Category Archives: Ron for 37th

Older posts about my 2018 bid for congress. Go to ronfor37.org for the latest on my campaign.

The trouble with a one party state

California is now a one party state.  This has been the big issue of the 2016 election.  It smacks of communist party rule, and is degenerative to society in so many ways.  During my campaign, I want to address Democratic Party dominance, how its entrenched their position in the state, and how its damaging society as a whole.

First is the legal entrenchment.  In 2010, California adopted the open primary rule, meaning only the top two vote getters in the primaries get to advance to the general election.  So this year, we didn’t get to vote for any Republicans except the president.

That Kamala Harris would become our next Senator was a foregone conclusion and a coronation.  There was no GOP candidate, only a runner up Democrat who ran to her left.

This scenario has left Republicans folding their tents and given the Democrats the keys here, they don’t even run campaigns anymore.  This leaves us with a political machine which has no debate.  Only one big machine, with ladders and favors to apparatchiks.  My 37th district has a congresswoman who’s a 4th generation dynasty of appointees.

One could say that, well, this is because California is a diverse electorate which does not fall for racists.  But they would be wrong.  As I’ve pointed out before, Trump made inroads to Blacks and Latinos that have flummoxed the Republican party for decades.  He basically cracked the race code.  Those cracks were evident earlier, when Democrats thought blacks would join them in fighting against Prop 8 (outlawing gay marriage) but they wound up being its most fervent supporters.  And I think that all peoples and races share some basic core values which make them natural Republicans.  Issues like Family, Law and Order, Work Ethic, Public service.

So why are so many voting Democrat?  The answer is social – the other dimension a one-party state entrenches power.  For this I have mostly anecdotal evidence.  But it’s assumed around Los Angeles that nobody, and I mean NOBODY, could vote for Donald Trump.  All the worst lies about him are assumed to be true, people around here are literally suicidal that he’s won.

You’d say, well who cares, but the fact is that you can’t support Donald Trump, you can’t even give him a fair hearing, without constantly getting into arguments.  Conversations start with “at least we all hate Trump, right?” or “I can’t believe how anybody could vote for that rapist”.  And when they see you not nodding in enthusiastic agreement, then the argument starts.

It’s not just annoying.  It’s damaging to democratic society.  Indeed it bares light on the Democrats’ strategy that goes all the way back to the Antebellum days – they treat their base like a plantation, and instead of resorting to reasoned arguments turn to slanders and violence on anyone who doesn’t support them.

So part of our early strategy in this run is to come out of the closet as Trump supporters and Republicans.  We need to come out, stand proud, and even if some of us didn’t vote for Trump, at least demand a fair hearing for him.  I share an opinion with a number of friends and acquaintances that, regardless of who we voted for, we still accept the other candidate and want to give them a fair hearing.

We can start with that simple premise.

 

Considering a congressial run in the GOP

FINALLY! A Secular non-tea-party Republican has run a successful campaign!

I know. Record screeching to a halt. What?  Yes.  Trump’s victory forever changed the GOP.  It dissolved both the Tea Party and the Evangelicals in one blow.  Yes, of course he made overtures to them during his campaign.  And he will fulfill promises to them.  But both Tea Party conservatives and hard evangelicals campaigned as hard against him with their #nevertrump as any Democrat.

Meanwhile, in his simple populist message Trump made inroads to Black and Latinos that have flummoxed the Republican party for decades.  He basically cracked the race code.  And I want to build on that.  Trump’s victory is a blow to PC culture which might actually grant us a real discussion among each other as Americans.  And I think that all peoples and races share some basic core values which make them natural Republicans.  Issues like family, Law and Order, Work Ethic, Public Service.

It’s these issues Trump laid the groundwork for.  If we can build on this, and really push forward a new Republican agenda of enlightened classic liberalism, we could go into the 21st century making it the greatest one yet.  And we can go into it with a consensus that really represents America.

Once again, California is a perfect starting point for this visionary future.

In his Victory, the Death of the Democrats

The Republicans reel from the dissolution of these wings which they depended on for their mass base.  But they will recover.  And they will come out stronger than before, ready to handle this century of challenges.  Already a new generation of anti-PC secularist militants sympathetic to Trump are organizing.  Mind you, these are not your leftist secularists.  We do not begrudge people their religion, we don’t attack their beliefs, in fact we enshrine their right to behave as they see fit.

The Democrats, unfortunately, are still saddled by their militant wings, which are pulling the party ever more into irrelevance.  One would think their base would see the error of their ways after Trump’s election, and drift away from identity politics and branding everyone and everything as a racist.  They are not, and in fact are doubling down on their politics.

But this is the symptom of a party that has been in power too long and has not needed to become self conscious.

I was a lifelong Democrat.  I worked for the Democrats in a number of campaigns, I see how they behave, especially in my home state of California.  I consider myself of the vein of such Democrats as Chuck Schumer, Jim Webb, and Jerry Brown.

But with Trump’s election, I’m flipping to the Republican party.  Because Trump effectively took over those wings of the Democrats, and now they are part of a GOP conversation.  I want to be a part of this dynamic conversation they are having.  The Democrats stopped having a conversation, and I fear there is not much for them as a party at this point.

This will be the first of many articles about my stances on various issues.  The major question at this point is how to run as a GOP candidate in California, which is effectively a one party state.  I would like to discuss how it became a one party state, how damaging this setup is to our politics and our society, and how we can reverse this trend.

Hillary’s E-mail Question

I should begin by saying I generally don’t consider issues like this “30,000 emails” thing.  I consider them theatrics for the masses, much like a politician’s sexual details or tax returns.  That being said, I’ve been running Exchange (Windows) mail servers for the past 15 years so I know a thing or two about how mail servers are run.  So watching this whole issue unfold brought up some interesting issues for me, with our government, with Hillary, and with what changes really need to happen in 2017.

The tipping point was when my wife and I were listening to an episode of This American Life which was trying to justify Hillary’s private e-mail server.  The basic premise was that this private e-mail server wasn’t some Machiavellian scheming on Hillary’s part, it was just a certain cluelessness and carelessness about a technology that the government hadn’t really adopted yet. I’d read some other justifications, like that it’s accepted protocol to destroy an old phone with a hammer.

First I’d like to debunk some of these justifications.  And first among those is smashing a phone with a hammer.  This is not just untrue, it shows real stupidity on the part of whoever decided to smash it.  Smashing a phone will just smash the plastic and glass, more than likely it won’t smash the flash memory on which sensitive data may reside.

Of course, in the private sector, business e-mail needs to be encrypted on a phone in such a way that it can never be retrieved if someone were to get the phone.  It technically doesn’t even sit on the phone.  And if a phone is stolen, the e-mail administrator has the ability to remote wipe it.  If you’d like to know more about that you can check out IBM’s MaaS360.

Second was Ira Glass’s charge that a lot of government officials use private e-mail accounts, citing Colin Powell’s use of an AOL account.  Now let’s get this straight, there is a huge difference between using a personal commercial e-mail address and hosting your e-mails on your own server.  An AOL account can be subpoenaed.  AOL follows proper data storage protocols, they can pull up any and all e-mails that ever went through their organization.  If Colin Powell were under investigation for something, the FBI could gain access to this.

Not only that, this is a compliance requirement of all private sector businesses.  I’d like to introduce you to an appliance I have personal experience with – the Barracuda Message Archiver.  All businesses with compliance requirements need something like this.  Any e-mail that goes in, out, or through the company gets passed through this archiver, to be stored for eternity.  Nobody gets away with deleting anything.

This is in addition to backups.  Without regular backups, Exchange simply doesn’t work.  You could technically skimp on the backups and keep a short retention history, but you can’t do that with the archiver.

So, my understanding is Hillary’s team made backups, even offsite backups, but didn’t archive.  The only way this could result in so many e-mails being deleted by chance is with some combination of deleting e-mails as they come in, and having a very short backup retention policy.  Which, if you’re going to keep backup retention that short, why even have them offsite?

Okay, so you see where I’m going with this?  Two possible stories surface here, both of which spell something scandalous.

  1. The traditional story that Hillary’s camp purposely used a private e-mail server so they could write each other e-mails outside the realm of scrutiny, knowing what they were doing was illegal.
  2. Government agencies do not have the compliance requirements of the private sector, which puts them above the laws they create. Hillary’s team’s carelessness about this is just a symptom of a much larger issue with a public sector that needs a tech overhaul.

Either story speaks of a scandal.

A quick way to vet which story is true is to find out what other senators, candidates, or any political officials run their operations with a private e-mail server.  But I have a hunch Hillary’s camp is unique in this behavior.  Really, e-mail is so much more complicated than a server.  Maybe 15 years ago we could get away with a simple server but we’ve been in the era of strict compliance and sophisticated spam filters for years now.  We generally talk of e-mail more in terms of systems than servers.  I haven’t even gotten into so many of the other features we have to keep in our e-mail organization.  Really, unless you’re an organization of at least a thousand people, it’s more efficient to outsource it.

Unless you have something to hide.

Why America needs a Trump candidacy

Most of my coworkers are Latinos – most of those are El Salvadoran.  So when we went out for lunch one day, it was only a matter of time before they found out I was leaning towards Trump.

Needless to say, it got awkward at first.  First came the comments about his disparaging attacks on Latinos.  Then his comments about Muslims.  But after I wasn’t knuckling other to either one, since I honestly think both charges are bullshit, the silence led one of them to make an illuminating comment:

“Of course we need to have laws.”

We need to have laws.  Indeed.  That’s the crux of the Trump candidacy, and it’s the crux of the European electoral tumult.

I’ve been in politics a long time – since my naive days of Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign.  I can say that the primaries are a brainstorming session for both parties – they let any comers shoot off any strange and unformed ideas they have, and see what sticks with the voters.  It’s only towards the end of the primaries, heading into the convention, that they decide it’s time to close down the session and rally around a candidate they feel represents them.

Only sometimes it doesn’t quite work as planned.  Like this year.  This year has been a real popular backlash against ruling class policy – that of abolishing all immigration law, and allowing anybody on earth to move anywhere they want.   We may have our “illegal immigrant” problem here at home (I’ll get to that in a bit).  But it’s nothing compared to the brilliant EU loophole of allowing “refugee” status to people in any one country and then letting them in through that back door into any other country in Europe.

As Douglas Murray puts it “‘imagine there’s no countries’?  We don’t have to imagine it, we’re seeing the real consequences of getting rid of borders, and that’s people blowing themselves up in the heart of Paris.”

It’s no stretch to say this is deliberate policy.  And part of that policy is to smear anyone who criticises the scrapping of immigration law and borders as a bigot.  This is happening both in European and American governments, both Democrat and Republican parties.

And that’s why when Trump comes in and says things like “build that wall” or “seal the borders” it’s a signal that he supports something THEY CANNOT ALLOW TO HAPPEN.

The remarks themselves aren’t even worth scrutinizing that much.  In a brainstorming session, one wants provocative remarks like this, because they spur thought, reaction, debate.  Nevermind if they’re unworkable or offensive, we have plenty of time to take those comments, see the direction they’re going in, and hammer them out into workable policy.

Like the “ban all Muslims” remark.  Nevermind that they twisted what he said.  Nevermind that there’s no way to ban based on religion.  But there are bans based on country of origin.  It’s not that hard to go from one to the other, and we did it to Iran after their hijackings.

But back to the American issue of immigration.  If I make one point, it’s this.  It’s okay to demand immigration be made legal.  It’s okay to make sure those immigrating here legally can do so more easily than those who don’t.  It’s okay to demand that those who pose a terrorism risk aren’t allowed in.  The more voters who make these demands are made to feel like bigots, the more they will rally and solidify behind a man like Trump.

It’s in everyone’s interests that everyone in this country is here legally.  The fact is, someone who is here working illegally is someone who is working with no rights.  Are there issues with this?  Of course.  That’s a whole separate article.

But nobody’s saying “kick out all the Mexicans” or “Mexicans are criminals”.  Those are just slanders.  Trump’s main remark, time and again, is that we can’t just ignore our own laws and let people pour over without any record.

That’s a great starting point.  If we’re short on workers, nobody has a problem with liberalizing immigration law.  As my coworkers told me, and I suspected, poor Latin Americans can’t immigrate legally to USA.  Only the rich can.  Well, that’s a problem.  And we can change that.  With laws.  Not by ignoring laws and ridiculing those that have a problem with it.

It’s no secret that America’s a nation of immigrants.  My coworkers relay to me their parents’ stories of escaping violence and poverty to seek a better life in America, and honestly, it doesn’t sound too different from anybody else’s story.  That’s why nobody’s doing themselves any favors by claiming the Trump campaign anti-immigrant.  Because those who’ve been paying attention to Trump’s remarks realize it’s a “pro-law” campaign.

Because America is a nation of immigrants, but it’s also a nation of laws.  And one doesn’t trump the other.

A presidential apology

Fellow Americans,

Last week, a high school student named Ahmed Mohammed was briefly arrested for bringing to school what some thought was a bomb.  I invited Ahmed to come to the White House because I thought it was an innocent science project, and he was being unfairly targeted because he is Muslim.

Unfortunately, it turns out we at the White House were misled about the facts of this issue.  That clock wasn’t a science project.  There was no programming involved, no rewiring, Ahmed just took an ordinary consumer clock, gutted it, and put it in a pencil case, something frequently used as a bomb casing.  He then took it to school, unsolicited.  When confronted about the clock, he gave no information that could de-escalate the situation.

Make no mistake.  Creating a device that looks like a bomb, with intention of it looking like a bomb, and bringing it into a school, or any public building or area, is a crime.  Even if it isn’t actually a real bomb.  In these tense times where terrorists bomb public events and children shoot down their classmates in school, it is all the more important to realize this.  Creating a hoax just undermines the policies we have in place to prevent a future terrorist attack.  That’s what makes it a crime.

We now have enough evidence to believe Ahmed and his father deliberately staged a hoax, and we will begin working with State and Local authorities to press criminal charges against them.  Muslims should not be profiled or assumed to be terrorists, yes.  But neither are they above the law.  We will hold them fully accountable for their actions.

I deeply apologize to both the teachers and law enforcement in Irving for putting them in the spotlight for just doing their jobs correctly and professionally.  In these times when cops and public officials nationwide are coming under increasing scrutiny, it is important to remember the public liability they have.  Teachers are responsible for our children’s safety, day in, day out.  Cops are responsible for all our safety.  If something happens under their watch, we hold them responsible.

It is important that we give them the benefit of the doubt, when events like this arise.  And it is important to honor the sacrifices they make, dedicating their lives to the public good.  As I’ve said before, it is this kind of service to America that really makes America great.

Thank you and good night,

President Barack Obama

The dark side of community organizing

I’ve had a long simmering suspicion towards “community organizers”.  Might have been since college.  While I preferred to listen to people, I watched career minded organizers come in with their own agenda, rally people around it, and kick out anyone who disagreed.

Then came the Iraq War.  I was opposed to it – even though I’m not a pacifist, I didn’t like being lied and manipulated into a war.  I organized MoveOn movie nights because it was a great way to find like-minded people and try to amplify our opposition that way.  But MoveOn quickly became an organizing agent for the Democratic party, and when our discussions were replaced with “Bush as an Idiot” slogans, I backed off and dropped out.

Now, it seems, such “community organizing” has taken a toxic turn.  In the past few years I’ve seen first J-Street appear, and then Jewish Voice for Peace.  These groups have no organic connection with the Jewish community.  Their only real connection is with the Democratic apparatus, their only unifying factor a desire for Democrat coattails.

I’ll leave J-Street alone for another day, I’d like to focus on JVP for now.  The articles about them are damning, and yet I wonder how long they’re going to last.  Their own website looks like they’re a bunch of slick internet hacks.  First of all, it’s only available in HTTPS, which means you can’t track or verify any of their traffic.  But it looks like they’re disputing their Wikipedia page, which points out that their only claim to fame is giving the anti-Israel lobby some cover against the charge of anti-Semitism.

Of course, that doesn’t stop other groups from revealing who they are.  The ADL has a whole page devoted to their tactics.  Forward magazine also has a great article about them.

And if they were recognized as such, that would be one thing.  But Democrats like Karen Bass are starting to give them an air of legitimacy.  And that’s what concerns me.  Note:  she originally posted this on her Facebook page, but once I commented with the ADL link, she took it down.  Luckily, the internet loves to archive pages.  And so do I.

Overall, my IT pro analysis is that they’re great at overinflating their numbers and influence, claiming to not only speak for Jews, but questioning whether established groups like AIPAC, ADL, etc. actually represent them.  This is what makes them valuable for the Democratic party, and why the Obama campaign has been really pushing them to the forefront as an alternative to those pesky established Jewish organizations with their pesky demand that Israel remain a safe haven for Jews.

And see, here’s the ultimate difference between a “community organizing” group like JVP and an established community group like ADL.  It’s the daily advocacy and work that groups like ADL, AIPAC, Hillel, Chabad, do on a daily basis for Jews.  Charity work, research work, going out of your way for other Jews, taking complaints about slurs and hate crimes against Jews, taking them seriously, advocating on different governmental levels.  The political programs are only an extension of this daily work.  And that’s why all these Jewish groups are tireless advocates for Israel.  They know how desperately Jews need a safe haven in this world that so quickly aligns against them.

I can tell you without any more than a peek at JVP that they do NONE of this.  That’s what makes them a fraud.  That’s what makes them toxic to this country, and why they need to be outed.

We don’t even need to make this about Jews, either.  I’m sure other races and people have similar issues.  Whereas the organic community has their own organizations and culture, ruling class representatives go in with foundation money, not to advocate for that community, but to push their own agenda on them.  The community is just a stepping stone to a political or intellectual career.

Appropriating #BlackLivesMatter

I’ll be honest.  Cultural appropriation and #BlackLivesMatter are two issues that, taken separately, I couldn’t care less about, or I at least can’t be bothered to debate on.  Both are issues that have nothing to do with me.

But a video crossed my feed that raised my eyebrows, as it was an interesting intersection of the two, and quite honestly, it marks the prime reason I got out of politics.  It was this latest video of a “harsh arrest” at the Ferguson protests (action starts around 0:32):

Now, let’s review.  It starts as an ordinary civil disobedience.  The cops uneventfully usher the kids off the freeway.  But a white kid breaks loose and runs around, provoking the cops.  By not following the cops’ orders, they now have to use force.  He gets body-slammed.

And the video gets passed around the internet as an example of police brutality.

I’m sorry, but exactly what is #BlackLivesMatter about here?  Is it about how you want cops to be nice to you when you provoke them?  Because I’ve seen quite a few videos trying to show police brutality, and they generally start with some kind of obvious provocation.

Because I can tell you, no.  No it is not.

#BlackLivesMatter , at least if it’s an issue that is anything serious, is about how black people face a different standard for cops than other people do.  I mean, if this is what it’s about, good luck.  But I think I’ve seen enough statements from well-spoken people like Kareem Abdul Jabbar that it’s about the racial divide.  Dave Chappelle also explains it really well.

And this is where cultural appropriation takes place.  You’ve got white kids running around acting out their anarchist fantasies and trying to speak for others.  You’ve got media channels picking up on these kinds of provocations like that’s what it’s about.

Well, is it?

 

I’ve written about this issue before in my gut review of 99 Homes.

Like I said, in the end I don’t really care about either of these issues.  So I’m not interested in a debate.  I just want to point out how this #BlackLivesMatter issue is going to be framed.  If it’s to be an issue where some people get treated much more roughly than others based on the color of their skin, great.  That’s an issue people could get behind.

But if this is an issue about wanting the cops to be nice to you when you provoke them?  Most of us, myself (and Chappelle) included, like the cops.  We think they fulfill a necessary function.  And if they get a pass, it’s because we know how rough a job they have dealing with punks like you.  In the end, people will take that video and enjoy watching you get bodyslammed on repeat.

And then it’s not just the pigs who are your enemy, but all mainstream society, blacks included.  So good luck with that, I’ll go get the popcorn.

Making hay in a drought

In response to the ongoing drought in California, our esteemed politicians have closed down beach showers.  This is a classic PR Stunt, as beach showers aren’t even a drop in the bucket of our water usage.  Nay, it effectively INCREASES water use, since everyone will just have to take (much more wasteful) showers at home.

PR stunts abound in our current water crisis, whether from Democrats using cheap stunts to pretend we’re saving water, or visiting Republicans telling us we need to relax environmental regulations and destroy even more of our natural rivers to feed our thirst.

Ironic that such PR stunts are making political hay out of this crisis.  When making literal hay is a big part of it.  I’ve been saying this for years.  Alfalfa – i.e. hay – is one of California’s main crops, and to my knowledge it requires about three YARDS of water a year.

It barely gets any mention in the press, but occasionally it does leak out, like in last week’s TED Radio Hour.

And yet, even the title “Will Our Demand For Food Threaten Our Supply of Water?” is misleading.  Here, let me quote them: “…the biggest consumer of water in California is alfalfa. Alfalfa alone uses more water than all of the humans in California combined, and most of it is shipped overseas.”  So this isn’t about us needing food, it’s about allowing completely wasteful crops to be grown, and not even for domestic consumption.

The more you delve into the statistics, the worse it gets.  Unfortunately I’m not a paid researcher, so you can look this up yourself, but I read it costs about $500 worth of water to grow about $100 worth of hay.  So we’re even SUBSIDIZING this wasteful crop.

And I’m not even gonna bother talking about rice.

When it comes to water usage, only 20% is urban, and about 80% is agricultural.  And when you subdivide urban use further – set up some kind of ladder of necessity – you’ll find we need even less.  Drinking, bathing, washing – these take nothing.  Irrigation of lawns starts taking more water.  Heck, even growing decent crops doesn’t take much water if you do it properly.  Eating meat takes water to grow the hay, but hey, let’s make some hay here and stop subsidizing hay production!

The answers are plenty.  Israel has much more of a water shortage than California, they even thought they could only support 2 million people with their water resources.  They now are a population of 9 million, and you know what?  Their public beach showers are AMAZING.  They don’t even have flow restrictors on their faucets, you know why?  Because it’s BULLSHIT.

It’s been the implicit thrust of this blog for a long time now.  The main issue in America is people are more interested in feel-good solutions than asking hard questions and looking at the big picture.  Maybe that’s the doom of America, that clinging such a philosophy as a symptom of our well-being will send us right out the other end of an apocalypse.

But I’d like to think there’s an alternative.

Review of 99 Homes – or, on Ruling Class Radicalism

On a rare following of the advice of others, I went to see Fury Road.  I hate reviews so much that I usually show up late just so I can miss them.  But one review caught my eye: for 99 Homes.  I’ll save you the description.

Even though it was the preview I’d be most likely to see, it still bothered me.  As I watched the family get kicked out of their home, I wondered: oh, is this a movie about how banks use shady legal tactics to foreclose on people who are actually paying their mortgages?  No … well, is it a movie about how banks ignore the laws and just kick people out without notice?  Is it about how people get mortgages they can’t afford and are stuck in an untenable situation?

No … well, what is wrong here?

And then it dawned on me.  The problem the movie is addressing isn’t any of these.  The problem is people have rules they have to follow.  Rules themselves have become unjust.

Here’s the deal.  And everyone who signs a mortgage understands it – or, they sign about 100 pages claiming they understand it.  When you get a mortgage on your home, it is not YOUR home.  The bank paid most of the money for it, and it is only your home provided you fulfill your end of the deal to pay them back their money according to a certain schedule.

If you don’t, and I fully understand there are plenty of people who don’t – there’s a whole legal framework the bank needs to follow before they can A) foreclose on the home B) evict you for living in what is now their home C) get a sheriff to come in and force you out of the house along with your furnishings.

Every one of those steps involves plenty of notification, and after the crash of 2008 there’s even more notification, and aid for those who face foreclosure.

The very fact that when the sheriff showed up, and none of them had any idea what was happening, well that just blew my mind with BS.  Did they not read their mail for the last year or two?  Did they not notice in their checkbooks that no debit was made to the bank once a month?

But I speak in vain here.  Because, see, this reveals a greater problem with politics in America.  I’ve been involved in the left when I was younger on a deeper level than I would ever care to discuss here.  But I was also well read about it.  And my idea of being on the left was to actually go into working class neighborhoods and listen to their concerns.

But time and again I saw people who came in and said all the fancy words to make themselves look cool.  At first I thought I could have a discussion with people like that, but then I realized they were really speaking from a different perspective – that of the well-off, who only sees the world from their well-off perspective, and has no intention of risking that privilege.

Marjane Satrapi echoed a similar concern in her book Persepolis.  Hanging out with a bunch of anarchists, they told her they were going to some Anarchist event.  Coming from an Iranian background of revolutionary communists and atheists, she thought she was going to some passionate demonstration against the injustices of the time.  Instead, it was a bunch of kids playing in the woods.

And that sums up the politics today – kids playing in the woods and fighting for a world where they have no duties or responsibilities.

The police brutality issue is an interesting one.  Remember Rodney King?  That was police brutality.  What are actual black people talking about?  Actual police brutality.  But what gets shown in the media?  Somebody hassling a cop, giving cops a hard time, and then getting their ass kicked.

This is not a fight for justice, it’s a fight for not having consequences for your actions.  And it’s baiting blacks to be the rebel anarchists well off white people want them to be, to fulfill their rebel fantasies.  Now, I’d like to think I’ve talked to enough black people in my life to know they’re for law and order, just like anybody in shitty neighborhoods do.  You meet a cop, they tell you what to do, do it.  If you want to break a law you feel is unjust, don’t resist arrest.

Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle can chime in a bit.

Go to a poor neighborhood, and see how well behaved people generally are in front of cops.  Yes, they know what happens if they don’t, but it’s also to distinguish themselves from the scum in their neighborhoods who so desperately need a baton shower.   Contrast that with somebody in a college town who gets pulled over, and they turn into Malcolm X.  Of course the cop has to sit there and take it or he gets disciplined.

I could keep on going – bitcoin, vaccines, Occupy, gay marriage, the Middle East …  behind every one of these issues of the day is the shadow of an actual issue.  But look more closely and what you’ll see is well off people wanting to escape the laws of society, even the laws of nature.

It’s the disease of every decadent ruling class since those ancient times when they were looking for the secret to eternal life.  And if you’ve actually read your Marx – it is a class problem, not a rules problem.

 

 

Douglas Murray on offending Islam

So apparently the Garland Shooting at the Pamela Gellar “Draw Mohammed” event raised this “controversy” about whether people approve of offending Islam.  

Since people seem to continue to have a problem with this, let me summon Douglas Murray’s words after that initial Charlie Hebdo attack:

“They offended Islamic blashpemy laws, which European nations do not follow and do not believe in.” 

“Twelve people were gunned down because European citizens asserted their right, and they have every right to do that… to do their job as cartoonists in a free society.

“The most important discussion at the moment is whether or not the press stands up for the right to draw what they like … the key issue cannot be stressed enough, most of us are not Muslims, we do not believe in Muhammad… Muslims should not expect non-Muslims to abide by their belief systems… There’s a growing idea in Europe that people who do NOT follow of Islam will also have to obey the rules of Islamic blasphemy.”

“Let’s get on to the substance of this … what Charlie Hebdo has asserted the right to do is treat Islam the same way they treat every other religion.”