Category Archives: Human Accomplishment

Heroism Stripped

Aesthetics, Britain, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Pop-Culture, Sex

An anonymous sage said that “expectations tend to be self-fulfilling”: Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. In the West, if kids so much as dial 911 in an emergency, they are decorated for bravery. So, it’s hardly surprising that evincing narcissism, self-adoration and bad taste has been elevated and recast as heroic, honest and gritty.

Going by the MailOnline’s sensibility, the au naturel uglies below are really “brave mothers and daughters [who] bare all – and reveal their hopes and fears about ageing” [sic]. I give you your new heroines. Scroll down for an eyeful.

UPDATE II: Priority Mail International To South Africa (5 Weeks & Counting)

Affirmative Action, Africa, Government, Human Accomplishment, South-Africa, Technology, The West

Will I ever learn? I’ve written a book about the New South Africa, yet I still attempt to get a priority envelope to my father (at a cost of $53.50), who lives in that country. Accepted in the US on Feb. 6, with a promise of a 5 to 7 day delivery, the item is currently STILL in transit to the destination. It is being stalled in South Africa.

Although the USPS has more or less completed its part of the deal, the onus is on the USPS stateside not to offer a “Priority Mail International Parcels” service to South Africa. I use the Mail-Clinic interface, which although more pleasant than the toxic USPS, is, nevertheless, still beholden to it.

Here is the USPS tracking data, beginning from the bottom:

7. PROCESSED THROUGH SORT FACILITY ON FEBRUARY 14, 2012, 3:51 PM, SOUTH AFRICA: THE ITEM IS CURRENTLY STILL IN TRANSIT TO THE DESTINATION.

6. Processed Through Sort Facility February 10, 2012, 12:58 pm, ISC LOS ANGELES CA (USPS)

5. Arrived at Sort Facility, February 10, 2012, 12:58 pm, ISC LOS ANGELES CA (USPS)

4. Electronic Shipping Info Received, February 07, 2012

3. Processed through USPS Sort Facility, February 06, 2012, 8:20 pm, WA

2. Dispatched to Sort Facility

1. Acceptance, February 06, 2012, 6:42 pm

[SNIP]

I’ve been through this many times. As a Pope once said, hope springs eternal in the human breast.

UPDATE: Mail and parcel theft is rampant in SA. It’s not so much political, as criminal. These are the things one takes for granted in the West. However horrid and monopolistic is the USPS, it does get a thing from A to B, generally “honoring” the contract with the American forced to purchase the service.

UPDATE II (March 15): JP, I thought the ANC was too much of a disorganized criminal syndicate to compile a list of subversives and chase the listed down. Do you honestly believe they have one such list and are capable of flagging “suspect” material?

Update III: Remember Andrew Breitbart; Forget Honky Hater Shirley Sherrod (Tease Journalism?)

Conservatism, Human Accomplishment, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Republicans

It is all about the legacy of Shirley Sherrod; didn’t you know it? In the universe of a dim bulb like CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux—who together with hormonally charged sisters such as Jessica Yellin just about climax on air when their president performs—the untimely passing of Andrew Breitbart, of the BigGovernment.com enterprise, is about Shirley Sherrod, the black woman Breitbart is alleged to have wronged racially.

Lies.

Sherrod, as this analysis revealed, “was fired by an administration that mistook her for a worse racist than she actually was. The Obama posse had overestimated the extent of Sherrod’s animus for whites. She turned out to be merely a mezzanine-level racist, rather than a hardcore honky hater.

One day, as she told the NAACP gathering, God put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer appealed for her assistance. Had the white farmer been a brother forced to beg before a sister in a position of power, Sherrod might have characterized him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances. Given the desperate farmer’s hue, Sherrod alleged he had a superior attitude, before going on to describe her dilemma: having to help a white man save his property, when so many black people had lost theirs.”
So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod smirked. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of them; to his own kind.”Drum roll for Ms. Sherrod

As I wrote at the time, “The acme of ethics in American is a black woman who has graduated from hard-core to soft bigotry. … if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites than is her right—she is up for beatification.”

Do read the moron MALVEAUX’s reverential love-in with Sherrod (well-annotated with my comments).

RIP Mr. Breitbart.

UPDATE I: Myron, you make the perennial libertarian mistake of reducing all argument to the state dimension. We’ve been over this error on BAB, many times, last in “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension.” Breitbart is not to be compared to Sherrod. Not ever.

UPDATE II: Andrew Breitbart being something of a neocon garnered plenty criticism from me. Here is one of quite a few critical posts from the past about “big this, big that” “Conservative Cretinism.”

There’s a reservoirs of piss-poor conservative commentary on the Internet. (People lap it up.) Trust Lawrence Auster to point out what few others do: “So much of the conservative part of the Web is unintelligent, incoherent partisan trash. Mondo Frazier’s article at Big Journalism about the Gore sex assault charge is an example. I saw it because it is listed in the ‘must-reads’ at Lucianne.com.”
Andrew Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Auster terms “low-grade conservative media.”

But then, you had to concede that Andrew Breitbart was splendid when he told the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), “Go to hell.” He just wasn’t your typical crunchy conservative, forever cowering for fear of being called a racist.

UPDATE III: “O’Keefe Antics, Again.” And I have not been very flattering about a brand of tease journalism Breitbart sponsored, I believe.

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

House Husbands

Affirmative Action, Economy, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Labor, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them:

“Seven of the 18 women who are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—including Xerox’s (XRX) Ursula Burns, PepsiCo’s (PEP) Indra Nooyi, and WellPoint’s (WLP) Angela Braly—have, or at some point have had, a stay-at-home husband. So do scores of female CEOs of smaller companies and women in other senior executive jobs. Others, like IBM’s (IBM) new CEO, Ginni Rometty, have spouses who dialed back their careers to become their powerful wives’ chief domestic officers.

This role reversal is occurring more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S.”

Buried within the Bloomberg Business Week edifying report above is that the “recession” is, more than anything, a man recession:

“During the recent recession, three men lost their jobs for every woman. Many unemployed fathers, casualties of layoffs in manufacturing and finance, have ended up caring for their children full-time while their wives are the primary wage earners. The number of men in the U.S. who regularly care for children under age five increased to 32 percent in 2010 from 19 percent in 1988, according to Census figures. Among those fathers with preschool-age children, one in five served as the main caregiver.”

[SNIP]
Alas, women still complain when a poor bloke—who has put in more years and hours and happens to be more talented—earns a bit more. I dispelled distaff America’s claims of disadvantage long ago: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.”