It’s midnight on the roof of the Hilton Manhattan East Hotel in New York and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is meeting with Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles), head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, Louis Farrakhan, head honcho of the Nation of Islam, and Jeremiah Wright, FOB (friend of Barack), known hereinafter as A, S, F, and W, respectively…not respectfully. Interpreters are used.
**A: Glad you could…
**W: I don’t care if you do send guns to them Iraqis and teach Stoning-Women 101 to freshmen at that school in Tehran, comin’ all the way up…
**F: Don’t mind Jeremiah there, Mahmoud…you don’t mind if I call you Mahmoud, do you…brothers in the faith and all that…praise Allah? Jeremiah’s been out on the revival circuit rolling in the cash from those love-offerings…LOVE OFFERINGS…oh…hoo-hah…and he’s worn-out baptizing all those suckers into…by the way, Mahmoud, it took me an hour to get through your security…had to take off all my clothes three times…don’t you think that’s a little much, especially since they made my 100 bodyguards pile their guns in an elevator that disappeared?
**S: What’s that awful smell, President A…I’ll just use “A” since I get tongue-tied trying to get out A-a-m-j-d…you can see how it is. In LA, we use code anyway and “A” in an e-mail to a brother stands for “waste a cop” and that just seems to fit you and those Republican Guards that catch all those adultery-type women and…whoopee…blood flyin’…
**A: Brothers, brothers…well, okay, praise Allah, at least you’re a brother, Imam Farrakhan, but Shabazz sounds mighty Islamic, too, Malik, so I guess we’re three-to-one…
**F: Not so fast, Mahmoud…Akbar Allah! Jeremiah is my close colleague and…
**A: Ah, that’s right. He went with you to see Moammar Qadaffi when you were looking for a million dollars…when was that…25 years ago…tell me…you didn’t watch those wicked houris in the dance of the seven vails, did you?
**W: Praise Allah and Buddha, too, and throw in the Hindus! Did we ever watch those houris…is that what they were? I thought it was just a strip-joint like in Chicago and it took Louis five days to remember why he was there.
**A: May Allah look down on you with pity, Allah be worshiped! H-m-m-m…the 72 virgins for the martyrs are also called houris…so…no burqas, huh?
**F: No burqas! Hoo-hah…no anything, Mahmoud. I’ll be sure to be a martyr someday…just assasinate an infidel policeman and get shot…well, Chicago’s full of infidel cops and a suicide bomb would be so messy anyway…not enough left of me for a grand funeral!
**S: but what about that smell…like somebody’s barbecuin’ shoe leather…I can smell it all the way up here in the pure air of New York…ha ha ha…pure air…too close to the UN building for that.
**W: Didn’t you read the paper? Mahmoud brought his own chef and you smelled fricaseed goat. They clean out the best meat and then use the carcass as the puck to play Muslim polo. Half the hotel guests left after the first night and PETA stole all the rest of Mahmoud’s goats and a camel that was supposed to be barbecued last night.
**A: Not exactly true! Only a camel rump-roast is any good. But, tell me, why have you sought out my brilliance?
**S: Our brother Barack is in a bind, A. Even though he claims to be a Christian, a third of Americans consider him one of us and that hurts badly at election time.
**A: Well, isn’t he? He was a Muslim kid for ten years and that’s supposed to make him a Muslim for life…just like the hated Israelis…for life!
**W: But he converted right in my church, Mahmoud…a matter of record, fortunately, except that because I prayed that God would damn America, folks even think I’m one of you and certainly after Barack threw me under the bus for damning America again at the National Press Club. Barack’s doing the backyard circuit now and the Christianity question is always planted after the barbecue but folks still don’t get it.
**A: You mean he’s actually a Christian after all? Allah be mortified…a traitor! When he said he would talk to me anytime without conditions, I thought he was a Muslim, though maybe a hated Sunni so I had a thousand guards trained for the meeting. Mullah Omar and Osama speak to me only when I send guns…they hate us Shiites, like that damnable Saddam did and killed hundreds of thousands of us. The only thing worse than a Sunni is an American.
**S: Well, the crackers all…
**A: Crackers? I thought crackers are good with peanut butter for a snack.
**S: Oh no. Crackers are white people – used to be honkies – but the NBPP changed that…
**A: Now I remember reading it in the paper. One of your brothers, also called Shabazz, screamed in Philadelphia that all the brothers should kill all the crackers and even the cracker-babies. I thought that was odd unless maybe they meant the big Zestas and the little Cheezits ground-up for maybe a fig casserole.
**F: So, as much as we hate to admit it, we need for you to denounce Barack as a hated Christian with maybe a fatwa out against him in the bargain…you know, make it good and get him all kinds of pity for the Congressional vote this year and all the marbles in 2012.
**W: Maybe you could say you learned this in a vision like you had in that UN speech a while back. It was in a vision that I learned that Reagan had AIDS invented to kill off black folk.
**A: Ah yes…that vision…glorious! Later, I spoke at Columbia…hoo-hah…Allah be amused…the school that Barack attended. (pause) Now, about this matter…what’s in it for me?
**F: And it was in a vision that I found out that Bush had the levees in New Orleans sabotaged by the army to let go and kill off black folk.
**A: (stridently) What’s in it for me?
**S: My organization and Louis’s organization, with our thousands of bodyguards, promise you a safe exile if the ayatollahs get mad and issue a fatwa on you or the Israelis bomb your new mosque prepared for the Twelfth Mahdi to rule forever, ruining your power, whichever comes first. (pause) I gotta go…that smell…
**F, W: Me, too…a-a-r-r-h-h-g-g-A-A-R-R-H-H-G-G! (S, F, W, gagging, run out)
**A: Not a bad deal! Hey…wait…oh well…wonder what it’s like in California…
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
The Player & the Grades
The big news in Lexington these days has to do not with the Equestrian Games but with whether or not Eric Bledsoe, the star basketball player of 2009-10 at UK and now in the NBA, had grades sufficiently appropriate for even being a student, much less a direct descendent of one of the Greek gods, which is the description awarded to basketball bouncers at UK. The investigation by the NCAA and/or the Birmingham, Alabama, City School System (actually hired a law firm for such a momentous task) has been ongoing for a long time.
A panel instituted by the Birmingham City Schools and headed by a former federal judge (nothing but the best) also looked into the matter and came up with “an independent review” concluding that some grades had been changed; however, the school superintendent decided that not enough evidence was available to declare the player’s transcript to be invalid. In fact, no grade books from his junior year were made available, nor were more than half from his senior year. The grade-books were AWOL from the system, if, indeed, even in existence…probably not.
One of the strangest findings was that Bledsoe received an “A” in algebra 3 before taking algebra 2, according to the Birmingham News. That’s quite an accomplishment. One of Bledsoe’s teachers indicated that a changed grade meant that extra work had been done that required the change. Problem: There was no proof, of course, that any extra work had been done. In any case, unless Birmingham is different, extra work happens BEFORE the grade is given, not afterward.
So what! Well…UK would probably have had to forfeit all the games it won, actually no big deal for the coach since he’s been through this stuff before at other schools and nothing as world-shaking as an NCAA final four appearance, the Mt. Olympus of basketball gods, was involved anyway. At $4 million a year, he had nothing financially to lose, nor did UK since it has faced everything from point-fixing scandals to illegal recruiting practices for decades. NCAA probation is virtually part of the curriculum, hardly worth a healthy yawn.
Strangely, Bledsoe has an attorney, notwithstanding that he didn’t construct his transcript and was not charged with anything. The attorney complained that the panel had not contacted Bledsoe to get his take on the matter, though what could he be expected to say about the panel’s report that 17 of 24 grades “earned” in his senior year had been “conspicuously changed?” The attorney pontificated about an unfounded attack on Bledsoe’s character and integrity, and that the player was not too happy about the whole thing. Still laughing?
One suspects that Bledsoe’s unhappiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that he recently signed a contract with the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported approximately $1.2 million, not bad for a year’s work involving 84 games, a lot of travel and all the rest. In fact, the player has probably been laughing all the way to the bank every time he’s cashed a check. Not many university graduates make that much for many years. And this is just the beginning for Bledsoe, a fine player, who maybe just got “a little help from my friends,” as the Lennon-McCartney song would have it.
It’s worth remembering that Bledsoe’s experience is not unique, especially in the NCAA Southeast Conference, but actually sort of par for the course. Sports fans understand that integrity on the part of coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents, who actually approve of and operate the whole shady enterprise (except at Vanderbilt), is neither expected nor particularly desired. They want a winner, the devil take the hindmost. Coaches and athletic directors become fabulously wealthy in the whole sordid mess and, in fact, make it on the backs of players like Bledsoe, who most likely knew exactly what was going on, but considered himself just another accepted part of the “system.”
College/university sports, with the possible exception of baseball, are accepted as the minor leagues for professional sports, especially football and basketball, the latter including girls teams. Even full scholarships for golf are available. Only a miniscule number of athletes ever make it to the pros but they get a free ride in education…sometimes if they can just sign their names, while actual scholars exiting high schools run up huge debts and flip burgers at McDonalds. This isn’t fair but the name of the game is money and the crazed fans demand their red meat.
And now a crass adjunct: The lead story in the book**"The Stem-cell Quarterback" & Other Stories is all about the SEC and the lengths to which university honchos will go to game the system on the backs of athletes. Read it and weep…or laugh.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
A panel instituted by the Birmingham City Schools and headed by a former federal judge (nothing but the best) also looked into the matter and came up with “an independent review” concluding that some grades had been changed; however, the school superintendent decided that not enough evidence was available to declare the player’s transcript to be invalid. In fact, no grade books from his junior year were made available, nor were more than half from his senior year. The grade-books were AWOL from the system, if, indeed, even in existence…probably not.
One of the strangest findings was that Bledsoe received an “A” in algebra 3 before taking algebra 2, according to the Birmingham News. That’s quite an accomplishment. One of Bledsoe’s teachers indicated that a changed grade meant that extra work had been done that required the change. Problem: There was no proof, of course, that any extra work had been done. In any case, unless Birmingham is different, extra work happens BEFORE the grade is given, not afterward.
So what! Well…UK would probably have had to forfeit all the games it won, actually no big deal for the coach since he’s been through this stuff before at other schools and nothing as world-shaking as an NCAA final four appearance, the Mt. Olympus of basketball gods, was involved anyway. At $4 million a year, he had nothing financially to lose, nor did UK since it has faced everything from point-fixing scandals to illegal recruiting practices for decades. NCAA probation is virtually part of the curriculum, hardly worth a healthy yawn.
Strangely, Bledsoe has an attorney, notwithstanding that he didn’t construct his transcript and was not charged with anything. The attorney complained that the panel had not contacted Bledsoe to get his take on the matter, though what could he be expected to say about the panel’s report that 17 of 24 grades “earned” in his senior year had been “conspicuously changed?” The attorney pontificated about an unfounded attack on Bledsoe’s character and integrity, and that the player was not too happy about the whole thing. Still laughing?
One suspects that Bledsoe’s unhappiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that he recently signed a contract with the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported approximately $1.2 million, not bad for a year’s work involving 84 games, a lot of travel and all the rest. In fact, the player has probably been laughing all the way to the bank every time he’s cashed a check. Not many university graduates make that much for many years. And this is just the beginning for Bledsoe, a fine player, who maybe just got “a little help from my friends,” as the Lennon-McCartney song would have it.
It’s worth remembering that Bledsoe’s experience is not unique, especially in the NCAA Southeast Conference, but actually sort of par for the course. Sports fans understand that integrity on the part of coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents, who actually approve of and operate the whole shady enterprise (except at Vanderbilt), is neither expected nor particularly desired. They want a winner, the devil take the hindmost. Coaches and athletic directors become fabulously wealthy in the whole sordid mess and, in fact, make it on the backs of players like Bledsoe, who most likely knew exactly what was going on, but considered himself just another accepted part of the “system.”
College/university sports, with the possible exception of baseball, are accepted as the minor leagues for professional sports, especially football and basketball, the latter including girls teams. Even full scholarships for golf are available. Only a miniscule number of athletes ever make it to the pros but they get a free ride in education…sometimes if they can just sign their names, while actual scholars exiting high schools run up huge debts and flip burgers at McDonalds. This isn’t fair but the name of the game is money and the crazed fans demand their red meat.
And now a crass adjunct: The lead story in the book
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, September 25, 2010
The President & the Preachers
Dear President Obama,
As the CEO of the well-known Washington consulting firm known as the Institute for Modifying All Governmental Entities (IMAGE, for short), I’m writing in connection with your recent conference call to preachers, ministers, imams, cult leaders, whatever, concerning your admonition to them to start preaching, purveying, promulgating, popularizing – in short –propagandizing the value of the recently legislated health-care package. According to law, religionists may not do this in the churches and retain tax-exempt status, but I assume that the czar you’ve appointed to regulate morality, spirituality, eating of pork, and the allowed amount of flour in unleavened bread, as well as the proper use of religious icons/idols/institutions, has cleared this with his legal spin-doctors.
Now that you’ve entered the religious realm of governance (I don’t believe the wags who say you jog on the Potomac, but don’t take that personally), you will need help in both style and substance in managing a religious undertaking. One false step, and your undertaking will devolve into a political undertakering – little joke there, but FOX NEWS is always out for some red meat and, as you know, currently has several contracts out on people like Senator Reid and your most avid supporter, George Soros, who helped the clergymen set up a PAC in 2003 to crucify George Bush concerning a second term. Bush, of course, resurrected.
The evil POLITICO listened in on the call (you need better hacker controls) and reported that you made the point that health-care is settled law and that your parishioners had better know this. That sounded like a threat, especially since you also told the preachers to “Get out there and spread the word.” That was so-o-o-o communistic and hate-mongering. This being the case, IMAGE can help you ease up by using materials from its Section for Energizing Righteous Manipulative Oratorical Nuances, known by its acronym SERMON.
The moonlighting head of this agency is the Right Reverend Honorable Exalted Imam Dr. Louis Farrakhan, sometimes known unfortunately and irreverently as Calypso Louie, who – I insist reverently – did NOT have Malcom X assassinated. Farrakhan is a master at manipulation of oily oratory, able without any backlash at all to pronounce that the U.S. government sabotaged the levees in New Orleans to kill all the black folk there in the wake of Katrina. He even pulled off another “Million” something or other in Washinton soon after Katrina and enthroned himself and his daughter as co-messiahs or co-12th Mahdis, depending on Christian, Shiite or Sunni apocalypse-approaches, without any protest-marches or terrorist attacks in the bargain. He’s a master at nativist nuancing and can talk the citizens into and out of anything.
Involving the religious gurus means more than just righteous rhetoric, so IMAGE will help you with substance through its agency called the Section for Promulgating Insured Righteousness Involving Theology Usage and Liturgies, or SPIRITUAL, for short. The term “health-care” has been replaced by “affordable care,” because when the bill was passed three million people showed up at ERs for everything from hang-nails to appendectomies, whether needed or not…just a freebie, warm place to hang out. This means that a theological base is needed to establish that there’s no free lunch, even in the hospital, thus necessitating the need for would-be sickos to obey that scripture insisting that those who won’t work don’t eat. I’m sure you see the connection, especially with the need for a good hellfire/brimstone warning regarding righteous retribution in the form of fines for those who won’t buy insurance. SPIRIT is without a leader now but hopefully Bill Moyers will take the job, being a seminary graduate and member of the one denomination that has officially sanctioned same-sex marriage, an absolute forward-looking background for the “NOW” generation.
Finally, so you will see a greater importance of your religious approach to health-care (consider also religion vis-à-vis cap/trade, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and immigration-amnesty), IMAGE’s agency to help is known as the Bureau for Utilizing Legalistic Liturgies Yoking Pulpiteering Unctions with Legislating Patient-Insured Trauma, known by its acronym Bully Pulpit. You’ve already begun this process. In fact, you sort of began in August 2009 when you had a conference call with 1,000 rabbis and said, “We are God's partners in matters of life and death,” an astounding insight into your role as not only commander-in-chief of the military but as commander-in-chief of sickness, health, and death of private citizens. You have become the voice of everything and in this regard you should always have at hand a BULLY PULPIT teleprompter to help guard against everything from Freudian slips (remember the navy corpse-man) to outright mangling of scripture verses. I’m sure you remember mentioning the 57 states during the campaign when you were tired.
IMAGE has extricated the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright from under the bus to head BULLY PULPIT account his preaching skills, which you well remember from your 20 years listening to him powerfully propound America’s guilt-trip that eventuated in inspiring you to travel the world in 2009 and apologize everywhere for this evil country. Rev. Dr. Wright is already preparing for you a teleprompter sermon guaranteed to convince everyone of sound mind of his insistence that Ronald Reagan had a top scientist invent AIDS for use in eradicating black folk. You can see how this ties in with health-care. In the margins of the teleprompter will be notes by Bill Clinton indicating when you are to shout, whisper, weep, laugh or tell a joke – in other words, feel everyone’s pain. The title of the sermon is, “Yes, We Can.”
I hope to hear from you soon in the affirmative and am already preparing the proper materials to make you the most outstanding Oval Office preacher of all time.
Respectfully,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE
As the CEO of the well-known Washington consulting firm known as the Institute for Modifying All Governmental Entities (IMAGE, for short), I’m writing in connection with your recent conference call to preachers, ministers, imams, cult leaders, whatever, concerning your admonition to them to start preaching, purveying, promulgating, popularizing – in short –propagandizing the value of the recently legislated health-care package. According to law, religionists may not do this in the churches and retain tax-exempt status, but I assume that the czar you’ve appointed to regulate morality, spirituality, eating of pork, and the allowed amount of flour in unleavened bread, as well as the proper use of religious icons/idols/institutions, has cleared this with his legal spin-doctors.
Now that you’ve entered the religious realm of governance (I don’t believe the wags who say you jog on the Potomac, but don’t take that personally), you will need help in both style and substance in managing a religious undertaking. One false step, and your undertaking will devolve into a political undertakering – little joke there, but FOX NEWS is always out for some red meat and, as you know, currently has several contracts out on people like Senator Reid and your most avid supporter, George Soros, who helped the clergymen set up a PAC in 2003 to crucify George Bush concerning a second term. Bush, of course, resurrected.
The evil POLITICO listened in on the call (you need better hacker controls) and reported that you made the point that health-care is settled law and that your parishioners had better know this. That sounded like a threat, especially since you also told the preachers to “Get out there and spread the word.” That was so-o-o-o communistic and hate-mongering. This being the case, IMAGE can help you ease up by using materials from its Section for Energizing Righteous Manipulative Oratorical Nuances, known by its acronym SERMON.
The moonlighting head of this agency is the Right Reverend Honorable Exalted Imam Dr. Louis Farrakhan, sometimes known unfortunately and irreverently as Calypso Louie, who – I insist reverently – did NOT have Malcom X assassinated. Farrakhan is a master at manipulation of oily oratory, able without any backlash at all to pronounce that the U.S. government sabotaged the levees in New Orleans to kill all the black folk there in the wake of Katrina. He even pulled off another “Million” something or other in Washinton soon after Katrina and enthroned himself and his daughter as co-messiahs or co-12th Mahdis, depending on Christian, Shiite or Sunni apocalypse-approaches, without any protest-marches or terrorist attacks in the bargain. He’s a master at nativist nuancing and can talk the citizens into and out of anything.
Involving the religious gurus means more than just righteous rhetoric, so IMAGE will help you with substance through its agency called the Section for Promulgating Insured Righteousness Involving Theology Usage and Liturgies, or SPIRITUAL, for short. The term “health-care” has been replaced by “affordable care,” because when the bill was passed three million people showed up at ERs for everything from hang-nails to appendectomies, whether needed or not…just a freebie, warm place to hang out. This means that a theological base is needed to establish that there’s no free lunch, even in the hospital, thus necessitating the need for would-be sickos to obey that scripture insisting that those who won’t work don’t eat. I’m sure you see the connection, especially with the need for a good hellfire/brimstone warning regarding righteous retribution in the form of fines for those who won’t buy insurance. SPIRIT is without a leader now but hopefully Bill Moyers will take the job, being a seminary graduate and member of the one denomination that has officially sanctioned same-sex marriage, an absolute forward-looking background for the “NOW” generation.
Finally, so you will see a greater importance of your religious approach to health-care (consider also religion vis-à-vis cap/trade, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and immigration-amnesty), IMAGE’s agency to help is known as the Bureau for Utilizing Legalistic Liturgies Yoking Pulpiteering Unctions with Legislating Patient-Insured Trauma, known by its acronym Bully Pulpit. You’ve already begun this process. In fact, you sort of began in August 2009 when you had a conference call with 1,000 rabbis and said, “We are God's partners in matters of life and death,” an astounding insight into your role as not only commander-in-chief of the military but as commander-in-chief of sickness, health, and death of private citizens. You have become the voice of everything and in this regard you should always have at hand a BULLY PULPIT teleprompter to help guard against everything from Freudian slips (remember the navy corpse-man) to outright mangling of scripture verses. I’m sure you remember mentioning the 57 states during the campaign when you were tired.
IMAGE has extricated the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright from under the bus to head BULLY PULPIT account his preaching skills, which you well remember from your 20 years listening to him powerfully propound America’s guilt-trip that eventuated in inspiring you to travel the world in 2009 and apologize everywhere for this evil country. Rev. Dr. Wright is already preparing for you a teleprompter sermon guaranteed to convince everyone of sound mind of his insistence that Ronald Reagan had a top scientist invent AIDS for use in eradicating black folk. You can see how this ties in with health-care. In the margins of the teleprompter will be notes by Bill Clinton indicating when you are to shout, whisper, weep, laugh or tell a joke – in other words, feel everyone’s pain. The title of the sermon is, “Yes, We Can.”
I hope to hear from you soon in the affirmative and am already preparing the proper materials to make you the most outstanding Oval Office preacher of all time.
Respectfully,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Globalism or Nationalism?
Perhaps the most bizarre and harmful voting process in the nation’s history occurred with the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency in 2008. Largely fueled by the late-teenage and twenty-something crowd gullible enough to be mesmerized by a campaign based on cosmetics and sleight-of-hand, his election has resulted in the delivery of just what he said he would bring to the nation and which older heads could see through as if the entire effort were couched in vapors…an attempt to completely replace the capitalist system with socialism.
The magic word in Washington today is GLOBAL. Whereas this nation was founded on principles designed to create in the United States a compatibility of governance with capitalism – NATIONALISM, in other words – the current establishment would trade that system for everything global, another way of saying primarily socialistic, even to the point of complete disintegration of the system that has made this nation successful beyond comprehension and in spite of gargantuan disruptions such as the Civil War and its consequences, as well as armed conflicts virtually a world away, not to mention a population so diverse as to practically scream for self-destructive class-conflict.
Just a small indication of the global approach was the recent announcement by State Secretary Clinton at something called the Global Initiative conference founded by her husband that the U.S. government is contributing $50 million to something called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves? Okay…these stoves are supposed to help save the planet from global warming, which the best U.S. climatologists have already indicated is simply in a normal cycle, nothing else.
The president, meanwhile, speaks constantly of a “global economy” while the U.S. economy is going down in flames. He has surrounded himself with “czars,” entities most people call “regulators” of everything from how we drive to what we eat, with an emphasis on acting globally. While my wife looked for an item of clothing recently (I rarely attend these torture sessions) I checked the labels on women’s blouses…made in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Jordan. That was in just one small department.
The next day (again, a rare exercise for me), I looked while she shopped for an iron, not a shooting-iron but a pressing-iron. I was very interested in one made in Germany. She chose the one made in China. She, as does Obama apparently by design, contributed to the global economy. Admittedly, the globalization of American industry with regard to actual manufacturing has been taking place for decades on the backs of governments headed by both democrats and republicans, but the obsession with actually bowing to so-called global concerns is overwhelmingly pronounced currently.
Shoes are made in China, electronics in Taiwan or South Korea, cars in Japan or Europe. The consequence is that the U.S. economy is basically service-oriented. Even at that, other nations take technology developed in this country and turn it to their own advantage. Being good global citizens, Americans just go along with this, notwithstanding that many young people in this country are not college material and need jobs that feature manual labor of some sort.
The stock answer as to why this is the case is that in order for other countries to buy U.S. products, as few as they are, the U.S. must buy theirs, never mind that this country’s trade deficit is of enormous proportions and has been for decades. U.S. manufacturers follow the money and relocate their enterprises to places like China, where a worker might make $1.50 a day while his counterpart in this country might make ten times that much or more.
The logical thing to do would be for the Washington crowd, especially the administration, to get management and labor together and iron out some compromises so that U.S. workers can make a livable wage while actually competing with nations that feature barely survivable wages and child-labor, thus bringing jobs back to this country. This would mean some sacrifice on all sides but it would mean long-term benefits. In other words, the time has come for an UN-GLOBAL approach. A good place to start would be the go-ahead on oil-well-drilling, the better to un-globalize the nation’s dependence on often hostile, unpredictable nations for the crude.
The nation is surviving very well, thank you (okay…just temporarily until nearing the financial abyss), on the current work-force reduced by some 8 million jobs, which means that probably millions of those lost jobs are not coming back online, especially anytime soon or at a time when the administration seems hell-bent on running the small-business man off the plantation by taxing/regulating him to death.
This isn’t likely to happen, just as it didn’t happen with Clinton or the Bushes or other presidents. With Obama, the globalist, it would seem to have no chance. The answer is at the ballot box.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The magic word in Washington today is GLOBAL. Whereas this nation was founded on principles designed to create in the United States a compatibility of governance with capitalism – NATIONALISM, in other words – the current establishment would trade that system for everything global, another way of saying primarily socialistic, even to the point of complete disintegration of the system that has made this nation successful beyond comprehension and in spite of gargantuan disruptions such as the Civil War and its consequences, as well as armed conflicts virtually a world away, not to mention a population so diverse as to practically scream for self-destructive class-conflict.
Just a small indication of the global approach was the recent announcement by State Secretary Clinton at something called the Global Initiative conference founded by her husband that the U.S. government is contributing $50 million to something called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Cookstoves? Okay…these stoves are supposed to help save the planet from global warming, which the best U.S. climatologists have already indicated is simply in a normal cycle, nothing else.
The president, meanwhile, speaks constantly of a “global economy” while the U.S. economy is going down in flames. He has surrounded himself with “czars,” entities most people call “regulators” of everything from how we drive to what we eat, with an emphasis on acting globally. While my wife looked for an item of clothing recently (I rarely attend these torture sessions) I checked the labels on women’s blouses…made in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Jordan. That was in just one small department.
The next day (again, a rare exercise for me), I looked while she shopped for an iron, not a shooting-iron but a pressing-iron. I was very interested in one made in Germany. She chose the one made in China. She, as does Obama apparently by design, contributed to the global economy. Admittedly, the globalization of American industry with regard to actual manufacturing has been taking place for decades on the backs of governments headed by both democrats and republicans, but the obsession with actually bowing to so-called global concerns is overwhelmingly pronounced currently.
Shoes are made in China, electronics in Taiwan or South Korea, cars in Japan or Europe. The consequence is that the U.S. economy is basically service-oriented. Even at that, other nations take technology developed in this country and turn it to their own advantage. Being good global citizens, Americans just go along with this, notwithstanding that many young people in this country are not college material and need jobs that feature manual labor of some sort.
The stock answer as to why this is the case is that in order for other countries to buy U.S. products, as few as they are, the U.S. must buy theirs, never mind that this country’s trade deficit is of enormous proportions and has been for decades. U.S. manufacturers follow the money and relocate their enterprises to places like China, where a worker might make $1.50 a day while his counterpart in this country might make ten times that much or more.
The logical thing to do would be for the Washington crowd, especially the administration, to get management and labor together and iron out some compromises so that U.S. workers can make a livable wage while actually competing with nations that feature barely survivable wages and child-labor, thus bringing jobs back to this country. This would mean some sacrifice on all sides but it would mean long-term benefits. In other words, the time has come for an UN-GLOBAL approach. A good place to start would be the go-ahead on oil-well-drilling, the better to un-globalize the nation’s dependence on often hostile, unpredictable nations for the crude.
The nation is surviving very well, thank you (okay…just temporarily until nearing the financial abyss), on the current work-force reduced by some 8 million jobs, which means that probably millions of those lost jobs are not coming back online, especially anytime soon or at a time when the administration seems hell-bent on running the small-business man off the plantation by taxing/regulating him to death.
This isn’t likely to happen, just as it didn’t happen with Clinton or the Bushes or other presidents. With Obama, the globalist, it would seem to have no chance. The answer is at the ballot box.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 16, 2010
DNC Memorandum #18
From the office of Tim Kaine, chairman, 16 September 2010
**Staffers are to play down the Primary results of Tuesday, in which incumbents – both parties – or democrats following the party-line may seem to have looked out-of-step with national thinking (everything is national these days, federal government as god). Please refer to Sharron Angle as “that nutcase woman” from Nevada and never mention that she was successful in beating court decisions that attempted to change Nevada’s tax laws, or that she was the republican ramrod in the Nevada legislature. Refer to Christine O’Donnell as that “other woman” or the “Delaware Demoniac.” Her opponent, Congressman Castle, was the Democrat Party’s favorite republican (after Arlen Specter), so in November the Democrats would have won either way. Now, we may have to do serious dirt-digging on O’Donnell as well as Angle. Please always mention that Harry Reid was once a D.C. policeman but never mention his record, especially the whining, in the Senate and his declaration of a lost war a few years back.
**The president and attorney general remain unhappy with all the red/yellow/black/white papers from the DNC defining the typical white person and the typical black person. However, these subjects are not to be further addressed until after the November elections for obvious reasons (because they’re divisive, for recent Harvard graduates). The wag who thumb-tacked the notice describing the typical Muslim person at the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush/BP/Limbaugh-dartboard as “anyone wearing a shirt or coat five sizes too large” will be punished when apprehended by having to write “Allah Akbar” on the conference-room chalk-board 10,000 times.
**Breaking news in New Jersey papers has to do with Imam Rauf’s acceptance of more than $2 million in tax money to renovate his rental properties but that apparently he just banked it and has been hailed into court. His apartments are full of bedbugs, rundown generally, are rat-infested fire hazards, have no utilities and not even accurate compasses pointing east so that their occupants will know in which direction to pray. One tenant had actually prayed facing west for three months and was speaking Arabic with a San Francisco accent and cross-dressing. Rahm Emanuel has noted that the imam says he did not do all those bad things and will not do them again. The official DNC line is that all the apartment-degradation was taking place while Imam Rauf was busy representing the president in the Middle East, along with George Mitchell, Richard Holbrook, State Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, and a homeless man from Kabul, the latter to give the representation diversity. The rumor that Imam Rauf asked to be accompanied by the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders instead of these clowns is untrue, and Rauf has said he will not ask again.
**Be on the lookout for additional accusations against Congresspersons Rangel and Waters vis-à-vis their ethics-trials, which hopefully will not be held before November. Rangel has just won his primary notwithstanding what amounts to actual crimes, not just ethics violations, things of which most if not all the legislators are guilty on a routine basis. Both Rangel and Waters will be reelected in November, notwithstanding their peccadilloes, as was Congressman Jefferson in 2006 despite that $90,000 stashed among the chicken-wings in his freezer and all the rest of the bribery-stuff that has him basking him in federal prison, eating three squares a day, bankrupt and trying to figure out how to pay his legal bills amounting to $4 million. Jefferson has repeatedly denied offering to sell Bourbon Street to the head Nigerian hatchet-man in 2005, just after Katrina hit. The Nigerian has corroborated this, claiming that Jefferson actually offered him the Ninth Ward, which was still underwater…for a long time.
**Michael Moore is planning a new propaganda movie, actually a mystery/thriller docudrama, concerning the Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August. The working title is: The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity have been hired by George Soros- and Rahm Emanuel-characters to infiltrate the crowd, talking in unknown tongues that a Muslim sleeper-cell group on a spy-mission from Dearborn mistakes for a fatwa from Iran’s Khameinei anent Beck and strike matches to their shoes as they rush the stage. Moore hasn’t decided on the rest of the script but he promises suspense that will spin the 400,000-member crowd (unfortunately, the correct attendance) into a group of about a dozen Satanists, with Beck as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner and Goldman-Sachs. Moore is planning a séance with State Secretary Clinton (an expert at channeling Eleanor Roosevelt) in an effort to resurrect the Three Stooges. More about this later!
**Do not – REPEAT – do NOT in your town-hall meetings engage in any talk about mosques in any locations. If the term Cordoba House Mosque comes up, simply relate that this is a building in Spain that belongs to the Catholics. If that doesn’t work, simply say it’s the name of an exotic cologne used by men of distinction. If that doesn’t work, terminate the meeting and take the names of the people there for investigation by Attorney General Holder.
**Staffers are warned not to get into the president’s “dogfight” talk. When he strayed off teleprompter in that speech the other day he mentioned that people in Washington “talk about him like a dog.” Obviously, real dogs can’t talk, though they might make more sense than folks if they did. The DNC line is that in Kenya elephants are referred to as dogs, so the president was just using a quaint way while paying tribute to his heritage to declare that the people in Washington who criticize him are republicans. Simple! Remember to keep a straight face when you mention this; otherwise, you may evoke embarrassing snickers.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
**Staffers are to play down the Primary results of Tuesday, in which incumbents – both parties – or democrats following the party-line may seem to have looked out-of-step with national thinking (everything is national these days, federal government as god). Please refer to Sharron Angle as “that nutcase woman” from Nevada and never mention that she was successful in beating court decisions that attempted to change Nevada’s tax laws, or that she was the republican ramrod in the Nevada legislature. Refer to Christine O’Donnell as that “other woman” or the “Delaware Demoniac.” Her opponent, Congressman Castle, was the Democrat Party’s favorite republican (after Arlen Specter), so in November the Democrats would have won either way. Now, we may have to do serious dirt-digging on O’Donnell as well as Angle. Please always mention that Harry Reid was once a D.C. policeman but never mention his record, especially the whining, in the Senate and his declaration of a lost war a few years back.
**The president and attorney general remain unhappy with all the red/yellow/black/white papers from the DNC defining the typical white person and the typical black person. However, these subjects are not to be further addressed until after the November elections for obvious reasons (because they’re divisive, for recent Harvard graduates). The wag who thumb-tacked the notice describing the typical Muslim person at the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush/BP/Limbaugh-dartboard as “anyone wearing a shirt or coat five sizes too large” will be punished when apprehended by having to write “Allah Akbar” on the conference-room chalk-board 10,000 times.
**Breaking news in New Jersey papers has to do with Imam Rauf’s acceptance of more than $2 million in tax money to renovate his rental properties but that apparently he just banked it and has been hailed into court. His apartments are full of bedbugs, rundown generally, are rat-infested fire hazards, have no utilities and not even accurate compasses pointing east so that their occupants will know in which direction to pray. One tenant had actually prayed facing west for three months and was speaking Arabic with a San Francisco accent and cross-dressing. Rahm Emanuel has noted that the imam says he did not do all those bad things and will not do them again. The official DNC line is that all the apartment-degradation was taking place while Imam Rauf was busy representing the president in the Middle East, along with George Mitchell, Richard Holbrook, State Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, and a homeless man from Kabul, the latter to give the representation diversity. The rumor that Imam Rauf asked to be accompanied by the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders instead of these clowns is untrue, and Rauf has said he will not ask again.
**Be on the lookout for additional accusations against Congresspersons Rangel and Waters vis-à-vis their ethics-trials, which hopefully will not be held before November. Rangel has just won his primary notwithstanding what amounts to actual crimes, not just ethics violations, things of which most if not all the legislators are guilty on a routine basis. Both Rangel and Waters will be reelected in November, notwithstanding their peccadilloes, as was Congressman Jefferson in 2006 despite that $90,000 stashed among the chicken-wings in his freezer and all the rest of the bribery-stuff that has him basking him in federal prison, eating three squares a day, bankrupt and trying to figure out how to pay his legal bills amounting to $4 million. Jefferson has repeatedly denied offering to sell Bourbon Street to the head Nigerian hatchet-man in 2005, just after Katrina hit. The Nigerian has corroborated this, claiming that Jefferson actually offered him the Ninth Ward, which was still underwater…for a long time.
**Michael Moore is planning a new propaganda movie, actually a mystery/thriller docudrama, concerning the Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August. The working title is: The Mad Fool of the Reflecting Pool. Three deranged Pentecostals named Faith, Hope and Charity have been hired by George Soros- and Rahm Emanuel-characters to infiltrate the crowd, talking in unknown tongues that a Muslim sleeper-cell group on a spy-mission from Dearborn mistakes for a fatwa from Iran’s Khameinei anent Beck and strike matches to their shoes as they rush the stage. Moore hasn’t decided on the rest of the script but he promises suspense that will spin the 400,000-member crowd (unfortunately, the correct attendance) into a group of about a dozen Satanists, with Beck as a wiccan foaming at the mouth and pronouncing curses on republicans, the Tea party, John Boehner and Goldman-Sachs. Moore is planning a séance with State Secretary Clinton (an expert at channeling Eleanor Roosevelt) in an effort to resurrect the Three Stooges. More about this later!
**Do not – REPEAT – do NOT in your town-hall meetings engage in any talk about mosques in any locations. If the term Cordoba House Mosque comes up, simply relate that this is a building in Spain that belongs to the Catholics. If that doesn’t work, simply say it’s the name of an exotic cologne used by men of distinction. If that doesn’t work, terminate the meeting and take the names of the people there for investigation by Attorney General Holder.
**Staffers are warned not to get into the president’s “dogfight” talk. When he strayed off teleprompter in that speech the other day he mentioned that people in Washington “talk about him like a dog.” Obviously, real dogs can’t talk, though they might make more sense than folks if they did. The DNC line is that in Kenya elephants are referred to as dogs, so the president was just using a quaint way while paying tribute to his heritage to declare that the people in Washington who criticize him are republicans. Simple! Remember to keep a straight face when you mention this; otherwise, you may evoke embarrassing snickers.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, September 10, 2010
Rauf - Insensitive Imam!
Appearing in the New York Times of 07 September was an article by Muslim Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the main honcho in the Cordoba House mosque-building matter and recent returnee from a swing through the Middle East, with Uncle Sam paying the tab. This is part of his screed: I therefore call upon all Americans to rise to this challenge. Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values.
Yeah…sure. Whose values? How unspeakably self-serving! It’s like commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with the rusting sunken USS Arizona, a coffin today for hundreds of sailors as a reminder, except that at Ground Zero, the reminder will be the Cordoba House, sitting on the ashes of some 3,000 Americans. This is the epitome of obscenity.
Reflect and meditate, he said,
Commemorate the dead,
And quell the rhetoric – so mean…
Praise Allah at the scene.
The vitriol…well, it must go,
With Christians all aglow –
There’s nothing radical at all…
Three thousand lives…so SMALL.
Our values…they must be preserved,
And Allah praised…well served,
But Christians must be mollified…
Until they all have died.
With strong belief, do not be weak,
Let Muslims chaos wreak,
As values are immortalized…
With murder idolized.
So build the mosque and build it well,
No martyrs found in hell,
Teach there the martyrs how to kill
The infidel at will.
[tune: Amazing Grace, perfectly fitting!]
Is this too harsh? Does it denigrate all Muslims? NO! It merely points up the fact that in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, is the demand that Muslims kill the infidel when and where they can. Muslims do not deny this, even the “peaceful” Muslims. They can’t because that universal fatwa is extant and can’t be changed.
Throughout the 90s, the fatwa was exercised on this country – the first WTC bombing; Khobar Towers bombing; American embassies bombed in Africa; the USS Kohl. That wasn’t enough, so in the name of Allah and courtesy of al Qaeda the second WTC bombing took place on 9/11 and just last year in the name of Allah as screamed before the fact, Major Hasan gunned down 13 souls at Ft. Hood. He has yet to be tried after nearly a year, so diligent is this administration in actually buying him time.
Imam Rauf will not deny that the fatwa is in force. He can’t, most likely because he would then be the current U.S. incarnation of Salmon Rushdie, with a bulls-eye on his back. Yeah…on his BACK. That’s the way of the terrorists. They kill as cowards and kill women and children – even their own – as if they are frying chickens…in the name of Allah.
Imam Rauf should denounce the jihadists, who actually control his religion. He will say he’s not in favor of all the blood-letting. Most Muslims are not but neither he nor they can lift a finger to stop it. The reason is simple enough, to wit, that the objective of the Muslims who hold supreme power throughout the world is the conquering of the world…nothing less.
The main impediment to this goal is the United States. The three million or so Muslims in this country should band together and form their own version of Islam, probably with Imam Rauf in the lead. After all, Islam is already fragmented into the Sunnis, Shiites and at least seven branches. The U.S. branch could focus on “peace.”
Won’t happen, of course! More’s the pity. This is what Rauf said to Soledad O’Brien on TV: If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. … And if we do move, it will strengthen the argument of the radicals to recruit, their ability to recruit, and their increasing aggression and violence against our country. In other words, Rauf is holding the USA hostage. Disgusting.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Yeah…sure. Whose values? How unspeakably self-serving! It’s like commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with the rusting sunken USS Arizona, a coffin today for hundreds of sailors as a reminder, except that at Ground Zero, the reminder will be the Cordoba House, sitting on the ashes of some 3,000 Americans. This is the epitome of obscenity.
Reflect and meditate, he said,
Commemorate the dead,
And quell the rhetoric – so mean…
Praise Allah at the scene.
The vitriol…well, it must go,
With Christians all aglow –
There’s nothing radical at all…
Three thousand lives…so SMALL.
Our values…they must be preserved,
And Allah praised…well served,
But Christians must be mollified…
Until they all have died.
With strong belief, do not be weak,
Let Muslims chaos wreak,
As values are immortalized…
With murder idolized.
So build the mosque and build it well,
No martyrs found in hell,
Teach there the martyrs how to kill
The infidel at will.
[tune: Amazing Grace, perfectly fitting!]
Is this too harsh? Does it denigrate all Muslims? NO! It merely points up the fact that in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, is the demand that Muslims kill the infidel when and where they can. Muslims do not deny this, even the “peaceful” Muslims. They can’t because that universal fatwa is extant and can’t be changed.
Throughout the 90s, the fatwa was exercised on this country – the first WTC bombing; Khobar Towers bombing; American embassies bombed in Africa; the USS Kohl. That wasn’t enough, so in the name of Allah and courtesy of al Qaeda the second WTC bombing took place on 9/11 and just last year in the name of Allah as screamed before the fact, Major Hasan gunned down 13 souls at Ft. Hood. He has yet to be tried after nearly a year, so diligent is this administration in actually buying him time.
Imam Rauf will not deny that the fatwa is in force. He can’t, most likely because he would then be the current U.S. incarnation of Salmon Rushdie, with a bulls-eye on his back. Yeah…on his BACK. That’s the way of the terrorists. They kill as cowards and kill women and children – even their own – as if they are frying chickens…in the name of Allah.
Imam Rauf should denounce the jihadists, who actually control his religion. He will say he’s not in favor of all the blood-letting. Most Muslims are not but neither he nor they can lift a finger to stop it. The reason is simple enough, to wit, that the objective of the Muslims who hold supreme power throughout the world is the conquering of the world…nothing less.
The main impediment to this goal is the United States. The three million or so Muslims in this country should band together and form their own version of Islam, probably with Imam Rauf in the lead. After all, Islam is already fragmented into the Sunnis, Shiites and at least seven branches. The U.S. branch could focus on “peace.”
Won’t happen, of course! More’s the pity. This is what Rauf said to Soledad O’Brien on TV: If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. … And if we do move, it will strengthen the argument of the radicals to recruit, their ability to recruit, and their increasing aggression and violence against our country. In other words, Rauf is holding the USA hostage. Disgusting.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Un-Righteous Rhetoric & Allah
I don’t spend much time looking at blogs but chanced on one the other day by a Campbell University Divinity School professor who, in winding up a blog about the volatile rhetoric connected with non-Muslim’s ideas about Islam (Christians should be nicer), had this to say as his last paragraph: “There may be no tears in heaven, but the Spirit of God on earth, I'm convinced, must be weeping.”
I felt moved to respond thusly: “From the last paragraph, may one conclude a sort of ambivalence on the part of God?” The professor, of course, has no knowledge of what or who concerning Heaven at this time but if God is there and not weeping, why would he, as Spirit in the world, be weeping here? Makes no sense, in other words.
I continued with this: “For words of genuine vituperation, John [the Baptist] set the stage early with this in John 3: “John would say to the crowds that were coming out to be baptized by him, ‘You children of serpents! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’ (ISV).
But for outright chewing-out in no uncertain terms, check into Matthew 23, virtually the whole chapter, and find out how delicately Jesus tip-toed around the sensitivities of his hearers – hypocrites; twice as much a son of hell; blind guides; blind fools; strain at gnats, swallow camels; full of greed and self-indulgence; whitewashed tombs; full of dead men’s bones; wickedness; snakes; brood of vipers. And that was just one sermon. Imagine his lecture when Jesus lashed animals and men from the temple, that ‘den of robbers’ thing.
The modern-day vituperations pale in comparison with what Jesus had to say, and this is just a small example. Islam is evil…from its roots it’s evil. This is not a condemnation of Muslims, only of their religion, used now as before for purposes of satisfying the mandate of the Koran…kill the infidel.
Someone else reading the blog had this to say to me: “Do you have any Muslim friends? Do you know someone who is Muslim? Most Christians would never be able to separate their ‘religion’ from who they are as a person. So to say that you don't condemn Muslims, only their religion, is too easy. You obviously hate Muslims. Why not be honest?
Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight. Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.. The blogger’s name was Scott, someone I don’t know and I’m sure doesn’t know me. Of course, I had already said I didn’t mean Muslims themselves as evil, only their religion, which, indisputably even by them, calls for death to the infidel whenever and wherever possible. Not good enough for Scott!
So…I simply parsed his response:
Too easy? I find it very easy. I condemn Islam for just what it is – evil, and I’m being very honest about it. I made it plain that I was not speaking of Muslims, so your self-righteous escapade into passing judgment and thereby becoming God in your own eyes is very amusing. I don’t know you from Adam but I absolutely refuse to genuflect before you, your claim to Godhood notwithstanding.
Scott: Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight.
Okay…so Jesus was hard on the Jews for their wrong-headedness about doctrine and subsequent behavior…called ’em snakes. I’d hate to guess what he’d say to the imams today. After all, they’re just part of the family, aren’t they? You know – Ishmael and his gang…Abraham’s own. As to divine insight…yours or mine?
Scott: Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.
Naw…I’ll recognize yours, but you just leave my hypocrisy alone. And if Jesus could launch into a genuinely good tirade, I feel free to do the same, even using his very words. In Matthew 11, he condemned whole towns, put ’em on a par with old Sodom. The problem with a lot of folks is that they don’t understand that Jesus was as much blood-and-guts as he was sweetness-and-light. I kinda like that. Needless to say, this parsing was not posted on the blog as a response…probably too offensive to both Scott, perhaps a minister, and the professor.
In especially the mainstream denominations that are losing membership in huge numbers, the going thing is to accept that Allah of Islam is just an appellation for Almighty God of the Holy Scriptures. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Islam was concocted by Mohammad who lived 570-632 AD, an illiterate polygamist (probably 12 wives officially, one marriage consummated with a nine-year-old), who somehow co-opted Bible names and events, had someone write his words, created Islam and made Allah the god involved, a figment of his imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out, especially at a time when Americans are in the crosshairs of the jihadists, who get their marching orders, including suicide/homicide bombings of women and children, from the Koran. The ministers and academicians who teach that Islam is to be respected as a religion in the same sense as Judeo-Christianity do a disservice to both God and country, as well as the students/congregants who are exposed to them.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
I felt moved to respond thusly: “From the last paragraph, may one conclude a sort of ambivalence on the part of God?” The professor, of course, has no knowledge of what or who concerning Heaven at this time but if God is there and not weeping, why would he, as Spirit in the world, be weeping here? Makes no sense, in other words.
I continued with this: “For words of genuine vituperation, John [the Baptist] set the stage early with this in John 3: “John would say to the crowds that were coming out to be baptized by him, ‘You children of serpents! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’ (ISV).
But for outright chewing-out in no uncertain terms, check into Matthew 23, virtually the whole chapter, and find out how delicately Jesus tip-toed around the sensitivities of his hearers – hypocrites; twice as much a son of hell; blind guides; blind fools; strain at gnats, swallow camels; full of greed and self-indulgence; whitewashed tombs; full of dead men’s bones; wickedness; snakes; brood of vipers. And that was just one sermon. Imagine his lecture when Jesus lashed animals and men from the temple, that ‘den of robbers’ thing.
The modern-day vituperations pale in comparison with what Jesus had to say, and this is just a small example. Islam is evil…from its roots it’s evil. This is not a condemnation of Muslims, only of their religion, used now as before for purposes of satisfying the mandate of the Koran…kill the infidel.
Someone else reading the blog had this to say to me: “Do you have any Muslim friends? Do you know someone who is Muslim? Most Christians would never be able to separate their ‘religion’ from who they are as a person. So to say that you don't condemn Muslims, only their religion, is too easy. You obviously hate Muslims. Why not be honest?
Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight. Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.. The blogger’s name was Scott, someone I don’t know and I’m sure doesn’t know me. Of course, I had already said I didn’t mean Muslims themselves as evil, only their religion, which, indisputably even by them, calls for death to the infidel whenever and wherever possible. Not good enough for Scott!
So…I simply parsed his response:
Too easy? I find it very easy. I condemn Islam for just what it is – evil, and I’m being very honest about it. I made it plain that I was not speaking of Muslims, so your self-righteous escapade into passing judgment and thereby becoming God in your own eyes is very amusing. I don’t know you from Adam but I absolutely refuse to genuflect before you, your claim to Godhood notwithstanding.
Scott: Matthew 23 was directed at the self described religious faithful by an insider, a member of the family. In other words, it is a word to those who think they have sole possession of divine insight.
Okay…so Jesus was hard on the Jews for their wrong-headedness about doctrine and subsequent behavior…called ’em snakes. I’d hate to guess what he’d say to the imams today. After all, they’re just part of the family, aren’t they? You know – Ishmael and his gang…Abraham’s own. As to divine insight…yours or mine?
Scott: Perhaps we should all recognize our own hypocrisy before using Jesus' words as justification for our own tirades against others.
Naw…I’ll recognize yours, but you just leave my hypocrisy alone. And if Jesus could launch into a genuinely good tirade, I feel free to do the same, even using his very words. In Matthew 11, he condemned whole towns, put ’em on a par with old Sodom. The problem with a lot of folks is that they don’t understand that Jesus was as much blood-and-guts as he was sweetness-and-light. I kinda like that. Needless to say, this parsing was not posted on the blog as a response…probably too offensive to both Scott, perhaps a minister, and the professor.
In especially the mainstream denominations that are losing membership in huge numbers, the going thing is to accept that Allah of Islam is just an appellation for Almighty God of the Holy Scriptures. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Islam was concocted by Mohammad who lived 570-632 AD, an illiterate polygamist (probably 12 wives officially, one marriage consummated with a nine-year-old), who somehow co-opted Bible names and events, had someone write his words, created Islam and made Allah the god involved, a figment of his imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out, especially at a time when Americans are in the crosshairs of the jihadists, who get their marching orders, including suicide/homicide bombings of women and children, from the Koran. The ministers and academicians who teach that Islam is to be respected as a religion in the same sense as Judeo-Christianity do a disservice to both God and country, as well as the students/congregants who are exposed to them.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Obama & Niebuhr?
In a recent article appearing in EthicsDaily.com, Colin Harris, a professor of religious studies in Mercer University, said this: “Reinhold Niebuhr is regarded by many as the most influential American theologian and ethicist of the 20th century. … In 1976, the citizens of the United States elected a president who claimed Niebuhr as a significant influence in his theological and political pilgrimage.” That was Jimmy Carter.
This statement has been attributed to Niebuhr: “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.” It would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed claim.
Ironically, Glenn Beck mentioned in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial during his “Restoring Honor” rally on 28 August the fact that part of his effort, actually the most important part, was to insist that salvation is not a collective thing, as is the case with “liberation theology,” but a personal, individual thing. Niebuhr had it backwards.
Without Hitler, the individual, there would have been no Nazism/Holocaust; without Lenin, no communism; without Mao, no great leap forward; without Pol Pot, no killing fields; without Saddam, no WMD-use on the Kurds, Shiites and Iranians; without Stalin, no gulag; without Khamenei/Ahmadinejad, no threat to obliterate Israel. There’s no chicken-egg argument in this matter. The individual comes first, then the carnage…or in some cases, just the opposite – good. Think of Lincoln and slavery and perhaps the most profound cultural change in U.S. history.
Collectivism eventuates from the actions of an individual, not the other way around. Jesus dealt with the individual, as did God in the OT, with the “nation,” the collective, taking form/action after the fact. Obama believes in the “collective,” another term for class-ism – us against them, which remarks victimization as the governing element in any enterprise. This is the “liberation theology” espoused by Jeremiah Wright and preached to Obama for 20 years.
In practical terms in the black community, “black liberation theology” amounts to reparations, the oppressor paying the oppressed account of slavery, even though for 147 years no white American has owned a slave. One might as well insist that all citizens in northern states make reparations to all citizens in southern states. Obama knows reparations won’t go down with the American people, at least now, so he alluded to it in his campaign by suggesting that the Constitution be adjusted in order to allow for the proper redistribution of wealth.
Obama, then, has become the individual through which the attempt at socialism – the collective – is being made. It remains to be seen if American citizens will become part of the collective, though they are well on their way down that road. First comes the individual, then the following “herd.” American communist leaders tried to turn the country in the 1930s, but even in the awful Great Depression of that time, the citizens wouldn’t have it.
This is attributed to Niebuhr: “Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.” Perhaps Niehbuhr has a point in some cases but one wonders how he could make that conclusion with the worst war ever fought – World War II. Or the Korean conflict soon after, two of this nation’s better moments!
The United States came in late (at least officially) in both WWI and WWII, proving that democracies (U.S. actually is a republic) use war as a last resort. In neither case was the resultant peace instrument vindictive, since the U.S. acquired no colonies and formed no firing squads for the losers’ citizens (just the bad guys, few in number at that). Indeed, the magnanimity (Marshall Plan) instigated for loser Axis nations of WWII was not only not vindictive but probably the most decent “peace arrangement” in all of history, as evidenced by the prosperity of those countries today.
As part of its beneficence (Niebuhr’s “vindictive” peace) to Germany (despite 405,000 American dead in WWII), the U.S. kept some 300,000 troops in that country to protect it from the Soviet Union following WWII until about 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Today, there are still more than 54,000 American GIs in Germany even though Germany has 244,300 active military of its own.
Some 28,500 American GIs remain in South Korea (American presence been there since 1950) in order to protect it from North Korea, which has 1,106,000 active military, nearly 5% of its total population. South Korea’s military numbers 687,000 but would be crushed if the Americans were ever to leave since even the little tyrant that rules North Korea, Kim Jong Il, knows better than to attack an American. Another example of Niebuhr’s vindictive peace?
This is Harris again: “Now we have a president [Obama] who also acknowledges a debt to Niebuhr for his influence in the development of his religious and political philosophy. He has also acknowledged the influence of his faith in his approach to the challenges of his office.” If this is true and with the comparison to be made to the Carter administration, God help us all.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
This statement has been attributed to Niebuhr: “Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.” It would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed claim.
Ironically, Glenn Beck mentioned in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial during his “Restoring Honor” rally on 28 August the fact that part of his effort, actually the most important part, was to insist that salvation is not a collective thing, as is the case with “liberation theology,” but a personal, individual thing. Niebuhr had it backwards.
Without Hitler, the individual, there would have been no Nazism/Holocaust; without Lenin, no communism; without Mao, no great leap forward; without Pol Pot, no killing fields; without Saddam, no WMD-use on the Kurds, Shiites and Iranians; without Stalin, no gulag; without Khamenei/Ahmadinejad, no threat to obliterate Israel. There’s no chicken-egg argument in this matter. The individual comes first, then the carnage…or in some cases, just the opposite – good. Think of Lincoln and slavery and perhaps the most profound cultural change in U.S. history.
Collectivism eventuates from the actions of an individual, not the other way around. Jesus dealt with the individual, as did God in the OT, with the “nation,” the collective, taking form/action after the fact. Obama believes in the “collective,” another term for class-ism – us against them, which remarks victimization as the governing element in any enterprise. This is the “liberation theology” espoused by Jeremiah Wright and preached to Obama for 20 years.
In practical terms in the black community, “black liberation theology” amounts to reparations, the oppressor paying the oppressed account of slavery, even though for 147 years no white American has owned a slave. One might as well insist that all citizens in northern states make reparations to all citizens in southern states. Obama knows reparations won’t go down with the American people, at least now, so he alluded to it in his campaign by suggesting that the Constitution be adjusted in order to allow for the proper redistribution of wealth.
Obama, then, has become the individual through which the attempt at socialism – the collective – is being made. It remains to be seen if American citizens will become part of the collective, though they are well on their way down that road. First comes the individual, then the following “herd.” American communist leaders tried to turn the country in the 1930s, but even in the awful Great Depression of that time, the citizens wouldn’t have it.
This is attributed to Niebuhr: “Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.” Perhaps Niehbuhr has a point in some cases but one wonders how he could make that conclusion with the worst war ever fought – World War II. Or the Korean conflict soon after, two of this nation’s better moments!
The United States came in late (at least officially) in both WWI and WWII, proving that democracies (U.S. actually is a republic) use war as a last resort. In neither case was the resultant peace instrument vindictive, since the U.S. acquired no colonies and formed no firing squads for the losers’ citizens (just the bad guys, few in number at that). Indeed, the magnanimity (Marshall Plan) instigated for loser Axis nations of WWII was not only not vindictive but probably the most decent “peace arrangement” in all of history, as evidenced by the prosperity of those countries today.
As part of its beneficence (Niebuhr’s “vindictive” peace) to Germany (despite 405,000 American dead in WWII), the U.S. kept some 300,000 troops in that country to protect it from the Soviet Union following WWII until about 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Today, there are still more than 54,000 American GIs in Germany even though Germany has 244,300 active military of its own.
Some 28,500 American GIs remain in South Korea (American presence been there since 1950) in order to protect it from North Korea, which has 1,106,000 active military, nearly 5% of its total population. South Korea’s military numbers 687,000 but would be crushed if the Americans were ever to leave since even the little tyrant that rules North Korea, Kim Jong Il, knows better than to attack an American. Another example of Niebuhr’s vindictive peace?
This is Harris again: “Now we have a president [Obama] who also acknowledges a debt to Niebuhr for his influence in the development of his religious and political philosophy. He has also acknowledged the influence of his faith in his approach to the challenges of his office.” If this is true and with the comparison to be made to the Carter administration, God help us all.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Sharpton, Duncan & the New Black Panthers
The Rev. Al Sharpton seemed to indicate the other day that the “Restoring Honor” rally staged by radio/TV personality Glenn Beck on 28 August and drawing some 300,000 to 500,000 people to Washington violated a day he considers sacrosanct (inviolable) by virtue of the rally headed by Dr. Martin Luther King (I have a dream) on that day in 1963. In other words, he puts the “I Have a Dream” day on a par with Christmas.
Sharpton had his own rally on the 28th in Washington, with a number of speakers who managed to come up with the same line that grew out of the civil-rights era regarding the entitlements, except that the new line insists that the government owes African Americans much more than it has GIVEN them. Sharpton is the guy who gave us the “Tawana Brawley Hoax” back in the day, one of his objectives being the ruination of the career of a prosecutor, who later filed suit culminating in Sharpton and other “advisers” being ordered by the court to pay prosecutor Pagones $345,000, while Brawley had to pay $185,000. Meanwhile, Brawley changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. Interesting, considering Rev. Sharpton’s Christian background.
A speaker in the Sharpton rally was Malik Zulu Shabazz, head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, which is not new at all and not much different from the old Black Panther Party of the 1960s, at least in its rhetoric. In that famous performance at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008, a member of the NBPP, Philadelphia leader Shamir Shabazz, exploded his hate for the “crackers” (white folk) and called for the murder not only of them but of their babies, too…those “cracker-babies.” Has the term “honky” gone out of style?
In the Sharpton rally, Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles) came up with a new wrinkle, i.e., that the “black jury” has found “white America” guilty of injustice and racism and called for all black young people, including the black gang-bangers, to unite against the “common enemy.” Who is the “common enemy?” Shabazz/Lewis elaborated, speaking of a “black dream that when we see caskets rolling in the black community…that we will see caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy as well.” Who is the enemy?
This is the kind of hateful rhetoric that incites people to riot. The “common enemy” referenced by the NBPP leader is obviously the white folk, though neither Shabazz/Lewis nor Sharpton wisely seemed to get around to articulating that fact. Suppose Glenn Beck had said something like that and referenced either directly or inferentially that the “common enemy” is the black folk. He would have been hounded into exile by even – especially – the white population.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Sharpton rally had to do with the memo put out by Education Secretary Arne Duncan: “staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march, … ." Duncan was the head honcho of the Chicago Public School system until tapped by Obama to make Washington his new home. There are about 4,000 federal employees answering to Duncan but, paying no attention to this blatant politicizing of the Department of Education, they didn’t show up.
Besides making a dumb actual threat, considering his power to hire and fire or just harass, Duncan may be so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realize that while the national average per pupil spending by state in 2006-07 was $9,557, the figure for D.C., his local district, was $16,540, or an increase over the state average of 73%. Blacks make up 54.4% of the D.C. population, thus Duncan was beating a dead horse if he had D.C. in mind regarding some sort of education-neglect for African Americans, not to mention that the D.C system is among the worst in the nation.
Nor is there any reason to believe that blacks are short-changed anywhere else. In the name of education-equity, school systems throughout the nation have been virtually irretrievably damaged by cockamamie ideas/actions – forced busing, for instance, now finally in disfavor – and the U.S. consequently trails many industrialized nations, especially in math and science.
The salient point not made by Duncan was that, beginning roughly with the entitlement laws of the 1960s, the black family unit has crumbled, the men seeming not to care for heading households as they did before 1960 (75%), and black women okay with bearing illegitimate offspring (70% of all black babies currently), perhaps with a view toward the welfare check. The experts on all sides (okay…the National Education Association [teachers union] probably excluded) agree that the lack of family support dooms children to failure in school.
So…was Duncan in the wrong camp? Should he have been in the “Restoring Honor” rally, where the main interests were preserving the family as a unit and a return to faith in God as the support in making that happen? Actually, he should have kept his nose out of the whole business, but with this administration class-distinction and consequent victimization mean everything. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Sharpton had his own rally on the 28th in Washington, with a number of speakers who managed to come up with the same line that grew out of the civil-rights era regarding the entitlements, except that the new line insists that the government owes African Americans much more than it has GIVEN them. Sharpton is the guy who gave us the “Tawana Brawley Hoax” back in the day, one of his objectives being the ruination of the career of a prosecutor, who later filed suit culminating in Sharpton and other “advisers” being ordered by the court to pay prosecutor Pagones $345,000, while Brawley had to pay $185,000. Meanwhile, Brawley changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. Interesting, considering Rev. Sharpton’s Christian background.
A speaker in the Sharpton rally was Malik Zulu Shabazz, head honcho of the New Black Panther Party, which is not new at all and not much different from the old Black Panther Party of the 1960s, at least in its rhetoric. In that famous performance at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008, a member of the NBPP, Philadelphia leader Shamir Shabazz, exploded his hate for the “crackers” (white folk) and called for the murder not only of them but of their babies, too…those “cracker-babies.” Has the term “honky” gone out of style?
In the Sharpton rally, Malik Zulu Shabazz (born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles) came up with a new wrinkle, i.e., that the “black jury” has found “white America” guilty of injustice and racism and called for all black young people, including the black gang-bangers, to unite against the “common enemy.” Who is the “common enemy?” Shabazz/Lewis elaborated, speaking of a “black dream that when we see caskets rolling in the black community…that we will see caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy as well.” Who is the enemy?
This is the kind of hateful rhetoric that incites people to riot. The “common enemy” referenced by the NBPP leader is obviously the white folk, though neither Shabazz/Lewis nor Sharpton wisely seemed to get around to articulating that fact. Suppose Glenn Beck had said something like that and referenced either directly or inferentially that the “common enemy” is the black folk. He would have been hounded into exile by even – especially – the white population.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Sharpton rally had to do with the memo put out by Education Secretary Arne Duncan: “staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march, … ." Duncan was the head honcho of the Chicago Public School system until tapped by Obama to make Washington his new home. There are about 4,000 federal employees answering to Duncan but, paying no attention to this blatant politicizing of the Department of Education, they didn’t show up.
Besides making a dumb actual threat, considering his power to hire and fire or just harass, Duncan may be so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realize that while the national average per pupil spending by state in 2006-07 was $9,557, the figure for D.C., his local district, was $16,540, or an increase over the state average of 73%. Blacks make up 54.4% of the D.C. population, thus Duncan was beating a dead horse if he had D.C. in mind regarding some sort of education-neglect for African Americans, not to mention that the D.C system is among the worst in the nation.
Nor is there any reason to believe that blacks are short-changed anywhere else. In the name of education-equity, school systems throughout the nation have been virtually irretrievably damaged by cockamamie ideas/actions – forced busing, for instance, now finally in disfavor – and the U.S. consequently trails many industrialized nations, especially in math and science.
The salient point not made by Duncan was that, beginning roughly with the entitlement laws of the 1960s, the black family unit has crumbled, the men seeming not to care for heading households as they did before 1960 (75%), and black women okay with bearing illegitimate offspring (70% of all black babies currently), perhaps with a view toward the welfare check. The experts on all sides (okay…the National Education Association [teachers union] probably excluded) agree that the lack of family support dooms children to failure in school.
So…was Duncan in the wrong camp? Should he have been in the “Restoring Honor” rally, where the main interests were preserving the family as a unit and a return to faith in God as the support in making that happen? Actually, he should have kept his nose out of the whole business, but with this administration class-distinction and consequent victimization mean everything. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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