Quarterback Quackery

The latest racially-inspired brouhaha comes from the world of NFL football and involves San Diego quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been busily explaining that his refusal to stand at games for the performance of the national anthem is his way of protesting the injustice delivered to African-Americans in the U.S.  There’s no argument with his right to behave thusly.

The irony, of course, lies in the fact that he, like most professionals in the National Football League, as well as those on taxpayer-supported college/university campuses, have enjoyed inordinate largesse from their society, not deprivation or sport-related discrimination. Indeed, Kaepernick, a black who was born illegitimately (though such is glorified lately), abandoned by his father and given up for adoption by his mother, was raised by adoptive white parents.

The U.S. is about 73% white though soon it will be predominantly Latino, with blacks coming in third.  This means that “reverse discrimination” is operative in professional sports, as well as on campuses, since sixty-seven percent of NFL football players are black.  Seventy-four percent of National Basketball Association players are black.  All twelve of the 2016 USA basketball Olympic champions were black…not one white player in that august body.  There’s no social injustice in Kaepernick’s sport or in the NBA, either.

In the major baseball leagues (American, National), 29% of the players are Latino, many of them unable to speak or understand English.  It’s doubtful that more than a handful, if that, are American citizens.  Strangely, where once blacks had a large population of MLB players (19% or 27%, depending on standards used) they make up only 8% now, even though their skill-level has certainly not declined. 

Perhaps this is explained by the fact that trash-talking, ridiculing opponents, taunting, writhing celebratory dances and other self-promoting juvenile activities introduced by black players a while back (and now adopted by many whites) are not seen in baseball games.  These irksome elements are practiced throughout professional football and basketball games, where skills and athletic finesse have been replaced by head-hunting and body-slams in both sports. 

Indeed, the New Orleans Saints coach was suspended for a whole season not long ago and some of his coaches also reprimanded for handing out “bounties” (cold cash) to players who inflicted opponents with injuries sufficient to necessitate their removal from games, sometimes trucked off to the nearest hospital.  Like in the old Westerns, these monsters-in-pads were called “bounty hunters.”

Nor has Kaepernick suffered from financial constraints.  His 2016 salary (including bonuses) will be $15,890,753, even though he may spend most of his time riding the bench or recovering from possible surgery, the better to be protected from concussions or other bone/organ traumas…and those headhunters, who, admittedly, have introduced him to periods on his back looking at stars floating by.

The average annual player-salary in the NBA, MLB and NFL, respectively, is $5.15 million, $3.2 million, and $1.9 million, not exactly chicken-feed.  Not counting post-season play, the footballers play 16 games, the basketballers 84 games and the baseballers 162 games.  They’re in the saddle for 7-8 months of the year, after which they can chill for a few months, though some baseball players may go home to places like Venezuela and Puerto Rico to play winter ball and visit family.

Suffice it to say that Kaepernick does not reference racial mistreatment in sports unless he is acting in behalf of white players who are in the distinct minority but not complaining if only because they would be accused of bigotry. Nor does he take note of the fact that by a vast majority white people have voted a black into the presidency during the last eight years.

Most likely, Kaepernick is caught up in the Black Lives Matter movement and is pointing the finger at mostly white policemen, never mind that blacks kill each other 95% of the time, especially in cities like Chicago, D.C., and Baltimore. If he were a person of official importance, his protest might mean something, but, just as in the case of other millionaire entertainers, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing...but ignorance.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Learning-Gap Redux...Again

CAVEAT ALERT:  The following will offend most, be approved by few, and castigated or not.   It concerns yet another “report” of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence (a think-tank of sorts) concerning the “education-gap” existing between black/Hispanic and white students. There's little if anything new in the report, which carries no weight since it has no connection to the Ky. Dept. of Education, making one wonder if it's worth the money contributed to maintain it.

Hardly a day passes without the media or non-profit bashing the education establishment(s) for not doing what often is impossible. Item: The report indicated that in order to achieve proper diversity among teachers the state would need to hire 6,882 black, Hispanic and teachers of other nationalities. The average teacher-salary in Kentucky, according to the Ky. Dept. of Education, is $52,618 ($58,385 in Lexington), meaning an additional outlay of some $400 million a year unless the white-teacher population is reduced by 6,882 teachers (5%) so political correctness can be achieved. The report didn't elaborate.

According to the Herald-Leader (19 August), Lexington minister C.B. Akins, chairman of the Achievement Gap Study Group of the Committee, said the gap could be closed by implementing strategies backed by empirical data and that no further study is necessary regarding the gap-matter. The report indicated that the state has failed to erase barriers due to race, income, language and learning differences, as if those things can be changed by pedagogy.

According to the Fayette System's count, black and Hispanic/Latino students make up 22.4% and 15.1%, respectively, of Lexington's student population, or better than a third. The Prichard report also indicated that minority students are disproportionately suspended or not considered as gifted as often as whites. It stated that those most likely to face barriers include those with low family incomes; are learning English; have learning-disabilities; or are black, Hispanic, Latino, American-Indian or native-Alaskan.

One can only imagine the inordinate attention demanded in the classroom for these students at the expense of attention given to those who are able to learn at grade-level, a teacher's nightmare. Akins knows the answer to the problem but he, like everyone else, dances around it by blaming the education establishment for not using empirical data, whatever that is. He didn't say. Since school-integration of the 1960s, the gap has steadily widened and is still widening, with no end in sight. Hardly more than half of African-American boys graduate high school in the U.S.

At risk of being tarred and feathered by the PC police, dare one wonder, especially in light of the total failure of forced busing remarked even by its originator, Dr. James Coleman, if the gap might start narrowing if at least a fourth of Lexington's school facilities be labeled at least “preferably minority” and staffed entirely by black and Hispanic teachers/administrators and state-of-the-art equipped? The quick answer is “no,” but the school-board, with great community input, should at least explore that possibility. There might be a great surprise, especially from blacks, since on-scene, real-time competition and consideration would be virtually ethnic-free.

In Fayette County, there are some 35,000 families of which some 28,000 are husband-wife structured. Led by a female with no husband are 5,000 families. Led by a male with no wife are 2,350 families. As Akins is bound to know, some 7,000 or so families are not likely to furnish normal support for the children involved, therein lying the problem, exacerbated further by the fact that “single mom” families are likely to be poor and welfare-dependent. The schools can serve children two meals a day but that does nothing for academics.

A far worse problem, as noted on the Prichard web-site, is that on the basis of the KY ACT benchmark testing only 37% of all Kentucky graduates (2014) are college-ready, this in the wake of the disastrous, pork-filled Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Unfit to Command

In order to prepare for the quadrennial circus in 2004, I read the thoroughly-researched book Unfit for Command by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi.  It had to do with John Kerry, the democrat nominee running for president against George Bush, the incumbent.  There were plenty of stories about Kerry’s unfitness but I wanted the truth from the horse’s mouth.  O’Neill had served in Vietnam and took over Kerry’s “swift-boat,” with crew of six, after Kerry’s departure to the states.

In order to prepare for the 2008 circus, I read Obama’s sort of autobiography, Dreams from My Father, that he wrote in the 1990s, obviously considering himself important enough in his thirties to be worthy of self-aggrandizement. I seem to remember that the publisher meant for the book to be about race or racial relations but that didn’t happen.

In order to prepare for the current quadrennial circus, I’ve read exhaustively-researched Hillary’s America by the highly respected political author Dinesh D’Souza. In reading all of these books, I’ve gained important insights about the candidates. One of the most clear-cut attributes that Kerry and Hillary Clinton share is that of telling humongous lies almost as a way of life. By his actions, Obama shares this trait in spades, while his book indicated his feelings toward whites—that “typical white person” tag he awarded the grandmother who raised him.

Kerry’s lies before a Congressional committee in 1971 regarding U.S. troops in Vietnam are the stuff of legend. He served as a swift-boat commander in actual combat territory for three months and received three Purple Hearts without any hospitalization or even one day off-duty, with two certainly but probably all three resulting from Kerry’s own mistakes such as launching a grenade too close to the boat and giving himself a tiny piece of shrapnel easily removed, no stitches, just a band-aid. Band-aids were the bandages needed for all his “wounds.”

With three Purple Hearts, a GI could request shipment home, and Kerry did though the usual tour in Vietnam was one year. Kerry became a war-protester and famously (or infamously or, more likely, not at all) “threw his medals over the fence.” One of his most repeated (by himself) lies was that he spent Christmas in Cambodia, with President Nixon assuring Americans that no GI was in Cambodia. Kerry was nowhere near Cambodia…at least 50 miles away. Nixon wasn’t even president in December 1968.

Kerry traveled to France to “meet” with the North Vietnamese representatives and parley for an end to the war. At least that’s the story, as if a junior Naval Reserve officer could do such a thing. As a GI, he probably committed a crime but who cared? He was a harmless egoist, who even had movies made of himself running up and down a Vietnamese beach and looking tough. He consistently wrote false reports and probably wrote the necessary documentation for one of his medals.

D'Souza goes far beyond just Clinton (and Obama) and traces the Democrat Party back to its beginnings, claimed by D'Souza to have started with Andrew Jackson. He applies through its history (time-line and main characters/entities such as Alinski and Tammany Hall) the ways it comports with Clinton's take on everything, including her seemingly pathological lying and deviousness vis-a-vis ethnic minorities, the Indians in Jackson's days and African-Americans today.

The latter group should read the book to see how blacks are perennially manipulated by democrats…for nothing but blind and misplaced loyalty to the welfare state meticulously designed to keep blacks “in their place.” D’Souza correctly calls this the return to the plantation mentality, beginning in the 1930s. The comparison to 1830 is startling.

Breathtaking is D’Souza’s accounting of the sheer greed that drives Clinton and hubby Bubba. She may break the national “glass ceiling,” but if she does she will introduce through its cracks corruption that matches or outdoes any that’s gone before.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Feminizing the U.S.

CAVEAT ALERT: The following may be considered by some (maybe most) as sexist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, politically incorrect or just plain stupid, in light of which I couldn't care less.

Perhaps the nation has changed culturally and socially in the years post-1970 more than in any comparable period of time in its history.  Feminization of about everything has constituted the major element of change, seen most graphically during the Obama presidency.  

The democrat party’s nomination for the presidency of Hillary Clinton is the epitome of that change, which embodies both the feminization aspect and its consequent overwhelming influence, since Clinton, besides being a compulsive liar, has committed high crimes (perjuries, as acknowledged by FBI Director Comey) toward which the Justice Department, headed by—you guessed it—a woman, has turned a blind eye. Hillary has been lynched (freed by Loretta, that is), but not by Congress or any court.  

Hubby Bill was impeached over a lurid sexual matter for committing perjury—lying under oath—when he was president . Hillary Clinton has committed far more serious perjury in lying to Congress about the private unprotected email servers she used instead of the government’s server when she was state secretary, thus placing on the Internet secret government documents that have been hacked and are now being released by Wiki-Leaks honcho Julian Assange, no matter who the actual hackers were. Astute high-school students could have done it.

The ladies are accustomed to being given a pass now, no matter the subject, not least because men naturally defer to them, but the ladies outnumber men in law schools and are at least on parity in areas in fields such as medicine. They are gradually taking over the court systems as well as the legal profession.

 The ladies finish high school in numbers greater than men's and outnumber men now on college campuses. They've even discovered that they can scream “rape” now and, while not necessarily being successful in making it stick (in fact, rarely, especially on campuses), they can ruin a man's reputation since his name is, without charge/trial, spread by the media while the woman is given a pass and remains anonymous. A gal takes whatever revenge she can get when she acts a fool, gets drunk and hangs out in fraternity whorehouses, conscious or not.

TV has done its part in this cultural change. Women now beat up men physically on shows such as NCIS, something which, all things being equal, just doesn't happen. Women fill police and fire-fighting forces now, never mind that they lack the physical skills to either overpower criminals or carry heavy equipment up long ladders and carry heavy people down. Chirpy gals in cocktail frocks are taking over the TV news/talk programs, letting thigh and cleavage do what the often abrasive, high-pitched voices don't, i.e., hold attention.

Recently, two female army officers were assigned to Ranger training, the toughest in the army, and, as before with females and many men, they failed.  The men were out of luck.  The women, however, were given a second chance, which they failed, so they were given a third chance and subsequently were certified.   

The course is designed for two months and 40% of their class finished in that time.  One female took four months and the other had to keep trying.  The president had demanded that women be in the Rangers, never mind the problems presented.  The course hadn’t changed and by then neither had the women become stronger after extended time to “bulk up.”   

Congressman Steve Russell, a former Ranger, became aware that people at Fort Benning said the Army had lied and were complaining of special treatment for the women, and became concerned.  Only the most naïve believe that the women qualified...that nudge-and-wink thing.  

The course is utilized to develop leaders who can function in combat, necessitating command skills, the proper emotions, and the ability to function physically in instances in which great strength is required.  Women lack these skills, not because they’re somehow inferior but because they’re different.  No soldier (male) should have to enter combat while by instinct forced to protect a female officer, the protection of whom could cost him his life.  

Though one is deemed chauvinistic or worse to point this out, the truth is that mortal combat is a “man-thing.”  The president and the politically correct social engineers would have it that unisex is here to stay, but it has never existed and never will.  

For that matter, a president should always have had military experience, combat preferably but not required.  To call her/him commander-in-chief without it is sheer folly. A c-in-c who has never worn the uniform is an empty suit. Obama's ignorance of anything military is the prime example. Except for Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, all presidents since WWII have worn the uniform.

Women, who have proven they can be just as corrupt as men, have the right to excel in whatever field they choose except one—the military.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Black Soul

Christians Be Damned?

The enormity of the bad taste of the DNC regarding the manipulating of a Muslim man, Khizr Khan, to appear in the Democrat Convention to lecture Americans will grow each day as citizens continue to think about that in-your-face gesture.  The man’s son, a Muslim U.S. military officer, was killed over ten years ago in Iraq.

 The man has a right to grieve but so have many other fathers, nearly all of whom were/are not Muslim.  The objective was to somehow embarrass or harass presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has never held an office in the government and certainly had nothing to do with either the man’s deployment or his death. Khan waved a copy of the U.S. Constitution as if in Trump's face though it had nothing to do with the subject but, ironically, Clinton voted for the action in which the son was killed.  

The man claimed that Trump had never made such a sacrifice.  Neither had the Muslim father.  His son made the sacrifice and his father cheapened that sacrifice by taking credit for it and cheapened it even more by using that sacrifice in an attempted political hatchet job.  What could be sleazier or more self-serving?  

It has been no surprise that the media has awarded this man almost iconic status (even having him appear on TV, where he, a Muslim, called Trump, a Christian, a “black soul”) in using the hatchet job as a politically correct affront to Trump, apparently just because Trump has had no sons killed in Iraq, as was/is the case with millions of other fathers, whether Muslim or anything else.  

The Democrat National Committee probably thought this would play on the emotions of everyone in Philadelphia and via TV throughout the entire world.  It has done that and will until the folks see through the “big con,” and they will resent this outrage in the next hundred days until the November vote.  To have one’s intelligence, the democrat party, and every military non-Muslim (infidel) sacrificing soldier (nearly all of them) so insulted is to invite utter disgust.  

Then-DNC chairwoman Schultz, ironically a Jew condemned by Khan's holy book to death, must take responsibility for this outrage, though she has been fired for attempting to rig the DNC against Clinton's Primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. An apology to all Americans is in order since that same holy book demands that infidels (non-Muslims) must be made to pay the tax (be enslaved) or killed, except for Jews, whose only option is death.

This affair occurred account blatant stupidity or planned example of the new social paradigm—political correctness. Or, it was just to get another democrat-voting bloc as per the black and Latino blocs, while scourging Trump as a racist vis-a-vis Muslims. Trump has correctly called for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants until they have been properly vetted, while Clinton has called for the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Syrians, who presently cannot be vetted for obvious reasons. A look at Germany and France is instructive.

In 2009 at Fort Hood, Khan's fellow-Muslim and his son's fellow-soldier, U.S. Army Major Hasan, screamed Allah Akbar and slaughtered 13 innocent Americans, wounding more than thirty more. He, not Trump, represents a “black soul,” as did each airline-hijacker on 9/11, killing 3,000. In political-correctness equity, the DNC should have had the Christian father of a fallen Christian son onstage to wave a copy of the Koran in Hillary Clinton's face. She, not Trump, voted for the war, in which both sons died.

Clinton got UN “permission,” not Congress's, for Obama to attack defenseless MUSLIM Libya, where innocent Libyans died in the streets for over seven months in 2011. Would Khan agree that she, too, is a “black soul?” What cheap, small-minded democrat hypocrisy!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark