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Knoxville Focus (knoxfocus.com)

December 13, 2021

I have always been confused by the abortion debate. The democrats who are abortion’s most ardent supporters are reducing their future voters while republicans are trying to stop them. It seems to me that this is opposite of what should be. As to abortion itself, I have wondered for some time why isn’t the unborn baby accorded citizenship and constitutional rights when it becomes viable. Perhaps one day that will be the basis of a court case. In the meantime I have asked why Planned Parenthood is not characterized as being predatory. 

The left routinely excoriates high rate lenders as predatory, alleging that they prey on low income and minority communities. They point out that the clientele of the lenders of subprime loans, payday lenders and pawn shops are disproportionately low income and minority. There are “advocates” who argue that no loan is preferable to loans at high rates. Obviously, these “advocates” have good credit, live in upscale neighborhoods and can borrow at low rates. “Advocates” say that “the financial institutions that do exist in minority areas are predatory—for example, pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charge high fees and rates of interest—so that minority group members are accustomed to exploitation and frequently unaware that better services are available elsewhere.” Predatory lenders are said to aggressively market in minority communities and the location of the lenders is enough to confirm in some minds predatory behavior. 

What is ironic is that using the same criteria, Planned Parenthood is should be classified as predatory, preying on low income and minority communities. Seventy eight percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are in minority neighborhoods even though blacks make up less than 14 percent of the US population. It seems reasonable to ask if Planned Parenthood is targeting black communities and poor women.

Targeting black women was the objective of Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger who said that “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated”. She gave speeches to women’s auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan and talked about purifying the human race by establishing a birth control clinic in Harlem in 1930. She said “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Thus, Sanger may have been the first to employ black spokesmen who would urge other blacks to act in a manner contrary to their best interests.

When these views came to light Planned Parenthood canceled their founder distancing themselves from Sanger, although her mission of aborting black babies remains unchanged. She would be delighted to know that blacks abort at a rate four times that of whites and black abortions were a third of total abortions last year in the US. In New York City, the headquarters of Planned Parenthood, more black babies were aborted last year than were born alive. Sanger would be pleased to know that absent abortion the black population would be 40 percent larger than it is today – most of them democrat voters. It should come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood is the number one killer of blacks in America.

So is Planned Parenthood predatory? You decide.

Knoxville Focus

November 15, 2021

I’ve been to South Africa three times to bow hunt. The first time I landed in Johannesburg I did not feel like I was returning to my homeland (since my homeland is Gray, GA). When I land in Knoxville I say to myself “home,” back to my things, to my house, to my dogs, back to where I belong. Not so in Africa. No one looks remotely like me. The only people who thought I was a native were a couple from Charlotte who asked me for directions (speaking very slowly) at the Johannesburg airport. No one came running up to me speaking Xhosa and welcoming me home as a fellow tribesman. My African tribes are much farther north. They were among the at least 100 tribal groups taken to America where they were broken up, sold and dispersed with loss of language and cultural identity. 

When you arrive in Johannesburg, there is a sign that says “11 Languages One Country.” Yet although there are 11 official languages, more than 35 indigenous languages are spoken in the country. In the airport you could see different tribes. Although the color was fairly uniform, there were very distinct differences in the features from noses and lips to differences in cheekbones and brows. When I landed in Polokwane where most of the blacks are Lesotho, the official language is Southern Sesotho. By the time I left, I could distinguish a southern Lesotho from a northern Lesotho (whose language is Sepedi).

At home it is rare to see two black people that could be identified as being from the same tribe unless they are from the same family. Clarence Thomas, Vanessa Williams, Beyonce, Nicki Minaj and Thomas Sowell do not look remotely alike. Even if you go to one city – like Knoxville – its hard to see any tribal similarity. In America, the blacks came from all over central and west Africa from literally hundreds of tribes. They were then split up, sold and then mixed with whites from all over Europe and Native Americans. The result is me. I have 10 distinct DNA strains and am only fifty percent West African.  My mother’s DNA was 32 percent British and less than 40% West African. I don’t know my father’s but I suspect it was predominately West African. Dad and his family were dark skinned. Mom and her family were fair skinned (her father could pass for white). Initially, Dad’s family did not embrace my mother because she was too white while mother’s thought my Dad was too black.

Thus, I have resisted calling myself an African-American. To me that’s denies all of my other ancestors. Don’t misunderstand, I am fiercely proud of my African ancestors. I am Cameroon, Mali and Togo. But I am also Scotch Irish, British, European, Russian, Scandinavian and Native American. I am tempted when asked on a form for my race to check all the boxes. At ESPN, one of the most woke and least tolerant networks, they suspended a sports anchor who said among other things that she was proud of her mix-race heritage and identified as both black and Italian leading her to check both the boxes of “white” and “black”. 

Some radical leftists have tried without success to pin on whites the term “European-Americans.” These are the same people who want to segregate us with hyphens: African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian Americans, Native American-Americans, and European-but-not of-Hispanic descent-Americans. Enough already. The racial/ethnic hodgepodge of American blacks like me make us uniquely American. Rather than African-American I am more correctly a Mongrel-American. However, that term will not likely gain much traction. So what am I? I am an American-American.

The Education Industrial Complex

Knoxville Focus (knoxfocus.com)

November 22, 2021

There is an old saying that all politics is local. That certainly was corroborated in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Despite the Biden Administration being a total disaster and supposedly unpopular in Virginia, the democrat candidate still had campaign appearances with Biden and Kamala Harris (who is even less popular). The inflection point in the election came when the democrat said in a televised debate that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” That comment, along with the controversy over access to girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms by boys who profess gender confusion, swung the election in favor of Youngkin, the republican. As I have written earlier, my solution to the bathroom controversy is to remove the male/female symbols from the bathroom doors and put up pictures of genitalia instead saying “if your privates look like this, then enter here.” 

Of course, the usual apologists in the media made stupid comments like “my parents shouldn’t tell my math teacher whether to teach the central limit theorem.” This assumes that the teacher knows what the central limit theorem was. No, the point was that parents should know if their children are being indoctrinated rather than taught. A great example is a liberal friend who objected to her school board adding LBGT books to the elementary school curriculum. She said at the school board meeting that she supported many LBGT issues including gay marriage but that such issues were for discussion in the home and not at school. When the board decided otherwise, she took her children out of public schools.

Schools should be tasked with teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and little else – although it would be nice if they also taught about our system of government. Yet schools are failing at these basic tasks and are not motivated to do better. If a child comes from a nuclear family with both parents college educated, then what transpires in the schools is almost irrelevant. One of my favorite professors said “I have never ruined a good student.” However, children from single parent households where the parent is not college educated face an uphill struggle. In a more rational world, the performance of our community’s children at Sarah Moore Greene and Green Magnet here in Knoxville would be cause of termination of the superintendent and system administrators. Those schools have dedicated teachers who are hamstrung by curricula and teaching method imposed on them by the Education Industrial Complex that have little to do with learning and retention. The abysmal scores go unpunished. I guess the consolation is that those scores look like Ivy League compared to those in Memphis.

Youngkin in Virginia has an aggressive education agenda. In it he states that all children are to be able to read by the third grade. Lots of luck with that one. What he doesn’t realize is that the Education Industrial Complex has no interest in teaching kids. The textbook companies, the textbook authors, the colleges of education, the teachers’ unions and the accreditation agencies all have agendas, none of which contain quality education for children. The annual convention program for the teachers’ unions reads like a socialist playbook with not a session on effective teaching. Several years ago, I was approached by a foundation to lobby for a program that emphasized reading for grades K-3.  If children cannot read by the third grade, then many are condemned to high drop out rates, incarceration and a subsistence dependent upon the government. The foundation was willing to fund a reading curriculum in our poorest performing schools. The school superintendent told me that he could not put the curriculum into the schools because it would not be approved by the state’s accreditation agencies because it “contained too much reading.” 

Given that the teachers’ unions contribute 95% of their political contributions to democrats, It is no surprise that the democrats are not interested (as a party) in educating our children and oppose virtually every educational alternative. The republicans have endorsed vouchers, charter schools and have advocated merit pay for teachers (all strongly opposed by the unions), smaller classrooms and increased funding. None of the above will work. They are all doomed to fail so long as the Education Industrial Complex is in place dictating teaching method and curriculum.

So if you are interesting in educating our children (all of our children) the only solution is to blow up the entire Education Industrial Complex. Lastly, this not solely about minority children. All of our children suffer as evidenced by the following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performance?following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performance?

following chart. The question is why do we tolerate this abysmal performace?