Texas Vs. The Pacific Coast: Explaining The Yankee Mindset

America, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Fascism, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-history, States' Rights, The South

NEW COLUMN IS “Texas Vs. The Pacific Coast: Explaining The Yankee Mindset.”
A slightly abridged version is now on Townhall.com.

Unabridged, “Texas Vs. The Pacific Coast” appears on Unz Review, WND.com, Constitution.com, and other discerning outlets.

Excerpt:

I recently traveled to Texas to speak about South Africa, at the Free Speech Forum of the Texas A & M University.

To travel from the Pacific Northwest all the way to College Station, Texas, without experiencing more of the “Lone Star State” was not an option.

So, after driving from Austin eastward to College Station (where I was hosted by two exceptional young, Southern gentlemen), I headed south-west to San Antonio. There I lingered long enough to conclude:

The Republic of Texas is a civilization apart.

Ordinary Texans—from my brief travels—tend to be sunny, kind and warmhearted. Not once did I encounter rude on my Texas junket.

On the Pacific Coast, however, kindness and congeniality don’t come naturally. State-of-Washington-statists are generally aloof, opprobrious, insular. And, frankly, dour.

Southern historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson tells of receiving “a package containing a chamber pot labeled ‘Robert E. Lee’s Soup Tureen.'”

It came from … Portland, Maine.

Unkind cuts are an everyday occurrence around here, where the busybody mentality prevails.

Stand still long enough, and they’ll tell you how to live. They’ll even give chase to deliver that “corrective” sermon. A helmeted cyclist once chased me down along a suburban running trail.

My sin? I had fed the poor juncos in the dead of winter. (Still do. Bite me, you bully.)

Having caught up with me, SS Cyclist got on his soap box and in my face about my unforgivable, rule-bending. Wasn’t I familiar with the laws governing his pristine environmental utopia?

Didn’t I know that only the fittest deserved to survive? That’s the natural world, according to these ruthless, radical progressive puritans.

Yes, mea culpa for having an exceedingly soft spot for God’s plucky little creatures.

When a Washington statist gets wind of your core beliefs—why, even if your use of the English language irks His Highness—he will take it upon himself to fix your “flaws,” try to make you over in his sorry image.

For the distinct cluster of characteristics just described, Dr. Wilson aforementioned uses the term Yankee. …

… READ THE REST. The column is “Texas Vs. The Pacific Coast: Explaining The Yankee Mindset”.

Or, unabridged.

Oh, Clyde Wilson adds this: “Telling other people not to feed God’s creatures according to some supposed scientific official plan is simply fascism.”

Another Kennedy Crime: Child Abuse: Institutionalizing, Lobotomizing & Never Visiting Sister Rosemary Kennedy

Criminal Injustice, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Relatives

Other than that she was not “perfect” like her siblings; there was nothing terribly wrong with gorgeous Rosemary Kennedy. She had learning disabilities. But Rosary looked lovely and was a sweet child.

Alas, she “never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence.”

WHICH BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, YOU’VE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL.

Still, after being locked up in “a boarding school for misfits,” she was smart enough to pen a heartbreaking (grammatical) letter to her ruthless father, patriarch Joe Kennedy:

Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.

Are these the words of an irredeemably retarded girl?

The rest of her life reads like a Medieval horror story. This is worse than genital mutilation, which can be survived. The bloody Kennedy clan was never implicated in decades of cruelty:

In November 1941 Dr. James Watts carried out a frontal lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy’s brain at a facility in upstate New York.

A psychiatrist present at the lobotomy asked Rosemary to tell him stories and repeat the months of the year. The doctor kept scraping away brain tissue until Rosemary could no longer talk.

Only then did Dr. Watts stop.

Following the lobotomy Rosemary could barely walk and knew only a few words. She would spend most of her life hidden away from the world and even her own family.

Such was the price the young Kennedy girl paid because her parents feared her condition would puncture the perfect impression of the relentlessly ambitious Kennedy clan.

Kate Clifford Larson revealed a host of new sources for her story of the tragic Rosemary for her book “The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,”published last year.

It is a book that shows Joe and Rose Kennedy in a dreadful light, prepared to sacrifice their daughter for their sons’ political careers.

Larson says that right from the beginning, when the obstetrician who was to deliver Rosemary was several hours late and a nurse botched the birth, Rosemary Kennedy was deeply unlucky.

By kindergarten Rosemary was called “retarded,” in the lingo of the times, and such children were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, it was a disaster.

Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence and she was packed off to a boarding school for misfits.

From there she wrote her father a heartbreaking letter as Larson reveals: “Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.”

Rosemary finally caught a break when her father became Ambassador to Britain and she thrived in a London convent school. But back in the States, Rosemary, a stunning looking girl, began attracting admirers. At twenty she was “a picturesque young woman, a snow princess with flush cheeks, gleaming smile, plump figure, and a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met.”

As Larson writes, “Her parents found her sexuality dangerous.”

In early 1941 Joe learned about frontal lobotomy, then coming into vogue, which allegedly “calmed” hyperactive patients.

Joe Kennedy ordered the surgery done immediately.

Later, Joe and Rose told all who asked that Rosemary was teaching at a school for handicapped students in the Midwest. In fact, she was in a home in Wisconsin, had the mind of a two-year-old, and was unable to do anything for herself.

After Joe Kennedy’s stroke Rose went to meet the daughter she had abandoned. When Rosemary saw her mother she ran to her then began beating her mother’s chest in deep distress crying and moaning.

It seemed, despite all the covering up, she still remembered her and what had been done to her.

The other Kennedy children also learned the truth and adopted an entirely different approach, visiting Rosemary and bringing her to Boston on many occasions.

Eunice Kennedy based her creation of the Special Olympics on Rosemary. She broke the family’s silence on Rosemary in the Saturday Evening Post, but it was not until 1987 that the story of the lobotomy became public.

Rosemary Kennedy was never allowed to live any kind of life by her ambitious parents, but in the end how she was treated by them, especially Joe, says far more about him than anything about her.

She just had the misfortune to be a Kennedy in an era when mental retardation was a large and ugly secret. She died in 2005 and, ironically, we have learned far more about her since her death than when she was alive and this new book adds valuable knowledge.

From: “The sad and dreadful life of Rosemary Kennedy.”

The Dismal Scientists Of Microeconomics Are ALSO Struggling To Do Science

Critique, Economy, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, Science

Almost every bit of research cited in support of some or another ridiculous claim in the popular press seems abysmally designed. At least to this former student of research methodology.

Samples are too minuscule to claim generalizeability of findings beyond the sample, to the broader, targeted population. Likewise, you just know sample selection is poor, too. Variables are not often operationalized in an intelligent way. The actual hypothesis frequently sounds wacky. On and on.

It transpires that the same methodological flaws that “bedevil most social sciences, and some hard sciences, too,” have infected the dismal scientists of microeconomics.

“Many results in microeconomics are shaky.” From the a series “on the shortcomings of the economics profession” in the Economist:

A recent examination in the Economic Journal, of almost 7,000 empirical economics studies, found that in half of the areas of research, nearly 90% of those studies were underpowered, ie, that they used samples too small to judge whether a particular effect was really there. Of the studies that avoided this pitfall, 80% were found to have exaggerated the reported results. Another study, published in Science, which attempted to replicate 18 economics experiments, failed for seven of them.

Speaking About WMD In Iran: Did You Know About The WMD-Filled Swimming Pools Of Brazil? It’s True.

Foreign Policy, Iran, Military, War, WMD

BY Myron Pauli

Iran is a very weak nation and there are far less Shiites than Sunnis yet America’s warmongers act as if there are five million Iranians poised to blitzkrieg into Columbus, OH, and Denver CO on a moment’s notice.

If there is a “worldwide aggressor” – I will give you a few hints:

[1] I wonder which COUNTRY spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.

[2] I wonder which COUNTRY stations forces in every continent, in over 140 countries.

[3] I wonder which COUNTRY is the only nation to have ever dropped atomic weapons on civilians. (A subtle hint is in “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki.”)

[4] I wonder which COUNTRY is currently fighting wars in N countries, many of which are clandestine wars.

[5] I wonder which COUNTRY was called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” by the revered Martin Luther King Jr.

But this paranoia is nothing new:

We have seen Mexican land invasions, galleons of Spain off the Atlantic coast, numerous aggressive attacks by the Austro-Hungarian Empire on American civilians, destroyers attacked by North Vietnamese radar blips, civilian airliners attacking Vincennes “supersonically,” “nuclear tipped cruise missiles from Iran,” Yugoslavian genocide, Qaddafi “genocide,” 18 consecutive years of Taliban attacks on America ….

Hell – let’s start MORE WARS. And while we are at it, did you know that there are swimming Pools in Sao Paulo, Brazil – which means they have chlorine which was the first chemical weapon and, given that WMDs are WMDs – it is time we got ahead of this and dropped some nukes on Brazil before it is too late (Munich! Munich! Munich!).

Here’s an idea: Why don’t these damn warmongers put their tushes where their mouth is, and go over to Iran by themselves and start a guerrilla movement?

Pictorial proof (aerial) that Spanish galleon are speeding toward—could it be?—the USA.

*****

Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.