Mocha Man (Don Lemon) Makes History, Or So He ‘Thinks’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Intelligence, Race, Racism

An ecstatic Don Lemon, the stupidest creature to have been plonked in an anchor’s chair on cable television, attended the launch, by black America’s president, of the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. The CNN cretin announced that He—as though being a mocha man made Lemon part of the story—believed the president when he claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”

If to go by “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” by Charles Murray, “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities.

It is against this backdrop that Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative-cum-shakedown will see “leading foundations and businesses [donating] at least $200 million over five years towards programs aimed at minority youth of color.”

Lemon, who is himself an important exhibit in my case that we live in The Age of The idiot, salivated live from the White House for CNN. If you locate the clip on that nitwork, send it along.

UPDATED: Three Branches of Colluding Quislings

Barack Obama, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers

Pray tell when have the “two other branches” that are supposed to check the presidency, ever done anything but collude with the executive?

One gets the impression that Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, thinks that “the expansion of executive power,” to which he has once again testified on Capitol Hill, was a feature of the Barack Obama presidency only.

Turley did, however, clarify that “this problem didn’t begin with President Obama,” and that he “was critical of his predecessor President Bush as well,” although “the rate at which executive power has been concentrated in our system is accelerating.”

“Frankly,” warned Turley, “I am very alarmed by the implications of that aggregation of power.”

Turley is also irked by the fact that “the two other branches appear not just simply passive, but inert in the face of this concentration of authority.”

But when have Congress and the judiciary ever done what the Founding Fathers promised the constitutional scheme would compel them to do?

The truth is that the Constitution gave us three branches of colluding quislings. It was in the cards.

UPDATE: Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be “no checks, no real balances,” thundered Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry.

Mitochondrial Disorder: Myth, Iatrogenesis, Or What?

Family, Healthcare, Relatives, Rights, Science, The State

My inclination is to say that Mitochondrial Disease, “a new and rapidly developing medical subspecialty,” is one of those made-up maladies Americans excel at conjuring and then milking for attention, attention-seeking activism, fund-raising, etc. There are rewards and reinforcements to be had in cultivating disease.

Mine is a hunch. However, so does the gamut of “Mitochondrial diseases” appear to be more conjecture than science—to say nothing of the circularity in the argument for their existence: A person lacks energy, therefore the Mitochondria, the locus of energy in the cells, is faulted.

I know nothing about the epidemiology of mitochondrial disorders, although the one study focuses on populations in the more affluent parts of the world: Northern England and Northern Finland.

Perhaps Africans are too preoccupied with survival to “develop” this malady?

The context: Fox-News host Megyn Kelly has been banging on non-stop about the mitochondrially impaired girl, Justina Pelletier. The 15-year-old girl was “taken into Massachusetts State Custody after her parents disagreed with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital over her treatment plan.”

A guest summed up the travesty more succinctly than the host:

Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Children and Families, DCF, [took] this child away from these parents, who love this daughter and who want to care for this daughter, and who simply disagree with the recent diagnosis of a newly minted physician who only had been out of medical school for seven months, who disagreed with her actual treating physicians from Tufts..

Irrespective of whether this newly minted disease is mythical or authentic—there is absolutely no ambiguity in the following: The hospital staff involved in removing this girl from her loving parents, together with the personnel from the Department Which Ought To Be Dissolved; they all belong behind bars for their actions.

Government Employees

BAB's A List, Etiquette, Government

Government Employees
By Myron Pauli

For some unfathomable reason, Americans surrender control over their lives, liberty, and property to local, state, and federal governments. After they do this, they often have a sort of buyer’s remorse – perhaps changing the person at the top will do it: Cuomo begat Pataki who begat Cuomo at the state level. Or Clinton begat Bush who begat Obama who begat Clinton at the federal level – as the French say, plus ca change c’est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). If “elections” to change the captain of the ship do not bring about Utopia, then perhaps it is the lazy and stupid crew – the “government employees”.

The often heard answer is that the bureaucracy does not work because of the idiot bureaucrats. The fact is that the primary rule of a bureaucracy is “COVER YOU’RE A**” – intelligent vs. stupid or lazy vs. diligent takes a distant place to the prime directive.

LAZY employees! Be careful what you wish for! Do you really want a government of zealous workaholic Torquemadas1? What we need are IRS auditors harassing twice as many small businesses; TSA perverts fondling twice as many women; CIA agents waterboarding twice as many ‘terrorists’; NSA listening to twice as many phone calls; SWAT teams breaking twice as many doors down of suspected dope-smokers in the middle of the night; twice the number of weddings in Pakistan blown up by drones.

And keep in mind that bureaucrats dispense money – so what we need are: twice as many ethanol grants, twice as many Solyndras, twice as many foreign governments bribed, twice as many food stamps handed out, twice as many community organizers, twice as many ‘research grants’ for ‘lesbian studies in amphibians’, twice as many no-bid cost-plus contracts, twice as many grants from the National Endowment for the Arts … And then we have those LAZY regulators – let them get off their butt and write twice as many EPA and OSHA and Medicare and IRS rules – all of them contradicting other rules. After all, these extra regulations will cause jobs for thousands of lawyers and accountants and Bastiat can break a few windows from his grave2.

No, my friends – with most of what government does – pay these guys to take the whole year off except for 1 day of cake and bonuses for the “laziest” bureaucrat who did the least damage to the nation and/or to the world at large. “In spite of the temptation to screw things up, you did less beyond the call of duty”.

STUPID employees! Admittedly, National Institutes of Health might be able to use a Pasteur or Salk but does your local SWAT team need them? Aren’t we better off with Steven Jobs3 innovating at Apple than handing out housing subsidies? Would you want to employ Beethoven dispensing food stamps, Einstein operating drones, Michelangelo listening to your phone calls, and Pythagoras fondling airplane passengers? Can you imagine Sigmund Freud waterboarding! (Please get on the couch, Abdul, while I hook up the hose and ask you about your mother). Given the nature of government, America is far better off if the capable and intelligent are used productively in what remains of private enterprise. Taking useful and innovative people from where they can be constructive and letting them run free “regulating” the state, nation, and planet is a definite prescription for the sadomasochistic. As for stupid presidents – if I have to choose between “stupid” Gerald Ford and our only Ph.D. president, Woodrow Wilson4, give me a harmless mediocrity anytime and anyplace.

For one who believes that government that governs least governs best, I have NO inherent objection to lazy or stupid (under the assumption that the political system will not ever allow a government agency to be dismantled). But I will make one confession – it would be nicer if our bureaucrats were more polite!

—– —- REFERENCES —- —-
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_de_Torquemada
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
3. http://barelyablog.com/steven-jobs-%E2%80%93-capitalist-hero/
4. http://barelyablog.com/woodrow-the-worst/

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor 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.