Social Justice in New York

 I remember moving to Spanish Harlem...108th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam...in the summer of 1984. $1,000 a month for a run down 325 square foot two bedroom apartment overlooking a back alley and a side alley. In today’s money, $2500/ month. Did I mention it was a fourth floor walk up? 

Defund the Police. Release the oppressed people in jails as the new LA Prosecutor has vowed to do. Because Social Justice. That’ll cure our cities.

The Crack Wars were going when I moved to New York. Spanish Harlem was actually pretty safe as it was a tight neighborhood where people socialized on the front steps, so they knew who belonged on the street and who didn’t.

We had a very nice guy from Costa Rica as manager. His first day on the job he opened a trash can and found a drug dealer looking at him. At least the drug dealer’s head was looking at him. Welcome to the Big Apple🍎, Enrique!

My first week in NY, riding the subway, and as the doors closed as the train pulled out of a station a guy slammed between them and out, with a gold chain he’d broken off a woman’s neck on the way. Same week I’m walking down the sidewalk...West 11th street...guy runs toward me and past, followed by a guy with a .38 snubby. Ah. That’s ok. .38 snubby = cop. Still the first week: guy with at least a dozen layers of clothes, none of which have been washed in at least a decade, standing behind a dumpster committing..um...inappropriate touching to himself. Quite enthusiastically. Keep moving: this is The Big Apple🍎.

The apartment rental agent, an old friend, tells me of an apartment I’d looked at but not taken. Real nice kid from Indiana took it. Young, clean cut. Innocent. Then he moved out a week later. Bad tenant, huh? Hmmm: got burgled three times his first seven days, the third time after spending $800 of his own money on burglar bars. Turned out the guy in the unit above was a junky who was teaching his five year old brother a trade: lowered the little bro out the window by his foot so he could get in the newbie’s window and open the door for his big brother. Give a kid a fish....

Another week, back in Spanish Harlem, big crash in the alley: three people pile out of another building’s window, slamming each other with 2x4s. Yeah: not like Hollywood. 2x4s break bones. Call the cops. Another guy shows up with a .38 snubby in hand.

My next door neighbor, very smart, very attractive woman in her twenties. Her boyfriend signed up for welfare, spent his entire first payment on drugs, except for a dollar seventy five he dropped on a present to demonstrate how much he loved her. Yeah. He got a job driving a limo, came home and told us he was going to work his way up, buy his own limo, and another. Make a lot of money. He was too stoned to go to work the next day. End of limo service ownership for him. His girlfriend, my neighbor, edited children’s primary school books for a major publishing house. She was still living with him three years later, because judging him would be just too harsh. Actually, since she paid all the bills, he was living with her. Don’t be harsh.

I only rode a bus through black Harlem, north of Central Park, a couple times, but that was Crack Wars Central. Both time I saw guys fighting in the middle of the street, middle of the day. Knock down, drag out fighting. No guns tho. At least that I saw, but I was on a Greyhound. Nobody paying any attention.

That’s what a city can be like when the politicians and more importantly the people who vote for them value criminals more than they value the decent people, and the decent people buy the politicians’ patter.

Because Social Justice. Or something.

Watch what happens to all the Social Justice Meccas over the next few years. 

Ideally from a distance.

Donald Trump' Unredeemable Deplorables Are Getting Very, Very Angry

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong: ""The emergence of Donald Trump as a political force reflects a mood of growing discontent about immigration, globalization and the distribution of wealth," write analysts at Fathom Consulting".

Trump support is about discontent with illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants getting massive subsidies with taxpayers' tax money, illegal immigrants undercutting wages commanded by legal immigrants and low/no skilled Americans alike, a perception that our leaders sold out entire workforces with trade deals designed to pour money into the correct people's undeserving pockets, and political direction of wealth to the correct people ie big political donors at the expense of the people who have earned that money in the marketplace.

Can't sell your obviously superior product for $35 because your century old competitors sell their inferior product for 86 cents? Get the federal government to ban your competitors' products. Trump support is a result of the politicization of every aspect of life by Republicans and Democrats alike: Refuse a cake order at your baker: Face bankruptcy. Refuse a photography job? Bankruptcy. Believe that people with two X chromosomes are female and people with a Y chromosome are male? The federal government is coming for you just as they have already come for others. You will submit to the dictates of your obvious superiors or be bankrupted and jailed because you are too stupid, ignorant, and smelly to be allowed to run your own lives, peasants.

THAT is why Trump has supporters, and if "analysts" are so removed from reality that they blame racism, sexism, and xenophobia for resentment at being bullied and fleeced by sniggering elites, we shall continue seeing more of the same until some non-trivial part of the people who own 300,000,000 guns may just decide that since the elites have openly torn up the social contract, that contract no longer applies to them either.

Like the peasants or despise them, Americans have spent the last decade arming like it is 1775, and if one thing is clear, they hold both major political parties in the same contempt in which the parties hold them.

A Trump presidency would likely be disastrous, but a Clinton presidency might just bring on an armed revolt. No one in their right mind should look forward to that, but from the sounds of the blithering 'analysts' they don't understand just what thin ice they are dancing on, because they don't even understand they are on ice.

Enormous numbers of people have been screwed by Republican and Democratic Party politicians alike, and Hillary Clinton's response is to call them deplorable and unredeemable. The Republicans and Democrats alike agree with her, and that should be a scary thing indeed because the unredeemable deplorables are getting very, very angry with sniggering elites, and they are very, very heavily armed.

Hold the unredeemable deplorables in all the contempt you like, but understand that when enough of them decide that politicians are too corrupt to be removed by the peaceful political process, there are 300,000,000 guns with which to do the job, and that can only end in calamity for all of us. Piss in an armed mob's face at your own sniggering risk.

PS: Agree with this ICE official or not, you ought to be able to recognize why such information angers the peasants.

There Was A Reason We Seceded From Britain...

...and there still is.

Pam Geller, if you don't recall, organized the Mohammed Cartoons show in Garland, TX, at which Muslim murderers arrived to slaughter the crowd, only to be gunned down by security.

It didn't get nearly the news play which was accorded far less important events.


Secretary of State Kerry believes mass murders by Muslims, such as in Paris, have a certain "legitimacy" because they are offended by cartoons. This, of course, may be extended to those who cut off Christians' heads and sell Christian girls into sex slavery. Christians who protest are anti-Muslim bigots.

But we already knew that.


http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/18/geller-the-nation-that-gave-the-world-the-magna-carta-is-dead/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29

Colleges Deduct 50 SAT Points For Being Asian-American

Gotta love that Race Conscious admissions policy.

Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column.

“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps.

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.

The Los Angeles Times has the despicable, racist, story.

Why Americans Have Weapons Instead of Guns

I just read a review of a new variant of the AR-15 rifle, which was designed to be legal in all fifty states. It sounds like an interesting response to a bewildering thicket of state level regulations, all of which I believe are prohibited by the Constitution. Big deal: my opinion won't change things.

One of the commentors objected to another's use of the term 'weapon' rather than calling it a gun.

My response:

"should NEVER ever be referred to as weapons(.) they are guns or firearms(,) weapons are what police and military use....we cause problems on ourselves by referring to our gun as weapons"

You have a legitimate point, but I do disagree with it.

My guns are weapons. Every last one of them, from a Belgian Browning 20 gauge A-5, through a Remington pump .22 Model 12A to Mini14s and S&W J-frames, and 1911s.

The Constitution protects arms. Not goose guns, not air rifles, not deer guns, not target pistols, except at they contribute to use and familiarity with military grade weapons or can substitute for them. The Constitution protects militia grade arms precisely for the purpose of killing people. That is demonstrated without any doubt by the 2nd Amendment's explicit tying of the right to keep and bear arms to a well trained militia. The writings of the Founders, published concurrently with the ratification debates and available today, make explicit the role of arms which are protected: they are explicitly for killing tyrants, foreign or domestic.

Anti-gunners freak at the idea, especially at the 'domestic' aspects as they inaccurately associate 'tyrants' with 'politicians', but weapons ownership, use, and the bearing of them should not be controversial in an age where domestic terrorists and ordinary criminals alike can strike anywhere, any time, and the police are incapable of being everywhere, all the time, to protect us.

That it is controversial is in part our fault: For decades we let the anti-gunners frame the debate. It is time to frame that debate ourselves, and force them to respond to us instead of us to them. We can do so only by using terms like 'weapons' and 'shooting people who need shooting right now', and defending those concepts as good and proper. If more people than the LEO at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris had been armed, more might well have survived: Killing murderous assailants is exactly what weapons are for, and that is a good thing. If the observer who videod the killing of the Paris LEO on the sidewalk had had a Mini-14 or AKM at hand instead of a video camera, the LEO might well have been killed anyway, but the murderers might have been stopped right there. They are exactly the kind of domestic tyrants the unorganized militia has a chance of stopping. By shooting them with weapons.

The 2nd Amendment protects 'arms', not just guns, but arms, for the purpose of arming the militia, including the 'unorganized militia', which means us: civilians such as those brave passengers aboard United Flight 93, who gave their lives defending us against the Islamists on 9-11. That means that not only are guns protected, but so are all other militia usable weapons: knives, including bowies, bayonets, and switchblades, cudgels, including billy clubs, and metal or plastic knuckles. Laws prohibiting them are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. That such laws exist and are widespread today is only evidence of our refusal to submit to the Constitution. Rather than submit, even by amending it, we have preferred to pretend that it does not mean what it clearly says. That is our shame.

The Constitution protects weapons which carry a single round, like the Liberator .45 of the Second World War, and it protects AKMs, AR-15s, and M-16s and their 20 & 30 round magazines. It protects sniper rifles and target rifles which may be used by the unorganized militia as sniper rifles. It protects submachine guns and full auto rifles ie actual assault rifles. The Constitution protects all of them for the explicit purpose of shooting those who would do us and our country harm.

Given that a number of the Founders owned ships with cannons, and given that the Constitution explicitly provides for issuing letters of marque and reprisal to privately owned ships, I expect that a plausible argument could be made that the Constitution also protects crew served weapons such as belt fed machine guns and at least light artillery.

We are on firm ground when we say that the Constitution protects military grade arms, and great big scary ones at that. If we refuse to make that point, the other side is on the way to victory.

Instead of allowing the anti-weapons crowd to cow us into refusing to defend weapons ownership, I prefer to make them confront our issue head on: The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to protect our ability to arm ourselves against tyrants, foreign and domestic. Those tyrants may be common criminals or politically/religiously inspired criminals such as disciples of al Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL, AQAP, and others. In any case, when they strike, the police are almost sure not to be there. The victims are always there, and only armed victims, willing to shoot them with weapons they bear, are capable of shooting people who desperately need to be shot.

The original article, "50 STATE LEGAL AR-15 – ARES DEFENSE SCR" by Sam Trisler in'Guns America', is here.

Matti Friedman on News Coverage of Israel

Matti Friedman has a long essay on news coverage of the Jewish/Muslim conflict.

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000)

The numbers are odd compared to the relative amount of coverage. Maybe something else is going on.

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players.

Friedman is here referring to Article Seven of the Hamas Covenant, which says that the Day of Judgement shall not occur until the Muslims kill the Jews.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters....as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli.

So, reporters know that Hamas is committing war crimes by dressing as civilians, but the AP and other "news" organizations refuse to report those crimes, preferring instead to describe them when killed as dead civilians. How charming.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story.

Is that properly described as reporting, or creating propaganda for an organization openly dedicated to genocide?

White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans.

One must expiate one's sins by condemning others for the same ones.

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer...requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is...an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.

Islamists see themselves as on the rise, and that gives them strength. The West sees itself as failing, as it well should, and that weakens us. Those of the far left, who have worked so long and so effectively to destroy western self-confidence are still ascendent. Hence the election of an utterly un-vetted leftist hack to the presidency of the United States, and European inability to even contemplate the possibility of halting Muslim immigration lest they be called racist. Islamists have openly declared their intention of re-taking the once conquered lands of Europe, and of doing so by conquest.

When the Night of the Long Knives finally arrives, it will be the people with confidence in their own righteousness who are likely to triumph. You could not pay me enough to live in Europe when that day comes.

Gardeners Are Racist Fascists

Or are they fascist racists?

I get confused sometimes.

Anyway, if you garden, you are a bad person. An English sociologist says so, so it must be true.

California vs Texas: Politics Have Consequences

Joel Kotkin, in the Orange County register:

Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of greater Dallas...is part of an ongoing process of disinvestment in the L.A. region....

The Toyota decision also reflects the continued erosion of California’s historic economic diversity...capped this year by the announced departure from Los Angeles of the headquarters of Occidental Petroleum. Blessed with huge fossil fuel reserves, California once stood as one of the global centers of the energy industry. Now, with the exception of Chevron, which is shifting more operations out of state, all the major oil companies are gone, converting California from a state of energy producers to energy consumers...

As did the oil industry, the auto industry, and, particularly, its Asian contingent, came to Southern California for good reasons... Back in the 1980s, the expansion of firms like Honda, Toyota and Nissan seemed to epitomize the unique appeal of the L.A. region – and California – to Asian companies. Today, only Honda retains its headquarters in Los Angeles (Nissan left in 2005)

The state and local politicians and those who vote them into power have apparently made it clear they don't want manufacturers, or even any other politically incorrect business's befouling their sensibilities with jobs.

Since 2000, one-third of the state’s industrial employment base, 600,000 jobs, has disappeared, a rate of loss 13 percent worse than the rest of the country.

But, the prevailing notion in California’s ruling circles seems to be, if you have Google and Facebook, who needs dirty, energy-consuming factories or corporate operations filled with middle managers? Silicon Valley crony capitalists and urban developers who support our political class, and are willing participants in various subsidized green energy schemes, have little interest in traditional manufacturing, regardless the damage inflicted on blue-collar workers....

Good riddance, say the pols.

More here.

Booth Tarkington's "Penrod"

“Penrod” was a childhood role model of mine. Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, that is, who lived in Indiana some time after the horse died, but before the stable was turned into a garage. Penrod was a boy after my own heart, or perhaps the other way around.

There is no finer exposition on American boyhood -nor any funnier- than “The Great Tar Fight”, which took up a couple chapters in Tarkington’s book “Penrod”. It is well worth the time to read. I read it many times as a boy, and as a man it still holds up as wonderful American literature about boyhood. Every 11 or twelve year old boy should read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “Penrod”, and “Penrod and Sam”.

I would add, as was added to my own reading list, anything by Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Most especially “Rolf in the Woods” and “Two Little Savages”, both of which would in their day have been categorized as “morally instructive novels for adolescent youth”. Rather than beat boys over the head with “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” Seton let lessons flow by osmosis from his pen to his young readers.

Penrod was perhaps more subversive than Seton’s characters, but still moral, and very much a boy in an un-PC day. The next generation would be the better for having read all those books.

The UnCool Alternative Lifestyle Of Married Olympic Skier David Wise

At 23, he is married, has a kid, goes to church. That's alternative for you. As NBCOlympics says:

At such a young age, Wise has the lifestyle of an adult.

What world do these people live in?

The Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich is Racist.

If you don't believe so, you have just encountered you own inner racist. Prepare to hate thyself, churl.

The terms 'Constitution' and 'Founding Fathers' are also racist.

The Principal of a Portland school say so, therefor it must be true.

This lunacy would be funny, but they control entire school systems. That is not funny.

The story seems to be over a year old, but for some reason has taken on a new life. As well it should.

Several of the comments are spot on. One commenter by the handle of 'Turtle' suggests that the following must also therefore be racist:

1) (American) football

2) hot dogs (some cultures don't eat them!)

3) bacon (it's existence is Islamophobic)

4) Womens & Gay rights (again, Islamophobic, some cultures don't like it!!!)

Basically, if you think women should have rights, you are racist against several cultures, if you think gays have a right to live, you are extra racist.

If you respect the rights of both while eating a bacon-wrapped hot-dog and watching football, you are basically hitler.

I think this pretty much catches the idea.

Still more here.

California Schools' Transgendered Showers and Bathrooms

If I had known in junior high and high school that all I had to do to hang out nekkid with all the nekkid girls in the girls locker room and shower was declare myself transgendered, I might just have done so. I'm sure that I was a lesbian, trapped in a man's body. At least until graduation.

What an opportunity lost. Sigh.

Governor Moonbeam, where were you when I needed you most?

White Privilege At VISTA Wisconsin

Gotta love what they try to do to volunteers.

Here.

More on Mayor Nutter

Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, yesterday continued the coverage of Mayor Michael Nutter's criticism of blacks in Philadelphia.

the apparent willingness by many whites and some black leaders to assume that poverty and the dysfunction it brings can only be alleviated by the individual, not greater society.

"Apparent willingness"? How about explicit statement? This is an editorial statement in a news story and it is wrong. Poverty does not cause dysfunction: Dysfunction causes poverty. Poor neighborhoods may have a lot of criminals in them, but that is because criminals are dysfunctional and therefore by and large poor. Dysfunctional people may be poor without being criminal. Pointing out that there are rich criminals does not change that.

Society cannot educate you: you must take an eduction when it is available or remain unemployable at any but the lowest level: pure ignorant labor. The Man does not oppress children in school: Other dysfunctional children and their equally dysfunctional parents do. The only Man holding back children is the Man in their own heads.

For half a century "society" has subsidized unwed motherhood, unemployment, the myth that the Man won't let them succeed, and other dysfunctional behavior. Just like subsidizing opera, one gets more of what one subsidizes.

Surprise, surprise.

Eliminate all welfare, eliminate all subsidies to unwed parents, eliminate subsidies to dysfunctional behavior, stop tolerating those who blame their own failure on others, including the mystical Man, and in a generation I think the problems will be largely gone. While you are at it, make early release from prison conditional on learning to read, write, and do basic math.

If "society" caused this, then society has a responsibility to stop subsidizing this bad behavior. I blame the individuals who blame society.

Nutter's strong language enables white society in America to downplay poverty as the root cause of the black community's problems, says Columbia University political scientist Frederick Harris, author of the upcoming book, "The Price of the Ticket: The Rise and Fall of Black Politics in the Age of Obama.” "If this discourse was led by Ronald Reagan, for instance, people would call him on his racism, but now that you have a black face to these explanations it gives it legitimacy," he says.

"People would call him on his racism." Right: The only possible reason a white person could criticize individuals who are black is white racism. If this quote is accurate, Dr. Harris assumes white critics are racist: Isn't that assumption itself racist?

I have come around to thinking that the proper response today to being called a racist is to smile broadly and thank the speaker, for the speaker has publicly admitted they have nothing with which to refute any point made by the 'racist'. The speaker can only retreat into shutting down the conversation by accusing the other of being racist. Today, calling another a racist is nothing but an admission of the speaker's inability to refute anything the 'racist' said.

Old Law School vs New Law School

I had never heard of the dichotomy of Old and New Law School, but now that I have read a wee bit about it, it fits in with my impressions in general of the modern American college.

For a specific example, see this on a controversy at the Widener Law School.

Q: Why Can't the President of the United States Make a Speech Like Mayor Nutter's?

A: He could, but he won't, because the President of the United States is Barack Obama.

The transcript of the speech which Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter delivered at the Mount Carmel Baptist Church is here.

One problem with Mayor Nutter's speech, though, was his audience: He likely was speaking to the converted. Still, it was a good speech.

Now let's see if the Philadelphia public will allow him to follow up on it with meaningful action.

I Feel So Morally & Culturally Inferior...

...to our more nuanced European superiors. They know how to handle rejoicing at the killing on an enemy:

A Hamburg judge has filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Angela Merkel for "endorsing a crime" after she stated she was "glad" that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces.

That isn't all:

Meanwhile a new poll reveals that a majority of Germans do not see the terrorist's death as a reason to celebrate.

This is described by der Spiegel as "A Sober German Reaction", but I think it is more along the lines of evidence for pathological self-hatred.

I suppose if Obama had been truly sensitive he would have declared a national day of mourning. Or, instead of ordering bin Laden killed at all, he would have simply committed sepuku on the White House lawn.

Grocery Bags: Paper or Plastic?

Doesn't matter to me. I am bi-sacksual.

Eco-Fascism

Cute. If you like blowing up children in their classrooms.

There are enough violent eco-freaks already. Why encourage more? Unless, of course, you want more.

Go, Maurice Sendak!

Imagine, a chilrens' book author having the temerity today to tell parents to "Go to Hell!"

The book is 'too scary' for the poor things?

"I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like.

Go for it, Maurice!

Sendak also recalled a fight he had with his publisher about Where the Wild Things Are, with the safety-conscious publisher keen to change the word "hot" to "warm" at the end of the book, when Max returns from his reign as king over the monsters to find his dinner "was still hot".

Allison Flood has more in the Guardian.