Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties

Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties

The folks at Gibson's Bakery caught some Oberlin College students shoplifting. They turned them over to the police, and all three subsequently plead guilty.

Because of this, they're accused of racial profiling.
So I'm guessing the students were not white. Or Asian, for that matter.

The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown

| National Review

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.

Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?

When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more popular.

That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.

The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

Race And Racism | According To Hoyt

Race And Racism | According To Hoyt

There is one thing in which liberal activists are right: everyone is racist. There is one thing in which they’re wrong: everyone is racist.

Racism is not confined to white people — and the idea that it equals prejudice plus power is an interesting (and stupid, as usual) Marxist distortion we’ll deal with later — it’s a characteristic of being human.

Why? Oh, like most other things because it was evolutionarily sound. I.e. those who had it survived and had more kids.

The thing is it’s not so much “racism” as in discriminating against another race. It’s “Fear of the stranger.”

And even if it involves just-so stories, it really doesn’t take much to figure out why people who have a fear of the stranger survive and have more children more than those who don’t. Even in modern society, the teen who will hitchhike and get in the car with just anyone has a higher chance of ending up dead. But long before that, the little kid who approaches panel vans driven by strangers, has a good chance of ending up dead. (NOT as high was our media makes it out to be, but high enough their scares are justified.)

In pre-human times, with many bands and tribelets living close enough for kids to stray, the name for a kid who thought that his family or strangers were equivalent was — at least if we go by how our closest relatives, the chimps, treat young from other bands — “dinner.”

Oh sure, in times of stress and famine, the chances that your own band would tuck in were fairly high, but still the chances that dear old mom would eat you were not nearly as high as that a stranger would eat you.

The thing is, this fear of the stranger activates more the more the stranger looks like you and your family. No, seriously. When is the last time anyone was accused of racism towards another species (Okay, fine, Harambe, but that’s an exception and also liberals be cray.) This makes perfect sense, because even toddlers (at least those not desensitized by stuffed animals and parents’ being idiots) understand that large animals are dangerous.

Okay, so being afraid of cows might be a new one, and I sort of invented it (I have no idea why as a child I thought cows and horses were both man-eaters. None. But then I thought there were sharks with chainsaws under my bed ready to lop off any limb that extended over the edge, so we might as well admit as a proto-writer I was already rather Odd) but most kids are afraid of anything large and furry that charges towards them. This is not racism, it’s survival.

The fear of the stranger that goes under “racism” in our society is the fear of people like us and yet not like us.

And it’s not racism in the sense that the media and liberals (who be cray) portray it. If you believe racism as they portray it, then you believe paler people are born with an instinctive fear of African features and dark skin. For the party that claims to be for “science” this is odder than believing in chainsaw sharks. What is their evolutionary reason for it, precisely? Is it the sort of fear as that of the Aliens in Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s end? Are people of African descent thought to bring about the apocalypse and does time run in a circular fashion?

Oh, I know, they say we all internalize racism and self-racism. Both those things are stupid. We absorb all sorts of prejudices from the society we live in, but for the last several decades we’ve been pounded with anti-racism. It works too. I was reading a mystery from the eighties where the teen wishes she were black, because you know, black people are so much cooler and don’t oppose other people. Yep, the book was written in the eighties. (And I thought “Rachel Dolezal, we hardly knew ya”) and the writer thought this was a perfectly sane character to sketch. And who knows, it might be, given the barrage of anti-racist propaganda. (More on that later, too.) But racism, true racism, is “fear of the stranger.” The myths and attacks come from THAT and it’s one of the basic instincts of humans. BTW it also makes “internalized racism” even dumber. You don’t fear yourself as a stranger, unless you’ve had one of those strokes that make it impossible to recognize yourself in the mirror.

So if the fear isn’t of dark skin or African features, what is it a fear of? “People who are not like my family/tribe/village to whom I’m accustomed” is a better way to describe it.

When I was a little girl, living in Portugal, I saw all kind of distinctions when I first entered elementary school. Some of my classmates were much darker than I, some were blond. Some were tall, some were short. Being sort of medium, I never had that trigger fear of the “stranger” or at least not towards appearance.

It took going back after 30 years here to realize as a child I’d seen differences that weren’t there. For one, Portuguese “blond” is a medium brown hair (unless enhanced with dye.) I myself was often called “ruiva” by guys calling from street corners, because my dark brown hair threw off red highlights in the full sun. Oh, sure there was a Viking in the wood pile there, and if I’d been in the sun a lot, my hair would look flame red when fully lit (acutally bozo-red. My kids make fun of those pictures.) BUT in the shade hair was dark brown (now it is whatever I feel like coloring it, being a rather ugly iron-grey since I was 28.)

It took my going back after 30 years here and getting stuck watching some sort of multi-school gymnastics competition to have the stunning realization of “Heavens, all these kids look like cousins.”

This is because the human brain in a highly homogeneous population will find the most minor differences to attach “stranger danger” to.

As for big differences… I was six the first time I saw a blond man. I mean REALLY blond. He must have been a tourist. In those days there weren’t many tourists in the north of Portugal, and at any rate, I was only taken to the city when I needed to buy shoes or something else my parents couldn’t find in the village.

So I’d never seen a blond. As I remember, I screamed, and tried to run. I also had nightmares for days. In my mind, I decided he was one of those molded plastic dolls, hair and skin the same color, that had come to life. But that came after for the nightmares. The first reaction was pure fear of the stranger.

The thing about that? Fear of the stranger — duh — goes away with familiarity. I had a blond friend in college (real blond, even if dark blond. Her parents were not from around there. At least her dad wasn’t.) My husband’s best friend for twenty years, whose kids were raised with ours as “cousins” was blond. His kids are blond. I don’t run screaming from them.

If kids are raised together in a great variety of skin colors and hair colors, they don’t even notice them. My kids who attended an urban school, rarely remembered to tell me the race of their friends. Which really wasn’t an issue, except when the friends did the same and their parents did have an issue with friendships between races.

Because again, it is fear of the stranger. Take an American kid who was raised with all skin colors, though, and introduce someone who dresses funny and the fear of the stranger activates. Which is why we’re now using (and fostering) “racism” for things that have bloody nothing to do with race.

I’ve become a different race before my very eyes, for instance. Worst, my family, abroad, has internalized/believes this. Oh, not a different race from them, but that we’re all a minority and despised.

Look, I grew up thinking of myself as “White.” This is a broad church in Portugal. I have a cousin who looks considerably more African than Obama’s Reverend Wright, but was also considered “White.” You’d really need to look pretty dark not to be considered “white.”

Yes, there were hints that some people already considered Portuguese “Latin” when I came here thirty years ago. Like, my first boss in the US thought Portugal was a city in Mexico (and he didn’t like Mexicans.) Someone (at a Mensa meeting for Bob’s sake,) was so sold on me as “Hispanic” that he heard my accent as that of Ricky Ricardo’s. Those of you who heard me (or search sings the blues in this blog, where there is a reading) should be jaw-dropped. Portuguese LOOKS like Spanish written, but sounds nothing like Spanish, so the accent is markedly different. Oh, and when I got my social security card they tried to put “Hispanic” in the field. I’d have taken Latin, but there was no such classification and Spanish I’m NOT.

The Hispanic/Latin classification in governmental things isn’t STRICTLY a race. There are Hispanic whites (one of our friends was an exchange student from argentina, whose family were first generation immigrants from Italy. If they’d immigrated here they’d be “white” but they hadn’t, so she was “Hispanic.”) and black Hispanics and everything in between.

At least that was the idea. BUT the problem when you paint a target and say “this is different” you’re going to activate the human instinct for “fear of the stranger.” And remember that this fear of the stranger can and does pick up minute differences.

So, over the last thirty years, I’ve watched Latin become a race. I’m still not 100 percent sure what people are picking up on, and sometimes what they do pick/don’t pick is bewildering. I’ve more than once been in a line/situation where my two kids are picked as “Latin” but I’m not. Given they’re a mix of me and their very white anglo-saxon looking father, this is somewhat bewildering. Though I’m happy — ???– to report as times go on, I too am picked out as Latin by strangers who don’t even ask before writing “Latin” in the form or saying “Hey, you’re Latin.” (To be fair, whatever the heck the marker is might have been there from the beginning, witness first boss, and social security lady.But it’s now more prevalent. People are more alert to the signs.)

It’s more prevalent now, though. People used to mistake me for Russian (this sometimes still happens, if they hear me before taking a good look at me), Greek, Italian, or Arab. But now, nine times out of ten it’s “Latin.”

Sure there are manners, there is a culture. I can laugh at “you’re so Cuban” jokes because they’re remarkably similar to what “you’re so Portuguese” jokes would be. And maybe what people are picking up on is gestures, a way of standing, but it’s all getting both highlighted by saying “look at this minority here” (seriously, guys, we could do this with redheads or people who have freckles by deciding they were an oppressed minority) and made “racial” instead of cultural. (Part of this is the liberal — liberals be cray — confusion between race and culture. They have come to think these are the same and culture can’t be changed, which is why making someone learn/speak English is racist. As someone who learned English at 14 I’m here to tell you calling Harambe’s death the result of racism is SANER.)

Because of that there is a tendency to consider “white” only blond and blue eyed, which frankly excludes even my husband.

The justification for this is the delightful Marxist illusion that racism= prejudice + power. Have I mentioned I thought Marx — who at any rate is not the originator of this illusion. That’s his followers trying to make his crazy cakes theory work — and his followers are all some form of Aspergers, and unable to see things outside what they’re classified as?

They seem to think — be honest, most sf writers do too — that power equals institutional/economic/government power.

Power in human societies is a matter of one on one interactions. Even if all black people in the US were held in menial positions, do you know how much power those can have? Yep, a cook can spit in your food. But more than that, a daycare worker can wreak havoc among her charges and mess with their self-image for years, even though she’s ultimately a low paid drone. But of course, because of various affirmatives, black people are disproportionately represented in the machinery of our government, both local and federal. And if you think that a DMV worker has no power over you, you don’t drive.

Even if racism REALLY were a thing of power and prejudice, it would apply to every “race” of human, ever. But it’s not. Racism is a fear of the stranger.

And our industrial-education-entertainment complex has the ability to cut out entire groups of people, point them out as different and thereby CREATE racism against them, which then requires intervention to make them “non discriminated against.”

It’s as old a game as any. “Divide and conquer.” If people are dependent on the government to keep them from each other’s throats, then they won’t notice the government is planting a foot more and more firmly on their necks. And if they do, they won’t unite to topple that government.

Sure, you’ll always experience “stranger danger” when you meet someone who is truly different. But stranger danger doesn’t shove people into groups and then train them to fear every other group. By rights, Reverend Wright should be part of the great indistinct majority of people who can be “Whatever” if everyone, himself included, hadn’t been trained to think of african features as meaning “different race.” (Older son gets considered black as often as Latin. It’s the features.)

Stranger danger is not racism as the ideologues proclaim it, but it’s the only form of non-government-induced racism, and the basis of what they use to try to claim that everyone is racist (like that heinous experiment with infants.) Stranger danger is a leftover instinct, not particularly useful in our society except to keep children from panel vans.

Fortunately it can be defeated by living in a varied society with people of all sizes and colors. After a while the alarm stops ringing.

Of course, you’ll still react to someone who ACTS weird comes to town. But seriously, would you want to stop that? Often it is a sign of danger, in fact, as often “acting weird” has to do with mental illness.

More importantly, when that leftist activist comes to town, do you want to think of her as just another human being, even as she lectures you on your “toxic whiteness”? Think of the lost opportunities to point and laugh.

Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog

Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog

Chicago PD has arrested the four gang bangers responsible for the two-day kidnapping and torture of a mentally disabled white male.

The gang of four who live streamed their acts of depravity which has left their victim traumatized have been charged with committing a hate crime among other charges.

Brittany and Tanishia Covington, Jordan Hill and Tesfaye Cooper are all charged with kidnapping, aggravated battery and aggravated unlawful restraint. Three of the four thugs detained were also charged with burglary.

Be sure to watch CPD press release below breaking down the string of events which lead to the arrest of these thugs. Talk about insanity.
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What are the odds that the court will throw the book at these thugs? Don’t hold your breath.
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With any luck, Jeff Sessions once confirmed, will not allow this case to be swept under the rug. Black on white violence must for once be reigned in.

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The Chicago Police Department, so politically correct, can’t find the words, are either afraid or just refuse t0 call this attack by its name. Instead, after decades of the inmates running the asylum, Chicago PD is attributing the kidnapping to boys being boys, correction, “kids will be kids.”

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There are those who refuse to call this racist attack by its name. Who are they? The same race baiters who by no fluke are profiteers of the grievance industry. You see, while there is money to be made in what is ordained “white on Black violence,” it has been officially declared that there is no money to be made or crime in “Black on white violence.”

Those dismissing this attack by refusing to call it by its name have a vested interest in dismissing the act because it does not fit their narrative and they see no profit.

Comments across social media and so-called new reports by government sanctioned propaganda machines continue to reflect as much.

Where Liberals Go Wrong on 'Discrimination'

Where Liberals Go Wrong on 'Discrimination'

Just Because Liberals Call Something ‘Discrimination’ Doesn’t Mean It Actually Is

The biggest problem with current sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws—including “Fairness for All,” which proposes a grand-bargain compromise between SOGI laws and religious liberty—is that they do not appropriately define what counts as discriminatory.

As I explain in a new report for The Heritage Foundation, “How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom,” these are the laws that are being used to shutter Catholic adoption agencies, fine evangelical bakers, and force businesses and public facilities to allow men into women’s locker rooms.

The problem is that liberals are calling anything they dislike “discrimination.” But liberals are getting it wrong. To illustrate this, consider several different cases of putative “discrimination.” The law must be nuanced enough to capture the important differences in these cases.

Invidious and Rightly Unlawful Discrimination

Racially segregated water fountains were one form of discrimination that took race into consideration—in a context where it was completely irrelevant—and then treated blacks as second-class citizens precisely because they were black. The entire point was to classify on the basis of race in order to treat blacks as socially inferior.

As a result, such actions were rightly described as invidious race-based discrimination, and—given the entrenched, widespread, state-facilitated nature of the problem—they were rightly made unlawful.

Likewise, throughout much of American history, girls and women were not afforded educational opportunities equal to those available to boys and men. This form of discrimination took sex into consideration and then treated girls and women poorly precisely because of their sex, barring them from education in certain subjects or at certain levels despite being otherwise qualified.

As with invidious racial discrimination, such treatment took a feature (in this case, sex) into consideration precisely to treat women as less than men. The law rightly deemed such actions invidious sex-based discrimination, and—again, given the entrenched, widespread, and state-facilitated nature of the problem—Title IX of the Education Amendments was enacted to ensure that girls and women received equal educational opportunities.

Appropriate and Rightly Lawful Distinctions That Are Not Classified as Discrimination

When Title IX was enacted in 1972 and its implementing regulations were promulgated in 1975, the law made clear that sex-specific housing, bathrooms, and locker rooms were not unlawful discrimination. Such policies take sex into consideration, but they do not treat women as inferior to men or men as inferior to women. They treat both sexes equally because they take sex into consideration (they “discriminate”—in the nonpejorative sense of “distinguish”—on the basis of sex) precisely in a way that matters: by appreciating the bodily sexual difference of men and women in things such as housing, bathroom, and locker room policy.

Would we really be treating men and women equally in anything but an artificial way if we forced men and women, boys and girls, to undress in front of each other?

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her majority opinion for the Supreme Court forcing the Virginia Military Institute to become co-ed, wrote that it “would undoubtedly require alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex in living arrangements.” Yet we certainly would be treating people unequally if access to intimate facilities were based on factors wholly unrelated to privacy, such as race.

As a result, policymakers did not consider sex-specific intimate facilities as discriminatory in the first place, and laws explicitly reflected that commonsense understanding while rightly declaring racially segregated facilities to be unlawful.

The lesson here is that not all distinctions in fact should be deemed unlawful discrimination.

Not Discriminatory at All

If sex-specific intimate facilities are an example of lawful, legitimate policies that take sex into consideration, pro-life medical practices are examples of policies that are legitimate and lawful because they do not take sex into consideration at all.

That only women can get pregnant has no bearing whatsoever on the judgment of the conscientious doctor or nurse who refuses to kill the unborn. The insistence of LGBT activists that men actually can become pregnant highlights the point: Pro-life medical personnel refuse to do abortions on pregnant women and “pregnant men” (i.e. women who identify as men).

>>>For more on this, see Ryan T. Anderson’s new book from Oxford University Press, “Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination”

Thus, we can identify three different types of cases:

• Cases of invidious discrimination, in which an irrelevant factor is taken into consideration in order to treat people poorly based on that factor, as with racially segregated water fountains;
• Cases of distinctions without unlawful discrimination, in which a factor is taken into consideration precisely because it is relevant to the underlying policy and people are not treated poorly, as with sex-specific intimate facilities; and
• Cases with neither distinctions nor discrimination, in which a particular factor simply does not enter into consideration, as with pro-life doctors.

Any proposed policy intended to address the documented needs of people who identify as LGBT must take these categories into account without conflation.

SOGI Discrimination: Real and Imagined

Consider a florist who refused to serve all customers who identify as LGBT simply because they identified as LGBT. That would be a case of invidious discrimination because the mere knowledge that they identify as LGBT should have no impact whatsoever on the act of the florist selling flowers, because there is no rational connection between the two.

Now consider Baronelle Stutzman, the 71-year-old grandmother who served one particular gay customer for nearly a decade but declined to do the wedding flowers for his same-sex wedding ceremony.

Baronelle Stutzman lost her case and is appealing to the Supreme Court. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
Baronelle Stutzman lost her case and is appealing to the Supreme Court. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
The customer’s sexual orientation did not play any role in Stutzman’s decision. Her belief that marriage is a union of sexually complementary spouses does not spring from any convictions about people who identify as LGBT. When she says she can do wedding flowers only for true weddings, she makes no distinctions based on sexual orientation at all.

This is seen most clearly in the case of Catholic Charities adoption agencies. They decline to place the children entrusted to their care with same-sex couples not because of their sexual orientation, but because of the conviction that children deserve both a mother and a father.

That belief—that men and women are not interchangeable, mothers and fathers are not replaceable, the two best dads in the world cannot make up for a missing mom, and the two best moms in the world cannot make up for a missing dad—has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Catholic Charities does not say that people who identify as LGBT cannot love or care for children; it does not take sexual orientation into consideration at all. Its preference for placing children with mothers and fathers is not an instance of discrimination based on sexual orientation—and the law should not say otherwise.

Purported gender identity discrimination presents similar problems. The Washington Post recently reported on a woman who was suing a Catholic hospital for declining to perform a sex reassignment procedure on her that entailed removing her healthy uterus. In that report, the Post captures the conflation of real and imaginary discrimination.

“What the rule says is if you provide a particular service to anybody, you can’t refuse to provide it to anyone,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. That means a transgender person who shows up at an emergency room with something as basic as a twisted ankle cannot be denied care, as sometimes happens, Warbelow said. That also means if a doctor provides breast reconstruction surgery or hormone therapy, those services cannot be denied to transgender patients seeking them for gender dysphoria, she said.

The two examples given, however, differ in significant ways. A hospital that refuses to treat the twisted ankles of people who identify as transgender simply because they identify as transgender would be engaging in invidious discrimination, but a hospital that declines to remove the perfectly healthy uterus of a woman who identifies as a man is not engaging in “gender identity” discrimination.

The gender identity of the patient plays no role in the decision-making process: Just as pro-life physicians do not kill unborn babies, regardless of the sex or gender identity of the pregnant person, doctors do not remove healthy uteruses from any patients, regardless of how they identify themselves.

As for the Human Rights Campaign spokesperson’s claim that emergency rooms “sometimes” refuse to treat the twisted ankles of transgender patients, there is no evidence—including on their own website—that it or anything similar in fact happens. Furthermore, insofar as this “sometimes happens,” it seems reasonable to think that the media would focus so much attention on it that the hospital would reverse course within hours. It therefore seems highly unlikely that this alleged problem merits a governmental response.

Need for Policy Shapes the Nature of Policy Response, Definitions, and Protections

My new Heritage report argues that any justified government policy must not penalize valid forms of action and interaction or burden the rights of conscience, religion, and speech. We can see this principle in action.

Because there was such widespread, entrenched systemic and institutional racism throughout American society in the 1960s, for example, and because social and market forces were not sufficient to remedy the problem, it was appropriate for government to respond. That response was properly tailored to meet this need. It defined discrimination to include racially segregated accommodations, places of employment, and housing providers while providing thin religious liberty protections.

Because the justification for antidiscrimination laws based on race was so strong and the need was so great, the law was appropriately broad with limited exemptions.

By contrast, consider laws that address discrimination based on sex. Because the nature of sex and the history of sexism did not represent an exact parallel to racism, the law did not treat them in entirely the same ways. Discrimination was legally defined so as not to include sex-specific intimate facilities, and much broader—and in some cases total—religious liberty exemptions were included. And to this day, sex is not a protected class for federal antidiscrimination law as applied to public accommodations.

In sum, because the justification for laws against sex-based discrimination was weaker than the justification for laws against race-based discrimination, the legal response was more modest: It covered less terrain, defined discrimination more narrowly, and provided greater protection for religious liberty.

Any proposed policies intended to meet the needs of people who identify as LGBT would need to be crafted in a similar manner. Without greater evidence of the justification for specific policy responses—greater documentation of what the needs truly are—it is hard to be specific. In general, however, the need clearly seems weaker than the need for policies designed to deal with discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

A policy response would therefore need to cover less ground, target discrimination more narrowly, define discrimination accurately, and avoid undermining the rights of conscience, religion, and speech. Alas, laws proposed by liberals today do not do this.

"Privilege" again

JJR-PC Watch

A major obsession on the Left at the moment -- particularly in the universities -- is "white privilege" It is alleged that just being born white gives you privileges not available to others. And whites are supposed to feel shamed and humbled about that and -- ideally -- give all their money to non-whites. It is part of the general and quite deranged attack on mainstream people that caused many Americans to become totally disgusted with the Obama/Clinton Left. They were ready to vote for ANYBODY who would stop the rot. So Donald Trump got the job, despite his hair and many other faults.

I pointed out recently that the "white privilege" concept is racist -- very similar to Hitler's thinking about Jews. In both cases we see hostility to people purely on the basis of their race.

So let me relate a true story about a privileged person I know. L. is an elderly Jewish man who recently had a bad turn. An ambulance was called to take him to hospital. When they were loading him on board, they asked him which hospital he wanted to go to. Brisbane has some big centrally located government hospitals plus a lot of excellent private hospitals scattered about. L. said to take him to WXY, a highly regarded private hospital with about 500 beds.

But after about 15 minutes the ambulance had still not driven off. The ambulancemen said that it was a very busy time with a lot of hospitals "on bypass" (full up) -- and WXY was one of those on bypass. So the ambulancemen had been ringing around to find a hospital with an available bed. L. said not to bother with that. Just ring hospital WXY and tell them whom you have got on board. The ambulancemen did that and L. was promptly whisked to his preferred hospital. He was taken in where others were not.

So was that Jewish privilege? Many people would leap to that conclusion. And Jews are often generous donors to all sorts of charitable causes. So that could have been it. It might have reflected gratitude to a donor. But that was not it at all.

Even though he is in his '80s and has had a stroke, L. has that restless energy we so often see in Ashkenazi (Western) Jews. After his stroke he could have just stayed at home all day and watched TV. He likes watching football on TV so that would have had some appeal.

But that was just alien to him. He wanted to be active and to contribute something to others. So he became a hospital visitor. With his own recent experience of stroke he felt sympathy for people lying in bed all day waiting to get better. So, by arrangement with the WXY hospital, he would spend days just walking around the wards and looking for people who felt like a chat. He is himself a cheery, flexible, positive person who is a good listener so he brightened the days of many.

So you see why everybody at the WXY hospital knew him, appreciated him and leapt to help him when he needed it. The "privilege" he had is the privilege of being a good man. He EARNED his privilege. He is just a good natured conservative man who likes to contribute to the society in which he lives.

And so it is with most privilege. What you do to earn privilege can vary greatly. You can even inherit it. But privilege is not random and is not assigned just by something as incidental as the color of your skin. There are many trailer park denizens -- poor people -- who just get by from week to week even though they are white. Where is their privilege? It doesn't exist because they have done nothing to earn it. Just being white earns you nothing -- JR

National Urban Myths League: When Race Trumps Truth - Ryan Bomberger

National Urban Myths League: When Race Trumps Truth - Ryan Bomberger

Now, the National Urban…I’ll say it…National Urban Myths League has put out a bogus report card on Barack Obama’s performance as president. They’ve deemed his presidency “Excellent”. It’s a painful exercise in allowing race to trump truth. The liberal organization ends the embarrassing assessment with the words: “Scandal-free administration”. Sure. And Hillary Clinton never had an email erased.

Liberals tend to simultaneously dwell on and ignore history. National Urban Myths League’s short-term memory can be refreshed with this thorough report on the Obama administration’s scandals such as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, Pigford, Iran nuclear deal, Iran hostage payment, and the IRS scandals. There are so many.

Most of today’s once honorable civil rights organizations have certain members of the public thinking they’re being empowered, but they’re being fooled by those in power instead. Truth means nothing. Propaganda is everything.

One only needs to look at the National Urban Myths League’s “EXCELLENT” rating for Obama on Poverty (pg 3). The League deceptively explains the poverty rate fell in the black community in 2015 “faster than in any year since 1999.” Perhaps they missed the fact that in 2010, more people were impoverished under the Obama administration (46.2 million) than in the 52 years the U.S. Census Bureau has kept track. In 2010, the national poverty rate (15.1%) was the highest since 1993. So Obama gets a gold star because he presided over poverty rates that were higher every year (hitting an apex of 27.6% in 2011) in the black community than during George W. Bush’s terms—the highest since 1996? And now, in 2015 they finally lower enough (24.1%) to nearly match what his administration inherited (24.7%) in January 2009 and that’s worth praise?

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Honesty and transparency really aren’t the National Urban League’s thing. They annually produce a disingenuous State of Black America report which details the challenges of Urban America and offers only liberal solutions. Many of the issues are the direct result of the one thing the League never, ever mentions—fatherlessness—an epidemic worsened by our culture of abortion.

When my organization, The Radiance Foundation, launched a pro-life billboard/social media campaign—TooManyAborted.com—to illuminate the racist history of eugenics and the abortion industry (Planned Parenthood) that it birthed, we were shocked by the response from so-called “civil rights” groups. Our TooManyAborted.com campaign, created as a Black History Month educational initiative, infuriated those who’ve been partnering with an industry that is the No. 1 killer of black lives. The NAACP (which later sued us for parodying them as the National Association for the Abortion of Colored People) called our Black & Beautiful campaign “racist” and that we were “creating an illusion that Planned Parenthood is an organization that is murdering black babies.”

What exactly would you call a business that kills over 266 black babies every day and an industry that kills more black babies than are born alive?

Fannie Lou Hamer called abortion in the black community “genocide”. So did Jesse Jackson, when he was passionately pro-life. Oh, but that was before he had to drop his moral convictions for political “prestige” in his 1984 run for the presidency in 1984.

The Marxist #BlackLivesMatter movement is always decrying “systemic racism” yet ignores it where it is most rampant—the abortion industry. What is more systemic than a taxpayer-funded population control organization—Planned Parenthood—killing unarmed black lives in the womb at a rate up to 5 times more than the majority population?

It doesn’t phase the National Urban Myths League, though. Led by president Marc Morial, they’ve put their allegiance in an abortion chain that fundamentally believes we are not equal. As a biracial individual, the irony crushes my heart. A few years ago, when The Radiance Foundation partnered with Pro-Life Wisconsin to place a billboard in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood in Madison, Wisconsin, I had no idea that the abortion biz was leasing space from the National Urban League. Yes. The National Urban League built the building in 2009 and leases space to Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, which commits 74.3% of the states 5,461 abortions (2015 stats). Of course, as is the case across the country, the black community is disproportionately targeted by the abortion giant which results in the huge disparity in abortion rates. In Wisconsin, although only 6.6% of the state’s population is black, 26% of the state’s abortions are black babies.

In New York City, where Planned Parenthood is headquartered, more black babies are aborted than born alive—the only demographic to have more induced deaths than births. For every 1,000 black babies born alive, there are 1,101 aborted.

This is black genocide. This is civil rights gone wrong.

Yet Marc Morial, signing on behalf of the National Urban League, joined the ACLU and dozens of other radical pro-abortion organizations in a letter vehemently opposing any effort to defund corrupt, taxpayer-defrauding Planned Parenthood. And don’t give me that whole “low-income, minority women need Planned Parenthood” garbage. No they don’t. They need real healthcare…comprehensive healthcare that they can find at over 13,000 federally qualified health centers and community health centers across the country that don’t make millions killing the most defenseless among us.

We can appreciate how far our nation has come by electing its first biracial president, but can we just be honest? Elevating race above all else gives us the legacy that Obama is leaving behind—a nation more racially divided than we’ve seen in decades and a government less transparent with each passing year. Barack Obama is no Messiah, and his failures will be felt for generations to come. Mainstream media has done, and will continue to do, all it can do to mythicize his presidency. National Urban Myths League, there is too much crucial work to be done to help those in need for you to be writing works of fiction.

Campuses buckle under Obama policies: Glenn Reynolds

Campuses buckle under Obama policies: Glenn Reynolds

One of Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics is that “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Odd as this may sound, it seems to have pretty good predictive power. And President Obama’s Department of Education seems like a good example.

Higher education, after all, is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest sources of support: Financial (according to Open Secrets, 4 of the top 10 organizations furnishing donors to the Obama 2012 campaign were universities: The University of California was #1, ahead of Google, and the others were Harvard, Stanford and Columbia), ideological (faculties lean far-left and the lefty faculty members tend to be much more outspoken, on average, than the conservative or libertarian faculty), and grassroots, with students, faculty and administrators serving as foot-soldiers (sometimes with university funding) for Democratic candidates and causes. And as Case Western University law professor George Dent notes, “Most state colleges and universities now serve as political action committees for the left, and their political spending dwarfs that of all other PACs.”

So you’d expect the Obama Department of Education to be doing whatever it could to nurture, support, and protect colleges and universities. But instead, it seems to be acting almost as if it were controlled by . . . a cabal of its enemies.

For example, in the area of Title IX enforcement Obama’s Department of Education has taken a statute that simply reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” and turned it into an Orwellian nightmare of what Harvard law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk call "bureaucratic sex creep.”

As a new book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr., The Campus Rape Frenzy, makes clear, the results have been bad for victimized students (almost always male), but they’ve also been bad for colleges and universities, producing horrible publicity, a growing number of expensive lawsuits, and increased trouble recruiting male students for what is increasingly becoming a pink-collar higher education system. This “rape frenzy” wasn’t the product of anti-sex religious fundamentalists, but of hard-core gender-war feminists. And Obama has doubled down by, at the very last minute, appointing a new, hardline head for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which oversees this debacle. She can be expected to double down, unless Trump replaces her.

And, in many other ways, the Department of Education’s pro-diversity efforts have — entirely deliberately — fostered a climate of racial balkanization and division on campus. Again, the results have empowered a small number of student “activists” and administrators, but with destructive, and sometimes genuinely disastrous results. That's that case at the University of Missouri which has seen enrollments and donations plummet by astonishing amounts, genuinely disastrous results.

Most recently, the Department of Education struck the Charlotte School of Law off the eligibility list for federal student aid, because of its graduates’ low bar passage rate. That’s pretty much a death blow. But why Charlotte, and why now?

Well, there’s a good argument, as education expert George Leef notes in Forbes, that we have too many law schools and that we should thin the herd. But as another expert I discussed this with noted, there are probably ten or fifteen other law schools that are just as strong candidates for this treatment as Charlotte. Charlotte is a for-profit school, and the Obama administration has been notably hostile to for-profit education in general, but the precedent set here is just as applicable to traditional “nonprofit” schools, many of whom also have lousy records at having their students pass the bar and find gainful employment.

Much of the hoopla about Trump education nominee Betsy DeVos has involved her views on K-12 education, though some critics have, absurdly, complained that her donation to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil liberties outfit that has, among other things, opposed the Title IX kangaroo sex courts on many campuses, is somehow disqualifying. The critics fear that she’ll reverse course on Obama’s education program.

But if DeVos is really hostile to higher education, she should probably just double down on these Obama policies. Because that would probably do more damage than anything she has in the works.

A Window Into a Depraved Culture | City Journal

A Window Into a Depraved Culture | Heather Mac Donald

Anti-police activists and the mainstream media are incensed at the suggestion that the Black Lives Matter movement could have influenced the behavior of the four individuals in Chicago who tortured a disabled white man for hours last week while yelling “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.” In one sense, the activists and media are right: The influences were broader than that. They include the reign of racial victimology, inner-city gang culture, and black anti-white animus.

We live in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s America, characterized by the assumption that blacks are the eternal targets of lethal white oppression. Coates’s central thesis in Between the World and Me, his acclaimed phantasmagoria of racial victimology, is that America continuously aspires to the “shackling” and “destruction” of “black bodies.”

Chicago’s four torturers certainly have not read Between the World and Me. But the book’s worldview echoes throughout our society, including in the inner city. Michelle Alexander’s equally publicized book, The New Jim Crow, argues that the U.S. seeks to reimpose de facto segregation on blacks via the criminal justice system. Alexander has been a staple on black media, among many other outlets. President Obama has insisted, even up to his last days in office, that blacks are the victims of a racist criminal-justice system. The press routinely disseminates phony statistics that purport to demonstrate a police war on blacks. These ideas matter.

Black Lives Matter ideology is just a more in-your-face manifestation of the Coatesian conceit that blacks are living in a system determined to destroy them. The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter embraces the motto “Stop killing us,” aimed at the Chicago Police Department. It chants: “CPD, KKK: How many children did you kill today?” (The answer is: Virtually none. Last year, over 3,400 people in Chicago were shot, overwhelmingly black. Victims included 24 children 12 years of age or younger. The Chicago cops shot 25 people, virtually all armed and dangerous, or .6 percent of the total.) The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter disseminates inflammatory lies about the Chicago police, such as that BLM activist Ja’Mal Green was beaten for 30 hours following an arrest for battery against an officer and trying to disarm an officer. Increasing the size of the Chicago Police department, per the Chicago BLM, will simply result in “more killings by police, more police torture and violence.”

These anti-law enforcement claims reinforce existing anti-white animus in the inner city. The notion that the dominant or exclusive racism in America today is white anti-black racism is absurd. Though many urban residents harbor no racial animosity, the recurrent “Fuck Whitey” and “Kill the cops” themes in rap music are not accidental. (Sample: “Kill the White people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the White people; but buy my record first,” by Apache, adopting without obvious irony lines from an Eddie Murphy parody; “The White man is the devil… Drive-by shooting on this White genetic mutant,” by Menace Clan.) I have been warned by residents of one East Harlem housing project not to go to a neighboring project because “they really hate whites there.”

Even if there weren’t already a strain of racial hostility in inner-city culture, the constant establishment refrain that whites oppress blacks at every opportunity would create it. Every highly publicized cop assassination in the last two years has triggered gloating on social media. Ja’Mal Green told the New York Times that the assassination of five Dallas police officers was “not a setback at all” for Black Lives Matter. The Dallas gunman had said he wanted to kill white people and white cops. Though Green insisted that he was not encouraging violence, he said that the assassination showed “the people of this country that black people are getting to a boiling point. We are tired of watching police kill our brothers and sisters. We are tired of being tired.” At some point, there “comes a time when black people will snap,” he said. While one is grateful for Green’s avowal not to be encouraging violence, such sentiments come close to rationalizing it.

The establishment typically looks the other way at manifestations of black anti-white animus. Racism in rap music is usually ignored. The Associated Press excluded any reference to the race of the victim and assailants in its initial report on the Chicago torture episode, as John Hinderaker observed at Powerline, and merely noted that police were investigating a “beating” captured on social media. The AP’s follow-up report acknowledged that someone in the video appeared to use profanities about “white people” and that the victim “appeared to be white,” while “others shown in the video appeared to be black.”

Radley Balko rushed to tweet out that the Chicago kidnapping is not a trend because since 2001, 80–85 percent of white murder victims were killed by whites. True, but the percentage of blacks killed by blacks is higher. From 1980 to 2008, 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks. White-on-black homicides are much rarer than black-on-white homicides. The vast bulk of interracial violence is committed by blacks. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author:

Distribution of violent victimizations, by race/Hispanic origin of victim and perceived race/Hispanic origin of offender, 2012–2013

Blacks, in other words, committed 85% of the interracial crimes between blacks and whites, even though they are 13 percent of the population. This data accords with the last published report on interracial crime from the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the Bureau stopped publishing its table on interracial crime after 2008, the first year of the Obama presidency.

Some portion of those black-on-white crimes may be driven by the same racial hostility that gives rise to urban flash mobs and the knockout game. As Dead Prez rapped: “We gonna order take out and when we see the driver/We gonna stick the 25 up in his face . . . White boy in the wrong place at the right time.” Even if the higher rate of black-on-white violence is simply a product of blacks’ higher rate of violence generally, that violent crime rate is another fact suppressed by the mainstream media whenever possible. In response to the Chicago torture video, Callum Borchers of the Washington Post sneered at conservatives’ supposed delusions, such as that “Chicago is a war zone.” This idea struck Borchers as so preposterous that he repeated it later in his column: “Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.”

One wonders how quickly Collum would move his family out of the allegedly pacific South and West Sides of Chicago if he actually had to live there. The following is a partial sampling of crime headlines from Chicago papers over the last few weeks, in reverse chronological order:

FAMILY SINGALONG ENDS AS BULLETS FLY THROUGH CAR WINDOW ON PULASKI ROAD

SHOOTINGS KILL 4 PEOPLE, WOUND 24 SINCE SATURDAY, POLICE SAY [referring to the 24-hour period from December 31, 2016 to January 1, 2017]

TWO BOYS, 16, KILLED IN SHOOTING THAT ALSO WOUNDED 65-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

A VIOLENT CHRISTMAS IN A VIOLENT YEAR FOR CHICAGO: 11 KILLED, 50 WOUNDED

BROTHERS KILLED, 5 OTHER PEOPLE WOUNDED IN CHRISTMAS SHOOTING

3 KILLED, 17 WOUNDED IN CITY SHOOTINGS

4 DEAD IN FERNWOOD ATTACK, 15 OTHERS WOUNDED IN SHOOTINGS

3 WOUNDED IN PARTY BUS SHOOTING NEAR LAKE SHORE DRIVE

WOMAN RAPED BY ARMED MEN AFTER ROBBERY IN HUMBOLDT PARK

MAN WHO ATTACKED, ROBBED 94-YEAR-OLD GARFIELD RIDGE WOMAN SOUGHT BY POLICE

47 SHOOTINGS SO FAR ON EXPRESSWAYS IN CHICAGO, 10 ABOVE ALL OF LAST YEAR

BOY, 16, SHOT ON HIS WAY TO SCHOOL — BUT WENT TO CLASS ANYWAY

INBOUND EISENHOWER SHUT DOWN AFTER SHOOTOUT BETWEEN CARS

MEN CHARGED WITH ROBBING WOMEN WALKING ALONE IN LAKEVIEW, POLICE SAY

SHOOTINGS KILL 9, WOUND 66 OVER THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, POLICE SAY

Or maybe Borchers is only interested in the white areas of Chicago, which are not yet a “war zone.”

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, responding to the Chicago torture, rejected the idea of speaking out “on crimes committed by black folk because nobody in this country is held more responsible for the crimes they commit, and even the crimes they don’t commit, than black folk in America. . . . American prisons are full of black folk who are being held responsible for every mistake they’ve ever made.” Try telling that to Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. Johnson regularly bemoans the fact that convicted gun felons in Chicago have little to fear from the criminal-justice system, because they are so quickly back on the streets following a shooting. The Illinois Black Caucus has blocked stiffer penalties for gun crime.

The victims of a November 2016 robbery spree in Chicago may also disagree with King that the criminal-justice system is vindictive against black criminals. Isaiah Scaife had already been convicted of theft, attempted theft, criminal trespass, and possession of a stolen motor vehicle before he turned 18, according to DNAInfo. He continued to commit gun crimes as a young adult. At age 19, after a conviction for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, Scaife was already out on parole. That’s when he began his five-day crime spree on November 18, robbing a Subway store’s customers after sticking his gun in a baby’s face and trying to manhandle his way behind the restaurant’s counter. A few minutes later, he robbed a man leaving a Citgo gas station, beating the victim unconscious with his gun before shooting him in the face. The next day, Scaife returned to the same Subway, where he robbed and choked a man while a juvenile accomplice pointed a gun at the victim. A few days later, Scaife pulled a gun on a man at another gas station and stole his possessions and car. At his arraignment, he yelled at the court deputies: “I’m going to spit on your ass.”

Scaife is hardly unique. A huge percentage of violent crime is committed by people with serious criminal histories who are free to continue terrorizing the innocent. And, pace King, if you commit a drug crime, you’ll get more leniency in a large urban jurisdiction than in a rural county, where sentences for white drug dealers dwarf those of inner-city traffickers, according to the New York Times.

At least one of the Facebook torture assailants belonged to the gang culture that produces Chicago’s violent crime. Tesfaye Cooper posted a video on his YouTube channel in October in which he points a rifle at the camera and says: “I’ll put a bullet in your ass,” reports DNAInfo Chicago. Cooper’s Facebook page glorifies him posing with guns and paying homage to local murderers. His raps threaten to kill people who disrespect him and his crew.

The violence in the Chicago torture video does not arise in a vacuum. Most residents of inner-city areas are hardworking bourgeois citizens longing to live in safety and in racial harmony. But the video opens a window into a culture that America would prefer to turn its eyes away from—and which it has helped create.

Chicago Death Toll -- Passive Policing Begets Aggressive Criminals | National Review

Chicago Death Toll -- Passive Policing Begets Aggressive Criminals | National Review

The city of Chicago is conducting a long, bloody experiment in what happens to a gang-ridden municipality in the absence of effective policing.

It is keeping the morgue depressingly busy. Seven hundred sixty-two people were murdered in the city in 2016, a nearly unheard of 50 percent increase over the year before. This is more than New York and Los Angeles — both larger cities — combined, and the worst figure in 20 years.

While everyone on the left pays obeisance to the slogan Black Lives Matter, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel runs a jurisdiction where black lives have been getting cheaper almost by the day, especially in its poorest areas. The lion’s share of Chicago’s spike of violence has occurred in five of Chicago’s 22 police districts. Eighty percent of the victims were rated by the police department as likely to be involved in gun violence, which means that the city is adept at identifying people as potential victims — just not at keeping them from getting shot.

Holiday weekends in Chicago reliably provide fodder for cable TV in the astonishing tallies of shootings and murders (a dozen people killed and 27 shootings over the Christmas weekend). Overall, more than 4,300 people were shot in the city last year. A woman told CNN she told her kids from a very young age what to do when they hear gunshots, a grim maternal duty in a city where gunplay is so routine.

The equation that accounts for the rising body count is simple: As the Chicago police have become less aggressive, the gangs have become more aggressive and more people have been killed. Chicago demonstrates that in swathes of inner-city America, you can have a chastened, passive police department, or a modicum of public order, but not both.

Chicago’s authorities courted the anti-police agitation of the past few years with their desperate mishandling of the controversial shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, killed by an officer in 2014. The city avoided releasing the dash-cam video of the incident for a year, until after Rahm Emanuel’s reelection. When it finally did, the police representations about the threat represented by McDonald looked to be false (the cop who shot him is now awaiting trial on murder charges).

With the police on their back heels, the city further hamstrung them. It discouraged minor drug arrests. It required the police to fill out two-page contact cards (with 70 different fields) whenever stopping anyone. These forms are then forwarded on to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The city would have been much better served by forthrightness in the McDonald case from the beginning, coupled with vigorous support of tough-minded, forward-leaning policing. Instead, it got the worst of both worlds.

Fearful of becoming the next “viral video,” harassed and mocked when out doing their job in tough neighborhoods, beleaguered by paperwork, the police have suffered a crisis in morale and clearly pulled back. Documents obtained by 60 Minutes show an 80 percent drop in stops from almost 50,000 in August 2015 to under 9,000 a year later, and arrests dropping from roughly 10,000 to 7,000.

This reduced police presence on the streets has been a boon only to anti-police ideologues (the ACLU welcomes it) and the city’s myriad gangs. Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson says that the surge in violence has been driven by “emboldened offenders who acted without a fear of penalty from the criminal-justice system.”

There is much about Chicago that can’t be readily fixed, but it is fully within the city’s power to make its criminal offenders feel less emboldened. Chicago simply needs to stop, arrest, and jail more dangerous people. The only alternative is the continuation of the city’s current experiment in chaos that is making the city unlivable for the people unfortunate enough to inhabit its most violent precincts.

It goes without saying that their lives matter. Chicago should begin to act like it.

Students’ Constitutional Rights on Campus: Time for Congress to Intervene | National Review

Students’ Constitutional Rights on Campus: Time for Congress to Intervene | National Review

Intent on establishing progressive utopias, universities and federal bureaucrats are together systematically violating the constitutional rights of students and professors. The stories are legion, the legal standards are unconscionable, and it’s past time for other branches of American government to step in and set things right.

Consider what just happened at the University of Oregon. Acting in response to student and faculty outrage after a white law professor dressed up as a black man at an off-campus costume party (she was attempting to protest racism), the university suspended the offending professor and then issued a lengthy report holding that wearing the costume constituted “discriminatory harassment.”

Why? Because the incident was race-based and caused arguments and controversy on campus. Here’s a key statement in the report: “Based on both the reaction and lack of reaction from other faculty and professors, students have also felt a sense of anxiety and mistrust towards professors and faculty beyond just Shurtz, with some students considering and seeking out transfers to other schools.”

Allow me to interpret. Offended students weren’t just angry at the professor, they were also angry that not all students and professors were sufficiently outraged at the offending professor’s actions. In other words, at Oregon if you speak on an issue of race, gender, religion, or sexuality, you are responsible not only for any anger your speech may cause but also for other students’ and professors’ reactions to that anger.

But of course identity politics don’t merely impact free-speech rights. They also lead to systematic anti-male sex discrimination and violations of the most basic due-process rights of students accused of sexual assault.

Then consider this legal complaint, directed at Indiana University. It is simply astounding. The university expelled a male student for sexual misconduct even though the female student allegedly admitted that she invited the male student into her bedroom, asked him to retrieve a sex toy, and asked him to have sex with her. She told the Bloomington police department, “I was, like, telling him, like, to have sex with me.”

The resulting university proceedings were allegedly a due-process horror show, featuring university hearing officers trained by an official “who admits that he starts each case believing the [defendant] is guilty.” The lawsuit points to news reports where this same official admitted to trying to “break” another defendant.

And speaking of due-process horror shows, this case from James Madison University shows how universities engineer the results they want. After an initial finding that the male defendant was “not responsible” on the charge of sexual misconduct, the female student appealed. The appeals panel reversed the finding and sanctioned the male student. The male student sued, and a federal judge ruled in his favor, finding that “no reasonable jury” could find that he was given a “fair process.” The reasons were legion:

In short, Doe [the male student] was given no opportunity to respond to some of the evidence . . . , was hampered by the rules prohibiting contact with witnesses or limited by time constraints in responding to others . . . , and was not permitted to appear before the appeal board. . . . Additionally, because the appeal board made no finding of responsibility by Doe and provided no reasons for its “Increased Sanction” decision, the appeal board decision and its review . . . were unfair to Doe.

I bring up these cases not because they’re unusual but because they’re becoming all too typical on campuses overrun by identity politics and governed by a federal educational bureaucracy that is lawlessly expanding Title IX and other federal statutes well beyond their intended scope. For disturbing chapter and verse on this sad and unconstitutional spectacle, I’d urge you to read Robert Shibley’s excellent Twisting Title IX.

The new regime mandates that universities conduct their own quasi–court proceedings to adjudicate criminal matters best left to real courts, sanctions and encourages “due process” that often denies legal assistance to defendants, and effectively shifts the burden of proof (through bizarre “affirmative consent” standards) to the accused. In a Title IX investigation, the accused is often prevented from adequately reviewing the charges against him and prevented from adequately questioning witnesses. University officials conduct themselves in a manner that would embarrass even corrupt or amateurish judges and prosecutors.

As for free speech, on campus the heckler’s veto is alive and well — with a student’s or professor’s First Amendment rights mainly dependent on the size of the outcry against him or her. Raise enough of a ruckus, and the Constitution fails.

A generation of litigation has inflicted loss upon loss on public universities, yet the campus climate is still rife with censorship and due-process violations. It turns out that administrators fear their own on-campus ideologues and the progressive education bureaucracy far more than they fear the federal courts. Indeed, the financial penalty for angering a bureaucrat — loss of federal funding — is far greater than any damage award imposed by any court. Judges are proving to be a poor check on campus power.

So it’s time to turn the tables. It’s time to readjust the incentives. Congress needs to intervene in two concrete ways. First, it needs to withhold federal funds from any public university that repeatedly violates the constitutional rights of its students or faculty. If a court of final jurisdiction finds that a public university violated the constitutional rights of a student or faculty member more than once in any five-year span, it should lose all federal funding for at least a year. Moreover, there should be a substantial, fixed financial penalty for each constitutional violation, no matter how infrequent.

Second, universities need to get out of the sexual-assault-adjudication business. Universities are educational institutions, not criminal courts, and they are poorly equipped to decide criminal cases or even civil liability. It is easy enough to separate students who are embroiled in pending criminal or civil proceedings, and universities should discipline or expel only students who are found guilty or liable by courts of final jurisdiction.

It’s simply too much to ask the Trump Department of Education to “fix” Title IX or to protect constitutional rights on campus. Any rulemakings or memoranda generated by a new administration can be just as easily undone by the next. It’s time to use sensible congressional majorities to pass sensible laws. Universities have proven they can’t govern themselves. Perhaps Congress can fill the breach.

How to Answer a False Accusation of Racism - Mike Adams

How to Answer a False Accusation of Racism - Mike Adams

The first thing to remember about responding to a false accuser is what not to do. Above all, you must resist the temptation to accuse the professor of harassment or of breaking the campus speech code. That is what leftists do and it is wrong. The best way to respond to bad speech is with better speech, not censorship.

Furthermore, you need to respond to accusations of racism with questions rather than assertions. Here are the three questions you need to ask. William Wilbanks, author of The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, inspired the first two questions. Greg Koukl, author of the book Tactics, inspired the third:

1. What do you mean by racism? First of all, you need to realize that academic leftists rarely understand the terms they are using when they attack conservatives. Racism is a specific belief that races can be ranked according to genetically inherited characteristics. For example, when a white supremacist takes a racist view of blacks he is really saying that they are genetically inferior. This genetic inferiority allegedly manifests itself in lower intelligence, which, in turn, translates into other undesirable characteristics such as sloth and a propensity toward crime.

If the professor cannot supply the correct definition of racism after he has used the term then he makes a complete fool of himself. If he can supply the correct definition, this leads to an even bigger problem, which we will explore with the second question.

2. How does racism apply to the situation at hand? If the professor does happen to know the real definition of racism then he’s in quite a pickle here. You can ask the professor “How exactly does the assertion that ’all lives matter’ (read: all lives have equal value) translate into the notion that certain categories of people are genetically inferior to other categories of people?”

3. Have you ever considered the following? After showing that the professor doesn’t know the meaning of the words he is using and has no evidence to support his position his credibility is decimated. Now it is time to move in for the kill.

There are a lot of options here. For example, one could simply ask, “Have you ever considered that the statement ‘all lives matter’ is fundamentally anti-racist?” Asking, “Are you at all concerned that by opposing an anti-racist statement you align yourself with the true racists” would be a good follow-up question from which the professor could never recover.

In academia today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the mentors from the protégés. Fortunately, exposing these incompetent professors is never more than a few well-placed questions away.

Football and Fallacies

Statistical disparities do not automatically mean discrimination.

This is a football story with both political and legal implications. It was fourth down in a National Football League game, and the punting team came onto the field. The other team went into their formation to defend against the punt. Then somebody noticed that the man set to kick the punt was black.

“Fake!” one of the defenders cried out. That cry was immediately echoed by others, and the defending team changed their formation, to guard against the kicker either running with the ball or throwing it. But, in fact, he punted.

Why did anyone think he was not going to punt the ball? Because chances are no one on that field had ever seen a black football player kick a punt. As someone who has watched NFL games for half a century, I have never seen a black player either punt the ball, or kick a field goal or a point after touchdown. I have seen hundreds of black players score touchdowns, but not one kick the point afterwards. I have seen a black president of the United States before I have seen a black kicker in the NFL.

Politicians, the intelligentsia, and even the Supreme Court of the United States have been saying for decades that statistical disparities between racial groups indicate discrimination. If so, then the racial disparities among kickers in professional football exceed those in virtually any other job anywhere.

But is it discrimination? The very same people who employ blacks at every other position on a football team are the people who hire kickers. Why would they be willing to hire black players in other positions that pay a lot more money than most kickers get, but draw the line at hiring black kickers?

In this situation, discrimination is an explanation that doesn’t even meet the test of plausibility.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, there are those who attribute differences in racial representation to genetics. Are blacks genetically incapable of kicking a football? Somehow black colleges have been playing football for generations, without having to recruit white players to do the kicking.

But if neither race nor racism can explain why black kickers are so rare in professional football, what can possibly explain it? One of the most obvious possibilities is routinely ignored in many cases of group disparities: Different individuals and groups have different things they want to do.

If black youngsters who are dreaming of an athletic career don’t happen to be dreaming of becoming kickers, then it doesn’t matter whether they have both the innate ability and the opportunity.

It is very doubtful if any of the guys who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem ever became ballet dancers. Is that because black guys can’t dance? Some of the best male tap dancers have been black. Is it because nobody would hire black male dancers? Some black male tap dancers have starred on the stage and danced in movies. Just not in ballets.

Many of us have been so brainwashed over the years — by sheer repetition, rather than by either logic or empirical tests — that statistical disparities are automatically taken to mean discrimination, whether between races, sexes, or whatever.

The plain fact that different individuals and groups make different choices is resolutely ignored, because it does not fit the prevailing preconceptions, or the crusades based on those preconceptions.

Women make different career choices than men, and wisely so, because men do not become mothers, and being a mother is not the same as being a father. And we can’t make them the same by simply calling them both “parents” or saying that “the couple” is pregnant.

Discrimination can certainly cause statistical disparities. But statistical disparities do not automatically mean discrimination.

When some racial or ethnic groups have a median age that is 20 years older than the median age of some other racial or ethnic groups, how surprised should we be to find members of the younger groups far better represented in sports and members of the older groups far better represented in jobs that require long years of experience?

Statistics are no substitute for thought — certainly not in government policies, and especially not in Supreme Court decisions.

You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex

You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

Trump has gone from campaign stop to campaign stop talking about how much he likes and respects minorities and wants to fight for them.

And if you believe he’s lying, fine. Yet I notice that people accusing Trump of racism use the word “openly” like a tic. He’s never just “racist” or “white supremacist”. He’s always “openly racist” and “openly white supremacist”. Trump is openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist. Trump is running on pure white supremacy, has thrown off the last pretense that his campaign is not about bigotry, has the slogan Make American Openly White Supremacist Again, is an openly white supremacist nominee, etc, etc, etc. And I’ve seen a few dozen articles like this where people say that “the bright side of a Trump victory is that finally America admitted its racism out in the open so nobody can pretend it’s not there anymore.”

This, I think, is the first level of crying wolf. What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that he doesn’t go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?

We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”

But doesn’t this still mean there are some white supremacists? Isn’t this still really important?

I mean, kind of. But remember that 4% of Americans believe that lizardmen control all major governments. And 5% of Obama voters believe that Obama is the Antichrist. The white supremacist vote is about the same as the lizardmen-control-everything vote, or the Obama-is-the-Antichrist-but-I-support-him-anyway vote.

4. Aren’t there a lot of voters who, although not willing to vote for David Duke or even willing to express negative feelings about black people on a poll, still have implicit racist feelings, the kind where they’re nervous when they see a black guy on a deserted street at night?

Probably. And this is why I am talking about crying wolf. If you wanted to worry about the voter with subconscious racist attitudes carefully hidden even from themselves, you shouldn’t have used the words “openly white supremacist KKK supporter” like a verbal tic.

5. But even if Donald Trump isn’t openly white supremacist, didn’t he get an endorsement from KKK leader David Duke? Didn’t he refuse to reject that endorsement? Doesn’t that mean that he secretly wants to court the white supremacist vote?

The answer is no on all counts.

6. What about Trump’s “drugs and crime” speech about Mexicans?

Trump said that:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.

Since everyone has been wrong about everything lately, I’ve started thinking it’s more important than ever to make clear predictions and grade myself on them, so here are my predictions for the Trump administration:

1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]

2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]

3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]

4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.

5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]

6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].

7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].

8. No large demographic group (> 1 million people) get forced to sign up for a “registry” [confidence: 95%]

9> No large demographic group gets sent to internment camps [confidence: 99%]

10. Number of deportations during Trump’s four years will not be greater than Obama’s 8 [confidence: 90%]

If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.

Clayton Cramer.: Another Popular Lie

Clayton Cramer.: Another Popular Lie

I understand that on some social media sites, Trump's victory is being blamed on Southern states closing black precinct polling places, so blacks couldn't vote. This seemed implausible, and should generated a storm of lamestream media whining. What I found was this story about how expiration of the Voting Rights Act allowed state and local governments to consolidate and reorganize precincts without federal supervision. There was no closing of polling places on Election Day; these stories are from before Election Day.

Of course, you could find out where your polling place was with a phone call, but that would require you to care. Black voting was down from 2008 and 2012 because there was no black man running for President. The progressives just don't like admitting their voting base is racist.

Another Day « the Air Vent

Another Day

For those who live outside of the US, you won’t understand just how much regulation the largest government on the planet can inflict, nor will it be easily understood just how much tax is being paid by business. There is a reason manufacturing has left the US in droves. I haven’t looked up historic records of such things, but the loss of American manufacturing capability has to be the single greatest migration of business in human history. Again, bulk math drives the situation. When a situation creates pressure for action the people or businesses respond to those pressures in kind. If the costs and regulations are higher in one area than another, like gas law, the business will flow from high pressure to low at a non-zero rate only slowed by the frictions caused by such movement.

And flow it has. From America to the rest of the world. To business friendly countries like China, Tiawan and now even VietNam. Countries with leaders who understand math outweighs feelings and oddly enough – Capitalism. These are people who understand that personal spaces and micro-agression are foolish in their very concept. They laugh at us – literally! These are folks who get that a building is very unlikely to really harm the planet and far more likely to provide a service to the population. They know that global warming is not a real threat but is an excellent economic business relocating pressure to use in against people who think it is. You know, common sense things like that which America’s liberals generally fail to understand.

Despite this flow of business away from America, and in fact completely without regard for said flow, American liberals actively wish to destroy business. The young generation has been taught that all business is greed and greed is a greater evil than not eating. See we live in a country where people aren’t starving, they have grown up without even the hint of a day without food. They live in cities and eat food transported to them from all over the world. They go to schools where indoctrination and acceptance of liberal belief is primary, feelings are a close second and math and science drop way down the list as useful things to understand. The acceptance of illogic is foundational to modern American liberalism. Fakenomics, global warming doom, cow farting is destroying the planet for gods sake, are part and parcel of the system they unwittingly serve.

I’m extremely disappointed with the protests in the cities to Trumps election. While it was often quoted by the fake media that Clinton’s supporters were more educated than Trump, what was nearly unreported was that Trump even won the now known to be inaccurate polling results among people who made more than 30,000 per year. I personally define this group as functional people. The protesters in the cities were obviously a young crowd, and were apparently really focused on Trump racism – because the media here spends much of its time telling people that republicans and conservatives are racist. After the endless liberal media channels realized that all of their advertising for Clinton, all of their unpaid and unabashed support for the democrats wasn’t enough to put a crook in office, that is when the lashing out began. I heard them repeatedly discuss Republican anger and hate, it was the uneducated rural folk who voted, that their anger against the billionaires was the problem. Never once in the first few hours following the election did they discuss that it was regulation, taxation, or of course the utter lack of common sense espoused by the current Democrat governance. Certainly not the fact that Hillary was and is a face-palm obvious criminal.

Then there were the protests. What was most disappointing to me about the protests was the fake claims of Trump racism, because I didn’t know of any examples. I took a minute to search the internet for examples of racism that Trump has exhibited and quickly found the exact sort of illogical argument the liberals have been so well trained to accept with religious fervor. From the Huffington post, an article titled – Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist.

Attacking muslim gold star parents.

Muslim is not a race, it is a religion. The argument with them was an avoidable situation but it certainly cannot be characterized as racist. It is an unhealthy religion too but in today’s liberal-think I’m not allowed to have that opinion but as a sexist republican, I cannot accept a religion which treats women so badly and by its own tenants doesn’t allow them the choice to exit. I also recognize it as an authoritarian government structure rather than a religion. — But again, whether you can figure that out or not, it is not racism to have an argument with a Muslim.

He claimed a judge was biased because he was a Mexican

So, while making policy which is clearly against Mexico, it is racist to even argue that a Judge from that region might be biased? I think even the slightest bit of common sense says otherwise. Oh, and Mexico is a country, not a race so again the argument defies logic.

The justice department sued his company twice for housing discrimination.

Lawsuits are not racism. They cannot be by definition. In business, you get sued, you go to court, you have problems with all kinds of people, you are a continual target for the Federal government. We don’t know the details of these suits and neither does the post. Did Trump do something racist in 1972, maybe, but calling the lawsuit an example of racism is completely bogus.

The article goes on and on with completely nonsensical claims, he didn’t hire ‘mostly minorities’ in one casino, the very definition of minority means less of them. The gave an example of one person who apparently made outrageous claims which the post didn’t even attempt to verify – even with a second opinion. Trump didn’t disown David Duke quickly enough for them, Trump didn’t use the right politically correct language, he accused a Bridgeport casino of being run by non-Indians mafia types, on and on but outside of the unsubstantiated outrageous claims by some guy who was clearly not a Trump supporter and for all we know doesn’t even exist, they had no actual examples of racisim.

One of the points the article attempted was the condoning of the beating of a black lives matter protester. Remember the apologies by the political left when they said ‘All Lives Matter’ and the backlash from the African community? Boy I do. And the backlash when people say blue lives matter.. Well the Post displayed a short video with the claims that the protester was being kicked on the ground. Since that time we have learned that the ‘protesters’ were being paid by the Democrat party to deliberately incite violence at these rallys. A crime for sure, but again the left-wing press is nowhere to be found when that absolutely damning video and email evidence of CRIMINAL activity by the Democrat party was produced. It is not racism to disagree with these people.

The problem with an objective reading of the Post article, is that none of the 13 examples are Trump racism. The language is inflammatory which you can tell from the title. It probably makes readers feel a certain way, but it logically is not racism.

In direct contrast, the liberal party of America is openly racist. Black lives matter might have started with a good thought but it is nothing but an anti-white hate group which is more violent, more popular, and more numerous than the also=evil KKK itself. The group is openly anti-white, openly anti-law and represents an evil sickness within the African community. The KKK and Black lives matter are equal groups in all things racist. Images and video of white people being beaten, abused and attacked for the sole crime of being white are quite common, and instead of rejecting the hate, liberals embrace it even inviting them to the white house because it is a popular movement. And because white people have pale skin.

The liberal party of America is also sexist. The LGBT community leads the way in this with anti-marriage, anti-male rhetoric of the worst kind. What is worse is that the worst of these groups are openly supported by the liberal media as a solution to a problem which largely doesn’t exist. While decrying Hillary’s loss as sexism, the media openly campaigned for a Woman simply because she was female and a black man simply because he was black. While you may agree that we need a woman in the White house, the very statement is sexist BY definition! While a black man is in the white house, promoting him simply because he was black was 100% racist, and much of the liberal media did exactly that in both cases. I was raised that all people are equal under the law, not that some are more equal than others and that IS how I chose to live my life.

Why isn’t the goal simply finding the best person with the best qualities is beyond me. Like all of my friends, we don’t care one whit what color a persons skin is. We don’t care what sort of hardware they hold in their pants. I liked Fiorina (a woman) first and then Carson a very smart doctor who, if you give a crap about such things, also happened to have black skin. Contrast that with the liberals in power promoted a woman’s candidacy over any shred of common sense simply due to the SEX she represented. They wanted to repeat the feat they performed with a black man, so the so-smart yet math-ignorant elitists in media, who would control rather than report, espoused the virtues of A CROOK in public for nearly two years. Hillary Clinton is a liar, a cheat, a theif and would sell the United States of America at the drop of a hat — because she already has. The media directly cheated the public to do so as well, handing Hillary debate questions (we will likely find out more about that in the future), coordinating with the DNC on what questions to ask Trump, actively colluding to destroy Sanders. All of which they did while holding their heads aloof and pretending that it was simply reporting. It is not only CNN which has this problem.

So my Trump voting “problem” these left-wing fools can’t understand, is NOT sexist, it is NOT racist, it is not anger against billionaires, it is not the desperation of a failing middle class individual that drives our decision, and nor is it some confused hillbilly in a pickup truck with two teeth and a dog —– it IS logic. A skill that the left-wing schools in America have successfully removed from the curriculum’s of our universities and high schools. How that particular bit isn’t obvious to the media, is as shocking to me as not being able to point out the sun on a clear day at noon.

So watching those young folk storm the streets in protest makes me sick to my stomach. The evils they represent are completely unknown to them. They are oblivious to the hunger and anguish which will be created by a collapsing economy under the pressures of an all powerful central government. The lassez fair shoulder shrugs they give when you talk about manufacturing leaving the country combined with the angry vitriol over climate change doom when one is in evidence and the other is not, are just another symptom of their immense ignorance. I very much fear for America because while we might have a supreme court with a bit of common sense in the future, we simply cannot overcome that much stupid in the long term. When a crook can garner that much of the vote, what hope do we have? When people have their heads up their asses, literally protest and cry as that same crook is not put into the highest position of the country, how can any other form of logic be expected to form within their minds.

It cannot.

But for now I will relax a little while understanding the really good news; that our supreme courts eventual transformation into the extreme court, that increased tax rates on the highest taxed businesses in the world, and that increases in the endless draconian regulation of the US federal, state and local governments

…… won’t be happening today!!

And that's why my feeling after the election was one of relief.

I voted for Pence, but the only way to do that was to darken Trump's bubble on the ballot.

So I did.