Thursday, June 03, 2004

Misleading headline

The headline says "Segregation persists in town behind Brown". It goes on to tell of a local public school that is 99% black, and another one that is 90% white.

OK, but the 90% white school is a private school. Brown v. Board of Education was about public schools and certainly couldn't force the integration of private schools.

I've lived in the rural South, and one of my junior high schools had been the black senior high. I'm not under any illusions about why that private school is there, and there are countless others like it throughout the South.

But can no one else see something fishy about a statement like "separate is inherently unequal", such as is asserted in Brown? Someone actually claimed that "...if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation." Yeah, right - black kids are automatically shortchanged if white kids aren't present. Am I the only one that sees that as insulting to blacks?

It's long past now, and IMO integration did me good. I didn't have to spend half my day commuting across town to satisfy some judge's idea of racial justice though. There had to be a way to make this happen without inflicting such questionable law on us in the process.

Feminism where it's needed, for a change

A group of Muslim women are "reclaiming the rights Islam gave women in the 7th century. Go sisters go!

Stolen from Instapundit.

Put me on that jury!

"Single mother says she can't afford $500,000 fine for daughter's downloads"

Bastards.

Voices of the dead

Well, sort of.

Monday, May 31, 2004

Old English slang

No, we're not talking about Chaucer - this is just something I found from the Gutenberg project which lists some English slang from around 1800.

This explains a lot of things

Have you marveled at French behavior regarding Iraq and the Middle East. I have a theory - their moral philosophers have been sleeping.

Beaker's Corner points us here, where we learn that French aren't getting enough sleep (and we Anglo-Saxons are at fault).

I'll admit that the French have developed leisure as an art form. The products which they are best known for, wine and cheese, came about because the French learned that if they sat on their asses long enough, microorganisms would do their work for them. Too lazy to bathe or shower, they invented the bidet, and that only because they believed that venereal diseases came from riding horses.

But it doesn't stop there. In business, they find it easier to sell overpriced goods and services to dictators like Saddam Hussein than to compete against modern economies. There's the 35 hour work week, which may be even too slack for them. And let's not forget the millions of unassimilated immigrants - their next war with Algerians might happen on French soil.

IMO what they need is a wake-up call.

Grudgenetics

What do you know? - it turns out that all those stories about white masters beating black slaves here in the US weren't true after all. For those of you who find this controversial, the answer is right here.

You see, Isaac Cortez Bynum is charged with murder by abuse in the June 30 death of his son Ryshawn Lamar Bynum. He did so because African Americans today are affected by past centuries of U.S. slavery because the original slaves were never treated for the trauma of losing their homes; seeing relatives whipped, raped and killed; and being subjugated by whites.

The slave theory is the work of Joy DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor in the Portland State University Graduate School of Social Work. In the hands of Bynum's state-appointed lawyer, "I think it can be proven. The problem is it's brand new. It's not as easy to present in court as something that's been established over years."

Yeah really, especially if you try to do it with a straight face.

But really now - if this is the first case identified after all this time, then there must not have been so much abuse after all, right? Or has this been sneaking under the radar for all these years?

Or else maybe this is the leading edge of a wave. Soon there will be millions of cases of black men killing their children because of this effect. Someone call DCFS!

Yeah yeah, we must be able to study ideas and follow the truth where it leads us, and weird ideas are OK as long as we reject them. But this one doesn't pass the first order giggle test. As far as I'm concerned the lawyer who put this forward should be billed for wasting the court's time.

Like animals

Debra Saunders: Target of the week: "Animal-rights activists went to the home of a Chiron employee one night last year to send a message. They pounded on her front door, rang her doorbell and shouted, 'Open the door,' followed by an epithet. Another night, they shouted through bullhorns and then bragged about it on the Internet. Someone also exploded two pipe bombs in her workplace.

Her crime? She was a paralegal for the Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, Calif., which engages in animal research to develop vaccines and other lifesaving products. It was her bad luck that Chiron had contracted with the animal-research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences -- and worse luck that animal-rights activists had formed a group committed to putting Huntingdon out of business, a group that was willing to intimidate any individual toward that end."

Imagine the fuss if someone set off some pipe bombs at an abortion clinic. Why don't these creeps get the same kind of coverage anti-abortion protesters get?

Sunday, May 30, 2004

"Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States."

Quoth Reggie Rivers, star of the storied Denver Broncos backfield of the early 90's, who must have taken a few too many shots to the head. What an ignorant SOB!

He might be a one-trick pony - here he compares the treatment of gays to that of blacks in the '50s. I didn't see that, but my history books must have left out the gay high schools and how they all of them had to sit in the back of the bus. Imagine how horrible it would have been to have gay-only public bathrooms.

Incidentally, unless he was one heck of a blocker he wasn't so hot a pro player either. In the 1994 season, which happens to be the first one I found on Google, he was good for 1.9 yards per carry and 83 entire yards. In total yardage he fell between two quarterbacks (David Klingler and Neil O'Donnell), and they both had more yards per carry.

But that's enough from me. We'll let Baldilocks do the wet work here.