Category Archives: Racism

UPDATED: Decoding The Plan to Make Detroit Work (Blame Honky)

Africa, Debt, Economy, Federalism, Government, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Socialism, Taxation

If these minority penalizing budgetary cuts were inflicted in New Hampshire, Desiree Cooper of Detroit Public TV would have probably cried foul. But they aren’t, so Cooper keeps her cool in an excellent factual account about Detroit’s black-dominated city council, and its efforts to save the city’s finances by consolidating services. (Read: directing these to those who PAY.)

This invariably means directing services to the dwindling tax base (You Know Who), so that this productive, paying minority gets the best bang for its huge outlays and goodwill and… STAYS IN TOWN. These good people want to remain in the city they helped build.

Have their overlords realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that keeping the taxpayers who pay their salaries happy might just be the key to their own statist status? As Cooper puts it in this remarkably impartial report: It is these “dedicated Detroiters, the more affluent Detroiters who are part of the tax base [that] the city desperately wants to hold on to.”

Barbara and Spencer Barefield are an example. The couple has “what they consider a small house amongst Palmer Woods’ mansions.” They (and their ilk; nudge-nudge) will be accorded “preferential treatment in this community’s upkeep, maintaining roads, sidewalks and streetlights. That could mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.”

Of course, it is a travesty to frame as “preferential” the provision of basic services in return for enormous outlays. It shows you how far we have gone in assimilating Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The Barefield are Detroiters of quite a deep dye, as they are prepared to put up with a $900-a-month utility bill!

READ MORE about the “Detroit Works” project, undertaken by Mayor Dave Bing and his crew—architect Rainy Hamilton, Karla Henderson who heads Detroit Works, City Council President Charles Pugh, and others—in an attempt to save the city (and their sinecures?):

With a sprawling city, 139 square miles, and few resources for city services, Mayor Bing took the Detroit Works project as an opportunity to redefine the city’s physical, economic and social landscape. He began by taking inventory, taking a close look at what Detroit really has.
Demographers have identified at least 100 distinct neighborhoods within the city limits. With that in mind, Detroit Works unveiled its short-term plan, classifying the city’s neighborhoods by their quality of housing and stability of population.
The degree of city services and investment would depend on whether the neighborhood is deemed steady, transitional, or distressed.

UPDATE (Dec. 13): Erik in the comment below blames honky in what sounds like vintage Yankee propaganda. You’ll get better historical facts about the South from reading or watching the brilliant timeless “Gone with the Wind.” So too did Mencken write about the civilization destroyed by the “dirty Yankees.” The South was the seat of the country’s aristocracy—and some of the finest families in America.

Although my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, advances the cultural argument in explaining underdevelopment, it is also highly critical of it. As follows:

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”
But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.
In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.

Read it, Erik. Mimicking whitey, if that is indeed your and Sowell’s explanation for black dysfunction, falls flat when it comes to Africa.

‘Generation Jobless’

Business, Economy, Education, Intelligence, Labor, Outsourcing, Race, Racism, Science, Technology

I wonder about those who claim our math and science students are first rank, and blame the high-tech sector and its greed for the “importation” of South and East Asian talent. Sure, there is an abundance of greed (not necessarily harmful in one of the freer sectors of the economy). There is also a requirement to display diversity, even if imported, so as to comport with the diabolic diversity policies peddled by all companies as zealously as do the state and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. But neither are there any shortages of unskilled Americans in the sciences. Have the reductionists, who refuse to recognize this dumbing down, ever spoken to senior and serious high-tech talent; people who are employed and always overworked, because there are so few of them?

“Although the number of college graduates increased about 29% between 2001 and 2009,” reports the WSJ, “the number graduating with engineering degrees only increased 19%, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The number with computer and information-sciences degrees decreased 14%. Since students typically set their majors during their sophomore year, the first class that chose their major in the midst of the recession graduated this year.

Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract. Some students, like Ms. Zhou, say their high schools didn’t prepare them for the level of rigor in the introductory courses. [She’s more honest than the professors. “My ability level was just not there,” says Ms. Zhou of her decision” to drop out from electrical and computer engineering.]

Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.”

Science classes may also require more time—something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science—though not engineering—students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

UPDATED: Slimy Sex Trail Leads to Chicago

Aesthetics, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Politics, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans, Sex

Ann Coulter provides some good shoe-leather reporting, absent from US mainstream media, as she tracks the slimy trail of Herman Cain’s accusers back to … Chicago. And, if you want the exact GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates, the breadcrumbs lead straight to “David Axelrod’s apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive,” where “Cain’s latest accuser, Sharon Bialekhe” resided.

What does it say about the workplace that someone who looks and sounds as Bialekhe does has held respectable position’s in various industries? And she’s only 50; so ugly and lined despite all the obvious plastic panel beating her face has endured. In answer to the question of how to stay young, I always reply: When you get to your late 40s, what’s inside begins to manifest on the outside. You can’t hide ugly insides.

UPDATE: The Real Rush has it that the media’s extra-hideous attack on Cain is because, “Herman [is] Cain more of a threat than the other GOP contenders: He could win. So, neither the Obama administration, the Democrat National Committee, nor the liberal GOP leadership wants him to secure the Republican nomination. Blacks would vote for him. The guilted white fools who voted for Obama would vote for him. Conservatives would vote for him. Evangelical Christians would vote for him. Is there anyone left?

Sure there is. But you get the picture: With Cain versus Obama, it’s Cain in a landslide.”

MORE.

UPDATED: The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower’ (The Sanctity of Life)

America, Colonialism, Crime, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, Race, Racism, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from “The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower,'” now on WND.COM:

“Whites will become a minority in 2042 and will fall to 46 percent of the population by 2050, comprising only 38 percent of U.S. population under 18. So writes Patrick J. Buchanan in his formidable new book, ‘Suicide of A Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?’

Every immigration worrywart recalls the ‘astonishing episode’ Mr. Buchanan recounts next. In 1998, Bill Clinton brought tidings of ‘their coming minority status’ to a ‘largely white student body’ at Portland State University.

‘In a little more than 50 years,’ rejoiced President Clinton, ‘there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through a demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.’ Taking their cue from their ‘enthnomasochistic’ president, the students erupted in cheers.

‘Ethnomasochism,’ laments Mr. Buchanan—who is surely one of the great patriots of our time—is ‘the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group.’ It is ‘a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower.’

In this writer’s latest book, the example of post-apartheid South Africa is used to deconstruct the effects of such a shift in a country’s majority/minority power structure.

Granted, the shift underway in the U.S.A. is incremental. But as is clear from the facts unfurled in ‘Suicide of A Superpower,’ the transformation of America will be as detrimental as the almost-overnight shift orchestrated in South Africa. …”

Read the complete column, “The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower.'” It’s now on WND.COM.

The aforementioned book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Barnes and Noble is always well-stocked and ships within 24 hours.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE (Nov. 4): THE SANCTITY OF LIFE. Here is a statistic from the book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot.” It might edify the Facebook writer (on this column’s WND page) who cavalierly compares the devastation of crime in the New South Africa to the devastation inflicted by the National Party (the apartheid regime): More people are murdered in one week under African rule (plus/minus 420) than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades (approximately the same). But, left-liberals do not consider the sanctity of life in a society as a measure of justice; only democracy—the might of the majority–rights all wrong.