Blog

January 5, 2024

Nikki Haley is trying to beat Kamala Harris in becoming the first Asian-American president. She had better hope that Biden lives out his term.

“Elite” college campuses are not the only places inhibited by the pro-Hamas crowd. It seems that the “progressives” in Washington government jobs have been infected as well. Did you see where 17 Biden campaign staffers anonymously wrote a letter opposing his stand on the Israeli-Hamas war? The staffers called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to military aid to Israel. Obviously this is a bunch of cowards or else they would have penned their names to the letter and they should resign or be fired. The chief of staff to the controller at the Pentagon also called for a cease fire. The Wall Street Journal reports that 500 appointees and staff from 40 agencies, including the National Security Council and the Justice Department, have sent Biden a letter demanding for a cease-fire and “de-escalation” between Israel and Hamas. Also more than 1,000 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development have signed a similar letter. Members of the State Department also objected to the administration’s policies. Then there were the gutless congressional staffers on the Capitol steps wearing masks to express their displeasure. One minor official in the Department of Education did resign over the administration’s stance in the war as did one in the Department of Education. All the rest should do the same.

Is it just me? I am tired of every article on race, DEI, and Critical Race Theory saying “after the killing of George Floyd”. I bet if young people were asked who is the most prominent black person in American history, they would answer George Floyd.

This year’s college football payoffs featured two teams from the Big Ten (Michigan and Washington) and two from the SEC (Alabama and Texas). I have no doubt that Washington and Oregon will continue to thrive in the Big “10” but have my doubts about USC and UCLA. But it will be interesting to see how Texas and Oklahoma will fare with an SEC schedule.

Claudine Gay, forced out as Harvard’s president, says that her ouster was due to racism and was an attack on the “pillars of American society”. She refuses to acknowledge the obvious – that her elevation to Harvard’s presidency was due to her race, gender and progressivism. A white male with the same resume would never even gotten an interview. As to the attack on the “pillars of American society” she is referring to the education establishment. Yet given the rot at the core of American education as evidenced by the student pro-Hamas protests, abuse of DEI, Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ indoctrination, it needs to be attacked. She obviously is not going quietly and her whining is tiresome.

When did we get the mandate not to call illegal immigrants illegal? Now they are just “migrants”.

Post George Floyd, the Oracle Who Names Stuff dictated that we now capitalize “black” but not “white”. The rebels out there responded by starting to capitalize “white”. Obviously a bunch of racists. Me? I refuse to capitalize either, unless its my name.

A climate scientist (Willie Soon) has confirmed what I have been saying for years that climate change is due to the sun’s axil tilt and not from carbon dioxide. We got global warming when the ice age ended and there were no automobiles or weed eaters then.

I’ve also said that if the fossil fuel energy companies had put the first wind turbines the greenie weenies would have wanted them banned given how many migratory birds were being killed.  Now the wind farm contractors are admitting that the sea based turbines are killing all the whales and dolphins that are dying in their vicinity. Yet not a peep from the green crusaders.

If systemic racism is due to the government I might be in favor of reparations. More on that later.

January 3, 2024

It was only a matter time until Claudine Gay yelled “racism!” regarding her resignation from the presidency of Harvard. I wonder if she knows that one of her harshest critics, Carol Swain is black? Also, the president of Stanford resigned due to charges of plagiarism and he is white with an impressive resume that dwarfs Gay’s meager one. Penn’s president resigned earlier and she is white. I think that Gay’s holding out was because she is black. If she were white she would have been long gone. It not surprising that Gay’s defenders – who should know better – are also screaming racism. And it is certainly no surprise that Al Sharpton has taken up her cause. 

By the way, what do Claudine Gay, Kamala Harris and Ketanji Brown Jackson have in come (other than they are all “progressives”)? They are all married to white men. I have said for a number of years that because among blacks, wormen earn 64% of the undergraduate degrees, 72 percent of masters and 66 percent of the doctorates that they would start to look elsewhere for a husband. While men more typically will marry a woman with less education, that is seldom true for women.

In one of the weekly food specials I get is a buy one get one for vegan burgers. You can save $1019! Huh? Ten dollars for vegan patties that approximate a food like substance? I am not a red meat buyer. I eat venison because I am a deer hunter and have not consumed any other red meat since 1971. But I never understood the fake meat thing and tried it only once to see what the shouting was about. It was awful, a ghastly experience not to be repeated.  Its not cheap ($10.19) and it is not particularly healthy. Just look at the ingredients and ask yourself if you really want to ingest that stuff. Real meat is healthier (and apparently cheaper). I wonder when the ersatz concoction will disappear from the grocers’ shelves. More than likely, they are there only so the grocer can virtue signal to the greenie weenies. A Beyond Meat “burger” has 22 ingredients:

• Water
• Pea protein isolate
• Expeller-pressed canola oil
• Refined coconut oil
• Cellulose from bamboo
• Methylcellulose
• Potato starch
• Natural flavor
• Maltodextrin
• Yeast extract
• Salt
• Sunflower oil
• Vegetable glycerin
• Dried yeast
• Gum arabic
• Citrus extract (to protect quality)
• Ascorbic acid (to maintain color)
• Beet juice extract (for color)
• Acetic acid
• Succinic acid
• Modified food starch
• Annatto (for color)

I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t feed this to my dog. She eats venison which contains no additives and no artificial colors.

When fake meat was introduced and the companies went public, their stock prices in the IPOs were high. Beyond Meat was trading at $238 a share. Now its around $10 a share. Pity the fools who bought the IPO. Hell of a virtue signal if you ask me. Then reality set in. All the fake meat companies are struggling and some have shut their doors in the face of tepid consumer demand. It is though people bought the stuff and discovered how awful it was. Given that the climate zealots want to ban cows I am not surprised that the Biden crowd didn’t try to mandate fake meat to force it down our throats – much like they are doing for EVs.

Do you sleep with your socks on? I sometimes do in the winter when my feet are cold under the covers. Invariably I find myself shedding them sometime in the night because I’ve gotten too toasty (there’s a pun in there somewhere). I thought I was one of the few until I read a Wall Street article on January 2^nd ‘If You Sleep in Socks You’re a Psychopath.’ Health Tip Kicks Up Controversy”. Well I am certainly not a psychopath and found that “one small survey suggested 63% of us don’t sleep with socks on, 25% sometimes do, and nearly 12% regularly do.” I am in the 25% but in the winter its 50-50. The journal also noted some benefits to sock wearing to bed: “A study published in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology found that young men fell asleep 7.5 minutes faster, slept 32 minutes longer and woke up 7.5 times less often than those not wearing socks.” Who knew? I am no longer a young man but as an old man I am going to wear my socks (clean ones not the ones I wore all day) to bed more often to see if I get to sleep faster, sleep longer and wake up less often. Starting tonight!

This is the beginning of the worse time for sports. College football is over except for the National Championship game. I hate Michigan. I am not a pro football fan and watch it if I don’t have anything else to do. Then I only watch the highlights on the NFL network rather than an entire game. I don’t care for basketball be it mens, womens or NBA. Spring Training begins on February 24 and I am counting down the days. The Braves added Chris Sale (a k a the Blade because he is so skinny). A great addition to the starting rotation provided he can stay healthy. Last season was one of the most fun I have had as a Braves’ fan. My youngest granddaughter just graduated from Georgia and her first job is at MLB headquarters in New York! I am trying to get her to go into Rob Manfred’s office and suggest two things. First, that no team gets a bye. None of the best teams made it to the World Series because they got rusty sitting and waiting. Second, that instead of Jackie Robinson Day where all players wear 42,  only let the Dodgers wear 42 and all the other teams wear the number of their first black player.

January 3, 2023

Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has finally resigned. The Babylon Bee (which everyone should read) says satirically that her speech was plagarized from the Gettysburg Address. She returns to the faculty. I wonder if she keeps her $1 million per year salary. The question is will Harvard hire someone equally mediocre going forward. Prof. Carol Swain whose work was plagiarized by Gay wrote the most devastating critique of a fellow academic that I have ever read. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 17 as “Claudine Gay and my scholarship.” I recommend it to you. Here is an excerpt. 

“Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university. 

Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard.”

Ouch!

It was interesting that at first Harvard’s Board stood by Gay and defended her testimony before Congress on the student pro-Hamas demonstrations and the antisemitic harassment of Jews on campus. Then came the charges of plagiarism. Again the Harvard Board stood by Gay despite the fact that plagiarism is perhaps the most egregious crime that a scholar can make in academe. (A personal note: I forced a PhD student to leave the program when I realized that he had plagiarized a critique of an academic article written by another student from my seminar a few years before. He had thought that I would not remember the report. But I did). Some Harvard students actually turned against Gay noting that the punishment for student plagiarism was severe while that accorded Gay was merely a slap on the wrist. The charges of plagiarism were not on a one off incident. Rather more than 50 instances of plagiarism were found in her “scholarly” work. Even so, her academic resume was painfully thin for one in such an exalted position. Interestingly, many on the Harvard faculty stood by her. More than 700 had signed a letter of support of her testimony – which leads me to wonder what the Jewish students would feel about these professors. When she resigned there were quotes from Harvard faculty who continued to support her even in the face of plagiarism. One wonders about their scholarship integrity as well.

January 1, 2024

January 1st is the 161st anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Although universally acknowledged as an important historical document, the reasons for its importance are not at all clear. I remember being taught in high school that Lincoln freed the slaves and immediately getting into an argument (which I lost) with the teacher. I contended that Lincoln could not have freed the slaves since the slaves were freed by the 13th amendment which was ratified after Lincoln’s death. She, of course, was referring to the Emancipation Proclamation as the document which freed the slaves. However, I remember a conversation I had with my great grandmother (Ma Mat) who said she was in December 1864 picking cotton on Bonner’s Hill in Clinton, Ga “when Sherman marched up the hill”. She also said that when she heard of the Emancipation the previous year, the slaves all of a sudden did not starting running around shouting “Lawdy we is free”. Rather it was business – or servitude – as normal. Even after “Sherman” had left Clinton headed to Savannah, the slaves remained in bondage. Although later I learned that it was not Sherman but rather Oliver O. Howard’s (Howard University) wing that marched up Bonner’s Hill, it still did not detract from Ma Mat’s powerful imagery. So armed with that information from my great grandmother I confronted my high school history teacher. Later at home I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica to actually read the Emancipation Proclamation and sure enough it stated that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Since those states had declared their independence, the Proclamation did not have any force of law. Indeed, so as not to offend the neutral states and territories that allowed slavery (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and the western counties of Virginia) Lincoln had carefully crafted his words. However, there was one very important provision of the proclamation, that was to have the Federal forces to “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” This was of extreme importance since in earlier years or the war, runaway slaves were often not aided by the federals and were sometimes returned back to the confederate lines. Also after the proclamation, the federals started wholesale enlistments of black troops. Although the vast majority were freemen, many were runaways. In the end, more than 200,000 blacks wore union blue and historians find that the superiority of manpower of the federals enhanced by the blacks in blue, hastened the end of the war. Finally, did my history teacher concede? No. She simply stated that Lincoln through the emancipation laid the foundation for freedom and had motivated the 13th amendment which was passed in the Senate before Lincoln’s assassination. 

Lincoln was emboldened by the Union victory at Antietam in September 1863 which lifted northern spirits after a series of defeats by Lee’s army. It prompted him to issue the Proclamation in hopes of dissuading the anti-slavery governments of Britain and France from recognizing the legitimacy of the confederate government. It also allowed him to allow the enlistment of black troops. However, the Proclamation was not met with universal favor in the north, leading to riots in some cities. So should January 1st be “Emancipation Day?” Texas, and many blacks, have long celebrated Juneteenth day as Emancipation Day. Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) marked the end of slavery in Texas and is now a federal holiday. Fittingly, Texas first enshrined the date as a state holiday in 1980. By 2019, Juneteenth was recognized by 47 states and the District of Columbia.  Thus, whether accurately or not, Juneteenth rather than January 1^st is Emancipation Day.

December 25, 2023

Knoxville Focus

knoxfocus.com

This Christmas, like all the ones before, I am grateful to have been blessed with great parents who had struggled to get an education and who made it easy for me and my brother to go to school. Dad’s parents did not finish college and his mother was a domestic. His father drove a coal truck. His mother would not let her three girls do any housework saying that she was not training the next generation of maids. Instead they all went to HBCUs and became school teachers. Dad and his three brothers all graduated from college and the older children helped finance the education of their younger siblings. Mother’s father was a farmer but her mother had a high school degree and was the one room school marm for black kids in Jones County, GA. Mother received the first four year degree from Fort Valley State University (GA) and is considered the mother of that university. Both of my parents had masters’ degrees and both my brother and I have Ph.Ds. 

My parents spent much of their lives trying to help educate black children in the Atlanta public schools. I am bitter about very few things. However, I am bitterly disappointed in the black intelligentsia and their opposition to improving the education of poor children. When I was growing up in Atlanta during the Civil Rights movement, blacks made up over 50 percent of the school age population but only had 6 of the 20 or so high schools in Atlanta. So our schools were big. We had horrible facilities, used textbooks with white school’s names on them and had no scientific equipment in our labs. However, we had terrific teachers. Back in those days, teaching was a well paying job for a black college graduate and we had tons of male teachers too. I got a great public school education. Now our public school teachers use teaching methods that do not work and make excuses for their failure. I thought that once blacks got the vote, we would elect city officials and school boards who cared about educating our children. I thought that the reason why black kids got shafted was because white officials who got elected by running on a racist platform were actively discriminating against blacks. Well it was true. So we got the vote, the whites fled the city, we voted the bums out and put in place black mayors, city councils and school boards. And what happened? Educational achievement went down. Why? First better jobs opened up for black college graduates. Teacher’s standards eroded as well as accountability. My beloved mother who taught second grade for 40 years complained about the deteriorating quality of the teachers – saying that they were unprofessional in their dress and behavior. Second, the teacher’s unions became a political force and were more interested in “social justices” than in academic achievement and third, the black politicians began to be manipulated and bribed. 

What was ironic is that the only politicians who seemed to care were the Republicans who pushed for vouchers and charter schools – both of which demonstrated higher achievements among black urban kids than the public schools. Of course both have been derided and panned by liberal democrats and their black sycophants. Well vouchers work. Charter schools work. What we need is a market solution to the problem of low achievements in education. The market would not tolerate a system that is so bankrupt, so corrupt and so poor that damages and destroys our children. Most urban parents are not equipped to home school their kids so that is not an option. However, many charter schools and private Catholic schools show a startling juxtaposition of the same kids from the same environment having radically different academic results. It is a national shame that we have allowed our education system to become so woeful. In a market system, poorly performing schools would have been put out of business and their teachers and administrators fired. Instead, they have been rewarded with ever increasing salaries, benefits, pensions and tenure. So when I once wrote “Why do democrats hate black kids?” I meant every word. I also include among that number the black leaders of the teacher’s unions and every so-called black leader and civil rights organization that remain silent rather than making this the number one issue in black America.

December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas

I love science fiction

I love science fiction growing up in its golden age. Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Larry Nevin, Poul Anderson, and my favorite Robert Heinlein were in their glory. Today not so much. When you look at lists for the best Sci Fi of 2022 or 2023, most of the books are from women writers of fantasy not science fiction. Today’s science fiction/fantasy is mostly anticapitalism with the wealthy subjugating and exploiting the poor. If big government is the tyrant, it is usually because it is doing the work of the uber rich. There is precious little hard science fiction with the wonderful books by Andy Weir being the exception. Saxon Andrew is as prolific as Edgar Rice Burroughs but his novels get tiresome quickly with humans of psychic power dominating his universes. I have tried Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Martha Wells and Cory Doctorow. I like Octavia Butler and occasionally John Scalzi and have yet to figure out what all the shouting is about for Neal Stephenson and Neil Galman. Frustrated with today’s woke authors, I find myself rereading the books of my youth. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers and Methuselah’s Children are all favorites but any of his novels are worth the read. He had the ability to weave his political thinking into his works without belaboring them but make no mistake he was no “progressive” democrat. 

Here are a few of his quotes.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.

[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.

Democracy can survive anything except Democrats

Patriotism is not ‘my country right or wrong’; patriotism means loving the ideals for which America stands and having the courage to speak up when these ideals are distorted for personal or political gain. The American government was instituted to be the servant of the people, not our master.

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.

The lessons of history teach us – if the lessons of history teach us anything – that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted…and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-and thoroughly immoral-doctrine that, ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

I love Thomas Sowell. Last year I was privileged to attend a Liberty Fund symposium celebrating his 93rd birthday. That Sowell has not received a Nobel Prize is an indictment of the Nobel Committee. If the vacuous Al Gore can be given a Nobel as well as that economic pretender Paul Krugman then in some areas the Nobel is simply a token given to whomever the Committee favors that year. But Sowell is a towering intellect. His early work in history of thought is still required reading. Leaving academia for Hoover has allowed him to let his imagination roam applying basic economics to everyday issues. Like his mentor Milton Friedman, Sowell has the ability to reveal the truth that is often obscured by feel good nostrums. His output has been prodigious. He once wrote a weekly column and just published his 41st book. All are worth reading. Here is a sample of his wisdom.

From Thomas Sowell:

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity”?

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’

What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: “I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.”

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves,

The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state

It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with ‘solutions’ to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions. 

The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and – perhaps most important – allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who ‘care.’ But, if they really cared, they would want to know what the facts are and what the actual consequences of their various nostrums are.

The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.

Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that

Some words of my father:

1. Conventional wisdom is seldom wise

2. Segregation laws exist because whites are scared of us. If we were not qualified then there would be no need for these laws.

3. Victimhood is an excuse for failure. 

4. I don’t care what you will become but I will be disappointed if you do not push yourself to be one of the best.

5. When I went to Georgia he said “Don’t look at their women. They lynch us for less.”

6. Envy is a wasted emotion. Envy no one. Make them envy you.

7. This one was from Mother on the civil rights anthem “We shall overcome.” “They don’t mind us overcoming so long as we don’t come over”.

8. Don’t let others discourage you and ignore those who try.

9. (From Mother after a fairly heated discussion). Me: Why did you have me? Mother: We didn’t know it was going to be you.

10. Focus on your objectives and shut out all the noise. 

11. Find your limits and when you do to find someone who could help you push pass them.

12. Excuses are not accepted in this house. Just do better next time.

The market for EVs has tanked. The initial purchasers were mainly high end buyers who have another primary vehicle. They and others are virtue signalers who want to brandish their green creeds. However, EVs are gathering dust on dealer lots and car manufacturers are cutting back on production and the building of new plant and equipment. Almost all startups are struggling and three have filed for bankruptcy. The stock price for these companies is down 80 percent from their initial offering wiping out billions of dollars. I want to say “I told you so” but I won’t. The market has also rejected ESG investments with an estimated $1 trillion decline in market valuations. Thus, the market is currently rejecting the governments’ shoving EVs and “renewables” down our throats. The next step, of course, is for the governments to ban fossil fuels and all internal combustion engines – even though the science tells us that even this will have little impact on the climate. To date over $1 trillion has been wasted going green. It will be interesting to see when the public will revolt and vote the bums out. Look at Norway. The greenies there are trying to force cattle farmers to cull their herds to lessen methane in the atmosphere. Cow flatulence is the primary source of methane which is why at the COP28, the meat eating elites were urging all of us peons to cut down on our meat consumption. Norway is going to pay cattle farmers not to raise cattle much like we pay farmers not to grow certain crops. The reaction in Norway was to form a new party opposed to the greenies which has garnered seats in the parliament with the new center right coalition defeating the sitting left leaning government. Will we be far behind. One of the few positive things said by Trump is that he will roll back all the green nonsense of the Biden administration.

Isn’t it interesting that the media and those on the left see populism as a threat to democracy when the populist governments are democratically elected? They view what is happening in Europe, North and South America as a decline of democracy, multilateralism, and tolerance. They hate Hungary’s Orban as much as they hate Trump and say that country has moved from liberal democracy toward right-wing populist nationalism. Their reactions to elections in Argentina, Italy and Norway are similar. Contrast this to their paying fealty to Hamas which was democratically elected but turned into a totalitarian repressive regime. I think the ‘progressives” have forgotten that populism can be from the left as well as the right.

There is a poll on whites as oppressors that some profess shock over. It is a Harvard/Harris poll that asks “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology? Seventy five percent of those over 55 disagreed. But 79 percent of those 18-24 agreed. A follow up question asked if Jews were oppressors. Ninety-one percent of those over 55 disagreed but two-thirds of those 18-24 agreed. I guess most respondents were white with the young stating that they, themselves, are oppressors. Naturally the right is pointing to the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the schools and all the rhetoric about “white privilege.” As one observer noted “success is possible, but only if one joins the system that critical race theorists believe oppresses people of color. Thus, if an oppressed individual achieves success, he or she becomes an oppressor, regardless of their identity.” Now I don’t know of any whites or Jews that are oppressing anyone. But certainly the Biden Administration is oppressing Trump and his supporters and the Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians on the West Bank. It is hard to find a government regardless of color that does not oppress. Governments in the Middle East (except Israel) oppress non-Muslims and Muslims of a different sect than the one in power, LBGQTs, and women. The Chinese oppress those that are not Hans who make up 92 percent of the population. Black African countries oppress whites, Indians and tribal groups not in power. Finland oppresses the Lapps, Russians, gypsies and Somalis. I am hard pressed to think of a government that is not oppressive.

I find it interesting that several commenters on my commencement address at the University of Georgia complimented me on talking about how we can confront racism and move toward better race relations. That was not my intention. I wanted to make two points. The first is that you can overcome adversity despite daunting odds and the second is that you are mired in mediocrity if you are intellectually lazy, Listen to the speech and see if you disagree. I start at minute 29.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0JQvHqAaXM

This was posted by the Georgia football program during Black History Month.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Georgia Football (@georgiafootball)

I start at minute 29.