‘As Happens With Many Dictators’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Foreign Policy, Islam, Journalism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The State

“As happens with many dictators …they grow comfortable with power.”

So spoke a CNN guest about the leader of … Syria, Bashar al Assad. “The Fall of the House of Assad” was the book under discussion.

For a moment, I thought the interviewed author was discussing creeping tyranny closer to home, but then it slipped my mind. The mandarins of the mighty Managerial State that stalks America, and the Middle East’s tinpot despots: never the twain shall meet, right?

Wrong, in this writer’s opinion.

Nevertheless, the more powerful dictator can easily depose of the lesser despot.

Duly, buried in CNN programing, yesterday, was the news that, “President Obama has secretly authorized American covert support for the Syrian effort to depose dictator Bashar al-Assad. Two U.S. officials tell us the president has signed what’s called an intelligence finding laying things out.”

When he signed that is not known. Nor do we know the exact contents. We do know that it gives the CIA and other American agencies permission to provide covert support to oust Assad. The dictator has not been seen in public for weeks. Today he put out a written statement, again blaming his year and a half war on, quote, “the criminal terrorist gangs.” That’s the phrase he’s been using justifying destroying cities.

Has this item made news headlines anywhere? Naturally not—not as far as I can see. Both political parties are agreed that, as Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, explained, “We should assume, where we have foreign policy challenges around the world, this is what we have an intelligence community to do, right? To go in clandestinely, to support American policy around the world. And so I — it shouldn’t be surprising.”

[SNIP]

Correct. It shouldn’t surprise that The Decider, Republican or Democrat, commits funds not his to causes he fancies. But does the element of surprise cover this debate? Apparently so. At least from the perspective of the malfunctioning media.

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?

Affirmative Action, BAB's A List, Education, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?
By Myron Pauli

Fairfax County, Va., is one of the wealthiest counties in America – naturally, right outside Washington DC (as Ilana would say, home of the “Oink Sector”). Nevertheless, a shocking article exposed rampant racism even in such an elite location! It turns out that a group of conspirators known as “Asians” are taking over the local magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology.

The racist youths are engaging in such underhanded techniques as: (1) studying, (2) working hard, (3) getting good grades, (4) learning, and (5) competing. In fact, Thomas Jefferson High School’s mean SAT scores are 65 percent above the Yale University freshman class! The Asian conspirators now take up 64 percent of Jefferson’s freshman class! As a result, blacks are not being admitted to the school which US NEWS called # 1 in the country!

Naturally, the mentality is to view achievement as some zero-sum game, where the more the Asian kids study, the worse off the black kids become! Presumably, giving every Asian kid a lobotomy would make blacks and Hispanics all smarter! As they say, in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is King!

Meanwhile, as I write this, there is a nearby school that is 99.6 percent black – Ballou High School – the nearest high school to the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):

NRL even has an outreach program with Ballou. In spite of that, no Ballou student has EVER passed an Advanced Placement test. Apparently the Ballou students are suffering because Ballou is “not a good school.” [Don’t you love those circular arguments, Myron?—IM] I guess Jefferson has better teachers, windows, chairs, bathrooms, etc. (actually, it is a very old school building). So I would suggest transferring the Asian racists to Ballou, and the local DC black children to Jefferson and see how those kids do one year later – after all, it is the “school” that is important and not the child (or his culture or home environment).

My speculation is that the result would be shootings at Jefferson, and that Ballou would become the best public school in the Metropolitan DC area (even if the teachers stink, the kids will just look up information online and study on their own).

The NAACP, of course, which is suing, is permanently locked into a mindset that we are still living in the 1920’s when lynching and Jim Crow were rampant. Perhaps the education of the appropriate minorities (as Orwell would put it, all minorities are equal but some minorities are more equal than others) can be improved by Congress – clearly the Civil Rights Acts have not been enough but we could bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act.

There is, naturally, a severe penalty for schools that prefer scholarship over “diversity”. Take Caltech, which admits vast numbers of Asians.

According to the New York Times, “Its baseball team has lost 227 games in a row and its women’s volleyball team has lost all 168 of its conference games. In 2011, the men’s water polo team snapped a seven-year winless drought, and the men’s basketball team ended a 310-game conference losing streak.”

Ironically, the NAACP, while living in the mindset of the 1920’s might have a hard time proving discrimination. In 1924, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act” which, by law, established only two races, white and “colored.”

It turns out that all those Nehrus, Tanakas, Moons, Nguyens, and Wongs are really “coloreds,” and therefore the actual distribution at Thomas Jefferson High School comes out as 74 percent colored and 26 percent white, even though the white school-aged population is nearly 50%. Clearly the school system is discriminating against whites!

******

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.

UPDATED: New Victors (& Old Anchors)

Human Accomplishment, Media, Politics, South-Africa, Sport

“The charmed men and women gracing the podiums of modern Olympia are there for no other reason than that they are the finest in their fields. What greater contrast can there be between the Olympian (like swimmers Missy Franklin, Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Matt Grevers) who powers himself to the pinnacle, and the politician, who drapes himself in the noble toga of idealism, in the famous words of Aldous Huxley, so as to conceal his will to power.” (“COMPETE, DON’T KILL”)

The story of the underdog is often more inspiring. Once superb sportsmen, South Africans were ousted from international competitions until they agreed to hand over the country to the African National Congress. (Nowadays, on winning, each young winner prays publicly to “Madiba,” Nelson Mandela’s African honorific, and an adopted affectation among liberals.)

Notwithstanding lack of sponsorship—South African Olympian Cameron Van der Burgh trains in “a 25 meter pool in his local gym“—great South African talent is emerging again.

Chad le Clos beat Michael Phelps in the 200 meters butterfly. A gold medal went to le Clos’s compatriot, Van der Burgh, “who broke the breaststroke world record on Sunday.”

The 24-year-old Van der Burgh “became the first South African man to win Olympic gold in an individual swimming event, after he powered through a race that left champion Kosuke Kitajima and previous record holder Brenton Rickard trailing in his wake.” (NewsDay)

He set a world record of 58.46 seconds on Sunday, beating the 58.58 set by Brenton Rickard in 2009. It also eclipsed the Olympic record of 58.83 he set in his semi-final on Saturday.
“Tonight, as I came in, I said to myself, ‘a man can change his stars, you can write your own destiny tonight’. I had my chance and I took it,” he said, after a victory that saw him lie back in the pool in sheer exhilaration at the finish.

Unrelated (and not to be rude), but has anyone noticed the frightful hags NBC has unleashed among the athletes, to gather news and interviews? OMG. I’m all for merit over pulchritude, so I hope this is what this is all about, but the stridency of Mary Carillo is quite something.

UPDATE: Facebook thread: Apartheid-era South Africa was subjected to sporting boycotts. I am not sure about boxing. In fact I do remember watching Gerrie Coetzee box.

Enoch Powell At 100

America, Britain, English, IMMIGRATION, Literature, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Race

Enoch Powell’s famous, much-maligned “rivers of blood” speech has devolved over the years to suit Powell’s adversaries. Delivered in Birmingham, in April 1968, notes The Times Literary Supplement, the famous segment read as follows:

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. . . . To see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

The TLS’s welcome, if marginal, mention of Powell is on the occasion of the publication of Tom Bower’s “balanced critique of Powell’s rhetoric”: Enoch at 100: A revaluation of the life, politics and philosophy.

Helped along by oodles of ignorance, the “foaming Tiber mutated over the years to ‘rivers of blood’, notionally streaming through British cities as the tide of immigration rose unchecked.” (TLS)

As Bower points out, “the official figure for immigrants at the time was relatively small”:

“only 7,000 males every year”, but “the government did not announce that annually a further 50,000 dependants of established immigrants were also entering Britain”.
Powell’s fear was less of immigrants as such (though his “Rivers of Blood” speech contains passages about “negroes” which might land him in [a British] court today) than of a breakdown in “social cohesion”.

“Repeatedly,” it is observed in this TLS editorial, Powell “pointed to rioting in American cities, then at a fearful pitch. Why was Britain inviting the ‘tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence’ of the country?”

Stupidly, the TLS editor joins in blaming Powell’s “oratory” for making “immigration a taboo subject by silencing even reasoned opponents of immigration and multiculturalism who feared being tarnished as racists.”

From the fact that “plain talk about the topic is rare, even dangerous,” the TLS concludes that Powell is at fault.

Oh my!

I do like what Saul Bellow said about the “intractable phenomenon” in the US: “we lack a language in which to talk about it.”

IT being unfettered immigration, also known as “The Suicide of the West.”

Still, I’m pleasantly surprised that the TLS (July 6, 2012) made even marginal mention of Enoch at 100. Surprised because the TLS, once so objective and rigorous, is tilting to tinny, lefty, obscurantist postmodernism. (To modify a Joan Rivers witticism, Why would you want to reproduce a rash?)

That’s one way to reduce circulation, and suck the joy out of English literature (“the English-speaking people” is a concept TLS reviewers now routinely mock or “deconstruct”).