New to the Blogroll

Up in Smoke.  @Up_in_Smoke on Twitter, too.

Fun With Seven Words

WTAE-ABC-4 Pittsburgh:  State Police: 5 Amish Men Assault Girls

It’s been a long time since an official police report said that suspects in a sexual assault fled the scene on horseback.

NYP:  [George] Carlin’s fans, family petition city to rename block in his honor

The only way to truly honor the late George Carlin in New York City is to name seven different blocks in his honor, one word at a time.

FNC:  Group Calls to Ban Pledge of Allegiance at Massachusetts Schools, Citing No Educational Value

Using that standard, they might as well close most of the schools.

Volokh:  The Puzzle of Black Women’s Marriage Patterns

Sorry, can’t do a credible study with such a low sample size.

Muncie (Ind.) Star-Press:  Many [Ball State University] freshmen unclear why they are in college

It’ll all become clear when Ball State and the University of South Carolina play a football or basketball game.

KNTV-NBC-11 SF:  [San Jose] Coffee Shop Cited for Nude Waitresses

The nudity I can handle.  Five bucks for a latte, now there’s the real crime.

 

Daily Mail:  Postal workers refuse to deliver Bible recordings because the CDs are ‘offensive’

Muslim letter carriers?

LAT:  San Diego power outage causes massive rush-hour gridlock

What explains the massive rush-hour gridlock every other day?

Daily Mail:  Security firm Blackwater makes a killing on Xbox war game where players are mercenaries

Remember the good ole days, when you had to pretend to be a real soldier under the aegis of a fictional government in order to kill people in video games?  Ahh, innocence.

NYP:  [Plaxico] Burress takes direct aim at Coughlin, Manning and fans

Fear not.  His aim isn’t any good.

Saturday Wrap-Up

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  P-D profiles school districts’ “border enforcement” policies.  In passing, it mentions that the East St. Louis district is requiring that all its students, both new and established, prove their residence.

Who in the HELL would want to sneak into the ESL District illegally?

*  Uh huh.  I kinda figured she had a personal motive.

She’s a municipal bonds broker.  Her job depends on people in the bond market having a high esteem of local governments’ credit worthiness.  Though S&P downgrading the Feds had nothing to do with local governments, if the Feds have a harder time borrowing money, then they won’t be able to spend as much money, ergo local governments won’t get the Federal grants they’re accustomed to getting now, and that will hurt their credit ratings.

*  Lambert might not survive if the Chinese Aerotropolis deal doesn’t happen?  Gee, that makes you former Bridgetonites feel a little better, doesn’t it?  Lambert just had to have that new runway that’s practically empty.

*  Speaking of Bridgeton…Can I draw any racial implications from this?  All I know is that food trucks, especially taco trucks, are really popular in areas where there are big Hispanic populations.

*  I suppose those were rather poor locks.  I can tell you this much — If they tried this at any gym that I am or have been a member of, they would have been noticed.

*  I’m not surprised that the former Miss Bush opted for a hyphenated name.  Who wants run around with the name “Lauren Lauren?”

*  News pops up in the damndest places — The NBC affiliate in COLUMBUS, OHIO insinuates that the Greyhound Bus shooting in Springfield was a racial hate crime.  None of the media sources in St. Louis or in Southwest Missouri did.  I don’t think this bus was destined for the Ohio capital, so what interest the NBC station there had in this, I don’t know.  But I’m glad they did.

NATIONAL

*  Greco-Roman:  Why would school districts go through all the time and trouble to implore students who obviously don’t want to be in school to come to school?

It’s all Greek to me.

Actually, it’s not Greek, it’s Latin:

Per capita, per diem.

Understand?

*  Don’t know about this.  Governor Walker and Attorney General Van Hollen seemed to be ready to use the hate crime statutes, though they took their good ole sweet time into indicating as such.  But when something calling itself “national socialist” comes to town asking for the same, it’s only going to scare the dorkpublicans away.  There’s a part of me that makes me think this is all a false flag operation from the left trying to discredit the politicians from applying hate crimes charges in this matter.

*  If they’re going to do that, then they should dig up Lee and Jackson and give their Earthly remains to some town that cares.

*  Another flash rob, this time in Chicago.  By black flash rob standards, this was a small crowd.  Again, though, a white victim — Just a coincidence, isn’t it?

*  Hey, whaddaya know — Dr. Dre is still important enough such that blacks to shoot other blacks.

*  Sure enough, this cocoa puff was cuckoo.  You might be surprised to find out that marijuana was involved.

*  I was thinking, this might have turned out way differently and much worse if Mr. Eels lived on campus.

*  I wrote earlier in this space that while I wasn’t really concerned with the repeal of DADT, the only thing precluding me from advocating its repeal is that I knew it wouldn’t stop there.

Like I said…

*  F&F:  Grenades, too.

It won’t be long before we find out that Obama, Holder et al. gave or wanted to give nuclear weapons to the Mexican drug cartels, probably to reduce nuclear proliferation.

*  Why?  I-M-M-I-G…you know the rest.  Lowering the wage equilibrium for everyone.

*  True, denser cities tend to have higher wages, but they also have far higher housing costs and other sorts of living costs.  So you’re worse off in a dense city.

*  The Machiavellian politics of gerrymandering:  Though Kansas did not gain or lose any House seats as a result of the 2010 Census, a heavily Republican state government is responsible for re-drawing the boundaries of its four existing districts.  Between 2006 and 2010, Democrats held two of the four districts in the state, which was a real aberration in a deep red state like Kansas.  To prevent that, the legislature is dividing up the liberal university town of Lawrence (University of Kansas) between two different Congressional districts, so that there aren’t enough liberals in one district to make a district go blue even during a blue wave election year.

*  I agree with the conclusion.  I just don’t agree with the reasoning.  The real answer?  You can’t build a first world competitive economy with a population of third world people.

*  Bank of America might shed some 40,000 jobs.  But here we go again — The story is dateline Bangalore, a city which I predict will have a lot more jobs, for some inexplicable reason.

*  The United States won’t allow white Canadians who have threatened suicide south of the 49th.  Brown “Canadians” who want to commit suicide bombings against embassy buildings and military posts?  They can come right on in.

*  The Cheap Labor Express, it just keeps rollin’ on.

INTERNATIONAL

*  May I suggest a third option?  All these European countries could have their own separate currencies.  You know, like they did until the late 1990s.

*  So let me get this straight:  He thinks that the riots happened because British prisons are too tough.

The only way they could be any more lenient is if they didn’t exist at all.

*  WikiLeaks:  Nigeria is pretty much part of the Caliphate now.

*  WTF?  This almost looks like a state funeral.

Yeah, we know, he was turning his life around.  We get enough of that bullshit on this side of the pond.

*  Kinda frightening, that there are enough Somalians in London such that you can go there to help fill the ranks of a Somalian government.  (See also:  Minneapolis, Stockholm, Oslo…)

Fun With Tortious Interference

Crud State:  The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care)

Don’t waste your time.  Nary a word about race or immigration or Hispanics.

FNC:  Colorado School Comes Under Fire for Hanging Saudi Flag Higher Than American Flag

He who pumps the oil calls the tune.

New Geography:  The Golden State Is Crumbling

Gee, I thought our diversity was our strength.

UK Telegraph:  Frenchman ordered to pay wife damages for lack of sex

Her alternative would have been having sex with a Frenchman on a regular basis, which is a real cause for monetary damages.

Daily Mail:  Beached 15-ton baby whale is saved and returned to its mother after gruelling EIGHT-hour rescue

The kid weights 15 tons, makes me wonder how much the parents weigh.

FNC:  San Francisco May Pass Public Nudity Restrictions

Say it ain’t so!  That would be like Texas limiting church construction.  Note the name of the man making this proposal.

NYDN:  Arkansas weatherman Brett Cummins found in hot tub with naked dead man wearing ‘dog collar’: police

In related news, applications to meteorology schools from San Francisco addresses have gone way up.

5:  Stephen Patrick McClure pleads guilty to not registering as sex offender

For the rest of his life, he’ll have to register as a non-registering sex offender.

5:  Man caught smoking dope in KC casino rescued after jumping in river

If Kansas City ever got the Summer Olympics, jumping in the river after smoking weed inside a casino would become an Olympic event, just to sell tickets to the locals.

The Hill:  [Scott] Brown: ‘Uncle Omar’ should be deported

So should Nephew Barack, but that’s jus’ me.

FNC:  Pelosi Peeved Republicans Opt Out of Rebuttal to Obama Speech

How to be racist:  Don’t criticize a black President.

MSNBC:  Trying to track the IHOP gun’s path from China

But not trying to track the IHOP killer’s path from Mexico.

Manhood

Truth About Guns:

There’s a long tradition among those of the anti-gun rights bent of explaining the motives of anyone who owns a gun by claiming that they’re actually trying to show that their penis is bigger than everyone else’s. That, or their compensating for a lack of, um, substance in that area. Never mind that this explanation conspicuously excludes women gun owners. Gun grabbers seem to have a need to impugn the motives and mental health of anyone with whom they disagree in the basest terms. This pseudo-Freudian, phallo-centric theory of the popularity of guns is not only shallow and lazy, it also exposes those who resort to it as the narrow-minded demagogues they are…

The latest proponent of this wankerized view of gun owners is Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald. To illustrate his point, he uses former NBA player and serial gun law violator Javaris Crittenton.

Crittenton, as you may remember, was booted from the NBA after he and Gilbert Arenas pulled guns on each other in the Washington Wizards’ locker room during an argument over a debt.

Crittenton now finds himself in much more serious trouble with a murder charge after an apparent drive-by shooting. What got under Crittenton hot and bothered enough to spray three people with lead? He suspected one of the three – not the one he killed – of stealing jewelry from him.

In a piece titled ‘No Manhood in The Barrel of a Gun‘, Pitts puts on his thinking cap in order to explain the large percentage of murders and non-negligent homicides.

There is a reason males, like Crittenton, accounted for about 90 percent of them; males tend to be more aggressive.

And there are multiple reasons young black men, like Crittenton, account for about half the arrests; one being that black men tend to be more hyper-vigilant about, and to guard more jealously against, perceived threats to their manhood.

You’d think having a chance at some sort of future would insulate you from those forces. You’d be mistaken. Crittenton, young, male and black, struck a dangerous trifecta.

Pitts isn’t a psychologist, but he likes to play one in the newspaper.

A man or boy has a psychological — perhaps even biological — need to prove his capability, durability, fearlessness, toughness. Recognizing this, it would be a worthwhile mission for families, schools, worship houses and other community institutions working toward violence reduction to formulate means that allow boys to fulfill that imperative constructively.

Motherhood and apple pie. Kinda. In Pitts’ view, it evidently takes a village to raise a child, and without making any suggestions of his own, he thinks it would be good to find ways for boys to constructively resolve differences. Here’s a suggestion: teach them right from wrong.

And then he resorts to the inevitable.

At the very least, teach them that a gun is not a penis. It’s a tragedy that Crittenton didn’t know that.

It’s a bigger tragedy that he’s not the only one.

Trying to explain away the frequency with which young black males turn to the use of a gun to settle meaningless perceived slights is a convenient way of absolving them of responsibility for their crimes. There are a great number of contributing factors Pitts conveniently avoids, not the least of which is a morally bankrupt urban culture in which many of these men are raised. A culture where too many children are raised largely by single mothers who exist largely on government support without a father anywhere in the picture.

Lots – in fact the vast majority – of gun owners with penises don’t lean out of passing cars in order to spray people who dissed them with gunfire. They’re responsible people who own guns for hunting, sport or personal protection. Attributing gun ownership to a need to prove length or girth is lazy thinking and beneath someone like Pitts.

What’s weird about this is that Pitts is trying to say that black men overcompensate their “manhood” issues with the use of the phallic instruments that are firearms.  But don’t they keep telling us over and over that black men are oh so blessed downstairs?

Can I Call ‘Em or What?

I’ve been saying in this medium for some time that Bank of America is on shaky financial ground, in spite of the outward appearances.

Uh huh……

The reason this matters is because the liberal talking heads have been using BoA as an example of a bank that both did subprime affirmative action mortgages and was profitable.  They can officially forget that bromide.

Checkmate

AP publishes photographs of Apollo astronaut foot tracks and abandoned lunar landing equipment.  The photos were taken by a lunar orbiter orbiting in a relatively low altitude (13-15 miles above the surface) orbit.

For a long time, I was conflicted about the “did we really land humans on the moon” theories.  On the one hand, it seemed that the notion that we could safely send human beings to the moon and back home on 1960s technology was too good to be true — My smartphone has more computing power than the computers that powered the Apollo missions.  On the other hand, there is the common sense notion of “what would it take to cover it up” if we really didn’t go.  So I was stuck in purgatory between “too good to be true” and “too hard to cover up.”  These photos have me just one iota short of convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that we really did go.

But that leads to the problem I realized all along even when I was stuck in purgatory — No matter what the answer turned out to be, I wasn’t going to be happy.  If we really didn’t go, then why the pretense and the massive cover-up?  If we really did go, then why haven’t we been back, established bases, and gone further, e.g. to Mars and beyond?  Especially since, like I said, a lot of people these days carry around in their pockets more computing power than the Apollo missions had.  Not only have we not been back and gone further, technically, the United States does not have the public ability at the moment to launch human beings into low Earth orbit.  All with our wonderful 2010s technology.  Hooray.  Not helping matters is that Obama wants NASA to focus on “global warming” and Muslims.

In the early 1970s, the rising costs of both Vietnam and the welfare state squeezed a lot of Federal budget line items, NASA included.  So there just isn’t the money to fund an ambitious manned space program.  The second and more important reason is that even if there was the money, there just isn’t the will or desire to go back to the moon, or go to Mars, or beyond — I’m convinced the only reason we sent men to the Moon and back was only because we wanted to beat another white country (in the case of the time, Russia) to the punch.  That’s a character flaw in white people — We generally don’t do ambitious things “just because,” we do them because we want to compete with other white people.  Russia could have sent men to the moon, but I guess they didn’t because they didn’t see the point — They were already beaten.  And we weren’t going to create permanent settlements on the Moon and go to Mars until the big bad Russians seemed to have the capability and desire to do the same, and since they didn’t, there was no point in our doing so.  Maybe China will develop a manned space program, but because the Chinese aren’t white, us Americans nor any other white country will feel the need to compete with them.  Did Christopher Columbus sail westward from Spain because the Spanish Crown wanted to send someone in that direction just for the hell of it just to see what was there?  No — The whole point was to establish rapid sea-borne trade routes to South and East Asia before the Italians and Portuguese could.  It’s just that Chris stumbled on two big continents in between Asia and Europe.

The good news here is that it was almost three centuries between Christopher Columbus’s accidental “moon landing” (so to speak) and the first independent European nation-state in the New World (the United States of America), sort of like a permanent manned base on the moon — Looking at the real moon with that sort of analogue of time, some humans should be living there permanently around 2300.  Of course, by then, there might not be any white people left on Earth, at the rate we’re going, and we don’t know if the Chinese can ever develop the ability to innovate and invent like white people have, beyond just copying other people’s inventions and using the cheap labor economies of scale to undercut the world on costs.

Jimmy Hoffa Jr

What happened to him?  I guess assimilation into the Democrat Party structure really didn’t do him any good.

In 2000, Hoffa endorsed Pat Buchanan’s Reform Party Presidential campaign.  Not long after PJB officially left the Republican Party in late 1999, and launched his Reform Party bid, the credible gossip was that he would pick Hoffa as his running mate.  In spite of what Hoffa has become now, I would have much preferred him as PJB’s running mate than whom he ultimately chose.

Run Silent Run Shallow

An eighteen-page essay last summer in the American Spectator magazine by Dr. Angelo Codevilla, a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University, entitled The Ruling Class, was all the rave last summer and fall on conservative talk radio.  At the time, I had a mostly positive but partially negative review of the subject matter, and another mild criticism later in the fall.  Last fall, Dr. Codevilla expanded the essay into what was said to be book length material.

Instead of buying it right when it came out, I waited around for used copies to show up on Amazon.  That’s just the cheap skate in me.  I finally got my copy in the mail about three weeks ago.  However, I was sorta burning a two-ended candle on three ends when I got it, so I didn’t even open the envelope, though I knew what was inside, because I anticipated needing to clear enough hours over several days to read what I thought was a really deep and involved book.

Turns out my worries were groundless.

One word:  Disappointing.

Not for the content.  The original essay was groundbreaking, and this book is also, assuming you never read the essay.

The problem is that the book is not that long.  (Who would have ever guessed that anyone, much less your ever lovin’ blogmeister, would criticize a book for not being long enough?)  While there are 147 numbered pages and 23 Roman numeral preface pages, only 14 preface pages have any real content (Dr. Codevilla’s own preface, and a Foreword by Rush Limbaugh before that, more on him below), and once the Arabic numbered pages begin, the real content ends at page 87, the final 60 pages are reprints of the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution and the bibliographical endnotes.  I mean, I’m no eco-nut, but save a few trees, why don’t you?  We already have a zillion places where we can read the Constitution and the DOI, we didn’t need another one, and certainly didn’t need it to pad the size of what was really nothing more than a very long essay pretending to be a book.

As for the 87 pages of content, Dr. Codevilla used the structure of his original 18-page AmSpec essay and hacked more material into it.  Fine as far as it went, but the trouble is, the new material really did very little for me, with one exception (see below).  Plain words, in spite of the size difference, if you read the shorter essay, you have already read this book.  Obviously, if you read the book and only the book, then you have also read the essay, because all the words that were in the essay were in the book.

Save your money, just re-read the original essay, or read it for the first time if you have not yet done so.

My original thumbs up and thumbs down bullet points from the essay still stand for the extra-long essay a.k.a. “book.”  However, I will add these things that I did not state last summer, but I really could have and should have, and only thought to say them after reading the “book” — One, Dr. Codevilla engages in too much Lincoln, Reagan and MLK worship for my tastes.  (This is me you’re talking to — ANY Martin Luther King worship is by definition too much.)  At several points, he notes and complains about the homogenization of American ruling class’s mindset, attitudes and ideology, compared to the local and regional elites of the past.  Well, where did that homogenization come from?  Answer:  Abraham Lincoln and his little military campaign.  True, the Union victory in the WBTS in April 1865 didn’t result in the country becoming homogenized by May 1865, but actions have consequences, even if the consequences take a lot of time to manifest themselves.  Dr. Codevilla portrays Reagan as outside the ruling class but victimized by ruling class-oriented treachery among his trusted lieutenants and advisers.  Like I said last summer, just because you’re not in the ruling class clique, does not mean he or I or you or anyone should automatically deify them or consider them a true blue ally of the “Country Class.”  Professional Reagan excuseologists (Dutcholators) like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin claim that on spending or immigration, Reagan was “duped” by Democrat promises of spending cuts or immigration control that they never followed through on.  (That dog doesn’t hunt on immigration, because Reagan controlled the INS, CPB and the Military — He could have had real border security any time he wanted.)  Problem is, you can only be “duped” so many times before you’re no longer a victim but you become a responsible perpetrator.  The pregnant question is this:  When does gullibility end and complicity begin?  Maybe in Reagan’s case, we’ll never know, but whether his Ruling Class-friendly agenda in his second term was a function of his gullibility or his complicity is immaterial to me — All that is relevant is that it happened, and it happened with the countenance of his ink pens.

But my main problem with the content, both book and essay, is that Dr. Codevilla portrays egalitarianism as a distinguishing characteristic of disparate “Country Class” mindsets and anti-egalitarian elitism as a Ruling Class staple.  In reality, it’s the other way around, but more complicated than that — The Ruling Class uses egalitarianism and enforces it, but as a front for their own elitism.  The “Country Class” is (or should be) very much anti-egalitarian, and it is (or should be) “guilty” of all the “isms” about which the Ruling Class and their sycophants complain.  Make no mistake about it, Dr. Codevilla is not a white nationalist, and the Ruling-Country Class dichotomy is not the same thing as white versus non-white.  It is a useful structural metaphor for our cause, though, and it doesn’t hurt matters that, in spite of Dr. Codevilla’s wrong-headed flubbing on this issue, the Ruling Class strongly corresponds with the anti-white establishment hell bent on race replacement, and the Country Class consists almost entirely of non-establishment whites who just happen to be victims of Ruling Class race policy.

In passing, I said yesterday here in my news roundup that the right wing should embrace outfits like Wikileaks, LulzSec and Anonymous, because even though they’re all left wing and all their leaks are done for mischievous left wing purposes, they wind up accruing to the right’s benefit.  After reading some of Dr. Codevilla’s paragraphs in the book (not included in the essay), especially one about President Woodrow Wilson’s tight control of international communications during the negotiations to establish then the American debate over joining the Post-WWI League of Nations, I should rephrase that — These “Leaks” operations are actually very invaluable for the Country Class, and are very much thorns in the side of the Ruling Class.  Ignore left wing or right wing for a moment here — Establishment and Ruling Class Republicans and Democrats are both sicking the lynch mobs after the Leakers.  (I therefore find Rush Limbaugh’s Foreword to be ironic, because Limbaugh has been very much a critic of Julian Assange, and too much the suckup and too much the professional excuseologist for Ruling Class Republicans, especially those named Bush — That and Rush’s unqualified support for our military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, in contrast to Dr. Codevilla’s implied opposition, leads me to think that Rush Limbaugh really had no business praising either the original essay or writing this Foreword.  Rush Limbaugh is far closer to the Ruling Class than either he or Dr. Codevilla would be comfortable to admit.  He’s just not close enough actually to be in the Ruling Class itself.)  The Country Class should embrace  these Leakers.  This goes back to one of my long-standing complaints — The real political spectrum is not and should not be left versus right, it should be up versus down, or Country vs Ruling.

Laboring With Headlines

5:  St. Louis named one of manliest cities in America

You’re welcome.

ABC:  S&P Rates Subprime Mortgages Higher Than U.S. Debt

Kind of ironic, when you think about it.   Hint:  Cause and Effect

FNC:  Parents Say South Florida Charter School Morphs Into Raunchy Adult Club at Night

I hate to say it, but there might be worse things happening in that regard inside the school during the day than in the club at night.

FNC:  California Superintendent Gives $800,000 in Salary Back to Schools

How white of him, literally.

Popular Mechanics:  Why Your Smartphone Will Become Your In-Car Infotainment System

Or, maybe, JUST F’N DRIVE AND PAY ATTENTION TO THE F’N ROAD AHEAD~!

P-D:  Washington U. fined for not disclosing lead-based paint in student housing

That’s right, you students attending one of the best universities in the country.  Don’t eat lead paint — that might make you stupid.

AP:  Hundreds of panties turn up along Ohio road

The bad news:  They can’t figure out how women’s panties wound up lying around on the side of a road.  The good news:  They’re not on women.

Gloucester (Mass.) Times:  Goose Populations Out of Control

The state also has a lot of turkeys, only it’s hard to vote them out.

NYP:  Man suffering from long, painful erections ‘tried to rob’ father for drug money

Now he’s going to do some long hard time.  Seems to me that those “drugs” are what got him into this mess.

NUFO:  UFO’s putting on a show over the skies of Kansas City; September 1st 2011

We dodged a bullet there — The aliens were probably in search of intelligent life to abduct, and found none.

Daily Mail:  Black England footballers suffer Nazi salutes and vile monkey noises from racist Bulgarian fans

I hope their feelings and self-esteem weren’t hurt.

NYP:  Oprah calls on tech bigs to save Web site

Surprise, she gives up her show and nobody wants to visit her show’s website anymore.  What were the odds?

Labor Day Weekend Wrap-Up

The pause that refreshes — I barely looked at the news all weekend.  But you know what that means…big big big stack.

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  I’ve been bitching about Peter Kindercare and his, ahem, “loving” ways for quite some time, hoping beyond hope that he gets some primary opposition.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news?  There is another Republican running for Governor.

The bad news?  Well, see for yourself.

*  Schnucks exiting the Memphis market, selling a majority of its relatively few Memphis stores to Kroger.

Hey, St. Louisan, do you see the irony in that?

*  Kansas City never had inter-district voluntary school desegregation in exactly the way St. Louis does/did, because the scheme that was forced upon Missouri’s taxpayers was to fund the KCPS as lavishly as possible to attract suburban whites.  (Blacks in Kansas City proper were never allowed to transfer to suburban districts.)  As you know, it was a big expensive flop.

Now, thanks to a Missouri Supreme Court decision of more than a year ago, and the possibility that the state yanks KCPS’s accreditation, the other side of the state just might get it.

NATIONAL

*  NYT comes out for Shari’ah, mainly on the “religious tolerance” angle.  Never mind the fact that Shari’ah and “religious tolerance” ought not be mentioned in the same universe, much less galaxy, much less solar system, much less planet, much less breath.

The proper reason to support anti-Shari’ah initatives and oppose Shari’ah Law in the United States is because the Federal Constitution mandates that the Federal government guarantee to each state a republican form of government.  Shari’ah Law contradicts a republican form of government.

*  More NYT shenanigans — Whines about the “racial bias” in the UCMJ application of the death penalty, but admits at the end that there hasn’t been a UCMJ-ordained execution since 1961.  Also conveniently they fail to tell us the racial disparities in the perpetration of crimes for which the UCMJ has the death penalty.

*  Again, more sanity from the online version of Glenn Beck.  He also ran with this on his radio show.

Now, will the snake oil salesman-like TV and live event version of Glenn Beck call the radio/website version of Glenn Beck a racist?

*  “The most dangerous place for a Chicago police officer is sitting in a Cook County courtroom.”  So recently implied the Chicago Daily Herald.

We all know why, because of all the gang banger’s gang banger cronies and relatives that show up to intimidate witnesses and jurors.

Not only should such trials be closed to the public, I like Steve Sailer’s suggestion that jurors aren’t in the courtroom for the live trial action, instead it’s recorded, the parts of the testimony to which the judge sustains an objection are edited out, then the jurors see the tape and make a verdict.  That way, it saves a lot of time for the jurors, and no Chicago ghetto thug ever sees their faces.

*  Ask one Mana Tahaie what she thinks about the separation of church and state.  Then ask her what she thinks about the separation of mosque and state.

*  It’s official — All the “anti-bullying” laws passed in today’s maniacal attitude about “bullying” (mark me — Orientation politics are behind a lot of this), are eventually headed for DumbLaws.com.

*  I partially agree with some of these proposals, but I don’t understand this paranoid panic about declining housing values, or the anxiety to get them back up.  They’re SUPPOSED to be falling because they were never supposed to be that high as they were in the last decade to begin with, or at the very least, they should not have risen that high so quickly.  It priced working middle class whites out of the market.

*  Dear Republican Party:  If this doesn’t show up in a 2012 media buy, then you’re even more stupid than I thought.  You should run and run hard with this kind of stuff because jobs and outsourcing ads helped Obama win enough working class white voters in crucial rust belt swing states in 2008 to win the Presidency.

*  Clever, but not clever enough.  What they’re forgetting to tell you is that the cost of incarcerating a convicted murderer for life in lieu of executing him will probably add up to more than the tab for carrying out a capital case.  The only difference is, it’s not the county budgets that bear prison expenses, it’s the state budget.  In such a case, there should be state financial help to county D.A.s when they take a capital case.

*  And just what kind of petitions that at least 5,000 13-year olds will sign in order for the White House to pay attention to them?  Answer:  Ginned-up activism from those 13-year olds’ public school teachers, who are mostly already Obamabots.

*  Lamercon blog Crud State moans about TSA PC.  Ironically, Crud State enforces its own brand of lamestream conservative political correctness, (think:  Buckley vs Birchers), which caused me to give up on Crud State.

*  Bronx house party goes awry.  Who would have guessed?

Money quote from the NYDN:  A 24-year-old man was rushed to Montefiore North Division in critical condition after being shot in the chest during the 3:39 a.m. shooting on E. 221st St. in Williamsbridge, officials said.  The teen sprayed the party with gunfire following some sort of dispute, cops said, blasting an 11-year-old boy in the right leg, a 13-year-old girl in the left thigh and a 14-year-old girl in the back. The children were rushed to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.

An 11-year old boy and two girls, aged 13 and 14, at a house party at 3:39 in the morning.  What would have possibly gone wrong?  Where are these kids’ parents?

*  Uberdork almost stumbled onto the truth.

Remember all that gun control that Sam Adams, Mayor of Portland, Oregon, demanded and got?  (I don’t know if they were ever able to be enforced, because of state pre-emption statutes.)  Turns out they didn’t work.

Here’s the money quote from Uberdork:

We’ve had too many African American teenage Portlanders murdered in this city, and we are going everything we can to stop it.

All he has to do is take out one word from that sentence, and he lands on the problem.  Unfortunately, if you do that, it makes his words after the comma a civil rights violation.

*  Reading between the lines, I see “race” a lot here, especially Chicano Hispanic.  Hint:  NAFTA, Mexican trucks.

INTERNATIONAL

*  “Chilling.”  Really, they’re probably air rifles.  If they were real guns, they’d all be in jail, and not just a for a two-year bid, like the typical murderer gets.

*  The UK doesn’t celebrate a September Labor Day, but if they did, this news would be ironic.  As it is now, it’s just plain disheartening.

*  Note to CNN:  Don’t hire anyone who got an F in geography.

*  Didn’t know Africa was so close, did you?  To me, it seems closer than that for some odd reason.

*  This is said in passing about a Kosovar Albanian Muslim accused of murdering American airmen, one of whom was born at Scott:

Although Germany has suffered scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Gee, to hear the media talk, all the terrorism in Germany comes at the hands of young white men with shaved heads and swastika tats.  And what’s this business about “the first attributed to an Islamic extremist?”  A good part of 9/11 was planned in Hamburg.

*  Hezbollah in Cuba.  That’s the part of the story we’re supposed to grab.  What jumps out at me is in the second paragraph — They came to Cuba from Mexico.

*  A lot of the right wing is opposed to operations like Wikileaks, LulzSec and Anonymous.  Why, I don’t know — A majority of their released leaks have accrued to the benefit of rightist causes.  For instance, LulzSec, in a lame attempt to torpedo enforcement of SB 1070 in Arizona, actually proved why SB 1070 was needed, because LulzSec leaks proved that Hezbollah is operating in Mexico.  (See above).  A leaked Wikileaks cable proves that the North American Union is actually on the establishment wish list, not just a conspiracy theory.

And now?  The newest round of Wikileaks cable releases shows that stereotypes exist for a reason.

*  More WikiLeaks:  Officials at the American embassy in Mexico didn’t buy the “Ninety Percent” bullshit.

*  Still more WikiLeaks:  Mugabe has terminal prostate cancer.

*  Farsi language Korans destined for Iranian consumption printed in China?  Full of errors?

That’s why we call it “LOLEngrish.”  I guess someone in Iran will start a website called “LOLFarsey.”

TECHNOLOGY

*  The one that folds up — Me likey, me wanty.

*  Yes, I believe this wasn’t an accident, just like I don’t believe losing the iPhone 4 prototype last year was an accident.  If you didn’t think the first one was an accident, the second one should change your mind.

It’s obvious what’s going on — AAPL is deliberately “losing” these things to create free publicity and marketing hype for the upcoming official release of the same technology.

HISTORY

*  If that part of the world ever was part of the Roman Empire, it, like anything north of the Danube River, wasn’t part of it for long.  Now, Vienna is on the south bank of the Danube, so it was definitely Roman territory.  But this training complex was unearthed east of town, meaning east/north of the Danube, which really wasn’t historically Roman, and only ephemerally so politically speaking.  Yet, in its short tenure as part of the Roman Empire, the Romans still built a big coliseum there.

MISC

*  Jerks and chauvinists get more?  Note to self…

*  The 2012 Chrysler 300 will have an option for an 8-speed automatic transmission.  Predictably, its fuel economy will improve compared to the current model year.

That begs the question:  Why hasn’t the CVT really caught on?

Labor Day Funny

The Argosy Alton Belle Casino has been running radio and TV spots in the St. Louis market, touting its upcoming 20th anniversary, which is also the 20th anniversary of riverboat gambling in the St. Louis area, as the Alton Belle was St. Louis’s first gambling boat after Illinois re-legalized riverboat gaming.

The add ends with the usual disclaimer that you have to be at least 21 to board.

That means the Alton Belle is not yet old enough to board or gamble on itself.

Tee Hee.

Contingency Plan…Stars with “B”

Reuters:

Fed asks BofA to list contingency plan: report

The Federal Reserve has asked Bank of America Corp to show what measures it could take if business conditions worsen, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the situation.

(snip)

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

What’s wrong with this picture?  The American Federal Reserve asks a bank called Bank of America about contingency plans, and the Reuters byline is from BANGALORE?

Methinks those “contingency plans” will be outsourcing even more BofA jobs to India.

Get College Ready: Pull Up Your Pants

See also:  Innocent cows had to die in order for people to comply with a half-witted law.

Reuters:

Florida lawmaker hands out belts under saggy pants ban

A Florida lawmaker is welcoming students back to school by handing out 200 leather belts to help them comply with a new state law that bans saggy pants on campuses.

Democratic State Senator Gary Siplin of Orlando pushed for six years for the so-called Pull Your Pants Up law, and finally got his wish last spring.

The state legislature voted overwhelmingly to enact the ban at the start of the 2011-12 school year, making Florida and Arkansas the only two states with such a widespread prohibition against saggy pants for students.

“We want our kids to believe they’re going to college, and part of that is an attitude, and part of that is being dressed professionally,” Siplin told Reuters.

I suppose Florida public colleges and universities ask applicants if they wear their pants at waste level, and throw all the “no’s” into File 13.  But from what I’ve seen recently, among college men of all races, sagging is worse on college campi than it is among boys and young men in general.  I guess it means that properly wearing your pants is like cursive writing or common algebra, one of those things you have to learn in order to get into college, but once you’re in, you’re smart enough so that you can unlearn it.

It’s just too damned bad that pulling your pants up doesn’t make you any smarter.