Archive for June 2011

The new president of France’s National Front party holds that the nation-state is the only legitimate basis of government. She vocally detests soulless multinational organizations. She cordially despises that usurper of national sovereignty, the European Union, and its ersatz currency, the euro. She dares proclaim that France and the rest of Europe are in dire danger of being swamped by illegal immigrants, especially now that half of North Africa is landing on Europe’s Italian doorstep. She says that if Muslims want to live in France, they must make the effort to assimilate and accept France’s Christian heritage.

Faced with positions like this, Paris intellectuals recoil in the righteous horror they reserve for the politically very incorrect. The mainstream media, led by flagrantly biased TV interviewers, are in league against her. The established parties, from Nicolas Sarkozy’s nominally conservative UMP to the socialists, ecologists, communists, et al., loathe and fear her in equal measure. Instead of responding to her ideas, they resort to ad hominem attacks and try to ostracize her with a political cordon sanitaire, charging that her party lacks “republican values.”

She must be doing something right.

A late-night altercation in a 7-Eleven parking lot in Boystown has left one man in the hospital and a community concerned for its safety. The incident sparked a racial debate about whether the increased presence of South and West Side youth is linked to higher crime rates in Lakeview.

On June 18 at about 3 a.m., police were called to the 7-Eleven at 3407 N. Halsted. A 20-year-old South Side resident named Anthony Bledsoe had allegedly stabbed a 34-year-old man in the chest and outer thigh following an altercation in the parking lot. Bledsoe fled the scene and was apprehended by security guards at Hydrate nightclub, two blocks north, according to police dispatch.

The stabbing victim, whose name is being held for privacy, was taken to Illinois Masonic Hospital and treated for serious, but non-fatal, stab wounds. He posted on Facebook that he’s doing well following treatment.

Bledsoe was charged June 20 with felony aggravated battery, arraigned on June 24, and held on a $150,000 bond. He is still in police custody awaiting trial, which is set for July 15, according to Andrew Conklin at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office.

In recent years, more and more young people from the South and West sides (which include Blacks and Latinos from lower-income backgrounds) have sought refuge in the increasingly affluent Boystown neighborhood. The youth cite the ability to be out in a safe environment and programs like the Broadway Youth Center as major draws.

Perhaps the major reason Jews have been able to keep their national identity alive for 3,000 years, the last 2,000 of which were nearly all spent dispersed among other nations, is ritual. No national or cultural identity can survive without ritual, even if the group remains in its own country.

Americans knew this until the era of anti-wisdom was ushered in by the baby boomer generation in the 1960s and ’70s. We always had national holidays that celebrated something meaningful.

When I was in elementary school, every year we would put on a play about Abraham Lincoln to commemorate Lincoln’s Birthday and a play about George Washington to commemorate Washington’s Birthday. Unfortunately, Congress made a particularly foolish decision to abolish the two greatest presidents’ birthdays as national holidays and substituted the meaningless Presidents Day. Beyond having a three-day weekend and department store sales, the day means nothing.

Columbus Day is rarely celebrated since the European founding of European civilization on American soil is not politically correct.

Christmas has become less nationally meaningful as exemplified by the substitution of “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”

The Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama for his involvement in the Operation Gunrunner scandal, as well as his recent edict instructing federal employees to establish a form of amnesty for illegal aliens in defiance of the Congress, existing federal laws, and the US Constitution.

Obama’s ICE Director John Morton issued a memo on June 17th to all ICE Field Office Directors, Special Agents-in-Charge, and all Chief Counsel, authorizing them to decline to remove illegal aliens who meet the qualifications for amnesty under the DREAM Act Amnesty which Congress has rejected many times.

Congressional investigations have determined that Obama’s ATF and Justice Department have been supplying assault weapons to the drug cartels that import most of America’s cocaine, methamphetamine, and illegal immigrants.

Earlier today I learned that I might have a slight racial bias.

I was reading something or another on the Internet—I forget exactly what, but it was deep down the Internet rabbit hole—when I found myself on the Project Implicit website.

Project Implicit runs a whole bunch of tests for unconscious bias called Implicit Association Tests. The tests basically see how quickly you associate positive and negative words with names or faces of people from various racial groups. (You can take the tests here.)

“It turns out that more than 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations, meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete answers when they are required to put good words in the ‘Black’ category than when they are required to link bad things with black people,” Malcolm Gladwell explains in his book “Blink.”

Gladwell took the test himself—a number of times—and it kept telling him he had a “moderate preference” for whites. It turns out that 48 percent of African-Americans who have taken the test indicate a preference for whites.

Centuries before William James coined the phrase, men have sought a “moral equivalent of war”, some human endeavor to satisfy the jingoistic lust of man, without the carnage of war.

For some, the modern Olympic Games have served the purpose, with the Cold War rivalry for medals between the United States and the Soviet Union, and, lately, between America and China.

But the Olympic Games, most of which involve individual athletes competing against each other, have never aroused the passions of soccer, where teams serve as surrogates for the tribe or nation.

[...]

“Soccer is often more deeply felt than religion,” says Franklin Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the World. “I don’t see tribalism ever really disappearing. … People are almost hardwired to identify as groups. And … group identity always runs the risk of being chauvinistic.”

Which brings us to Saturday’s match in the fabled Rose Bowl, with 93,000 in attendance, between the United States and Mexico.

According to Bill Plaschke [Email him] of the Los Angeles Times, when the U.S. team took the field it was “smothered in boos. … Its goalkeeper was bathed in a chanted obscenity. Even its national anthem was filled with the blowing of air horns and bouncing of beach balls.” [In Gold Cup final, it's red, white and boo again, By Bill Plaschke, Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2011]

Jerome Hudson

ExposingLeftists.com arrived on the campus of the University of California, Merced, last May to gather signatures on a petition calling for a redistribution of grade-point averages.  Not surprisingly, few star students wanted to share the fruits of their academic labors.

But the logic was liberally sound.  Students who worked hard and studied longer than their peers—in the spirit of fairness—should be willing to sacrifice their higher GPAs to benefit those whose grades weren’t so high due to laziness or ineptitude (or both).

Ironically, many of the same A students unwilling to take a B so someone else could be saved from an F, endorsed a progressive tax code that essentially spreads wealth from people who earned it to those who did not.

The same crew recently showed up at the University of California, Riverside, to see whether the student body there would sign a petition demanding that the athletic department consider race as a determining factor in team rosters.

The now-famous LulzSec hackers have taken aim at Arizona, and the state’s controversial immigration legislation.

Not fans of Arizona’s SB1070, which was signed into law last year, LulzSec hackers obtained and released law enforcement documents the group said included “intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords.”

Their reasoning for the hack?

“We are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.”

Elaine Cali is trying to hold onto her California of yesteryear, a relaxed place where sun-kissed orange groves thrived.

For California native Elaine Cali — yes, that’s her real name — the best thing about growing up here was the smell of orange blossoms.

Her mom used to take the family on drives through Orange County’s citrus groves, the windows down so they could take in the tangy, semi-tropical aromas. Back then in the ’60s, her brown hair blowing in the wind, Cali saw this place as a coastal paradise — where picturesque farmland stretched on forever and the idea of swimming pools and movie stars seemed shiny and new. There was room for everyone back in those days.

Now 56, the rare seventh-generation Californian is trying to save one of Orange County’s last orange groves, which sits abandoned behind a chain-link fence near her Santa Ana home. A developer wants to turn the land into yet another ticky-tacky subdivision — the kind that now occupies every valley in this sprawling greater-metro area, which extends from the Pacific Ocean to the San Bernardino Mountains, some 70 miles away.

In doing so, she’s trying to preserve an older image of this state — one before it became so congested and expensive and inaccessible to almost any average American.

She’s holding onto the California Dream.

“It’s a piece of history,” she said of the grove. “There’s not much of this left.”