Hillary's thesis

I've carelessly lost the links to this, but it's everywhere, and I'm sure industrious readers (are either of you industrious?) will find it.

Hillary's thesis at Wellesley, written at age 21, was inaccessible throughout the Clinton presidency at her request. And I grant that a 21 year old Hillary, like many of us at that age, probably wasn't the wisest or most rational person in the world.

Nonetheless much of what she is can, apparently, be seen in that document, as well as much that is true but that she apparently rejects today.

I've found one quote that bears a look, a comment about public welfare and its downside:

“A cycle of dependency has been created,” she wrote, “which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy.”

In this she is dead right. And it is the conservative's lament today, that what well could be good and hardworking and capable people are never given the chance to learn just how much they could achieve, because from childhood they are locked in the degrading cycle of accepting public money to get by.

It's just one of the many good reasons to look at poverty through the lens of a vibrant economy rather than a government program. The more active and productive America is, the more jobs are created and the more opportunity exists for people to become self-reliant.

Conversely, the more government programs and taxes there are, the less vibrant the economy will be, and the fewer poor people will ever have the chance to know just what they can do. "Resignation and apathy", in Hillary's own words, are their fate.

Too bad that these days Hillary decries the conservative view she proposed in that paper. Today she claims the people who don't believe in government programs are evil, and want those poor people to remain in misery.

But as she wrote so long ago, it is socialism that distributes misery, not capitalism.

In case you haven't seen these... :-)

Here's part 1 and 2 of my epic docudrama, filmed entirely on location in Montauk and on the water in Block Island Sound.

In other words, a fishing trip. :-)

I hate to be right all the time... :-(

... and lucky for me, I'm not. :-)

But I was this time. I suspected in a post down below that Dog Chapman's son Tucker was the one who publicized the telephone call recording that has engineered the downfall of the Dog empire. Sadly, it's true.

Recall, Chapman was attempting to draw the line with Tucker over his girlfriend. He didn't trust her and didn't like her, and felt his family and his media empire was at risk because of her.

Almost everyone in media, every black public figure with an axe to grind, almost everyone in GENERAL has decided Chapman is a dreadful ugly racist who should be punished.

Remember the context, the actual words of the call, I beg you. Not because I'm defending him over the use of the word-- he should have stopped talking like that 20 years ago, for obvious reasons-- but because Chapman himself explained in the call that he doesn't mean by that word that all black people are inferior, or that he hates them, or that he is a racist.

He didn't say these things clearly or well; he was under immense emotional pressure, trying to draw a line between himself and his son for now and the future. It was difficult, and the words did not come easily to him.

Contextually, though, he was saying "Tucker, I don't dislike her because she's black. She could be any race or color and I would feel the same. I don't trust her not to be an opportunist, to run to the media with stories about how we talk in this house. We don't mean anything by it, but America wouldn't understand. I don't want to risk everything I've worked for, and you should think about your family here and what everyone has to lose. I don't want her in this house. Either break up with her or get a job somewhere else, and I'll help you do that."

So, influenced by a young woman raised in the Sharpton/Jackson generation, young Tucker did what dad thought impossible. He betrayed his family and his father.

This episode does not make Dog evil, and it certainly does not make Tucker the good guy. Doubtless he enjoyed and participated in all the household conversations in which that N word was used, and for other reasons had only recently developed a distaste for it.

Still, the right thing to do would have been to move along to the other job Dog would have helped him find, and encourage his father and family to change their ways, for the right reasons. Had Tucker done this, I could have respected him and given him public credit for being a good person and for encouraging his dad to be better.

What Tucker did instead makes me sick and heartbroken. He is young and unwise, and probably believes at present that he has done the right thing, but that won't last long. I repeat, Dog should have changed his habits decades ago, and was certainly aware of the risks in more recent times. But he was an authentic guy, an honest man, and it was hard for him to really believe that just being who he was in his own private time was so wrong as to require wholesale change.

And perhaps he was right to be confident in his own goodness, but that word was always going to bring him down.

Dog's a bad man who became a good man. Tucker has wrecked everything Dog built, and put an end to the good influence Dog was bringing to the world.

Sleep well, boy, if you can.

and then there's Cherie baby...

After watching that previous post's TV clip wherein the little guy with the beard was teaching the young men how to respectfully beat their wives, I was greatly uplifted to find this.

Cherie Blair, wife of former Brit PM Tony, has made a public appearance and said that the bit about beating your wife is NOT in the Koran.

Well thank goodness. That TV clip had me all worried that Muslims might think all the wife-beating they're doing is called for by the Koran.

Oh, wait. Read further down in the article about Cherie baby and you'll see that she's wrong, that wife-beating IS called for in the Koran.

Darn it. How are we supposed to make Islam all rosy and acceptable when its own book keeps agreeing with the fundamentalists?

We'll just have to ignore it. Say it isn't there. Pretend everything's fine, and it will be.

Let's all change our names to Neville Chamberlain and proudly shout "peace in our time!" and it will come.........

How not to beat your wife, Islam-style...

Muhammad al-Arifi is his name, a teacher of young men in the finer points of Islamic life. These are his admonishments to young teens in a television show appearance captured by Memri explaining the proper Islamic way of beating your wife.

"If he beats her, the beatings must be light and must not make her face ugly. He must beat her where it will not leave marks. He should not beat her on the hand... He should beat her in some places where it will not cause any damage. He should not beat her like he would beat an animal or a child - slapping them right and left. Unfortunately, many husbands beat their wives only when they get mad, and when they start beating, it as if they are punching a wall – they beat with their hands, right and left, and sometimes use their feet. Brother, it is a human being you are beating. This is forbidden. He must not do this."

That's right, you Islamic teenage boys, it's a HUMAN BEING you're beating. You should beat her only with the utmost respect for her humanity.

Is this sick, or am I just behind the times?

See it here.

An igNobel act

This year, a Nobel prize was awarded, split between Algore and the IPCC, for their work in warning the world of the coming disaster of Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming (cue the screams of the panicked public)....

Gore is one man, but the IPCC is thousands. Nonetheless, one of the thousands has publicly rejected his share of the Nobel (0.0001%, as he jokingly says) due to the uncomfortable fact that he disagrees with these 'scientific conclusions'.

He says it's far too complicated to fully understand. He says we've had warming and cooling before, many times throughout thousands and millions of years, and that it's all cyclical. He says one year you have hippoes swimming in the Thames, and in a geological eyeblink you have an ice bridge between Britain and America. He says if we can't predict the behavior of one storm system over five days, we can't possibly begin to understand the entire world's climate over a hundred years, and yet other panel members pretend loudly that they can predict such climate change over such a long term.

He does note a loose equitability between the carbon record and the temperature record, but does not go on to remind us of an important fact Gore never mentions; that the carbon dioxide increases in history come hundreds of years AFTER the temperature increases, not before or during. This means, logically, that increased temperatures cause increased CO2, and not the other way around.

Nevertheless, it's nice to see an actual Nobel winner rejecting the prize out of principle. He worked on the IPCC panel, but his work and his conclusions are nowhere near what the panel as a whole has claimed.

I wonder how many other scientists out of those thousands of panel members are similarly uncomfortable with its claims.

HT Atlas.

Dawg vs. the Senator

Senator Robert Byrd in clearer, more principled times.

Yes, it's really him.

***********************************

Dog Chapman's worst fear has become reality. The show is over. The reputation is in tatters. The future is gone.

Very few print or online outlets are admitting that there is context here in his telephone tape, and that it is ironic in the extreme. I've read a dozen or more stories to the effect that he has 'let loose a racist tirade loaded with expletives', 'replete with the N word', and so forth, but nobody seems interested in the actual point Chapman was making while saying those things.

And for clarity's sake, as for irony's, it bears examination.

I've listened to it several times, and the context is clear to me--

Chapman is upset with his son Tucker's choice of girlfriends. He distrusts her and wants his son to break up with her, believing she is the kind of person who will use what she knows about the Chapman family to destroy them, just for spite, or perhaps for money. Chapman issues an ultimatum to Tucker; break up with her, or find another job.

I think benefit of doubt applies to Dog in terms of his ability to judge character. He wasn't born yesterday, and he's seen every kind of phoniness and perfidy mankind can offer. He is certain about this girl, for whatever reason, and he is certain his son is starry-eyed and cannot see what kind of person she is.

Tucker's girlfriend is black, of course. Chapman's greatest fear, as revealed in the conversation, is that everything he's worked for over 30 years will be destroyed by an opportunistic black person who will reveal publicly what she has heard in the Chapman household as casual conversation.

Dog complains that America wouldn't understand the meaning, in his household, of these words. He claims to be innocent of the vicious racist meaning of the N word, using it only to differentiate between Black People and N****s, and the implication is that Black People are good ordinary people and N****s are vile, troublesome, dishonest and untrustworthy people who happen to be black.

This is not an unusual sentiment among ex-convicts-- and former KKK members. Senator Robert Byrd revealed his endorsement of that view on national TV, even to the extent of calling some white people n***s because of other aspects of their lifestyle that they, apparently, share with the authentic n***s. Whatever, Senator Byrd. Whatever. I still can't believe this evil old coot is still serving in the Senate.

But Dog's greatest nightmare has come true, ironically because of the telephone call with his son in which he explicitly asserted to Tucker that he was determined to avoid that nightmare.

What Dog Chapman has failed to realize (until it's too late) is that he was doomed from the outset. If in fact he's been using that word in casual family conversations and in personal time, as doubtless he has all his life, then the PC clock was always ticking, and the Sharpton bomb was always going to go off.

He is a victim here, of his own upbringing. He spent his youth in that environment, absorbed its language, and probably never thought twice about changing his style. He became a criminal and a murderer, went to prison, found Jesus, turned his life around, and in the years since it can be argued that he has done an awful lot of good in a world of very very bad people who need exactly what he offers.

But he never changed his habits. Like many people, he knows in his own heart that he means no harm by his language. It is simply a part of him, his personal history. And even today, many black people claim the right to use the term on similar grounds, that 'we know we mean no harm by it'.

I do not defend Chapman. He's a big boy, and he already knows more about actions and consequences than I ever will. And I won't defend the use of that word. It had its genesis in the name of an African country and in the spanish word for Black, but it accrued over time a heavy load of contempt and insult and it deserves the scrap heap. Rappers too should abandon it, but nobody will pressure them to do so.

But why does Robert Byrd deserve no consequences for the life choices he made, which even today have cost him NOTHING? Hasn't he used that word in casual conversation about a MILLION times? Isn't his personal opinion of black people already published and accessible to anyone who wants to look for it?

Some would say, 'yes, but he's apologized.' In fact that is what he says, when asked about all this.

So has Duane Chapman.

His show is cancelled, his life and contributions to the lives of others are ruined, by a telephone call illegally recorded and illegally released.

It was a painful private moment for a man whose early life made him this way and whose later life has by any measure redeemed him.

I wonder if any of the hardcase young men on whom he has made a positive impact will step up and speak for him. I hope so.

But the juggernaut of political correctness spares none from its heartless destruction, and I doubt any young man has the courage to publicly support him now.

Where are the democrats now, with their loud protestations about freedom of speech?

It doesn't apply, of course; this was a private moment, protected by laws about privacy, and nonetheless now raw and bloody and public.

Dog never changed his private personal style, even when he was probably becoming aware that it was risky business to continue with it. He trusted his family. And perhaps it was Tucker himself, angry at Dad for intruding into his romance, who released the tape. Perhaps he will live to regret it.

But political correctness has worked its magic and destroyed another life.

Dog's is a life that celebrates redemption and offers it to others.

Or at least it did.