Category Archives: Human Accomplishment

Since When Do Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Race

The Bell Curve authors, Charles Murray—an American Enterprise Institute Scholar and the 2009 recipient of the Irving Kristol Award—and the late Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard professor, used multiple regression analysis and other perfectly conventional and uncontroversial statistical methods to arrive at some irrefutable correlations, linking the G Factor (general intelligence) to other social and demographic indices.

Frank Borzellieri, a dedicated educator in “a predominantly black and Hispanic Catholic elementary school located in the Bronx, New York,” spoke and wrote of the same facts, for which he lost his job and was expunged from our increasingly Sovietized society, accused of a thought crime: a belief in “white supremacy.”

Via Jack Kerwick:

Borzellieri is the author of six books, some of which treat racial and cultural issues. His great sin seems to consist in the fact that he dared to note that there are interracial IQ differences that correlate to some extent with other social indicia. …

… Borzellieri chose—he chose—to ply his craft as an educator tending to the needs of New York City’s black and Hispanic students. He was also elected thrice to the New York City school board where he resisted efforts to replace literature on such Western heroes as Columbus and Washington with a curriculum requiring children to read books on homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and birth control.

“Today,” writes Jack, “Borzellieri lives a lonelier—and dramatically harder—existence. The man who wants for nothing more than to resume his duties as an educator is jobless. Branded with the “R” label, he’s been shut out in the cold.

Mike Abel, the caretaker of an orthodox church, has started a ‘Go Fund Me’ page for Borzellieri. Please consider helping this casualty of Political Correctness.

As Mike Abel says, Borzellieri could be any of us.”

[SNIP]

Let me add this: The substance of Borzellieri speech is irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is … “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.”

Help Frank Here.

Adding Fire Power To The Literary Canon

English, Human Accomplishment, Literature, The West

With respect to the column “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon,” my good editor at Quarterly Review rightly griped that I should have added more titles fit for the precocious child reader.

Leslie’s favorites are Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Seconded. And boy, did I adore Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Add Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. The Hebrew Bible is a very racy, great read. I’m no expert on the New Testament.

Your Life; A Playground For Rich Liberals

Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Ethics, GUNS, Human Accomplishment, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

“Your Life; A Playground For Rich Liberals” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Make sure it doesn’t happen in your state next,” warns Michelle Malkin, in “Rocky Mountain Heist,” a documentary in which the columnist puts her trademark shoe-leather journalistic sleuthing to work in exposing the Democrat-rigged “democracy” of Colorado. There, a group of well-heeled liberals used its power—and “every scheme possible”—to transform Colorado into a playground for the rich (and their liberal ideology) and a nightmare for “common” Coloradans.

Malkin, who once resided in our state, might already know that the dice are loaded against decent people in Washington, too. Take I-594, a gun-control measure which, we are led to believe, expresses the legislative will—even though it is, as The Zelman Partisans have noted, “the anti-gunners’ dream. Under the pretense of being ‘only’ a universal background check bill (common sense, you know!), it will criminalize nearly all transfers of firearms, including the most essential, innocent and fleeting. Loan a gun to a friend in need? Felony. Instructor hands a gun to student and student hands it back? Two felonies.”

The measure was “bankrolled by billionaires on the left,” among them former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Microsoft billionaires Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer and, of course, Bill Gates. These busybodies—who reside in fortified castles and are cosseted by security details—raised millions and gave unstintingly to make it harder for ordinary folks to defend life and property.

It runs in the family. In 2011, we were menaced by another unfathomably wealthy “man,” who got behind an effort to bilk Washington-State businessmen and women of more modest means. The Service Employees International Union (state and national locals), the National Education Association, and Washington teachers union locals all united to champion a new income tax. The poster boy for this regressive measure was William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The late Steve Jobs was not the only man who had no time for that excuse of a man, Bill Gates. Less well-known for his contempt for the patronizing Gates was hedge-fund founder Robert W. Wilson.

Having donated an estimated $600 million over his lifetime, Mr. Wilson was one of the most generous philanthropists in our country. Still, Wilson flatly refused to join what he derisively termed Bill Gates’ “worthless Giving-Pledge” charity.

And it was not only Gates’ showy, sanctimonious, very public giving that Mr. Wilson discounted.

But first—and against this background—let me add the following: The righteous give discreetly; the pious give publicly. Accustomed to the hedonism of Hollywood and the exhibitionism of cable news anchors, it may surprise some to learn that the manner in which most ordinary Americans give—anonymously—satisfies the exacting standards of righteousness specified by Maimonides. The 12th-century Jewish philosopher stipulated that the highest form of charity is practiced when “donor and recipient are unknown to each other.” …

… Read the rest. “Your Life; A Playground For Rich Liberals” is now on WND.

Aaron Swartz: Parasites Have the Power To Kill The Host

Government, Human Accomplishment, Intellectual Property Rights, Liberty, Private Property, Technology

Aaron Swartz got too big for his boots, so the government decided to make life unbearable for the gifted young man, who had created more value for shareholders and customers when just a kid in short pants than any of the nogoodniks who prosecuted him. Yeah, freedom baby.

US media tries to forget the late Mr. Swartz . RT has not:

Swartz was a 26 year-old information transparency activist, who took his own life nearly two years ago, having faced a standoff with the government.
When he was just 14, tech prodigy Swartz helped launch the first RSS feeds. By the time he turned 19, his company had merged with Reddit, which would become one of the most popular websites in the world.
But instead of living a happy life of a Silicon Valley genius, Swartz went on to champion a free internet, becoming a political activist calling for others to join.
Swartz drew the FBI’s attention in 2008, when he downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents from a restricted service. The government did not press charges because the documents were, in fact, public.
He was arrested in 2011, for downloading academic articles from a subscription-based research website JSTOR – at his university – with the intention of making them available to the public. Although, none of what he downloaded was classified, prosecutors wanted to put him in jail for 35 years.