Shaming Sherman? Are You Kidding Me?

Feminism, Gender, Political Correctness, Sport

Men have been shamed into partaking in the pregnancy production: “We are pregnant.” “We are having a baby.” “I can’t close on that million-dollar deal now; “we’re due today,” they all chant obediently.

“And I can’t play the Super Bowel if my girlfriend gives birth on the day” is what Richard Sherman, the Seattle Seahawks’ cornerback, is expected to announce. Yes, with 30 million or more on the line, the man is expected to drop the ball and rush to the delivery room if his girlfriend drops a baby on Sunday.

Excuse me while a puke.

Coach Pete Carroll, who will have a baby himself if Sherman deserts the field, is too afraid to say anything insensitive lest some Enforcer gets on his case and he is forced to resign.

Sherman is one of the best players expected to play in Super Bowl XLIX. His ability to virtually shut down an entire side of the field causes major game-planning obstacles for opponents. That’s especially true for a team like the New England Patriots, which relies heavily on the passing game to move the ball.

(Bleacher Report.)

You and I know that Sherman, 26—who, I dare I say? will have many more girlfriends in the future—wants to PLAY come Sunday, no matter what.

Anyhow, the New England Patriots are going DOWN.

In the battle with the Boston Brahmins of the Northeast; the team furthest away from Rome must win Super Bowl XLIX. How else can I get worked up, if I don’t cast this weird game as a battle between those close to Rome and those far away from it?

Go Seahawks. Go Sherman!

Too Earnest, Too Attractive, Too Macho, Too Moneyed, Too White, Too Christian

Elections, Ethics, Republicans

“Romney’s repeal-and-replace statism was irreconcilable with this writer’s libertarianism. … Romney was wrong on China. Wrong on Iran. Wrong on Russia. Wrong on Foreign policy, in general. Wrong on almost everything. Yet as incongruous as this may seem, Mitt Romney is a fine man—a man with great personal virtues, if profound flaws in political philosophy. Ann Romney, herself a delightful lady, is a lucky woman. Romney is a great provider, is fabulously devoted to family and faith, is consistently generous and charitable to all those around him, and brilliant in all endeavors, academic and entrepreneurial. … Unlike Obama’s university transcripts, Romney’s would have stood up to the scrutiny that never came.” (From “No Country For Old, White Men.”)

And whatever you think of him, Romney is still doing what he believes is best for the country he loves.

According to National Journal, despite bowing out of the 2016 race to rule, Mitt “Romney’s push forward had been his belief, … that other establishment candidates—Bush, Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio—aren’t up to snuff. But his Friday remarks indicate that he thinks his presence in the race would be more damaging to his goal of electing ‘a conservative leader to become our next president.'”

Romney is right about the rest of the Republicans in the 2016 race to rule; they’re a repulsive lot.

More about Romney the man:

… Money was Mitt’s Mark of Cain. So were his wicked work ethic and whiteness.

Romney was booed when he wooed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Enough to provoke the ire of blacks, Latinos, ladies of all hues, the halt and the lame was the mere hint that the too-white-to-like Romney would slow down the gravy train.

Lickspittle Republicans were as eager as the Democratic representatives of these identity groups to lambaste Mr. Romney for being too attractive, too macho, too white, too Christian, and too rich. No one could have failed to notice that Mitt Romney resembles the “Mad Man” played by Jon Hamm, in the eponymous AMC series. Both men are tall, dark and handsome, with the kind of picture-perfect, quintessential American good looks. Both hide their feelings and are spare with their emotions. When they show their softer side–it actually means something. Each is dutiful and dependable.

Such qualities, once considered desirable in a man, now offend the dominatrixes who run the nation’s newsrooms. “He’s a very private man; and that’s a liability.” “How can you get me to vote for him, if I don’t like him?” “He needs to humanize himself.” And, “Can he [even] be humanized?” demanded one CNN ghoul by the name of Gloria Borger on the eve of Halloween. Mitt Romney was inhuman: That, very plainly, was the premise of this harridan’s rhetorical question.

“Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him,” noodled the banal Ms. Borger over and over again, for the campaign’s duration.

This was the menstrually inspired miasma that emanated from TV studios countrywide.

Thus did Mitt Romney come to embody elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* The “tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit.” (Check)
* The character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* The protagonist is pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* The character must be neither totally good nor totally evil.
* An error of judgment or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events. (Check: Romney’s failures ushered in four more years of epochal evil.)
* His action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* He struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, he gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s pathos-filled election concession speech crystallized these tragic elements.

We “left everything on the field,” he said. “We have given our all to this campaign.”

Indeed, the prototypical Greek tragic figure “struggles courageously until his fall.” …

MORE.

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

… The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.

Why So Many Cop Killings?

BAB's A List, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, GUNS, Justice, Law

BY WILLIAM B. SCOTT

In the wake of grand jury decisions to not indict two police officers, who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, persistent protests erupted across the United States. These led to senseless attacks against police officers, including two New York City cops, killed as they sat in their patrol car. Unfortunately, such reprehensible, inexcusable shootings were predictable—and will continue, unless timely, pragmatic action is taken.

Activists, media analysts and politicians have focused on myriad “causes” for the unrest—race-based unfairness, a perceived pro-police bias within the judiciary, mendacious cops, legal system deficiencies, and other issues—to explain the recent backlash against an epidemic of citizen fatalities at the hands of police officers.

Overshadowed by rightful outrage and angst that followed the insane execution of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in New York is an equally alarming fact: In 2014, police officers killed 1,100 people, an average of three every day of the year. (KilledByPolice.net) That figure contrasts with 126 law enforcement officers killed in 2014, according to an annual report released by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Fifty officers were killed with guns, and 15 of those were via “ambush assaults,” matching a 2012 total. Attacks on cops have been increasing over the past few years, although police work is much safer today than it was in the 1970s.

These statistics should be a loud-and-clear wakeup call for every American. Unless leaders at the federal, state and local levels openly acknowledge that there’s a dark, disturbing correlation between the deaths of 1,100 citizens and a rash of intentional, random attacks on police officers, this nation will be condemned to thousands more heartbreaking funerals in 2015.

Indignant police union leaders’ demands that Congress label attacks on uniformed officers as “hate crimes” have yielded chilly, skeptical receptions. Equally irate American citizens are demanding practical, substantive changes in police policies, practices and training—realistic solutions that hold quick-to-shoot cops accountable, yet protect good, honorable officers, who daily live their oaths to protect and serve.

Worried public officials from the White House to local mayors’ offices and city councils are scrambling to appease angry, fed up, disaffected citizens and embattled police officers, before outright armed rebellion explodes into nationwide chaos. Most public officials fully understand that citizens are fed up with post-shooting patronization: “We’re conducting a thorough investigation to determine exactly what occurred.” “We’ll change policies, procedures and practices to make sure this never happens again.” And the tired granddaddy of all, “We’ll improve officer training.”

On the other side, upstanding, professional police officers are frustrated by protests and repercussions attributed to the misdeeds, questionable shootings, chokings and general abuse committed by their uniformed compatriots. Consequently, the chasm between disheartened cops and exasperated, infuriated citizens continues to widen.

Police officers and taxpayers of all races and creeds, from Los Angeles to New York, must face several inescapable truths: Unless drastic improvements are made, the only elements guaranteed to change will be cops’ annual body count and the number of attacks on police officers. And race isn’t the primary factor driving either police brutality or ambushes on cops. Despite what we’re told by the media, high-profile activists and police unions, many of today’s sworn officers are equal-opportunity abusers and killers. They shoot to kill, without regard for ethnicity or creed.

Something must be done to drastically curb police brutality and killing, as well as egregious attacks on police officers, then rebuild trust between citizens and the U.S. law enforcement community, before outrage ignites a shooting war.

*******
William B. Scott is a former bureau chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, a Flight Test Engineer graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and author of The Permit, a thriller based on his eldest son’s death.