope, this can apparently be found on page 261 of the paperback version:

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging.

I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

Just the sort of attitude you want to have at the head of a country for the next four years, eh?

P.S. The sprawling skyscraper where Barack Obama and William Ayers worked together for years but never laid eyes on each other. And Kurtz on Obama and the New Party. And Biden: Elect Obama and We'll Have an International Crisis. And Shots Allegedly Fired at McCain Campaign Bus. Not that it's newsworthy (and likely to show up at butterfliesandwheels.com) or nothing'.... Nor will this. (In fairness, I also saw a story about McCain-supporters slashing the tires of Obama-supporters at a rally recently, but can't find the URL for that.)

Oh, and if you respect Garrison Keillor, you should read the latter third of this. It summarizes a lot of the blatant double standards (indulged in by Keillor, et al.) in the media coverage of The One and Joe the Dumber, vs. McCain and Palin. As does Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? .

From Crossing Paths Daily: Obama and Ayers Shared an Office (Update: For Three Years):

"Mr. LaBolt said [Obama and Ayers] first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood."

I'm going to suggest that two guys working in the same building for a period of years probably crossed paths pretty often. For all we know, they had lunch together on a daily basis....

According to this letter dated 1995, Obama's office was on the 3rd floor....

And according to this memo dated 1996, [Ayers'] Small Schools Workshop was also on the 3rd floor....

Do you think maybe Obama and Bill Ayers ran into each other once in a while?

And Soros-Funded Pair Running Obama Transition Team. And Obama Gave Bill Ayers' Book a Rave Review. And They are sweeping Obama's socialist answer to Joe Wurzelbacher's question under the rug. And The story hasn't changed; we're just too dumb to get it straight. And Letter to the Republican Party from a concerned PUMA...:

As PUMAs we worked our butt off to ensure Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party's Primary, against all odds, including being outspent 4:1, the MSM being in Obama's corner, charges of racism and blatant displays of sexism by Obama and his surrogates, and last but not least, electoral fraud perpetuated by ACORN. Folks, indeed the more things change the more they stay the same, nothing has changed, except John McCain has taken the place of Hillary Clinton....

Obama is a man whose political ideology is more in line with that of Daniel Arap Moi, a founding father of Kenya who thrived on the cult of personality, than it is in line with that of our founding father, George Washington, a man who put it all on the line so that our country would truly be greater than any one man.

P.S. Theodore Dalrymple's essays, archived at City Journal. Well worth reading, especially if you're still under the delusion that more-than-bare-minimum government programs for the underclass solve more problems than they create.

Hmm. Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called—with a straight face—"the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.

More recently, the same debunker has suggested:

My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it. The calculation in Dreams is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House....

At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.

The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter—the former has no precedent. If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers.

In 1981, Obama wrote and published the following cringe-inducing poem:

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance...

The above is, on inspection, clearly the work of someone who possesses no creative-writing ability at all, and who lacks even the potential to produce anything of value in that discipline: You can't get from penning something as awful as the above, as an adult, to being a real writer, much less a world-class one. And BHO's clunky (prose) style had not improved at all by 1990.

For reference, this is the first "keeper" song I ever wrote, in my early twenties ... around the same age as when Obama (b. 1961) wrote and published the above "figgy ape" poem:

RED-HAIRED GIRL

In my eyes, red-haired girl
You are surrounded by adjectives
Words like cute, breathtaking, beautiful
Radiant, unapproachable
Words that you find in a big dictionary
When you're checking the spelling
Of "contemporary"
Words that reflect what I see in your eyes
That can damn with faint praise
But can never describe

And your life, red-haired girl
Is a page, of thirty-one lines
Filled with poetry, big words that rhyme
And are spoke to the wind
With a penny and wish
And my life, red-haired girl
Is a noun, and it stands all alone
Near the margin of doubt
Lacking the power of action

Oh, red-haired girl
Emerald eyes to die for
Flowing like a river
To the place it wants to be
My heart goes out to you
Like a cookie to the sea

And your life, red-haired girl
Is a page, empty page in a notebook
That I, that I would delight just to write on
In pencil, I think
'Cause then it would work to erase
All the stumbling words, the mistakes
Reminders that you are the grace that you are
And I am just what I am

Oh, red-haired girl
Emerald eyes to die for
Running 'cross the flowered fields
To the Emerald City
Is where you hold my heart
And there you hold the key
Is where you hold my heart

It took me another decade and a half of practice after that 'til I could honestly say I knew how to write prose. (Exhibit A, from a few years after the above song.) Yet I still haven't written a sentence, in any context, to compare with these jaw-dropping beauties, credited to the 1995 Obama:

Winter came and the city turned monochrome-black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.

You can see from the lyrics in the song above that I already knew how to use many a literary device, even well prior to learning how to write engaging prose. There's no indication at all, however, of Barack "Apes and Figs" Obama possessing the same skills on either count, prior to their sudden appearance, out of the blue, in 1995.

P.S. "I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me". And PC Effect, Not Bradley Effect, May Haunt Obama:

There is a plethora of legitimate reasons for rejecting Barack Obama as president. That we must either endorse his candidacy or admit to being malignant racists is a risible notion....

A defining characteristic of the fashion by which the media attempts to mislead and indoctrinate our people is through omission of fact. Should whites fail to embrace Senator Obama it proves their underlying racism, but if blacks back him near unanimously—as they overwhelmingly did in the Democratic primaries of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—it proves that they ... supported a Democratic candidate....

And You down with JTP? Yeah, you know me!:

According to Rand Simberg, the Obama camp is actually complaining that McCain didn't—and this is real, they're actually saying this—that McCain didn't vet Joe Wurzelbacher.

And Sink Traps of Shame. And I Am Joe:

Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Puts classical liberals like Ophelia Benson in a bit of a bind, doesn't it? You know, for enthusiastically supporting freedom of speech and citizen participation ... but then simultaneously posting links that attempt to discredit Joe, when all he did was dare to question the Integral Socialist Messiah.(She gives no mention of disapproval of the content at those linked pages, which one may reasonably take as being an implicit approval of the same and an assertion of relevance.)

Joe's lack of a plumbing license, and the opinion of the local union about that, isn't even remotely newsworthy. Yet she posts the link in her News section, as if it was some significant contribution to the debate. While simultaneously posting links to other pieces about how nasty the Republicans have supposedly been during this election, and de facto excusing every piece of shit which her own side has thrown at Sarah Palin (not to mention throwing a few pieces herself). I would have expected better, from her. But as always, when you threaten a person's most deeply held (if utterly unsupportable) beliefs....

Anyway, back to eternal victims who the world just won't stop picking on: And the week's biggest victim of a hostile media is:

If you vote for this narcissist, then you'd better be prepared for at least 4 years of agreeing with every single thing he says and does. Keep your mouth shut, racist. Or he'll get his guys to shut it for you.

"Racist"? Hey, that's me!! And a sexist and a scoundwel, and a wobber, and a wapist ... and a pickpocket.

And from Maybe I haven't been looking, but in the media frenzy to destroy Joe the Plumber, here's a quote I haven't seen much since Wednesday:

If we're going to plunge headlong into outright socialism, then I want some of what George Clooney's got. You're a big Obama backer, right, George? Well then, put your money where your wagging, chiseled chin is. It's not fair that you've got so much more than I do. I'll take one of your houses and one of your cast-off girlfriends. Doesn't have to be one of the good ones in either category. Whatever you can spare, genius.

And through it all, We are at war with a rape cult.

From Charles Krauthammer's Who's Playing the Race Card?:

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate [Jeremiah Wright] issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card....

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I once believed him.

Yeah, I think there was a time when we all expected Obama to "play fair," attributing a degree of integrity and competence (e.g., in economics) to him that he clearly lacks, in spades. (For me, it was up until a few months ago.) "To be that young again."

The thing that effete little whiners like Obama and his feminist counterparts never manage to understand is that "If you've gonna do the time, you might as well do the crime." That is, if you're going to be called a racist, sexist, right-wingnut or whatever anyway, just for having the temerity to question the wisdom and authority of the feminist/Obama/liberal "cult leaders" ... you might as well not hold back or even try to humor them to begin with. (McCain may or may not figure that out before the election; if he doesn't, a good chunk of the rest of the country will figure it out over the next four years. When I've talked about Obama rolling back race relations in the States by forty or fifty years ... well, you can see what his bullshit and bullying has done to me, and I'm one of the tolerant ones! Or at least, I used to be. So what changed?)

You had already figured out that that's the tack I've been taking, right? You know, where it's actually a matter of pride to be considered a "racist" and a "sexist" (or an "untrustworthy asshole" by the integral-ites) ... simply because that's where telling the truth will invariably get you. Frankly, if the real racists and shameful race-card-players in the world (Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan, Obama, etc.) don't consider you to be a racist, and if the real sexists in the world (Steinem, Dworkin, MacKinnon, Rich, etc.) don't regard you as a raging sexist ... you should be ashamed of yourself. Because if your ideas are actually so much in line with theirs that they don't consider you to be "part of the problem," you really must not care that much about truth and reality.

And if anyone's wondering why Sarah Palin's Christian-rapture beliefs, stumbling "gotcha" (Couric, etc.) interviews, and other wrong ideas (re: global warming, abortion, etc.) don't freak me out the way they cause Sam Harris, for example, to shit himself and spit bile: Part of it is that my own Christian mother never finished high school. But that didn't stop her from taking over the family chicken farm after her own missionary father went out west to "convert the heathens," and running it very well, even in a monolithically male, sexist environment. (She actually developed a reputation among the surrounding farmers and vendors of having a "sharp pencil," i.e., they had learned the hard way that, contrary to their Christian-sexist expectations, they couldn't pull stuff over on her.) She also grew up believing in a literal bodily Resurrection from the grave, and it wasn't until the last walk we ever took together that I ever heard any doubt from her about needing to believe in Jesus in order to get to heaven. Yet I can assure you that she would have been a far more sane choice to trust with nuclear codes and the like than any slippery "community organizer."

So I'm familiar with strong, principled, confident, compassionate women who are smart even without having had much formal education, and who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty: That's what I grew up with, to the point of taking it for granted. (Doesn't everyone's mother eviscerate chickens with her own hands, after a pre-marital life of attending operas in Germany, during her own missionary days?) And as much as I look down on the dumbfuck rednecks and construction workers in this world, I also think it would do the likes of Harris (and Obama) good to do an honest day's manual labor now and then.

Maybe they could get on as plumbers' apprentices....

Plus, Harris's tolerance for Terence McKenna's psychedelic-induced "exquisite ravings" is just as crazy, and nearly as potentially dangerous, as are any Christian Rapture expectations. For, if the many-worlds cosmos really was peopled with "self-transforming machine elves" who can communicate with us in altered states of consciousness ... how might those communications from higher beings affect Harris's own decision-making, should he (god forbid) ever be placed in a position of responsibility?

People like Sarah Palin understand the separation of Church and State well enough to not try and force their own religious beliefs onto others in that context. By contrast, to truly embrace integral spirituality is, by its very nature, to attempt to apply it to every aspect of life. Would you want someone with that kind of belief system to be holding an elected office, where he would necessarily have to try to bring his spiritual/religious beliefs into government? I sure wouldn't. The integral dumbfuck Harris, though, probably would. If he's thought it out that far.... (Philosopher? Hah!!)

P.S. Equating Islam with Terrorism Will Lead to Terrorism. And I don't normally do "fisking," but in this case I'll make an exception. And Operation Destroy Joe the Plumber:

This time around, with Joe The Plumber as their target, the MSM is coming out with guns blazing. Maybe they should spend more time telling the bigger story about Wurzelbacher—that he managed to get Obama on the public record as favoring a socialistic redistribution of wealth....

After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama's rhetorical tap dance was "almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.," the inevitable cries of "bigotry" followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for "Joe the Plumber racist.")

See? Why should you even try to please these duplicitous bastards? They've already set it up so that you can't win. Better to be a proud Islamophobe, sexist ... and "racist." (Plus, they're throwing the term around with such abandon that it's rapidly losing its damning quality. Pretty soon, "Bob, how the fuck are you, you racist bastard? How's the house nigger?" will be standard fare at dinner parties.)

Yet, I see that Ophelia Benson, over at butterfliesandwheels.com, is linking to a "Plumbers Disavow Joe: Union plumbers are not impressed by Joe the plumber" article. As if the man's lack of a license (or the opinion of the local union about him) for a simple trade is relevant to anything! They gag and scream about even the slightest provocation from McCain and Palin, while looking straight past the fact that their own side is using every dirty trick in the book, and pretending that their own spewing of unveiled contempt at Palin is in some way justified. "None so blind as socialists who will not see," eh? (Christ, you read leftist analyses of the subprime mortgage crisis, and they're actually trying to sell it as being a failure of the free market and deregulation, when in reality it was excessive affirmative action-like regulation, going back to the late '70s, that created the problem! People without the first fucking clue about what's going on around them, yet they've still got it all explained, stupidly pretending that "every assertion about the merits of deregulation and about the primacy of [free] market forces is now dead.")

Honestly, I wouldn't have imagined that a person like OB could be so sharp and clear on so many other topics, and yet so utterly uninformed about something she spent her twenties reading up on (i.e., socialist politics, and presumably also getting to "know her enemy" on the opposite, conservative side). But then, you look at how the bulk of her postings on the dangers of Islam focus just on how women are getting shafted there, and combine that with the title of her forthcoming book (Does God Hate Women?), and a certain, tired pattern starts to become painfully evident....

I'll always be grateful to OB, and to her site, for having opened my eyes to the dangers of radical (and even moderate) Islam. But I also know, by now, that there are much better sources for information on that same topic, which she totally ignores—for whatever reasons, from simple unawareness of their existence to the fact that they invariably tend to be politically conservative sites, simply because it's mostly the conservatives who seem to have any interest in fighting for their society and culture, while the majority of liberals can't wait to import the people and culture of the Third World, in the name of multiculturalism. (Cf. conservatism is "the set of ideas that men adopt in defense of their social and political institutions when they come under fundamental attack.")

Really, the (complete) extent to which she relies on the mainstream media for her news is downright embarrassing. Not that I was any better until a few months ago; but I've already posted enough links on her comment pages that there's no excuse for her not having learned by now. Granted, those were frequently links to right-wing sites; but even if you want a left-wing take on the news, you can do better than the MSM. Try therealnews.com, for one.

Same thing's happened to Betty Bowers: Gone from fantastic, witty "Christian" barbs directed at The Shrub to simple hate-filled bitching about McCain and Palin, without even trying (and certainly without succeeding) at being funny or even entertaining anymore.

If you ever needed a demonstration that giving up your political ideology, even long past the point where it's clear that it doesn't work, is just about as hard and cognitive dissonance-producing as is giving up your religion....

And, World Record Sandwich? Iranians Eat Evidence:

Iran failed Friday to register what it said would be the world's largest sandwich in the Guinness book of World Records after people rushed forward and began eating it—before it was measured....

The giant snack was gone in minutes, a Reuters witness said, leaving the three Guinness representatives present with a dilemma.

Can you imagine the scene? Fifteen hundred metres is around 5000 feet of sandwich. To finish that off in "minutes," you'd have to have thousands of ravenously hungry, smelly Iranians, each grabbing madly for his footlong piece of the action, and then wolfing it down, to ... to what? Ensure his place in history, before crapping it out, in the opposite direction from Mecca? (Yes, they're not supposed to face the holy city when they're taking a shit. This is a big thing for the design of bathrooms in London, e.g., for the upcoming Olympics there.) Or for a story to tell his grandchildren: Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed and Mohammed?

Stupid, shit-faced goat-fuckers can't even restrain themselves against the temptation of a pile of cold cuts and bread. No wonder they need to keep their women covered from head-to-foot. No fucking self-control at all.

"Step away from the sandwich ... Mohammed."

From Spencer speaking tonight at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which may no longer be in America:

I got off the phone a little while ago with one of the student organizers of my address tonight at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He told me that I would be led to and from the stage via secret passageway; that thirty security personnel would be on hand (in addition to my own); that attendees would have to pass through metal detectors; and that a bomb-sniffing dog would also be on hand.

It is rather amazing to me that all this would be necessary anywhere in America today—and all because I am saying things they don't like.

Yes—we've cast the pearls of freedom at the feet of Islamic swine, and now they're turning on us, with bombs and metal detectors. And child pornography.

I was in the rental office of a property near the U of Toronto a couple of days ago. And while I was there, a couple of Arabic guys walked in, wanting to get the keys for their suite. The manager asked for their names, and after they told her, she said: "You're the third Mohammed." In a property with forty units.

On the bright side, I finally get the line in Annie Hall, with Woody Allen's character distressing about (I think) Annie's "anti-Semitic" mother: "Van Gach, like an Arab she spoke." 'Cause that's exactly how they talk.

There's another great scene from that classic movie:

Alvy Singer: You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.

Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.

Alvy Singer: Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.

So it's okay.

It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.

—Woody Allen

P.S. Obama Bashes McCain with a Bogus Story. And Secret Service: No One Shouted 'Kill Him' at McCain Rally. And Hey, what happens if you ask Obama an honest question and he accidentally gives you an honest answer? And Obama: The Oak Grown from Acorn. And:

I saw a great cartoon of the emperor's new clothes once. The king was standing in front of a tailors' mirror wearing only his crown and surrounded by the tailors. The caption was "Cool, I dig them. I want you to make the same outfit for every chick in the kingdom."

So: Numerical Sex Positions.

From Obama will Kill the Insurance Biz:

On tonight's debate while discussing health care I heard Obama say, "make sure insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions."

Am I living in another universe or didn't we just learn that forcing banks not to discriminate against someone because of credit reasons brought us into the current crises we are in?

Now Obama wants insurance companies to take on the burden of insuring someone without regard to what illnesses they already have? Well, if that ever passes I'll wait until I get sick before getting health insurance. Then I can say to the insurance companies, "Nyah, nyah, you can't turn me down just because I have liver cancer."

I wonder if Obama will also want insurance companies to not discriminate against smokers, stuntmen, skydivers or alcoholics?

You thought I was joking or exaggerating about 'Bama Bunny and his fellow weftist wadicals being economically clueless, didn't you? No such luck.

Obama's getting off easy: The GOP would be hitting a white candidate twice as hard:

Liberal Democrats have a long tradition of tarring opponents as the monolithic forces of hatred and prejudice while casting themselves as the enlightened proponents of peace, love and decency. And this election shows that tradition is alive and well.

Yep, it sure does.

And, the raging anti-Semite Jesse Jackson's at it again:

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.

Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

Bad, racist nigger! BAD, JEW-HATING, RACIST NIGGER!! No fried chicken, watermelon or reparations for you!

Just as the white populace in Nazi Germany hated the Jews in no small part for being smarter and more successful than they were, blacks in North America—who don't have the IQ (much less the academic work ethic) to compete even when they're given every affirmative-action opportunity—hate the honkeys and the Hymies. Jews were "to blame" for all of the Germans' problems; whites/Jews must be responsible for all of the blacks' problems, in America and in Africa. It's nothing if not symmetric ... for being a product of basic human psychology.

And the more power blacks get in America (as in Africa), the more it will become obvious to everyone but themselves that the past "white, hegemonic power structure" was not actually at the root of their failures and sufferings for the past half-century ... and the more they'll defensively project and take their frustrations out on successful whites, Jews and Asians (e.g., Korean grocery store owners in black neighborhoods). What else can people do when they've been raised in a culture of irresponsibility and victimhood, and are then confronted with their own continued failure, even when they've been given every opportunity to succeed? It's always going to be "somebody else's fault." Psychologically, for them in their worldview, it has to be.

And all of that, combined with their low average (85) IQ and consequent widespread inability to understand any reasonably complex or abstract explanations, is predictably fertile ground for all manner of paranoid, tinfoil-hat/dimwit conspiracy theories about how whites and Jews are "out to get" blacks, in alleged continuing attempts at genocide, via AIDS and otherwise.

(FYI, the reason why blacks are more susceptible to AIDS than other races is because the mutation which protected them from malaria in Africa also increases susceptibility to the AIDS virus. Sickle-cell anemia is another byproduct of the genetic protection against malaria. It ain't whitey's fault!)

If you took the white population of any country and removed most of the above-average IQ people, leaving basically just the rednecks, the plumbers and the construction workers, you'd have a remarkably good approximation to black society and culture (but with much less whining victimhood in the 'hood). Or at least, that's the unnoticed converse of the black economist Thomas Sowell's "black redneck" explanation for why African-American culture is the way it is:

Following Grady McWhiney's book Cracker Culture, Sowell attributes much of "redneck culture" to the Scotch-Irish, those bellicose Protestants from the violent Scottish-English border region and their descendents who had settled Ulster. During the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Scotch-Irish migrated to America, especially to the Appalachian backcountry.

Sowell attributes much in current black culture to the Scotch-Irish, such as a tendency to react tumultuously to being "dissed."

Sailer explains why Sowell's theory is more wrong than right; but the point is that there really are enough similarities between inner-city black and rural redneck culture that they could have both had the same (non-genetic, merely cultural) source. They didn't, but they could have. (Sowell's theory is itself a "blame whitey" approach to the shortcomings of black society, i.e., he imagines they learned their gangsta ways from the backwoods whites.)

The other point is this: What would an entire, monolithically white neighborhood/society of rednecks and construction workers look like? What would you expect from it in terms of the value it would place on education and technology, etc., vs. alpha-male posturing, shiny status-symbols and crime? More specifically, how would it differ from inner-city black society and culture? Answer: Not Very Much At All.

So it's not just that blacks "don't know about and/or don't care a whit about the sacrifices that Jews made for them in America." It's more of a "tall poppy syndrome" writ large. That is, "a societal phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are criticized or resented because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers," with "peers" there being no small in-group, but rather the American public in general—a society filled with the talents and awe-inspiring intellectual achievements of whites, Jews, and Asians in particular, set against a few black rappers (who'd be in prison if it wasn't for being able to make a living as "rhyming thugs") and sports stars.

Plus, if things ever did become truly harmonious between blacks and whites, worthless little racist fuckers like Jackson would be out of a job: Even aside from psychology, for his own security in income and prestige nothing can ever be "good enough" to make up for all of whitey's past sins (real and, more recently, merely imagined).

But is Obama—who's not a descendant of slaves—truly a typical American black?

Jackson emphatically answers yes: "You don't need to be a descendant of slaves to experience the oppression, the suffocating injustice and the ugly racism [yes, the racism coming from people like the Reverends Jackson, Sharpton and Wright] that exists in our society," he says. "Obama experienced the same environment as all American blacks did. It was nonsense to suggest that he was somehow not black enough to feel the pain."

Except, of course, that he's half-white, and grew up bodysurfing in Hawaii, etc.

"Barack is determined to repair our relations with the world of Islam and Muslims," Jackson says. "Thanks to his background and ecumenical approach, he knows how Muslims feel while remaining committed to his own faith."

Christ. These shit-for-brains morons want to "repair our relations" with a group of people who, in their soft jihad and violent reactions to trivial provocations like the Danish cartoons, are the number one cause of the erosion of Western freedoms today. People who can only be appeased by giving in until there's nothing left of Western civilization (or of Israel). Brilliant.

Like the dangerously-stupid, hate-filled whining bozo Jackson said back in the late '80s: "Hey ho, hey ho, Western Civ has got to go."

And there it goes....

P.S. Why Isn't The Obamaniacs' Rage On Your Front Page Too? And, The Left's Big Blunder.

Oh, this ain't gonna make Ann Coulter happy at all:

Surviving members of Grateful Dead rock for Obama.

Doesn't make me happy either, grrr....

And Michael Moore's been rabble-rousing too close to (my) home:

Michael Moore Makes Odd Appearance at Canadian Debate.

Nothing politically interesting happening down in the States these days, I guess.

And, from The Synagogue Bombing for Civil Rights That Black America Forgot:

[I]n poll after poll ... Anti-Semitism remains strong in one community in America (actually two communities, if you include Muslims): the Black community. Because they don't know about and/or don't care a whit about the sacrifices that Jews made for them in America. They've rewarded it with anti-Semitism....

What have we Jews learned from that bombing and the resulting fifty years of anti-Semitism espoused by the most admired figures in Black America?

What have we Jewish-Americans learned when 60% of us, in poll after poll, still plan to vote for Barack Obama, a man who held a 20-plus year relationship with a man who was not afraid to spread his hatred of Jews at his and Oprah's church?....

I am glad Jews were a vital part of America's civil rights movement. The pigment of one's skin should never be a reason for the denial of basic human decency and equal treatment. But I am outraged that we continue to be—along with America, itself (Rev. Wright's "G-d Damn America")—a target of the hatred of the community we stood up for.

P.S. Note to everybody who can't stop moaning that it's all over and we're going to end up in Room 101 with rat-cages strapped to our faces. Good advice. And Switzerland: Don't Hurt Veggies' Feelings:

Wheat and all plant life has feelings and researchers must take veggie's tender emotions into account when tinkering around with their genes, the Swiss government has ruled.

According to the Wall Street Journal's Gautam Naik, last spring under an amendment to the constitution, Switzerland began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant's alleged dignity....

Last April the Journal reported the group published a 22-page treatise on "the moral consideration of plants for their own sake." They ruled that vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by "decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason," for example.

A decade ago, when I was working at a natural-foods store in Winnipeg, one of the cashiers there could "hear" the dried herbs crying out, wondering where they were after being harvested, etc. So she'd talk to them until they calmed down.

Her sister was clinically schizophrenic.

Looks like they'd both fit right in, in Switzerland ... where the holes are no longer just in the cheese, if you get my drift.

On a related topic: Euthanasia—Being a vegetable is not the Problem. Except if you're a Swiss vegetable, that is.

Every once in a blue moon you come across a goldmine of ideas and information. Neuropolitics.org is one such site.

And then there's Carl Sagan's excellent essay on abortion.

P.S. Sarah 'Paylin' makes a porno. And, the Palin-hating socialists over at Butterflies and Wheels finally annoyed me to the point where I had to spend 9+ hours composing this comment. They're good people/thinkers for recognizing the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, and the need for secular thought and values against religion, but Christ is their understanding of politics and economics deficient. And truly, they'll talk and philosophize and talk and philosophize back and forth, wringing their "lilywhite collegiate hands" about collateral damage (e.g., in Iran) and ultimately doing nothing, until it's too late. You know the debating-while-Brian-is-being-crucified scene from The Life of Brian? That's them.

@JT: The most obvious example is the way conservatives in the US seem to have convinced almost everybody - even liberals - that the media has a liberal bias.

You may find this study informative, if disillusioning:

Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist:

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the [same] newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

@G: Democrats do not have a well-established pattern of trying to block people from voting based on spurious "disqualifications" which always turn out to be lies. Democrats do not have a history of falsely crying "Voter fraud!" every time a voter registration drive kicks out inevitable, perfectly expected duplicate registrations.

And yet:

"Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board" with 57,435 [i.e., 22.7%] rejected for faulty information. "Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures, addresses that do not exist, and duplicate registrations. In one case, a man was registered to vote more than 15 times since the Primary election."

More shenanigans from ACORN, in STEAL THIS VOTE.

The Republicans would be proud; "Grasshopper" has learned well....

@G: I'm not saying no Democratic political operatives have ever pulled any of these stunts, but in documented fact the politics of dirty tricks is almost all on the Republican side of things, and has been for decades.

Ah, but the Obamanation is catching up:

Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign's Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement:

What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment....

The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

And "Swift-boating" Obama? Sorry, but that ship has sailed:

I think that this current wave of criticism is practice for the years ahead, and I am not encouraged by the Obama campaign's instinct to dump a pile of bricks on anyone who won't engage them on their terms.

Not to mention Obama's Foreign Donors.

@G: Ayers left behind his ultra-radical past (without leaving behind progressive politics, which still makes him evil in right-wingnut-land) and become a professor at University of Chicago (a quite conservative institution) and a model citizen.

Not exactly. From Don't Need a Weatherman:

Ayers boasts that he bombed New York City's police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972—and proudly adds, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Asked whether he would do it again, he answers, "I don't want to discount the possibility." Or, as he puts it in Fugitive Days: A Memoir, "I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility."

@G: the sum total of the supposed friendship between Obama and Ayers consists in sitting on the same charitable education foundation board - a charity funded by a wealthy Republican, incidentally - and Ayers hosting one campaign event when Obama was first running for state office in Illinois.

No, it was much more than just the two of them sitting together on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda....

Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman [as Obama was] without his approval....

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism....

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with ACORN, and ACORN members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns....

As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle.

@G: Many of Bill Clinton's long-time allies in the African American political community have expressed views every bit as loony as Jeremiah Wright, but even the Republican slime machine didn't bother to trot them out and try to pretend that their views were Clinton's views. But because Obama himself is black, and the public still has a lot of deep-seated bigotry that can be easily manipulated, they do try to pretend that Wright's views are Obama's views against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Actually, Barack's mother was white (pic), so he's just as white as he is black, genetically. That he chooses to identify as black rather than emphasizing his half-whiteness, is no small psychological point.

And Clinton didn't sit in the pews of a mentor and father-figure for twenty years absorbing radical rhetoric. Woulda been a bit of a story if he [or McCain] had ... or if he had launched his presidential campaign [or political career] in the living room of a former (but now reformed!) abortion-clinic bomber, for example.

@G: McCain was censured by the Senate for the corruption, so it is a direct part of his history and performance in his elected office.

Depends on what you mean by "censured." From Wikipedia:

In the end, McCain was cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee of acting improperly or violating any law or Senate rule, but was mildly rebuked for exercising "poor judgment."

Plus, you're aware that Mother Teresa received money (over $1 million) from Keating too, yes? Unlike McCain, however, she refused to return the money—but did write to the presiding judge to ask for clemency for Keating. If Ayers is "Citizen of the Year" material (in Chicago—didn't Al Capone win that once?) then McCain's a "saint." :)

@G: [McCain] has continued to vote in favor of every banking deregulation bill that has ever crossed the Senate floor.

He also, along with nineteen other Republican senators, tried (in 2006) to prevent the subprime crisis. Even Bill Clinton gets that the Democrats are to largely blame for that fiasco. And Obama was right in the middle of that mess years earlier, suing on behalf of ACORN to ensure that the bad loans would continue to get made to people who clearly couldn't pay them back.

@G: Richard, which right wing talking head told you that Ayers has never repudiated violence? To quote Ayers' own description of his book about his radical youth, Fugitive Days, "My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy.... Ayers has in fact said that terrorist violence is never justified, period."

Again, in the biographical words of Ayers himself:

"Of all those fugitive days—of all those terrible, exquisite years—I regret nothing for myself," he wrote. "I can't quite imagine putting a bomb in a building today—all of that seems so distinctively a part of then. But I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility either.

@G: Barack Obama himself has never expressed any view whatsoever that remotely resembles Ayers' youthful radicalism or Wright's grotesque (but not uncommon or surprising) reverse racism, and in fact has clearly and universally stood against such views in general and in these specific cases.

Yet, on p. 200 of his autobiography, Obama writes:

"If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence."

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq [a Black Muslim ally].

He's rejecting Farrakhan's racist black nationalism there on practical, not moral grounds. So, if only a way could be found to make it work effectively ... who knows?

Plus, WTF is "reverse racism" supposed to be? It's just plain racism, not something different just because it comes from a member of a "non-privileged [outside of affirmative action, etc.] group." Call it "black racism" if you want, but calling it "reverse racism" is just ridiculous. (I realize you didn't invent the phrase, with it presumably coming out of FUBAR Marxist ideology in which only people with power can be racist; but it's a stupid term regardless.)

@G: Seriously, your unthinking willingness to swallow and regurgitate ... talking points....

Right back at'cha. Seriously. Or, as the fantastic and widely respected (for very good reasons) conservative black economist Thomas Sowell put it:

[T]he country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

Still, I for one welcome our new, know-it-all, economically clueless Socialist Overlords. And good luck to them in their attempts at meeting/negotiating with Ahmadinejad, etc., "without preconditions" ... except of course for the preconditions set by the Jew-hating governmental terrorists themselves. Pay no attention to the mushroom cloud where Israel used to be; "we can talk it out," right? It always worked in poli-sci class....

This makes me a "right-wing troll" or a "right-wingnut" now, right? Ah, well; so be it. But I used to be farther left than any of you. I've got the tie-dyes and tofu to prove it. (I'm also more IQ-elitist than anyone on this board; but it doesn't keep me from recognizing that there's a time and a place for "hockey moms" and their ilk, even in national politics at the highest level. An effete, race-card-playing metrosexual versus a nuclear Iran and the soft jihad in America itself is such a bad idea.)

P.S. The president of the L.A. chapter of the National Organization of Women recently endorsed Sarah Palin. Don't y'all go gettin' yer panties in a bunch over that....

Obama: ACORN will "Shape the Agenda" When I'm President.

In related news, regarding the supposed "benefits" of a high minimum wage:

[H]ow many city councilmen would understand the thick pile of studies from liberal as well as conservative economists showing conclusively that big hikes in the minimum wage ultimately kill low-wage jobs, as employers replace now-expensive receptionists with newly cost-effective voice-mail systems, say, or pile more duties onto experienced employees instead of hiring additional low-wage beginners? And how many councilmen would understand that increasing the costs of city contractors today will require them to raise the prices they charge the city tomorrow, requiring eventual tax hikes that will drive employers—and jobs—out of town to cheaper locales, isolating the poor who are left behind?

Sort of like I was saying, eh? (Conversely, high levels of unskilled immigration, which drive wages down for the dumbfuck segment of the workforce, are one of the primary things which retard the replacement of fruit-pickers and human parking-garage ticket-takers, for example, with machines that can do the same work far more efficiently.) But honestly, any councilperson who can't see how increasing labor costs would cause prices to go up, in turn requiring taxes to be raised to cover that additional expense, etc., isn't competent to be even a small cog in any political machine. Are there really people that stupid, even in local politics? (Don't answer that: What Would Obama Do? Hint: Raise taxes for corporations ... which may sound fine, until you realize that even small businesses are corporations, so they'll have to either cut staff or raise their prices. "Won't somebody think of the waitresses?!!")

The 1996 welfare reform act, with its emphasis on personal responsibility and work, is one of the great social policy successes of recent decades. By bringing hundreds of thousands of former welfare clients into the mainstream economy, it has given them brighter prospects and new self-respect. With the national welfare rolls down by nearly 50 percent, child poverty has also declined, from 20.8 percent to 16.3 percent—rather than risen, as critics had darkly prophesied—and the anxiety levels of the teen children of working ex-welfare mothers have also diminished....

[W]ith workfare, as with all aspects of welfare dependency, ACORN has never learned the most important lesson from the failures of 1960s radicalism—that there is a tight connection between irresponsible personal behavior and poverty. One can read hundreds of pages of ACORN pronouncements on the problems of inner-city neighborhoods without finding a word about how single-parent households have helped cause and perpetuate them.

No surprise there. "Responsibility? Yo man, that's honkey talk. Gimme my welfare check already, racist muthafucka!"

The banks that ACORN has shaken down refuse to discuss their contributions to a political organization that, to put it mildly, is hostile to free enterprise. But one prominent consultant to the financial industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, admits: "The banks know they are being held up, but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business." Some of ACORN's fellow community activists are even blunter. "ACORN knows that corporate America has no starch in their shorts and, therefore, what they try to do is buy peace from groups that agitate against them," says Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a community-action group that stresses moral regeneration and individual responsibility rather than government handouts. "The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."

Yep, if you're black in America and not good at sports or rapping, there's always extortion from whites who are scared of riots, and even of being called "racist" by the real racists in the world: despicable, hate-mongering assholes like Jackson and Sharpton.

P.S. The Lingerie Football League. And time for a cold shower....

Mark Steyn Victorious—But Don't Celebrate Yet.

Enjoy your own free speech while it lasts, US and A: The Spics are Coming, the Spics are Coming.

And more of the fantastic Thomas Sowell:

Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama's election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers' money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance—but an alliance is not just an "association" from being at the same place at the same time.

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. [Roger Kimball: "That hatred, in more or less muted form, at the center of Obama's appeal among leftists and Europeans. In their eyes, America is fundamentally an illegitimate enterprise in desperate need of redemption. Obama—the Harvard education, metrosexual, left-wing sophisticate—is just the chap to perform the exorcism. America as it is is deeply flawed; Obama will recast the country according to a vision acceptable to socialists in Europe and America."] No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that....

The story of Obama's political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot—after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates' petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

Despite his words today about "change" and "cleaning up the mess in Washington," Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

If there were more respect-worthy black and white people like Mr. Sowell in this world, America (and Africa) would be very different, and much better, places than they are.

There's an interesting passage in John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me:

[The Negro] knows one thing—the only way out of this tragedy is through education, training. Thousands of them sacrifice everything to get the education, to prove once and for all that the Negro's capacity for learning, for accomplishment, has nothing to do with degrees of intelligence, talent or virtue.

Griffin wrote that in 1959, prior to the civil rights movement. And yet John McWhorter recently made the following observations about contemporary black American culture:

This discrepancy [in the continuing low average scores of middle-class African-American students on standardized tests such as the SAT] today stems less from deprivation than from a cultural tendency which expresses itself in black culture regardless of class, namely the well-documented one of black children to associate doing well in school with selling out to "whiteness." The few hopelessly nerdy black kids such as myself plow on in the face of this, but often at the expense of general social acceptance, and the majority of African-American children inevitably fall into line to some extent with this evaluation of scholarly achievement with "the other," even in comfortable middle-class circumstances.

Quite the self-defeating step backwards, eh? And more community-organizing, or even reparations, or even scholarships and special educational programs for blacks, is going to change that proud attitude, how?

But that change obviously isn't going to happen. 'Cause it's way easier to just keep slacking off, busting caps, and blaming whitey for all of your problems, eh? So they'll predictably keep doing that for as long as they can get away with it, i.e., until they've sucked so much money out of the pockets of people who have actually worked for it that there's nothing left to give except resentment.

African-American family structures tend to fall midway between African and white American norms. America's dominant culture had actually succeeded fairly well in inculcating monogamy and bring-home-the-bacon traditions in African-Americans by about 1960, when it suddenly lost its self-confidence.

The government then began funding, via Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the traditional African tendency toward mothers supporting their children without much help from their fathers. And society stopped stigmatizing having children out of wedlock. [And then, in the mid-'60s, the Ted-Kennedy-driven immigration reforms started letting in the flood of uneducated immigrants, who will work unskilled jobs for less than native-born blacks will, thus pushing the latter out of the dumbfuck end of the workforce and into the only other thing they know how to do: crime.]

Our ignorance of African-Americans' African heritage proved costly. In effect, America imported a welfare policy—paying generous welfare benefits to single mothers—that had worked reasonably well in Scandinavia for a generation. Yet, within two or three years, illegitimacy and crime rates among African-Americans were soaring—because they didn't respond to the new incentives like Swedes.

And then there's the 15-point average IQ difference between whites and blacks in America, which alone would condemn half of the black population to lives of sub-85-IQ, grunt-working poverty, without even the potential to do intellectual or even office work. (The unfortunate fact that they actually can't compete in terms of IQ/intelligence is no doubt responsible for no small part of their cultural denigration of tasks and jobs which require at least an "average white IQ" to do competently.) I've seen people (e.g., on PZ Myers' very leftist blog, where the quack science-popularizer Stephen J. Gould still gets mentioned complimentarily) point out that exposure to lead in childhood can decrease IQ by 5 or 7 points, and that toxic chemicals like that are frequently dumped specifically in poor black neighborhoods. But only around 20% of African-Americans live in ghettos. (Surprised? You thought it was higher, didn't you?) So that can only account for at most one or two points of the 15-point differential. And even if ghetto kids are growing up today on baby formula, (fortified) breakfast cereal, Kraft dinner and Jell-O, they're still not going to be malnourished to the point of retardation.

And, while "culture" and educational opportunities might even conceivably account for another dozen points of IQ, there's a comparable 15-point difference between African-Americans and sub-Saharan Africans (avg. 70 IQ, i.e., borderline cretin/moron) ... and another 15-point difference, in the opposite direction, between whites and Ashkenazi Jews (115+ IQ). That's three standard deviations between sub-Saharan blacks, and Ashkenazi Jews, on average. It's just wishful thinking to imagine that "culture" could stretch far enough to cover that entire range, from literally borderline-cretinous to smart-university-grad.

Whatever the causes may be of the IQ gap between blacks and whites, in practice "half of all Hispanics and over 60% of all blacks" in the USA are too dumb to even be trusted with the defense of their own country. That those same retards are disproportionately carrying guns on the crime-ridden streets of Detroit and El Paso is just one of life's little ironies.

Does allowing for genetic differences in intelligence between the races bring one to the verge of proposing a program of eugenics, to ensure a smarter and whiter future for the human race? Only if you don't follow the facts through. After all, Asians are on average slightly higher in IQ than European whites; and Ashkenazi Jews are again a full standard deviation (i.e., 15 IQ points) higher than "my race." So I just hope they never get it into their heads to create a Jewish Master Race! We'd all be screwed. (The Nazis knew very well that the Jews were smarter than they were; that's why they had no use for IQ tests.) Better that they just continue to take over the world financially, instead. (Puts on tinfoil hat.)

P.S. Maybe Some of It Is About Race, After All. Yep, if the Big Zero loses, "it'll be a riot...." And "Obamazebo" Reveals the Candidate's Flawed Judgment:

"Judgment to Lead" is supposedly what Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama brings to the table. The claim, as PJM's Pam Meister described it last month, is that "he may not have the same experience as his opponent, but he has what it takes to make the right call."

While others search vainly for examples in Obama's political life supporting that claim, I will describe a situation—what was has come to be known as the "Obamazebo"—where he clearly made the wrong call, demonstrated poor judgment, and utterly failed to lead.

That's the thing: First, BHO isn't nearly smart/insightful/courageous enough to unlearn his beloved socialist-handout ideology regardless of how clearly it fails to work. (Even just a minimal understanding of human nature, or contact with one or two welfare-cheats, should cure you of the idea that "more welfare [and gov't programs in general] is better.") But worse, he simply doesn't have a "political brain." His way of thinking may work, to a degree, in academia and in a "handouts for you, handouts for me" context—where the cure for funds spent poorly is to throw more Other People's Money after it—but it's suicide in the dog-eat-dog real world. Like one commenter said:

For all Obama's pretensions to be a citizen of the world, he is hopelessly provincial, locked in a bubble of theoreticians.

And politics, even more than mere economics, is about practice, not theory.

I was on the Ryerson University campus in downtown Toronto yesterday. Not only did I encounter half a dozen Muslim women with their heads covered, but for the first time in my nine years in this city, I came face-to-"face" with two of them wearing niqabs—just the slit for their eyes, with an amorphous, interchangeable person underneath. (I think I had also seen one on the subway a month or two ago.)

Granted, their women tend to be puke-ugly, so in that sense it's not much lost; but still....

I was just reading the other day (don't recall where) about how, when you start to see the niqabs, it's the beginning of the end. So how many years will it be until their shit-for-brains, 85-IQ, homophobic goat-fuckers start beating the crap out of gays here, in broad daylight, like they already do in Amsterdam ... and in Washington, DC? (Ryerson is right next to Church Street and the former Wilde Oscar's, etc.)

I truly hate what those seventh-century cult-following parasites are doing to my country, and to the civilized world in general. We're so close as a species to having solved our major problems, being on the verge of absolutely phenomenal breakthroughs in biotechnology and nanotechnology, etc. But simultaneously, we just can't give away our freedoms (of speech, and gay and women's rights) fast enough, to a bunch of petulant, violent Third-World savages—ignorant bastards who have no respect at all for even the basics of civilized (e.g., white middle-class) society. Given half the chance, those shit-faced, pre-rational assholes will send the entire Western world back to the fucking Dark Ages. Goodbye science, goodbye freedoms, and say hello to a hell-on-earth, under our new Islamic-fundamentalist overlords.

P.S. Corruption Eruption: Obama's Earmarks For Mich-Bucha. And Obama Endorsed Acorn Candidate: "We Had Elected One Of Our Own", Caught Lying About Acorn. And Treason: Obama's Tacit Support For Odinga's Violent Overthrow Of Democratically Elected Leader In Kenya. And James Carville Hints at Riots If Obama Loses Election. You thought I was joking or overreacting? No such luck.

And Dewinter Battles the Leftwing Fascists, Islamists as Allies:

A new report from the domestic intelligence service of the German city-state of Hamburg shows ... that actual neo-Nazi groups in Germany—i.e., groups that themselves embrace this description—in fact likewise opposed the "Anti-Islamification Congress" and are notably hostile to its sponsor, the "citizens' movement" Pro-Cologne [Pro-Köln].

While the neo-Nazis agitate against what they describe as Germany's "flooding by foreigners"—or "Überfremdung"—they take precautions against criticizing Islamic influences or Islam as such, since the latter is rather "to be seen as an ally."

And Farrakhan on Obama: "The Messiah is absolutely speaking". So the next time the Democrats go apeshit about conservatives mocking Barack H. as being "The One"....

Camille Paglia:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor?....

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism—the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary....

Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment....

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism.

And Mark Steyn:

I think this is really the worrying thing, that old media, which is on the ropes in terms of its market share, if they can drag their guy [i.e., Obama] across the finish line, and it took them some effort in the primary season, if they can drag their guy across the finish line, I think you're going to see a lot of attempts by the Pelosi-Obama left-wing government to regulate the internet and talk radio and all kinds of other things.

P.S. ACORN Files Voting Rights Suit on Behalf of Imaginary-Americans.

From Focus, People:

Barack Obama isn't just inexperienced. It isn't naiveté that drives him. I take him at his word. He and his vice-presidential candidate believe in "talk, talk, talk" regardless of the hourglass or the stakes or the intentions of the person across the table. No amount of learning on the job is going to change their way of thinking. Approving the use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a Rubicon they will not cross—before civilization as we know it comes to an end.

Yes, like I said: Palin is smart enough to learn basic economics and foreign policy on the job, and already knows how to pull the trigger (e.g., on Iran) when that needs to be done. But Barack "Present" Obama isn't smart enough to unlearn all of the wrong-headed notions he's been swimming in over the years, about what works in academia (e.g., dialog, and allowing terrorists like Bill Ayers into tenured positions of respect and responsibility) and in community-organizing—i.e., agitating for handouts from a Big-Government Daddy with Deep Pockets—versus what works in the real, non-affirmative-action world. And from his perch in the White Black House he's going to try and run an entire country in the same way, in a time of financial uncertainty, soft jihad, and violent terrorist threats to the Western way of life.

And in doing that, he'll be lucky if he doesn't set race relations in the States back by forty or fifty years. How ironic, that America has finally become "ready" for a black president, at a time when it can least afford all of the black-racist (Jeremiah Wright, etc.) baggage and victimization/reparations ideology which are inherently part of the same deal. Don't be surprised if, a few years from now, global warming (which is probably real and human-made, but also likely too late for us to do anything about except "ride it out") is the least of our worries.

He's good with the nuances (and straw men), though: Obama's Disingenuous Statement on William Ayers.

P.S. Insulting Muslim Jokes:

A Muslim in a London street doused himself with gasoline, set fire to himself and burnt to death.

They're having a collection for his family.

So far, they've got 20 gallons.

A Muslim walks into a welfare office with a filthy parrot on his shoulder. The parrot's feathers are falling off, its beak is broken, and it looks to have been horribly injured.

The social worker looks in disgust and asks, "Oh my God, where did you get that ugly thing?"

The parrot replies, "Pakistan."

[T]he country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

—Thomas Sowell, on Barack Obama

And Steal This Vote. And Don't Need a Weatherman: The clouded mind of Bill Ayers:

What Ayers does not mention is that the bomb that killed his friends was an antipersonnel bomb meant for an army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had it exploded at its chosen target, thousands of soldiers and their dates would have been killed. "Terrorists destroy randomly," he writes, "while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate." Somehow, the GIs his comrades aimed to kill—or the policemen he might have murdered had a bomb he planted in a Chicago station gone off—do not count. And the GIs' dates, and the civilians working at the police station, also do not count. Their deaths would simply have been a way of educating people—as Bill Ayers continues to educate them at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

10 questions for Steven Pinker. And for Charles Murray.

And how are things going in South Africa these days?

Die, the beloved country.

And speaking of our violent past and present:

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that Neanderthals were covered with a heavy coat of fur, and that Homo erectus, their ancestor, was as hairy as the modern chimpanzee. A naked Neanderthal could never have made it through the Ice Age. Sure, he had fire, but a blazing hearth couldn't keep him from freezing when he was out on a hunt. Nor could a deerskin slung over his shoulders, and there is no evidence that Neanderthals could sew. They lived mostly on game, so they had to go out to hunt often, no matter how rotten the weather. And the game didn't hang around conveniently close to the entrance to their cozy cave.

The Neanderthals disappeared when Homo sapiens, who by then had learned the art of sewing, took over Europe and Asia. This new species, descended from a southern branch of Homo erectus, was unique among primates in being hairless. In their view, anything with fur on it could be classified as "animal"—or, to put it more bluntly, game. Neanderthal disappeared in Europe for the same reason the woolly mammoth disappeared there: the ancestors of the modern Europeans ate them. In Africa today, hungry humans eat the meat of chimpanzees and gorillas.

With or without that, we're still the descendents of cannibals. Some civilized societies, though, stopped doing that before, say, the 1960s....

P.S. Obama and Ayers: tenuous, schmenuous -- McCain camp missing the point. And Obama chief advisor calls for a military invasion of Israel. And Ayers Was on Woods Fund Board with Obama When He Stepped on Flag in 2001. And Associated Press Hits Bottom, Digs.

Yep, four years of media-assisted race-card-playing to trump any criticism of Obama, while he does his best to transform an entire country into handout-seeking, ghetto Chicago. Can't wait to see it.

Not a joke. Really not a joke:

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

So much for depth perception. Still, I love it when a woman shows a little bit of iris. Cor!

I'd also like to see that Obsession DVD (torrent). If it's upsetting the dhimmis and the seventh-century goat-fucking savages, it can't be all bad.

P.S. Islam, the religion of peace, and Terrorism. And, The Ruins of Detroit. Different cause, same effects.

"Goodbye, Western civilization; hello Camp Obama."

Vlaams Belang allies with British National Party

And then there's our own social-democratic NDP, the party that I grew up voting for:

Having lived 30 years in Pakistan and 10 in Saudi Arabia, [Tarek] Fatah knows intimately what constitutes "soft jihad" when he sees it. He expressed his sorrow, as a lifetime social democrat that after 17 years of engaged support for the NDP, he could no longer be affiliated with that party. He saw the doors opening to Islamists under Alexa McDonough and now, under Layton, he has seen them "flood" into the party....

[T]he NDP ... has shamelessly courted and integrated into its inner circles Islamist Muslims with views that are antithetical and even dangerous to the continued health of Canadian values. Fatah has watched in frustration as Islamists in the NDP pursue a relentless campaign to instill a sense of victimhood in Muslim youth....

[Federal NDP leader] Jack Layton ... "has gone to bed with Islamists." He is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law, which, all the panelists made clear is the litmus test for dividing real moderate Muslims from Islamists. Fatah also expressed his contempt for the Ontario Human Rights Commission which, he asserted is "infiltrated by Islamists": There are commissioners in the OHCR closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canada-Arab federation, both of which, according to Fatah, have "contempt for Canadian values." Anyone, he says, "who brings religion into politics should be suspect" because they "are a threat to western civilization." The NDP's failure to interrogate their Muslim supporters for fear of revealing their Islamism is the "racism of lower expectations"....

As for feminists, where are they? Also pandering. They have not spoken up about the Talibanist woman in Mississauga who teaches the virtues of polygamy to her female students, nor have they criticized a cleric who openly admits to performing polygamous marriages. Feminists seem to have lower expectations for Muslim women than for themselves: what Tarek Fatah calls "left wing racism." Ms Raza is, according to an Islamist website, #5 of the "most hated Muslims in the world." "My aim," she chuckles, "is to become #1."

I'm really interesting in seeing David Zucker's (Airplane, etc.) new movie, An American Carol; but it doesn't seem to be playing anywhere in Toronto yet? Surprised me to see that Leslie Nielsen's got a small part in it; but then, given that his late brother Erik used to be the deputy prime minister of Canada back when Mulroney was PM....

P.S. Sarah Biden. And, the Newfies are offended. Boo-hoo-hoo.

Hmmm:

It's not just Osama it's the whole Muslim movement we need to fear. You need look no further that the severe brutality of the koran to see what a danger they pose to everyone. All of these bleeding heart Liberals need to wake up and realize they want to ahniallate (sic) western civilization. They consider all of us the great Satan, and rightly so. Muslim society looks to us and sees a land of thieves, murderers, sexual deviants a culture obsessed with the material world.

I do not agree with your belief that AlQaeda poses no danger to our people. 9/11 and the recent subway bombings in Spain were not an act in my imagination or yours. I take very seriously any threat from terror groups and so should you. MinorityReport was right when he stated, it's the whole Muslim movement we need to fear. We need to protect ourselves by not allowing nationalities from terrorist sponsored countries into Canada and by enacting racial profiling to protect our citizens.

In Canada, that right there is "hate speech."

And then there's this whole motherlode of articles on Obama's scary attitudes toward government programs for all, reparations, Universal Voluntary Public Service, etc.

And yes (sigh), Palin. One commenter kind of sums up my take on the subject:

So I guess I will still vote McCain/Palin because I sure can't vote Obama, and hope that Obama will win and screw things up royally [this is a very good bet] and thus both the Democrats and Republicans will implode and be replaced by new parties, ones which we are not ashamed to be affiliated with. Or else civilization will collapse, in which case we'll be too busy acting like Mad Max to care about politics any more.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, our present Tory government is running a "campaign about nothing":

Dryden gave no quarter Wednesday, accusing Harper of running a directionless "Seinfeld" campaign with no vision for Canada.

Well, Prime Minister Harper is "master of his domain." And what a domain/Dominion it is, even without free speech:

It's not the first time [Richard] Warman's use of the law to curb hate speech has produced unintended consequences. Far from the polemics surrounding the Lemire case, he has been locked in a battle that has pitted him against the British author David Icke and—somewhat improbably—against Canadian public libraries. That Icke happens to be one of the great wing nuts of the modern age makes the dispute all the harder to fathom. In a series of delusional tomes, the sportscaster-turned-visionary maintains that humanity is controlled by a circle of influential Jews known as the "Illuminati," who are in turn descended from fourth-dimensional, lizard-like creatures from outer space. He accuses numerous world leaders of engaging in ritual sacrifice of children, including the Queen and former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Well, I for one welcome our new fourth-dimensional, lizard-like overlords....

Ronson ... was struck by Warman's blindness to the bigger picture. "I remember we were sitting in a hotel room at one point and he was joking about getting Icke's books seized and incinerated," he says. "He joked about having me arrested for bringing one of Icke's books through customs. I mean, book-burning carries a lot of baggage, doesn't it?"

P.S. Iowahawk, Filed In Triplicate. Absolutely fucking brilliant.

I like pirates:

And I like tattoos:

:

No pictures of (female) pirates with tattoos, unfortunately.

Still, Happy (belated) Talk Like A Pirate Day (Sept. 19)!

And:

• 13 Myths of Sarah Palin

• Chris Rock is an Idiot

• Spike Lee is a racist idiot

• More Offensive Muslim Jokes

A Russian, a Cuban, an Englishman and a Pakistani are on a train.

The Russian takes out a bottle of his best vodka, drinks a bit and throws the rest off the train and says, "There's plenty more of that where I come from."

Everyone is impressed. The Cuban takes out one of the finest Havana cigars, takes one puff and throws it off the train and says, "There's plenty more of those where I come from."

Again everyone is rather impressed. So the Englishman stands up and throws the Pakistani off the train.

P.S. Who's Sleeping More Deeply—Europe or America?

[W]ill the next president of the U.S. be someone who is every bit as eager to appease Islam as the archbishop of Canterbury, resulting in a strong transatlantic alliance devoted not to the joint preservation of freedom but to the joint pursuit of dhimmitude? I'm sorry to say that a year or so ago, when it looked as if the major-party presidential candidates would be Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton—the former of whom obviously gets it, and the latter of whom, I suspect, does so as well—I was considerably more hopeful on this score than I am now.

P.P.S. Every so often, an article escapes from The Onion into the "real news." Like this.

If you've ever wondered just how backward the Muslim world really is:

When in 1761 [Carsten] Niebuhr came to Alexandria, that ancient center of learning, a Turkish merchant asked him for permission to look through his so-called astrol[a]be—a sort of astronomical telescope—and was much surprised to see a tower in the city upside down. This led to a rumor that the Danish expedition had come to Alexandria to turn the entire city upside down, and it was even talked about in the governor's house.

When one of Carsten Niebuhr's companions successfully predicted a solar eclipse on 18 October 1762, everybody thought that he must be a great medical doctor and came running to him with all sorts of ailments.

The emir in the city of Luhayyah in Yemen was given a watch by his European guests but did not know what it was used for, and a local Christian merchant had to come by every day to wind it up.

The Yemenites thought that the expedition's botanist went out to study flowers and plants in order to collect some substance used to produce gold.

Most Arabs believed that Europe must be to the south of Yemen because the ships carrying Europeans always came from that direction. This was, of course, before the construction of the Suez Canal. Even learned men encountered by the expedition had never seen a map....

The Oriental underdevelopment observed by Niebuhr cannot be explained by something done by outsiders, such as European imperialists. The first modern European army came to Egypt in 1798, when Napoleon landed in the Delta.

So the Orient's economic, political, cultural and philosophical backwardness—which is striking compared to the civilization that flourished in these parts five to six hundred years prior to Niebuhr's visit—must have endogenous causes. It must have to do with some fatal flaw in the culture itself.

And that surprises you?

Interesting window into the pre-scientific worldview, though.... And, for those who keep trying to present Christianity and its values as being in some way a fertile soil for Western scientific advancement:

The pioneers of the European Scientific Revolution did not evade their share of condemnation, even though many of its leading lights considered themselves devout Christians who had absolutely no intention of undermining church doctrine. This was certainly the case with Galileo and Newton. René Descartes even worked hard to prove God's existence.

The scientists' good intentions towards the established church were not reciprocated. In 1616—73 years after his death—the Catholic church condemned Copernicus' heliocentric world picture as heretical. In 1633 the church basically crushed Mediterranean science by forcing Galileo to retract his contention that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Not that it made any difference in the real world—except that the Catholic Church drove serious science out of Italy and the Mediterranean lands and thereby handed the scientific and soon after the economic, political and philosophical lead to countries in Northern and Western Europe....

What distinguishes Europe—and later European societies across the seas—from the Islamic World is the fact that religious orthodoxy could not survive the onslaught of free thought and free expression. By the time Carsten Niebuhr and his colleagues set out for Arabia in 1761, no educated man in Europe doubted that the world was heliocentric. Nor did any educated man question the value of reason and experiment as methods to obtain true knowledge of nature and man's place in it.

Just like I said. If it was up to the Christians, for all their good (and bad) intentions, we'd still be deferring to the Holy Ghost for our knowledge of how the world works.

All of which reminds me that I really need to get back to writing that book about the paleolithic origins of religion. It's just that that project's going to take me a year to complete, and I keep getting distracted from that by the rest of the world falling apart, and with bloodthirsty, hopelessly ignorant cult-follower savages trying to take away my freedom of speech. Not to mention them trying to destroy the rest of what we recognize as civilization, in the name of their Imaginary Friend in the Sky and his pedophilic Prophet.

At the same time as the Arabs were afraid that Niebuhr and his companions were planning to turn their cities upside down by means of a strange looking glass, the Scotsman James Watt was busy developing the steam engine. James Hargreaves' revolutionary spinning machine, the Spinning Jenny, was patented in 1770.

These technical advances—and the economic progress they gave rise to—led to the development of the modern class system of capitalists and wage earners, which in turn paved the way for the breakthrough of political freedom, democracy, equality before the law, emancipation of the poor and downtrodden (including women), the elimination of traditional modes of government and sources of authority and not least for the abolition of slavery in the Western World.

Let me emphasize that this entire development could not have taken place without critics who insisted on their right to free speech and more precisely without the hard-won freedom to criticize religion, including the right to express opinions that someone would find blasphemous. Let us recall—once again—that every major step of social progress—the abolition of royal absolutism and the prerogatives of the nobility and the religious hierarchy, the freeing of the peasants, voting rights for workers, equality for women, the abolition of slavery and apartheid, prohibition against beating servants and children etc.—has invariably been opposed by reactionaries and holy men as offensive to the god-given order. So there is no progress in human society without a relentless struggle against the very concept of blasphemy....

Evil is what others do to you. Contemptible is what you do to yourself—such as refraining from saying what ought to be said for fear of being ostracized....

In the era of globalization, freedom must either advance or it must give way to the forces of darkness. And to those who cannot believe that a civilization as mighty as the Western and European civilization can simply collapse and humanity regress to some state of semi-barbarity—who cannot imagine that we can loose our technical accomplishments, our knowledge, our science, our humanism, that we can go back to hunger, illness and early death—just look at what happened to the Roman Empire.

And the first harbinger of imminent collapse will be the curtailment of free speech.

P.S. The Difference between Muslims and RattleSnakes:

[W]ould anyone say that Jews who feared Nazis were bigots or racists or Naziphobes? No, because their fear was completely justified. Well, what about before 1939, before the Final Solution was put into effect, before there was a premeditated plan for genocide? Would we still call any Jew a bigot who warned that Nazis were dangerous before the mass killings started?

[Matt] Groening was born on February 15, 1954 in Portland, Oregon USA. He grew up in Portland, the middle child of five children. His mother, Margaret Wiggum, was once a teacher, and his father, Homer Philip Groening, was a filmmaker, advertiser, writer and cartoonist. Homer, born in Main Centre, Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in a Mennonite, Plattdeutsch-speaking family. Matt's grandfather Abram Groening was a professor at Tabor College, a Mennonite Brethren liberal arts college in Hillsboro, Kansas before moving to Albany College (now known as Lewis and Clark College) in Oregon in 1930. (Wikipedia)

"Plattdeutsch" is also known as "low German." A university-professor friend of my family compiled the first low-German dictionary, just a few decades ago. He was also an "old flame" of my mother's, from before her marriage, back in Manitoba.

About a year after I moved to Toronto, I was having dinner with a women here. Turned out that she had been on some kind of German scholarship at the U of Winnipeg before she moved (back?) here, and had taken a class with the same prof.

And here's where it gets interesting. Because, during that same class-taking, the prof in question had invited her out on what she took to be a "field trip" to a local restaurant, but which ended up with him finagling her back to his apartment, talking about how his ex-wife had been a "bitch" for not having an abortion when he wanted her to, and overall trying to seduce her.

Small world, huh?

Last I heard, he's retired and living on a goat farm in southern Manitoba.

So it's just as well that things never went beyond "dinner and a movie" with me and that girl ... or with that prof and my mom ... or with that prof and the girl. There was a whole Woody Allen movie (or life) waiting to happen, there.

There's just all kinds of stuff you don't know about me. :)

But it ain't nothin' compared to what you don't know about Barack Obama:

What exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes—and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

... or about his bullying (via) campaign tactics:

I'm now a lot more worried than I was a month ago about how Obama will deal with criticism from the right should he be elected, because they ain't going away.

Obama says he will change Washington. That he will govern in a bipartisan way and get Congress unstuck. I want to believe him. But I think that this current wave of criticism is practice for the years ahead, and I am not encouraged by the Obama campaign's instinct to dump a pile of bricks on anyone who won't engage them on their terms.

Just like I was sayin', huh? Or did you think I was overreacting? Curious George has been an utter fuck-up over his eight years in office. But just a few months of Barack "57 States" Obama, properly reported by our gutless mainstream media, would make us all nostalgic for the good old days of the "honest, reasonable, tolerant" Shrub. (I say that as someone who still thinks that the Dixie Chicks were absolutely right to voice their embarrassment at Bush being from the same state as they are, in the run-up to the Iraq War.)

And, Subversives for Obama:

Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unrepentant former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters—oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it's a fair bet they wouldn't let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US! If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated—let alone what we now know about Obama's key role in Ayers's CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organizations modeled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.

And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions.

Ah, and about the subprime crisis:

"[The $700 billion figure is] not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Hey, that's how I do my budget, too!

P.S. Geert Wilders, America as the last man standing.

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