The Case For Reparations

On January 27 and 28, 1944, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. This moment had been a long time coming. Blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution. More than 68,000 died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

On the morning of January 27, a patrol of sixteen P-40 Warhawks led by Lieutenant Clarence Jamison flew at five thousand feet, just north of Anzio, just as fifteen German FW-190's pulled out of an attack on the Allied anchorage at Peter Beach. The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half-dozen .50-caliber machine guns.

"I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail. I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot," reported Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr. Flames spurted from the enemy's fuselage, then from another and still another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops only to clip the ground in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one flaming wing.

"The whole show lasted less then five minutes. We poured hell into them," Major Spanky Roberts later said.

The squadron returned to Naples to refuel, and returned to the Anzio beachhead. In two days the squadron tallied twelve enemy planes destroyed, three probable kills, and four damaged. But the implications of the combat prowess of the Tuskegee Airmen, as they were informally known, would reverberate for long afterwards. An unnamed black soldier later said that men like him were "doing their bit here, their supreme bit, not for glory, not for honor, but for, I think, the generation that will come."***

These men, and the generation that followed, were betrayed by their country. My Jewish uncle served in the same theatre of war, but when he came home, there were federal programs in place to assist him. The Veteran's Administration loaned him money to buy his first home. It was assistance like this that helped millions of veterans buy homes, and begin creating generational wealth.

The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) insured federal mortgage loans that were made by the VA. But the very covenants of the FHA were discriminatory. One underwriting standard warned that "if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties should continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes."

Between 1945 and 1959, African Americans received only 2 percent of all federally insured home loans. FHA established guidelines to steer private mortgage investors away from minority areas, known as redlining. Therefore, not only were blacks excluded from new developments like Levittown, insurance for minority-dominated neighborhoods was discouraged.

The FHA isn't the only Democratic Party program designed to disenfranchise blacks. It isn't even the only New Deal-era program to do so. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1934 required that construction firms contracting for the federal government must pay their workers "locally prevailing wages." This was explicitly designed to keep lower-skilled African-Americans out of federal construction projects.

The New Deal wasn't the only bad deal for blacks engineered by Democrats. Part of the impetus for this essay is the current mob rage over the confederate flag. The truth is that the confederate flag is the property of the Democratic Party. The states that seceded from the Union in 1861 were all Democratic Party states. The party that held that one person can own another is the Democratic Party.

The party that enforced segregation and Jim Crow apartheid policies for a century after the Civil War was the Democratic Party. When Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Senator Robert Byrd died, President Barack Obama delivered his eulogy. Because he was a Democrat.

I only have one condition for supporting reparations to the descendants of those brought here in chains. A full, official, and unconditional apology by the Democratic Party. I want to see Debbie Wasserman-Shultz tell a bank of cameras that the Republican Party was founded to oppose and abolish slavery. I want Harry Reid to say that the G.O.P. supported the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights act in spite of Democratic Party filibustering. I want President Obama to admit that the Democratic Party is still subjugating blacks today, by telling them that the only way they can feed themselves is by taking food from a government official.


***Rick Atkinson, The Day Of Battle, Picador 2007, pp. 381-385

Cultural Marxism's Long March

Homophobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Obamacare Is Here To Stay

At the gym today, I climbed the stairmaster and noticed that the television was on CNN, and their top story was the Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell. The decision that saved Obamacare. Mitch McConnell went to the podium to announce that the G.O.P. would continue to try to repeal the law, but I don't think he believes his own rhetoric.

What puzzled me was the fact that I felt nothing, as I watched the celebration unfold on TV, and saw the glee on Jeffrey Toobin's face. I usually feel angry when Democrats win one. But I didn't even feel surprise. During this Court's present term, my best-case scenario was a win in King v. Burwell, and a loss in Obergefell v. Hodges, the gay marriage case. My absence of emotion upon learning today's decision compelled me to search for my personal interpretation of the ruling.

It's still early, but I think what the decision means is that the Democratic Party has complete ownership of the law. I happen to think it is a bad law. Abraham Lincoln once said that "the best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

In some insurance markets, premiums are expected to increase by up to 51 percent. That's because the risk pool is older and sicker than expected. Democrats own each and every premium rate increase, and this should be hung like an albatross around the party's neck.

Democrats also own high deductibles. The lower-tier bronze and silver plans have more reasonable premiums, but costly yearly deductibles. A study by Health Pocket estimated that the average deductible for 2015 Bronze-level policies, the lowest tiered plan, is about $5,181 for individuals. Therefore, the bronze plan is quite reasonable, unless you actually plan on consuming medical services.

It's hard for me to feel contempt for Chief Justice Roberts, even though his comment that "the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase" sets a dangerous precedent. What liberal hasn't argued that the "context" of the Second Amendment are references to musketry and state militias?

Roberts also said that "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." Wait, what? I thought Congress wanted to improve health care outcomes? Every single disappointing health care outcome forever, every sick kid who couldn't find a Medicare provider, every patient that is left in a hospital corridor to die, are now the responsibility of the Democratic Party.

I think the G.O.P. should abandon talk of repeal. We got beat. Time to move on. Better to introduce bills that reform the ACA. Tort reform, allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, provisions to get more doctors into the supply pipeline. Otherwise, the law might collapse under it's own weight, and usher in a single-payer system. That is the ultimate goal of supporters of the ACA anyway, even if most of them only admit it to themselves.

I wonder if this unwieldy law, two-legged stool that it is, is so bad that Roberts believes it will fail anyway. Somehow Roberts must understand that the ACA doesn't improve markets, it distorts them. The person who consumes medical services now has even more layers of insurance and government apparatchiks between them and their provider than ever before. Maybe Roberts is just crazy like a fox.

Democrats Disarming America

If you mark your ballot "Democrat," you are in favor of repealing the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In 2008, DC vs Heller was decided by a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs in Heller argued that the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms protected lawful possession of a firearm in one's own home.

Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer would have you disarmed in your own home. The Democrats only need to replace one conservative Justice to start confiscating firearms.

President Obama seems disinclined to wait that long. Obama is once again using the Justice Department to attenuate support for legally owned firearms. The Justice Department, thanks to Operation Fast And Furious, is the only cabinet agency with a bona fide body count, including the Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco. Fast And Furious operators walked guns into Mexico to bolster Administration claims that drug cartels were waging war using weapons procured in the U.S.

Justice is at it again. This time, the operation is called Choke Point. The purported aim of Choke Point is the investigation of companies believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering.

Before Sultan Barack decreed that henceforth all laws would originate in his executive domain, there was something called due process. A law enforcement official would have to demonstrate probable cause of crime and ask a judge for a warrant. Not anymore. Nowadays the existing laws that are inconvenient are ignored, and de facto legislation issues forth from agencies, like EPA and FDIC.

Banks have been targeted, using the FDIC, if they do business with a concern that may pose a "reputational risk". Operations like payday lenders, racist materials, pornography, and firearms and ammunition sales, are among those in the cross-hairs.

Poway Weapons & Gear is located near my town, and they have been using US Bank since 1992. Poway Weapons & Gear is licensed, and fully compliant in all regulations regarding sales. They have also been given ten days notice that US Bank is closing their account.

All credit for breaking this story goes to Mike Slater of 760 KFMB. Slater took over Roger Hedgecock's radio slot when Hedgecock retired recently, and he's doing capable work. It is saying something that I always listen to Slater instead of Hugh Hewitt these days.

Slater interviewed Poway Weapons & Gear's John Phillips yesterday. Phillips reported that even his personal bank account is being closed. Keep in mind that neither Phillips nor Poway Weapons & Gear have been accused or suspected of criminal activity.

Five months ago, FDIC announced regulatory guidance that "instructs banks to judge their relationships with their customers on a case-by-case basis, rather than refusing to provide banking services to entire categories of industries." Unless they are politically incorrect? That means pot shops can operate in the clear but not a firearms dealer. The FDIC is ignoring its own regulations.

Father's Day's Sorrows

I used to think that among other things, I would write cautionary tales. I would explain to the reader that smoking is bad, so don't do it. I did it, and look what it did to me. I would try to save the world from itself, like Holden Caulfield.

I realized long ago the utter folly of this endeavor. Experience is the true teacher.

I emulated my father, and I tried to appropriate some of his behaviors. Before I was married for the first time, I had the intention of just being temporarily married. If my dad could divorce my mom, then I wanted to divorce my first wife, too. Playing with fire sounds more fun than the reality of being seared actually is.

Dad gave me advice about sowing my oats. "Don't get them pregnant," he told me. He never told me what to do if I did happen to impregnate a young woman.

The culture told me. Since I was in college, the conventional wisdom held that a baby would "derail my career" prospects. Nobody wants to "be stuck with a baby."

My oldest offspring would now be thirty-three. There were three others, conceived by my seed, and aspirated from their wombs. I was so ashamed of the suffering generated by my procreative impulses, that I saw a urologist and tried to persuade him to perform a vasectomy on me. Dad had one of those, too.

I spent my twenties and thirties climbing into a bottle almost every night. That is a pretty effective way to derail a career, too. I was tormented by my actions, and I thought that I was going to hell. One day, I went to All Saints Episcopal Church, just walked in and asked to make confession. I knew that they didn't have true confessionals, like in a Catholic church. A pastor was kind enough to take me into his office and hear my admission.

He told me that it was incumbent on me to pray for the souls of the women involved, and he also directed me to pray for the souls of the unborn. That advice has helped me a little bit over the years. But it can never erase the shame that I feel, and the regret about roads not taken.

I don't know if I'm going to hell anymore. I used to feel like I deserved to, if there were such a place. But now I think that maybe hell isn't a place under the earth with sulfur and fire. Maybe hell is just the prison that incarcerates my soul. I punish myself with self-reproach.

That's a pretty good way to derail a career, too.

Children of Career-Obsessed Moms Better Off

One thing I have noticed is that the pathologies left in feminism's wake, like divorce and single motherhood, are consistently ignored. If they are acknowledged at all, it is to assert that the outcomes for the children are better. Not just as good, but better.

Case in point is the story about some findings out of Harvard Business School, leading to articles like this one, entitled Kids of working moms are better off. The female news anchor reading the story off the teleprompter this morning was positively beaming. "That's very encouraging to me as a mother," she said.

Among the study's findings:

Daughters of working mothers earn 23% more than daughters of stay-at-home moms in the U.S.

Adult women who grew up with a working mother are not only more likely to be employed, but they are also more likely to hold supervisory positions than women who grew up with stay-at-home moms.

Sons of working moms are more likely to grow up contributing to the childcare and household chores.

Wow, it sounds like this study checks off every single box on the feminist wish-list. "Looks like my little girl is well on her way," the female news anchor concluded. The study did produce a confounding statistic, but good news! It only reinforces the hugbox.

Career prospects of children who identified as conservative were unchanged regardless of whether or not they had a working mother. If your child identifies as a conservative, you have failed as a parent.

Conclusion? You are abusing your children and condemning them to a life as lower-caste underlings if you don't work outside the home.

This story will get a lot of traction and it proves the power of fallacious reasoning. In this case, there is a clear appeal to authority. Everybody is supposed to recognize the fact that the study came from Harvard, and is thus unassailable. The study doesn't look at any measures of happiness or well-being. It concludes that women being supervisors and men staying at home to raise children is good. It sounds like the researcher started with a premise and then cherry-picked evidence which supported it.

The study's author is Kathleen L. McGinn. Her bio states that "Professor McGinn studies the role of gender at work and in negotiations." She has a BA in Psychology, an MBA, and a doctorate in Organizational Behavior.

McGinn's CV is dotted with papers such as Beyond Gender and Negotiation To Gendered Negotiations, and When Does Gender Matter In Negotiation? I wonder how she feels about Ellen Pao banning salary negotiations at Reddit on the basis that women are disadvantaged by them.

In other words, McGinn is a glorified psychologist. Is it any coincidence that social sciences like organizational behavior are totally dominated by women? Women like her study our culture and recommend changes, and because they have fancy degrees, mainstream media swallows the message whole.

Just don't tell boys that you expect them to stay home with the children.

Aloe Vera Heals

This is a post about just one subject: acid reflux and how to cure it.

If you have esophageal reflux, then you know it is not just uncomfortable, it is dangerous. If left untreated, it can cause cancers of the esophagus.

I used to treat with calcium carbonate (Tums). I was buying Tums at Costco to get the volume pricing. That was just masking the symptoms. Stomach lesions, the underlying issue of gastroesophageal reflux, are not treated just by using Tums.

I have used Prilosec in two iterations of self-treatment. You have to use it every day for three weeks for the symptoms to disappear. Prilosec does work. The symptoms came back eventually, though, all too soon.

I have also used every OTC remedy on the market. The last one I used was Tagamet. That's a histamine H2-receptor antagonist that inhibits stomach acid production. Tagamet always works. But Tagamet is a powerful drug, and interacts with other medications, and you're only supposed to take it for two weeks.

The thing for me is, I can't give up coffee. I want a few cups in the morning. I have had to quit drinking coffee to make my symptoms disappear. And they always seemed to be lurking, waiting for me to have a latte, then boom! All that acid coming back into my throat.

A few years ago, I started collecting aloe vera, and cultivating it. There are dozens of pots all around with different species of aloe. Like this one, which is flowering:

To treat, I just break off a leaf and stick in whatever drink I am carrying around. It will bitter up coffee pretty good. The best way is in a cup of iced tea with lemon, the sour of the lemon counteracts the bitter of the aloe.

It took several months, but it did happen. The aloe vera cured my stomach lesions, and my acid reflux. And what's most amazing to me, is that I don't seem to overproduce stomach acid anymore.

I have seen aloe vera in bottles at the market. I've never tried them, and can't vouch for their efficacy. The whole reason I cultivate, it's about something that gets lost in the whole "buy local" fervor. The reason you buy local is because every plant and animal has its own immune system, and a plant that has been cultivated nearby has proven that it can tolerate environmental stresses very similar to the ones you encounter. Air pollution, noise, temperature, all these affect the viability of every living thing. When you ingest a plant that has developed immunity to the same environmental stress that you face, it helps you.

I wouldn't even recommend trying aloe vera without talking to your doctor. All I know is that it works for me. I trust pharmaceuticals only for treating very specific disorders, and then, only for a limited time.

UPDATE: 1-27-16

At the time of this writing, I was being cured of another stomach affliction by using aloe vera. I would experience cramps in the area between my stomach and duodenum. Even hours after eating, it felt like the food hadn't left my stomach. I would describe it as incomplete emptying. And I couldn't trace it to any one food. It happened one time right after eating a few macadamia nuts. I realized several months ago that I haven't had symptoms of this for at least six months. Whether it's correlation or causation, all I know is I believe this condition has been cured.

Feminist Scold Says, "That's Not Funny!"

Amanda Marcotte has taken the stereotype of the dried-up, humorless feminist scold and jumped the shark with it. She wrote an article about Jerry Seinfeld and teased it with the following tweet:

What’s really funny is Seinfeld’s defenders prove, with every gripe and whine, that they like him because they have no sense of humor.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) June 11, 2015

What's really funny is that a joyless feminist wants to tell me what is funny and what is not funny. I would have never thought that Amanda Marcotte was devoid of self-awareness until just now. Either she doesn't care about being reduced to an archetype, or this is professional-grade trolling.

"Jerry Seinfeld is really not that funny," Marcotte explains. "This is all our collective faults for ever pretending Seinfeld was funny." And, "Wasn’t the joke on Seinfeld that he was a second-rate hack?"

Seinfeld has earned more than three billion dollars in syndication. That is more than the gross national product of thirty countries. That's first-rate hacking.

I understand that different people have different taste in entertainment. I find Will Ferrell funny at times, but he puts his politics front and center of a lot of his routines. I regard him warily, as he belongs to the other tribe.

Maybe Amanda believes that Jerry belongs to the other tribe. Marcotte shows that her feelings are still bruised over Seinfeld's comments last year that she frames as "dismissing the value of diversity in comedy." Seinfeld was asked by Buzzfeed whether he is bothered by criticism that his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee isn't racially diverse.

He replied, "Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that." The emphasis on diversity bean-counting is "anti-comedy," he concluded.

Seinfeld also ruffled feathers when he said that he won't do shows at colleges, because the atmosphere of political correctness is pervasive and absurd. Marcotte does acknowledge the salience of this point, saying "some on college campuses use lefty politics as a weapon to try to censor or police the language and ideas" of others. In the very next breath, she dismisses the idea by saying that it's only a "marginal bit of infighting on the left, as opposed to a serious cultural shift towards hypersensitivity or censorship."

It's anything but marginal. Political correctness has become so solidified, that it is now being used as a barrier force guarding against possible desertion. That's the best way to understand the grievances filed against feminist Laura Kipnis, merely for suggesting that the definition of sexual assault is being stretched to fit whatever conduct Title IX coordinators feel like.

Amanda Marcotte reminds me of George Costanza's mother. He tells Jerry, "Listen carefully. My mother has never laughed. Ever. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a tee-hee..never went 'ha!'"

That's gold, Amanda! Comedy gold!

Where Will You Be?

I love the new AT&T commercial in the series, "Where Will You Be?" The premier ad depicted people watching on their smartphones as the first people land on Mars. The new commercial portrays people watching on their smartphones as the first female pitcher in major league baseball goes into her windup. They imagine that she's a right-handed power pitcher, and it looks like they used some CGI to make her overhand motion seem faster.

At first I thought it was a ludicrous concept, and an attempt at memetic programming and conditioning by our thought generators in the media. I thought the idea of a female major league pitcher was beyond conception. Well, I was wrong.

There is currently a woman playing baseball at the junior college level. Her name is Sarah Hudek, and she is the daughter of former all-star John Hudek. She is described as a 5-10 lefthander who throws 82-mph. That's not bad. That's John Tudor territory. I could envision someone like her on a major league roster. Her role would be situational: working out of the bullpen, called in to face left-handed batters, making forty appearances per season.

There may be some baseball terminology that the media will need to avoid. It's too problematic to describe her straddling the rubber. The telecasters would never be able to complement her splitter. It would be problematic to say that a batter got to first base against her, and forget about saying a team scored against her. They will need to find a different way to say that a team batted around against her.

I could go on and on about other problematic terminology, like backdoor sliders, but I think I will just take one for the team on that thread.

Wikipedia states that Jackie Mitchell was signed to a professional contract in 1931. She played for the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Class AA minor leagues. In other words, she was a bush leaguer.

She did strike out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game.

I know that radical feminists are angry that sports is not a level playing field. Male athletes draw bigger audiences, who are in turn targeted by advertisers. Some feminists come right out and say that the only way to ensure women athletes can achieve equality of outcomes is to shut down the men. That's what Melissa Harris-Perry said on MS-NBC, and she was being serious.

I love how the same feminists who want to overhaul men's sports and have inept commissioners fired are utterly silent on the pathological behavior of female athletes. Hope Solo was arrested on domestic violence charges, and although the charges were dropped on procedural grounds, prosecutors plan to re-file. After the Women's World Cup, naturally.

Female athletes routinely come up on charges of domestic violence, intimate partner abuse, and the like. Nobody hears about that, because it violates the narrative.

Well, I have another narrative. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels in the lesbian community.

So, where will I be when the first female pitcher makes it to the majors? Watching a different station. I will make every effort to catch the highlights. I wouldn't want to miss the replay of someone charging the mound.

Feminism's Purpose

Roosh had an interesting post a few days ago. It was entitled The Theory of Evolution Does Not Apply to Modern Human Beings. The essay was an attempt to challenge the notion that the human urge to reproduce is the driving force in our lives. One point was especially salient. that "the more resources a person has, the less likely they will reproduce at all."

This phenomenon is occurring all over the developed world. It led me to the revelation that the drive to reproduce is subordinate to the drive to acquire and control resources. Even the way we communicate with each other, through hundreds of different languages and countless dialects, is resource-driven. A spoken and written language is a barrier to outsiders seeking entry into a society's resources.

It follows that the unstated prime directive of feminism is the control of society's resources.

Every initiative undertaken in the name of diversity can be viewed in this way. Recently, Apple Computer released its Employee Diversity Report. CEO Tim Cook is not satisfied with his company's diversity. The report states that 70% of Apple's 98,000 employees are male.

Probably because eighty-two percent of computer science degrees are earned by men. The only way to fix that is to deny males admittance to computer science programs.

What's interesting to me is that feminists are using the cultural marxist template to advance their agenda. They argue that the culture is responsible for all of life's inequalities. I wonder how many feminists are aware of the inherent conflict between marxism and their desire to control outcomes within capitalism?

Tim Cook has a vested interest in diversity, because Apple will be even more profitable, the more women are in the workforce. In every field where women have made significant inroads, wages have fallen. It naturally follows that doubling the supply of a commodity, like psychologists, will lead to price (wage) reductions to clear supply.

Feminism may have once been about equality and humanism, but not today. I have never heard of a feminist asking what we can do about the disparity in male incarceration rates or sentencing. But it is not uncommon to hear words like those of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was asked when she thought there would be enough female justices on the Supreme Court.

"And my answer is when there are nine," Bader Ginsburg replied.

Open Letter to Disney-ABC Domestic Television

The definition of pornography is "obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit." After watching about two minutes of last night's episode of Scandal, it is hard to conclude this program has any artistic merit.

The opening scene features Huck torturing Quinn. How de-sensitized does a person have to be not to be disturbed by images like this one?

Is there a meta-message about the morality of extracting vital information from an enemy combatant with a ticking clock in the background? Is this a metaphor for the agony Shonda Rhimes feels processing her thoughts to paper?

No. Huck tortures because he likes it. That is called torture porn.

About five minutes later, former Vice President Sally Langston is pressured by a consultant to change her belief from pro-life to pro-choice. The decision is framed as bowing to simple political expediency. The inference is that all pro-lifers are hypocrites who will sell out their beliefs to the highest bidder.

The reality is that most, if not all, pro-life people arrive at their core belief about the sanctity of life honestly and deeply convicted. This is in spite of fierce messaging from the abortion activists depicting someone who is pro-life as "the other." People who are pro-life never call abortion supporters "anti-life," but they do call us "anti-choice."

After that scene cut away, the viewer is confronted with images of homosexual sexual activity. This is not a complaint deriving from homophobia. I feel uncomfortable anytime I am presented with images of sexual congress. It used to be a private matter.

But then, Disney used to be a respectable company. I remember The Wonderful World of Disney, airing on Sunday nights. I remember movies like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

Yes, I could unplug my television. That would solve one facet of the problem. Another facet of the problem is that I am a Disney shareholder. Not only that, I belong to a subset of America who craves wholesome fare. Stop serving this dog's breakfast.