Monthly Archives: August 2014

A Very Tall Moron

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I always had a soft spot for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Maybe it is is freakish physique or his weird demeanor. I don’t know. He’s just a weird dude in so many ways I can’t help but like him. John Derbyshire talks about old weird America from time to time and Kareem is part of old weird America. He’s one part black guy, one part California weirdo, one part famous athlete and one part crazy philosopher. Lately Time Magazine has been letting him express his crazy side.

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?
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The answer can be found in May of 1970.

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

That’s not true at all. There was a big showy commission that addressed both Jackson State and Kent State. The Jackson State incident was due to the students trying to burn down the university and the cops being put into a situation for which they were unprepared. They basically threw a bunch of cops into the middle of a riot and they panicked. But hey, who has time for details?

And, unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare.

By focusing on just the racial aspect, the discussion becomes about whether Michael Brown’s death—or that of the other three unarmed black men who were killed by police in the U.S. within that month—is about discrimination or about police justification. Then we’ll argue about whether there isn’t just as much black-against-white racism in the U.S. as there is white-against-black. (Yes, there is. But, in general, white-against-black economically impacts the future of the black community. Black-against-white has almost no measurable social impact.)

Then we’ll start debating whether or not the police in America are themselves an endangered minority who are also discriminated against based on their color—blue. (Yes, they are. There are many factors to consider before condemning police, including political pressures, inadequate training, and arcane policies.) Then we’ll question whether blacks are more often shot because they more often commit crimes. (In fact, studies show that blacks are targeted more often in some cities, like New York City. It’s difficult to get a bigger national picture because studies are woefully inadequate. The Department of Justice study shows that in the U.S. between 2003 and 2009, among arrest-related deaths there’s very little difference among blacks, whites, or Latinos. However, the study doesn’t tell us how many were unarmed.)

This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.

And that’s how the status quo wants it.

Poverty is simply not an issue in modern America. I see a lot of poor people. Way more than Kareem does out their in Malibu. Most of the poor are fat. Most of them have plenty of drugs and booze. It’s not a life I want to live, but it beats starving or shivering in the cold. The poor have it better than any poor people on the planet.

The rest of it is more of the same nonsense he picked up from TV. Like I said at the start, I’ve always had a soft spot for Kareem. I wish him no harm. He would be better off just enjoying is remaining years and feeling good about having lived a better life than all but a handful of humans in the history of man. Kareem had a great life.

Welcome to Iran

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One of the most dangerous people in a modern democracy is someone that enjoys making fun of the people in charge. A king can be generous with the jester, as no one doubts who is king. Even depots can be indifferent to criticism from the mobs, because they have no power. The rulers of a democracy have to pretend to respect public opinion, so they hate the jester. it’s why the liberal scolds are now going after TV jester Gavin McInnes, trying to de-platform him.

Gavin McInnes, chief creative officer of Rooster in New York, has been asked to take an indefinite leave of absence following the publication of a transphobic essay.

Published earlier this week on Thought Catalog, “Transphobia is Perfectly Natural” has at publication received 2,082 comments. It has also sparked a “Boycott Rooster” movement, with Tumblr and Twitter accounts asking followers to let Rooster clients—Vans, Red Bull, Fox Sports and others—know they will not support companies that work with McInnes.

“Gavin’s views are his own and do not represent those of the company or its members,” said a Rooster representative. “We are extremely disappointed with his actions and have asked that he take a leave of absence while we determine the most appropriate course of action.”

McInnes co-founded Rooster in 2010 as an agency that would make ads for people who hate ads. He has appeared in the shop’s work for Vans, most recently as the man who explains how to do absolutely everything.

Prior to that, he co-founded Vice Magazine. McInnes has made controversial comments publicly before, with essays on Thought Catalog and contributions to Fox News. Though, due to the tone of his work, some are unsure if it is meant to be taken seriously.

McInnes could not be reached for comment.

If you go to the site where the article is published, you get this message:

The article you are trying to read has been reported by the community as hateful or abusive content. For more information about our reporting system head to our about page.

By the “community” they mean entitled weirdos and deviants.

The fact is we have reached some sort of tipping point. Sex is a biological reality, not a social construct. Humans are either male or female and that’s determined by genetics, not “assigned at birth.” The people butchering themselves to change their sex are not doing anything but butchering themselves. They suffer from a form of mental illness and should be treated as such. Apotemnophilia is treated as a mental disorder and that’s not materially different from what the “trans” people suffer.

Of course, this is not about biological reality. It is about fanatics trying to force their morality on the rest of us. This pagan cult we call liberalism is no different from the Muslim lunatics running Iran. They lack the ability to behead heretics in public, but that is not a permanent condition. Since they cannot murder McInnes, they will do the next best thing and that’s ostracize him. If he loses his job, they know the next guy will censure himself so as to avoid the same fate.

This madness cannot hold forever. Boys cannot become girls and two guys playing house is not marriage. If these obvious realities cannot be spoken in public, what other realities must be ignored? At what point does this disconnect from observable reality become untenable?  When do normal people stop ignoring these lunatics and begin to push back? Or, are we headed for the same fate as Iran?

The truth is, this sort of thuggery always leads to pushing around the wrong person, who then shoots one of the thugs. The thugs then ramp up their pogroms and more thug-murderers are born. Create enough people with nothing left to lose and they stop abiding by the rules that permit you to push them around. The only way forward is the intolerance we see in a place like Iran. The mullahs must always be paranoid of the people, else risk their revenge.

The Legacy of Slavery

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The legacy of slavery is primarily a two digit IQ. That is, according to fashion, slavery made a whole population too dumb to fend for themselves. At least that seems to be the case here.

Supporters of Mireille Miller-Young cite the “cultural legacy of slavery” and even the effects of pregnancy to explain why the feminist studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara would accost a teenager spreading a pro-life message on campus.

The pregnant 38-year-old who pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of theft, vandalism and battery after stealing and destroying an anti-abortion poster and injuring a a16-year-old activist, says she’s sorry for some of her actions and hopes to “makes amends through community service.”

An associate professor whose course work, which includes pornography and sex work, has gained her the nickname the “porn professor,” Ms. Miller-Young was set to appear for sentencing today (August 14) before Judge Brian Hill in Santa Barbara County Superior Court.

Think about that for a second. A university in a first world country employs someone to teach pornography and sex work. In fact they have a whole department for it.

But the hearing got moved to another courtroom before being rescheduled, perhaps Friday.

The News-Press obtained Ms. Miller-Young’s apology letter, which was part of a package of letters of support prepared by defense attorney Catherine Swysen, aimed at getting the lightest possible sentence for her client.

Three months pregnant at the time of the March incident, a portion of which was recorded on a cellphone camera, Ms. Miller-Young states, “I wish to apologize for my actions … The Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust group had a perfect right to come to UC Santa Barbara to express their views about women’s reproductive rights.”

“As much as the images they displayed were offensive and distressing to my students, and to me, I had no right to take their poster or destroy it,” she writes.

But the letter says nothing about the battery charge, which stemmed from Ms. Miller-Young scratching teenage activist Thrin Short.

Thrin’s 21-year-old sister, Joan Short, who also participated in the demonstration, isn’t buying the apology, telling the News-Press exclusively today, “I guess I would like to see her say to her students, ‘I did a really stupid thing. You shouldn’t follow my example.’ ”

In the video, posted online by Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, Thrin pleads with the associate professor to return the sign, at one point calling her a thief.

“I may be a thief,” a smiling Ms. Miller-Young replies, “but you’re a terrorist.”

She told UCSB Police that she was pregnant at the time and was “triggered” by the graphic images of abortion on the poster.

After initially pleading not guilty, she changed her mind and in July entered pleas of no contest.

Support letters submitted by defense attorney Catherine Swysen and obtained by the News-Press laud the respect and admiration Ms. Miller-Young has among her peers as well as her generosity when it comes to students.

Some of the letters were written on UCSB letterhead, presumably on university equipment and university time. Among them is one from history professor Paul Spikard, who states that his colleague is the object of “an energetic smear campaign that seems to have little to do with her person or her actions, and a great deal to do with fomenting racial hatred and rallying right-wing political sentiment.”

“It would be tragic if Dr. Miller-Young were sentenced to jail time or mandatory anger management classes based on the press’ portrayal of her as an Angry Black Woman.”

He cites no reports or stories to back up the claim.

Another letter of support, also on UCSB letterhead, comes from Eileen Boris, a professor in the Department of Feminist Studies.

Prof. Boris seeks clemency for her colleague, stating, “she was at the stage of a pregnancy when one is not fully one’s self fully, so the image of a severed fetus appeared threatening.”

“If she appears smiling on camera,” Prof. Boris continues, “she is ‘wearing the mask,’ that is, she is hiding her actual state through a strategy of self-presentation that is a cultural legacy of slavery.”

Pat Hardy, a member of Santa Barbara Friends Meeting (the Quakers) and president of a group called Alternatives to Violence Project California, urges Judge Hill to consider AVP’s conflict resolution workshops as part of Ms. Miller-Young’s punishment.

“These workshops are offered both in the community as well as 19 prisons throughout the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”

Ms. Hardy says workshops in Santa Barbara are being offered “to gang members and at-risk youth as well as a widely diverse group of adults.”

“I urge you to look beyond the recent act,” she writes to Judge Hill, “to explore the opportunity for (Ms. Miller-Young) to make a change by exploring the world of non-violence within this setting.”

Joan Short said any punishment that doesn’t include some sort of broader apology to students, not just for stealing the poster but also for the physical nature of the confrontation, does not go far enough.

“Before, some of the things she was saying was, ‘I had a right to do this. I set a good example for my students. I was showing them how to protect themselves,’ ” Joan said.

“I think she should publicly say to her students, ‘I acted completely inappropriately.’ ”

If you look at the collection of crotch warriors in the link to the UCSB Crotch Studies Department, you won’t find anyone who majored in math or physics. There are no “right answer” studies in there. This is why we have a trillion dollar student debt problem. A big chunk of that debt finances this stuff. There’s zero demand for these courses , but students are forced into these courses. Scan through the typical state university catalog and you find more worthless courses than useful ones.

But, that’s life in a social democracy. The game is about shifting costs onto others through manipulation of the system. These broads are making lavish salaries by gaming the higher ed system. An army of worthless administrators fill up offices pushing paper around like African bureaucrats. The bill for all of it ends up in the hands of the dwindling number of people pulling the cart.

The Weirdness of Texas

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Texas is the new cool place these days. There are a bunch of TV shows shot in the Lone Star state. Austin has become the hipster place to be. An Austin aesthetic has developed that is showing up all over. It’s like white trash meets SoHo. It helps that the economy is booming. The people who claim to measure these things say more jobs have been created in Texas since the bust than the rest of the states combined.

But, it is a very weird place with a distinct third world vibe to its politics. This story is a good example. The local DA gets drunk and decides to drive around, getting caught by the cops eventually. Anywhere else, even deep blue states like Massachusetts, the DA would have resigned. If not, then the rest of the crooks would have backed efforts like Perry’s in order to force the issue. Not Texas.

A Travis County grand jury Friday indicted Gov. Rick Perry on two charges related to his effort last year to force District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign after her drunken driving arrest.

Grand jurors charged Perry, 64, with abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony, and coercion of a public servant, a third-degree felony. The first charge carries a punishment of 5-99 years and a fine of up to $10,000. The second charge is punishable by 2-10 years and a fine of up to $10,000.

The indictment stems from Perry’s threat last summer to withhold $7.5 million in state money from Lehmberg’s office unless she step down – a threat he later carried out by vetoing an appropriation in the state budget.

Mary Anne Wiley, General Counsel for Perry, said in a statement following the indictment: “The veto in question was made in accordance with the veto authority afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution. We will continue to aggressively defend the governor’s lawful and constitutional action, and believe we will ultimately prevail.”

Immediately, after the indictment was announced, Perry, who is poised to make a second run for president, tweeted: “Help RickPAC elect candidates who support a strong border, new jobs, smaller gov’t, and fiscal responsibility.”

The special prosecutor in the case, San Antonio attorney Michael McCrum, said he was confident with the strength of the charges filed against Perry.

“There has been an immense amount of work that has gone into my investigation up until this point,” he told reporters after announcing the indictment. “I have interviewed over 40 people who were related in some way to the events that happened.”

He later added: “I looked at the law. I looked at the facts. and I presented everything possible to the grand jury.”

This is the same court that hounded Tom DeLay out of office. A lunatic named Ronnie Earle terrorized the state for years, abusing his office with the full support of the kooks in Travis County.

Asked about his thoughts of Perry’s ability to do his job as governor, McCrum said: “I took into account the fact that we’re talking about the governor of a state and a governor of the state of Texas, which we all love. Obviously that carries a level of importance, but when it gets down to it, the law is the law, and the elements are the elements.”

McCrum said he will speak with Perry’s lawyers Monday to arrange for the governor to be booked and formally notified in court of the charges against him.

Ray Sullivan, a former chief of staff to the governor who served as his spokesman when he ran for the 2012 presidential nomination, said of the indictment, “I think it certainly will be a big deal with the liberal media – Slate, Salon – and therefore for the national media. It is beyond ridiculous that Travis County is pursuing the governor, after letting the seriously drunk, police-disrespecting DA stay in office.”

Some Democrats were calling for Perry to step down.

Again, you see the weirdness of Texas. Anywhere else this either gets laughed out of court or laughed off the stage. In Texas, it is how they do politics. I wonder if it is the unusual combination of people. If you look at this great map from American Nations, you see Texas is a mix of independent Mexicans, chaos-loving Scots-Irish and Anglo-Saxon rejects. That’s not the genetic stock one looks for in a stable democracy. Great warrior class, but not what you want in local burghers.

 

Advice From Madmen

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Karl Denninger has been kicking around paleocon and paleo-libertarian circles for a long time. He used to turn up on radio programs hosted by old school paloes, but most of them have died off now. Denninger is right about a lot of things, but he has a lot of weird ideas too. You got the sense it takes a maximum effort to will himself into a zone within striking distance of normal. At any moment, the string could snap and he would spiral into lunacy.

Example.

I’ve posted a handful of locked-comment Tickers lately (yes, I still do add features once in a while to the software, and this is one of the recent additions — the ability to pre-lock a submission so it’s read-only.  Fancy that.) and have had a couple of people ask via an invite-only BBM channel I set up “what’s dat.”

The software he uses is awful. The comments appear way down the page, so you would not know they exist if you did not scroll well past the post. Denninger is terribly thin skinned so the comments are heavily regulated and salted with his rantings about comments he does not like. His obsessing over it is very weird. The fact that he has an invite-only Blackberry channel is hilarious. It’s like grown men building a tree house for his friends and no girls allowed.

The rest of the post has nothing to do with the first graph so maybe his meds kicked in at that point. If you look at his bio on Wikipedia, there is a summary of his business career. Like Mark Cuban, Denninger got rich from the free money era, without ever creating much of any value. Further, his company could only exist because he got a government contract. Now he is a retired guy ranting about the excesses of government and the excesses of money creation.

Denninger would not be the first person driven mad by the realities and contradictions of his own life. Denninger knows how government awards contracts and he knows how fake money works. His insights, therefore, are useful. On the other hand, it is hard to be a critic of those things if you have befitted from them. It’s not impossible, but it requires a mental discipline and degree of self-awareness that he clearly lacks.

You Don’t Matter

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So, you think your vote counts. You’ve been one of those guys lecturing us for years about voting for the most rightward leaning viable candidate. Anyone voting for a third party was just voting for the bad guys, by taking a vote away from the viable alternative, always a Republican, of course. Maybe you write checks to the GOP or volunteer to work for a local candidate. You really think it matters. If you just keep trying, things will turn and the pols will pass the right measures.

Well, you’re an idiot.

A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The startling study, titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.

Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page’s research “shattering” and says their scholarship “should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government.”

The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.

The study’s findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants “threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs,” and 63% believe “immigrants place a burden on the economy.”

The solution, say the scholars, is a reinvigorated and engaged electorate.

“If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened,” conclude Gilens and Page.

The word ‘democracy” does not mean what people think it means. Instead, it is used to mean the people picking between the options the rulers offered them. When Muslims vote for Sharia, no one celebrates democracy in action. When the extremist right wing extremists of the most extreme kind win an election, we hear that democracy is under assault. These days, democracy is about the result and not the process.

But, that’s just another example of the idiocy of our age. Democracy is a process and a shabby one. One reason our government has grown increasingly corrupt over the last century is we have more democracy, not less. In 1914, Senators were still selected by their state’s legislatures. Blacks and women were wisely barred from voting in many states. The poor and the stupid were discouraged from voting. Like or not, you had a better class of voter 100 years ago.

That’s why the average voter counted for much more than it does today. The typical Congressman knew he was being judged by a reasonably intelligent electorate. There were plenty of dopes, but the ratios made it hard to fool the majority most of the time, so they had to be more clever at foolling the people. Today, cobbling together a majority of mental midgets is too easy.

Even if the people were geniuses, democracy is no way to run a country. It works fine in the town and village. It may even work fine in a city or county. Once you get to the state level it starts to fall apart, which is why state’s have legislatures, constitutions and governors. At the national level it becomes a beauty contest. Obama beat Clinton because young and charming beats old and cranky. Obama beat McCain because young and charming beats old and cranky. Plus, it was his team’s turn.

Even a nitwit can figure out if his local school is running properly. He can see if the roads are paved and the sidewalks are in good condition. He can figure this stuff out and place the praise or blame on the person responsible, when there is a person responsible for it, like dictator or prince. At the small scale, the mayor or county executive can be blamed. If the mayor or town council ignores the people, the people can go to their house and beat the hell out of them.

It is not perfect. Nothing is, but the irony of democracy is the government becomes less responsive to the people in the areas most important. Instead, the state becomes obsessed by obscure things like equality or dignity. You keep voting for different people and they keep doing the same things, because that’s just how it works. The people really in charge are beyond the reach of democracy.

Robin Williams

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I was never a big fan of Robin Williams. His TV show, Mork & Mindy, was funny for a sitcom, but it was so long ago I no longer remember much about it. I think one of the stars was murdered by a stalker. None of his movies jump out to me. People tell me Goodwill Hunting is great, but I never watched it. These things are a matter of taste and for whatever reason Robin Williams never did anything for me.

The public reaction to his decision to kill himself is interesting to me. I read a lot of sites and always read the comments. I can’t recall the last time I saw a reference to Robin Williams. Yet, it seems everyone is now commenting upon the guy, as if he was a national treasure, who died after a heroic fight with cancer. Because he was a weird and deeply troubled comic, everyone is trying to draw lessons from his death, other than the fact he was a deeply disturbed person who killed himself.

This story about his money trouble is not terribly flattering.

Robin Williams‘ tragic death at age 63 came as a shock to the world who knew him only as a lovable comic figure. But a source close to the Mrs. Doubtfire star tells RadarOnline.com that in addition to his addiction struggle, the actor recently confided to a family friend that he had “serious money troubles,” and was worried about his family’s financial security.

According to a family friend who had spoken to Williams recently, “All he could talk about were serious money troubles. There were clearly other issues going on and Robin sounded distant during the telephone conversation. Robin was known for being so generous to his friends and family during the height of his success, and would help anyone out that needed it.”

“There was also frustration that Robin expressed at having to take television and movie roles he didn’t want to take, but had to for the paycheck,” the source said, referencing his recently announced decision to film Mrs. Doubtfire 2. “Doing sequels was never Robin’s thing, and he wasn’t that excited at having to reprise the role of Mrs. Doubtfire, which was scheduled to start filming later this year.”

Robin Williams made an enormous amount of money so it took an enormous amount of effort to squander it. Most people in serious money trouble are worried about making rent and buying food. Williams was worried about making a sequel. A lot of people in  would give their left nut to be so burdened. I’m sure suicide sounded like a great way out his troubles, but is hard to see how that is going to help his family. Thanks to his selfish act, they are facing even bigger financial problems.

Then again, maybe they are relieved of a greater burden now. That is the thing seldom discussed about suicides. The people who do it are usually a burden on their families and friends for a long time. Their constant depression and demands for attention put a lot of pressure on everyone around them. It is very frustrating for family. They try to help the person, but there is little they can do but suffer along with them. Inevitably, there’s a fair amount of bitterness and resentment.

When I was a kid I stopped a family member from killing herself. They were on some sort of meds and tried to swallow the whole bottle. I’ll never know if she staged it so I would stop her or it was just dumb luck. Either way, I forever resented that person afterward. Even as a kid it struck me that the person was being horribly selfish. There are some things you can never ask of another person. If you do, you fail at the basic human contract, the unwritten and unspoke agreement.

I suppose that’s why I can’t muster much sympathy for Robin Williams. Even if I was a fan, I’d still be thinking about his poor family and the horrible things he put them through and what he has done as his final act. The man leaves three kids who will forever be haunted by the fact their father killed himself. It’s hard to respect a man who does such a thing. Suicide was his last act of cowardice.

Then there is the proportionality. Robin Williams was a comic and an actor. Not one single life on this planet would be significantly altered if he had decided to be a plumber or a truck driver. If Obama drops dead, the world changes in a big way. If a famous scientist dies, then we have a great life worthy of mourning. If a doctor drops dead, his patients will suffer a real loss. That’s worth remembering. The death of a man who got rich pretending to be someone else is just not that big of a deal.

The World Wide Leader In Lunacy

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Everyone that watches sports knows ESPN has become this weird fever swamp of liberal lunacy. They slobber over Obama, for example. They find a reason to do an Obama story every day, despite the fact Obama knows nothing about sports and they are supposed to be a sports network. They are suspending someone for crime think every week it seems. That and they have notorious bigots like Michael Wilbon and Kevin Blackistone on regularly.

What’s stunning to me is how they work so hard to destroy the very things that allow them to exist. For example, they have been cheering the court cases against the NCAA, even though ESPN counts on college sports to survive. Yet, their on-air talent is forever cheering the demise of college sports. We see the same stuff with the NFL and major league baseball. The only sports they promote are soccer (anti-American) and basketball, anti-white. Otherwise, they are anti-sports.

Now we have one of their retarded people – and let’s be honest here. Kevin Cowherd probably has an 85 IQ – is bashing their customers for NASCAR. Further, he is trying to piss off the part of the country most crazy for sports – The South. But, as we know from watching these lunatics, they will jump on a grenade to spite the bogeymen. There are no more important bogeymen than white southern men.

Moonday on The Herd, ESPN’s Colin Cowherd partially blamed what he described as NASCAR’s southern “eye-for-an-eye culture” for the tragic death of driver Kevin Ward Jr., who was run over by three-time champion Tony Stewart Saturday at the Canandaigua Motorsport Park dirt track. As for Stewart, Cowherd said, “I watched the video seven, eight times: He revved up, other racers put on the brakes.”

Cowherd started off the 11 a.m. EST hour with a rant ripping the “machismo” perpetuated by NASCAR and what he repeatedly called the “eye-for-an-eye” worldview of the South. During his opening monologue and his follow-up discussion with NASCAR analyst Marty Smith, Cowherd criticized the sport for failing to ban running on the track and other dangerous displays of “bravado” long ago, and suggested a number of times that three-time champion Tony Stewart could have avoided hitting Ward.

Cowherd began the segment by citing NASCAR’s embrace of dangerous displays of masculinity and “settling the score,” saying that it, like the NFL, NHL and boxing, deliberately allowed those elements to draw in a larger male audience.

Maybe what they need is some homosexual drivers. Put a couple of trannies out there and magically it will be better!

War on STEM

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Progressives are not just obsessed with destroying competitors. They seem determined to pull down the pillars of civilization. Their destruction of the America health insurance system is a great example. There’s no reason to explain the mayhem they are causing, other than a desire to destroy. It is possible that it is just gross incompetence, but it sure looks deliberate. This piece in IBD the other day is a good example. All of these results were predicted and avoidable. Yet, here we are.

Another example is the continued assault on the STEM fields.

Tracy Van Houten has always been infatuated with space. Over the course of two decades and two degrees, that love took Houten from a pre-engineering class in high school to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she works as an aerospace systems engineer on groundbreaking projects like the Mars Curiosity Rover.

Like many female engineers, though, the 32-year-old mother of two has encountered challenges one might expect in a field where nearly 90% of professionals are men. Colleagues have occasionally asked Van Houten — sometimes the only woman in the room — to take notes during meetings and plan work parties. At times she feels her ideas aren’t acknowledged or heard.

Van Houten must also make difficult choices in order to juggle work and family — a balance male engineers may not feel as compelled to achieve. When her second child was a year old, she turned down the opportunity to join a team operating Curiosity once it landed on Mars, because of the grueling schedule.

A common assertion from feminists is that women have to make choices that men do not face. There’s never a mention of the reverse. Men certainly face choices women do not face. Both are a product of biological reality, but determined to be a social construct, because, well, you go girl.

Yet, Van Houten remains a dedicated engineer, and that’s not always common according to a new survey. For the past several years, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have surveyed 5,300 women with degrees in engineering. They found that females frequently leave the profession because there aren’t enough opportunities for career advancement, or because they need to fulfill parenting or caregiving responsibilities in the absence of family-friendly work practices and policies.

The research indicates that leaning in to an engineering career may not lead to leadership prospects or a lifelong vocation, as women may hope. Instead, these women find themselves working for unfriendly or even hostile supervisors who show little interest in helping them advance professionally or designing a flexible work schedule to accommodate family obligations. The survey respondents also reported being discouraged by antiquated attitudes expressed by male colleagues and feeling isolated in a “male-centric” workplace.

Notice how men are supposed to accommodate women by “helping them advance professionally.” Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it is something a smart business owner should do. Who knows. What this is, however, is a childish demand by girls unprepared for the real world. Suck it up toots.

Women, in fact, comprise about 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female. In Fouad’s survey, a third of the women who left the field in the past five years did so to take care of children at home. Twelve percent reported a dearth of opportunities to advance in their career.

Engineering, for example, is not sales. The value of an engineer is cumulative. A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work, not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases. Her peers have advanced to supervisory positions. Odds are, the mom returning to work has better options outside of engineering.

To help both employees and their employers address these problems, SWE recently published a “playbook” that offers suggestions on how to better integrate work and personal commitments. Among the recommended policies are flexible scheduling practices, maternity and adoption leave, and on-site health and wellness resources.

Fouad, along with Bierman, believes that companies must start evaluating their policies for both sexes in order to effectively change attitudes in the workplace. As more men feel comfortable insisting on a sensible schedule, such requests will become the norm and not just the domain of female employees. Similarly, as more women view engineering as field that accommodates and encourages all of its professionals, they may increasingly join its ranks.

It’s not hard to see where this is going. The diversity rackets started the same way. First they sent out “helpful” play books. Then they sent out letters reading, “Nice company you have there. Too bad is something were to happen to it.” Not long after, the HR departments were flooded with women and minorities running diversity clinics. Jesse Jackson is out shaking down Silicon Valley. The more subtle types will be demanding engineering and technology firms start hiring girls – or else.

Put another way, it is convert, or else.

Some Pro Tips

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Don’t run in traffic: Over the weekend, the sports people could not stop talking about race car driver Tony Stewart driving over another driver on a dirt track. The dead driver, wearing a black suit, got out of his wrecked car and ran onto the track. He made every effort to get in the way of Tony Stewart, because the guy thought Stewart intentionally caused him to wreck. The lighting at the track looks pretty bad. Maybe Stewart should have seen him. Maybe he should have done something different. Who knows.

As citizens, we have a responsibility to conduct ourselves so as not to cause harm to others. It is a basic responsibility on all people everywhere. Otherwise, you cannot have human settlement. Race car drivers, for instance, have to try and avoid hitting other drivers or wrecking their cars. That responsibility stops where your responsibility to you begins. You are in charge of you. Your life means more to you than anyone else so you get the primary duty of guarding it.

That means when you run into traffic and try to jump in front of speeding cars, you own the consequences. Sure, the other guys have to take reasonable measures to avoid you, but if they don’t it is still on you. It is sad that a young man is dead and it is sad that the other man will now have to carry that with him. That’s all on the dead guy. The obvious advice here is simple. If you don’t want to be run over by Tony Stewart, don’t run in front of his car on the race track.

Don’t fight with the cops: Look, the cops are out of control. We all know that. In the land of the free, there are close to 50,000 SWAT raids every year. Fewer than ten percent involve an armed stand-off or kidnapping. We have foolishly turned the local police force into a paramilitary force. The difference is that the local yokels are rarely qualified to guard a lamppost, much less handle mil-spec hardware in urban areas.

That does not mean you fight the cops. When you do that, they may shoot you. When confronted by an armed retard with a sour attitude, you are wise to do as you are told and let the lawyers figure it out. Most cops are decent enough people and just want to get home to their families. Some are nuts and others are just stupid. You can’t know any of this at the time of contact. Don’t fight the cops.

Don’t start riots: Black people have a lot of unsolvable problems, because blacks are not equipped to live in white societies. African used to be called the white man’s graveyard, because whites are not built for Africa. This reality is what it is, but that does not mean you cannot have some sympathy for blacks. There are some things society can do to make things a bit easier for them.

The thing is, when you riot and burn down your neighborhoods, people start to think maybe the bad guys are right. When oleaginous scumbags like Benjamin Crump is hired to represent the rioters, people are even less inclined to sympathize. The family of the victim probably has a legitimate claim and they should get representation. There are plenty of local lawyers looking for work. People will be more inclined to listen if you avoid hiring a human hemorrhoid as your mouthpiece.