A couple of questions about Jackie

For those who have been in a media blackout for the last few weeks, Rolling Stone magazine (one of the guiding lights of my adolescence), screwed up and published an unreliable account of a gruesome frat-house rape at the University Of Virginia. 

A young lady named "Jackie" was supposedly gang-raped by seven guys.  For three hours.  During a party.  On a floor covered with shattered glass.  And she refused medical treatment.  And the guy she claims to have gone with might not exist.  And etc., etc., etc.... 

Rolling Stone printed every word of it.  The University prez shut down the entire Greek/Frat system.  No judge, no jury. 

A few media groups are now picking apart the story, but they're concerned about not doing violence to the "larger truth" - that there is a culture of rape in America. 

Horse hockey. 

Considering that Jackie's behavior didn't take place in a vacuum, here are two types of questions that real journalists would be asking:

1)  What classes has "Jackie" been taking?  Victimology 101?  Intro to Grievance Studies?  The Western Canon As A Metaphor For Rape?  Advanced Privilege-Checking?

Has "Jackie" been exposed to classroom instruction that taught her that unless she is oppressed, then she is part of the problem? 

I would love to know.  Considering that a frat house has been vandalized, picketed, shut down and otherwise defamed, and that some guys could've gone to prison, I think we all have a right to know the crap that the University Of Virginia has possibly been pumping into that young lady's head. 

2)  The culture of rape schtick has apparently gone from bug to feature, and I'm wondering what all-female universities do with their evenings (without white straight males to fear, protest against, and warn each other about). 

Does anyone else think that Jackie might have been to one to many of the Rape Culture Seminars?  Did she go to any Take Back The Night marches? 

Did some variety of Victim Envy cause her to do this?  There are no effects without causes, and this fable had some causes. 

***********

It's looking more and more like Jackie made up the entire story.  I'm just curious about why she did it, and I wish that more journalists were. 

 

If Barack Obama Were To Enter My Department Store

It looks like it's going to be "All Trayvon, All The Time" through the November 2014 elections.  We're going to be overlooking the tragedy, and the easily preventable causes, of thousands of black kids murdered by other black kids every year (see previous post) and concentrate on the one black kid who was murdered by a Hispanic guy who was also partly black and part white.  I think. 

I'm so sick and freakin' tired of political hacks dividing us into Hutu's and Tutsi's.  But if you had Obama's track record to defend, you'd talk Trayvon too. 

Therefore, it's time to start ridiculing every statement that the President Of The United States makes on the subject of race.  He gave a shameful speech the other day, in which he identified with the black kid who had the Hispanic guy on the ground, pounding his head into the curb.  There was no indication that this shooting was a "hate crime", but that's the direction that Obama, going off-teleprompter, chose to take it. 

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

Oh, sweet mantle of victimhood !! 

Barack, if you think people were following you around before you were president, wait until you see what happens afterwards.....

The actor James Woods recently tweeted that they only reason they've ever followed you was to make sure you wouldn't raise their taxes. 

I can top that.....  If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, I'd have him followed to make sure he wasn't going to break my windows.  The "broken windows" parable of Frederic Bastiat really does appear to be his dominant economic misunderstanding. 

If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, I'd have him followed to make sure he didn't take what wasn't his.  I've never known a human who was so enthusiastic about taking money from Person A to give to Person B, but not before raking some off the top to give to his Washington flunkies in Group C. 

If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, yeah, I'd have him followed.  "You Didn't Build That" isn't that much of a leap from "You Don't Deserve That", followed closely by "I Know Some People Who Could Use That And They All Voted For Me".

If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, well, I gotta be honest.....  I'd ask him for a subsidy.  I'd point out my Green Energy Perpetual Motion Machines that are invisible to the naked eye, I'd show him the documentation that the entire store is heated and cooled by Compressed Green Fairy Flatulence, and I'd agree to change the name of my website to "The Greened Sepulchre".  And, like so many of his other green energy subsidy benefactors, I might get a buncha money that I could walk away with before letting the thing go bankrupt. 

If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, I'd ask him to simply buy it.  Then I'd watch him destroy it, the way we shamefully destroyed all those cars during the "Cash For Clunkers" debacle. 

If Barack Obama were to enter my department store, I wouldn't insist on a cash payment.  Hell, there's no telling how much more of the stuff was printed while his limo waited in the parking lot.  I wouldn't want a check.  All of his post-dated checks are going to be bouncing soon.  I would want his credit card.  Please dear God, I know that I'm a sinner, but let me get my hands on that damn fool's credit card.  Whatever he bought, I'd add $51,000.00 to the total charge.  That's the additional amount that he's put on mine. 

The Life Of Julia - Libertarian Remix

The Obama campaign has rolled out an unintentionally hilarious slideshow called "The Life Of Julia".  It shows the life of a woman through her government benefits.  If you have even the slightest interest in Victimology, you've gotta check it out.  I don't care who you are, or which hoss you support in this race.  This thing is funny.  The parody potential is massive.  For starters, just look at the first slide.  It touts the benefits of HeadStart?!??!!!   Really?  Even if the Department of Health And Human Services says HeadStart probably doesn't make a difference? 

Want to know what else is super creepy about this accursed thing? 

Tribalism. 

Not only can Julia not exist without help from Dear Leader, The Teleprompter Jesus, but she might also have some difficulties if she doesn't align herself with a tribe.  (In case you're new to my blog, I see religious, ethnic, and national tribalism as the #1 curse on humanity.)  Check out this drop-down menu from the Obama campaign at the beginning of the slideshow:

I honestly can't believe that the Democrats had the cajones to put LGBT Americans on their site.  Barack Obama is the highest ranking gay marriage opponent in the United States.  But enough about the obvious....Julia needs the government for almost everything, and she needs to be aligned with a special-interest group, right?  Right. 

Parodies of this thing are all over the place.  Iowahawk's is greatness. Go there. 
 
Reason magazine is a much bigger outfit with a much bigger budget for these amusements, so I'm going to borrow most of their pics.  Go here to see the pics in context.   And please go here every day.  It's great stuff.

Here goes, from Reason:

Then, just 6 months later, disaster strikes Julia's family:

Julia turns 18, and is ready to take on the world !!!  (Be sure to check out Iowahawk's parody.  At this point, Iowahawk has Julia going to get a degree in Feminist Website Design.) 

Just seven years later, Julia graduates.  And like most recent graduates, she's a victim of Barackaganda. 

Julia's son goes to school.  There is no mention of Julia's sperm donor on the Obama website, BTW.  Who needs a Daddy when you've got a Big Brother? 

Thanks to the new, Weimer Germany-levels of government debt and inflation, Julia is able to start a business !!

Julia is now resigned to working the rest of her life, providing stimulus funds for Washington to send to supporters and campaign contributors.  A life well-spent and well-lived, Julia.  You have the thanks of a grateful nation.  The government was bribing you with your own money the whole time, but you didn't bitch about it.  Great job !!

Go here, to Reason Magazine, to see the actual stats backing up the jokes (also known as Obama and Romney policy statements.) 

One other thing - Here's a good breakdown of the Obama/Julia Victimization Slideshow from Hot Air. 

3 years old – Julia gets a new-and-improved Head Start, which a new HHS study shows won’t do anything for her anyway.

17 years old – Race to the Top improves Julia’s SAT scores. Is there any evidence at all to support that argument? Even so, she’s down the list from all of the home-schooled children and the charter- and private-school students who actually got an education rather than an NEA indoctrination. However, thanks to the NEA indoctrination, Julia is now better prepared for a life on the government dole.

18 years old – Julia’s family qualifies for a $10,000 tuition tax credit spread out over four years, while Obama’s student-loan subsidies drive tuition costs up even faster.

22 years old – Julia undergoes surgery, which has to be funded by her parents’ employers despite Julia being an adult, and which will be most likely delayed as providers decline in number thanks to the economics of ObamaCare.

23 years old — Thanks to the Lily Ledbetter Act, trial attorneys get rich by filing lawsuits against employers that otherwise wouldn’t have been brought, leaving fewer resources to hire Julia. No college job for our intrepid Julia!

25 years old – Julia finally gets her 4-year degree in seven years, thanks to the inability to handle the tuition bubble and the lack of work. However, the good news is that the $200,000 in student loans will only hang over her head for 20 years, while taxpayers like Julia end up paying for the costs of default.

27 years old – Julia wants to have sex for the first time in her life, apparently, and is looking for contraception. Her employer would provide it for free thanks to the ObamaCare HHS mandate … if she could only find a job.

31 years old – Julia gets pregnant, which tells you all you need to know about free contraception. Oddly, Julia hasn’t gotten married first, probably because the economy is so poor by this time with the huge entitlement debt crisis breaking that no one can conceive of putting a home together. Fortunately, ObamaCare makes pregnancy possible, because until Obama took office, no one ever got pregnant, since government support and approval for it didn’t exist.

37 years old – Julia’s son Zachary, named after his sperm donor, starts school. Head Start has long since disappeared, apparently, but Race to the Top still exists. Must be a marathon.

42 years old – Julia starts a business with an SBA loan, which also apparently never existed before Obama took office. Her student loans are just three years away from defaulting onto the backs to taxpayers, so that’s good news.

65 years old – My, how time flies! (Do women do nothing of value between 42 and 65?) Julia enrolls in Medicare, which ceased to exist decades earlier, thanks to the fact that Obama and Tim Geithner didn’t have a plan to address the debt crisis — all they knew was they didn’t like anyone else’s plan. You can get the cards at Spencer’s as a gag gift.

67 years old – Julia retires, since the entitlement collapse wiped out her business and the rest of the American economy. The timeline stops here, which suggests that the IPAB probably denied her care, as she was nothing but a drain on society by this time, and the few resources they have left had to be used to pay for face lifts for members of Congress.

There you have it — a timeline filled with government interventions in a fantasy lifetime, with absolutely no sense of the cost it would take to provide Government Nanny to Julia and the rest of the country. At least they picked the right name for their fantasy woman trapped in an all-encompassing government; Julia was the name of the lead female character in George Orwell’s 1984, after all.

Lord have mercy, I'm glad to be alive for all this.  Interesting times, interesting times. 

Marvel Variants is going to hell

Marvel Variants is going to hell. 

For those of you new to this site, Marvel Variants used to be my boss.  That was back before he promoted himself into the stratosphere and put additional layers of management in place between us so that he could spend more time defrauding comic book geeks. 

Here's why Mr. Variants is going to suffer the tortures of the damned:   I usually run our morning production meeting, and go around the meeting room asking the Plant Managers and salespeople if they have anything for the larger group. 

When I asked Mr. Variants if he had anything new to justify his existence in the company, or on the planet, he pulled out a copy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  The front page had a story of a guy who got a face transplant. 

BOSTON -- A Fort Worth man who received the nation's first full face transplant said Monday that the first thing his young daughter told him when she saw him after the operation was "Daddy, you're so handsome."
Dallas Wiens, sporting a goatee and dark sunglasses, joined surgeons Monday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in his first public appearance since the 15-hour procedure in March.

"It feels natural," said Wiens, 25, who received a new nose, lips, skin, muscle and nerves from an anonymous donor. The operation was paid for by the U.S. military, which hopes to use findings from the procedure to help soldiers with severe facial wounds.
Wiens was blinded and his features all but burned away when he hit a power line while painting a church in November 2008.

No one in the meeting knew where Marvel Variants was going with this story, or why he was reading it out loud in the morning meeting.   

Then he held up the picture and said "Out of all the faces that he could have gotten, why did they have to pick Allen Patterson's???"  And he held up this picture. 

Much hilarity ensued. 

For those who don't know me, I spend much of the winter looking a lot like Dallas Wiens, the burn victim in the picture above, but without that cheerful happy-go-lucky expression that Mr. Wiens has on his face.  See below. 

And since I work with a room full of comedians, the responses to "Why did they pick Allen Patterson's face?" were swift and brutal. 

"Well, his only insurance was through an HMO...."

"There were 5,000 radiation victims from the Japanese nuclear plant accident who all needed new faces, and they all got to pick first."

"The guy asked his doctor when he would start to see improvement, and the doctor told him 'Oh, that thing will rot off in a few months.  THEN we'll give you a real face.' " 

They said things about me that were much, much worse than anything I've ever said about Pelosi, Boehner, Republicans, Harry Reid, or even The Teleprompter Jesus.  I took it like a man. 

But Marvel Variants is going to hell.  A hell fueled by variant-priced copies of Daredevil #132, Scooby Doo #1, and Iron Fist #14.   Oh, and the extremely rare Star Wars #1, graded at a 9.6. 

Guess who is to blame for the coming hyperinflation ??

Unbelievable. 
We're about to have some hyperinflation.  Printing money is the only way that Uncle Sam can pay his debts. 

It's not the fault of the Republicrats or the Demoblicans, who have spent money like they'll all be dead before the bills are due. 
It's not because of the Federal Reserve, which is now printing money faster than the stimulus projects can spend it. 
It's not the fault of the Nanny State. 
It's not because of open-ended wars. 
No, Time magazine, which I'm hoping will soon go the way of Newsweek, has found the culprit ! 

Go here.

The Paycheck Fairness Act, or REASON NUMBER 5,729 TO DO ALL MANUFACTURING IN CHINA

Think of all the people who do the same job as you.  Not almost the same, not practically the same, but the same.  Same job, same place, same amount of experience, same cost of living, same circumstances, and same track record with the same manager/owner. 

Ok, got the list?  Raise your hand if the number you came up with was zero.  Ah, almost all of you.  So it should come as no surprise that all of you are paid different amounts, even if the work you do is almost, but not quite, the same. 

Ok, now think of the wildly different amounts that you may have paid babysitters.  Or if your lawnmower has needed repair more than once, think of the dissimilar amounts that you have paid others to mow your yard.  Remember the different prices that you've paid for hamburgers?  Dishwashing liquid?  Hell, think of the different amounts you have paid for identical, absolutely identical, gallons of gasoline. 

It's unfair, isn't it? 

The Obama administration wants to end this gross unfairness with something called The Paycheck Fairness Act, also known as REASON NUMBER 5,729 TO DO ALL MANUFACTURING IN CHINA. 

The Paycheck Fairness Act is described as follows:

A much needed updated of the 45-year-old Equal Pay Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a comprehensive bill that would create stronger incentives for employers to follow the law, empower women to negotiate for equal pay, and strengthen federal outreach, education and enforcement efforts. Championed by longtime AAUW friend Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the bill would also deter wage discrimination by strengthening penalties for equal pay violations and by prohibiting retaliation against workers who ask about employers' wage practices or disclose their own wages. Together with the Ledbetter bill, this critical piece of legislation can help create a climate where pay discrimination is not tolerated, and give the new administration the enforcement tools it needs to make real progress on pay equity.

In other words, if you've been busting your rear end on the job, don't bother asking for a raise.  Because if they give you a raise, they have to give a raise to everyone whose job description is similiar to yours, and it just ain't going to be worth the hassle. 
The burden of proof will be on the employer to show that any increase in compensation is NOT due to sex discrimination. 
If there's a lawsuit against your employer, the potential for punitive damages will be more or less unlimited. 
If there's a lawsuit against your employer, you, as an employee, will automatically be part of any class action lawsuits unless you opt out. 

This thing is a feast for lawyers, a feast for federal employees, and a feast for anyone wanting to play the Victim Card.  In other words, this bill was written to appeal to Obama's support base. 

Anyone who hires anyone within our borders needs his head examined. 

And people wonder why the unemployment rate hasn't improved.  Barack Obama and Congress would have to study hard for ten years to rise to the level of "Economic Idiots". 

End of rant.

Jesus and The Rich Young Ruler and Mandatory Compassion Outsourcing

Many of you are probably familiar with the story of The Rich Young Ruler: A guy comes up to Jesus and asks "What do I have to do to be saved?" Jesus says "Take what you have, sell it, and give the money to the poor". The guy sadly walks away, because he has lots of money that he doesn't want to part with.

That entire story is a mistranslation from the original Greek. I've spent the last 6 months working on this. I don't know how these textual errors have lasted for 2000 years, but I've set it all straight.
This is from Matthew 19:16-22.

16 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

17 "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."

18 "Which ones?" the man inquired. Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony....

19 ....honor your father and mother, and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'

20 "All these I have kept," the young man said. "What do I still lack?"

21 Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, lobby for Hope and Change. Set up large programs administered by your government, in which other people are forced to give up their money to fulfill your agenda. Keep a lot of this money for yourself. Dole it out to your favorites. Give nothing of your own, for you know best how to use it, and nothing feels better than spending other people's money. Ensure that the multitudes retain their dependent victim status, and that they will be with you always. For such is the Kingdom Of God."
22 When the young man heard this, he went away rejoicing, for none of this would cost him a dime.

I'm sure that all of you are relieved to learn this. This new interpretation relieves you of all personal responsibility, and puts the burden on others.
I've found other passages that have been mis-interpreted, and I'll be getting to them later.

The painting of Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler came from here.

The Weekly Radley - This will be discussed for decades

From Radley Balko's Agitator blog:

So if you’re going to be a pedestrian who mistakenly calls the cops because you see a black man trying to pry open the jammed door to his own home, and if you’re going to be the responding cop who then questions said black man for possibly burglarizing his own home, then arrests said black man for subsequently taking offense and getting uppity with you, both of you should probably make sure said black man is not Henry Louis Gates, the famed Harvard professor of African-American Studies.

Uh-oh. I bet Gates is a mite irritated. Here's The Washington Post:

....in a country where one in nine young black men are in prison, where racial profiling is still practiced, the arrest of a renowned scholar on a charge of disorderly conduct in front of his house last Thursday has fueled an ongoing debate about race in America in the age of its first black president.

....The white officer who arrived found Gates in the house (the driver was gone) and asked him to step outside. Gates refused, and the officer followed him in. Gates showed him his ID, which included his address, then demanded that the officer identify himself. The officer did not comply, Gates said. He then followed the officer outside, saying repeatedly, "Is this how you treat a black man in America?"

The charge against him (Gates) was dropped Tuesday, but Gates said he plans to use the attention and turn his intellectual heft and stature to the issue of racial profiling. He now wants to create a documentary on the criminal justice system, informed by the experience of being arrested not as a famous academic but as an unrecognized black man.

The harsher side of the experience was "deeply painful and traumatic," Gates said. "I'm outraged that this could happen to me in my own home, but I'm outraged that it could happen to any individual."

He said his documentary will ask: "How are people treated when they are arrested? How does the criminal justice system work? How many black and brown men and poor white men are the victims of police officers who are carrying racist thoughts?"

According to Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition., Reverend Al Sharpton has already chimed in. Here's The Washington Post:
Rev. Al Sharpton: "I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black."



Meyers continues:

Give me a break. Why isn't it enough that the charges of disorderly conduct have been dropped against Gates? The question answers itself: The race activists need to posture that the nation has to pause and contemplate and endure yet another round of guilt around their "truth" and constant observation of racism by cops. "See," they exclaim, "in postracial America, the black man with a Ph.D. can't get into his own home without causing suspicion and getting arrested."

The real truth is that Gates did not get arrested for being black or even for being suspicious or for breaking into his own home. He was arrested for disorderly conduct - for failing to do what civil rights activists and race experts always advise innocent black men, and all others who come into contact with the police, to do: cooperate.



It makes sense to repeat this message now, especially for the benefit of young black men. If the police confront you, don't go demanding badge numbers and reading the cops the riot act. Be courteous and calm. Explain yourself and, if asked, present ID.
If there has been a constitutional violation of some kind by the cops, that can be taken care of once the police have left you alone, moving on - let's hope - to investigate other suspicious behavior.

So which way should Professor Gates have responded?

A Rant - Republicans, yes Republicans, are concerned that Obama might be a Socialist.

Out of all the totally ridiculous things in the 2008 elections.... the number one absurdity, in spite of serious competition from Reverend Wright, moose hunting, how many houses McCain owns, flag lapel pins, and Hillary crying in New Hampshire....the number one absurdity is Republicans claiming to be concerned that Obama is a Socialist.

How in the name of All Things Holy, after the last two months, can anyone claim to be concerned that Obama could POSSIBLY rise to the same level of Socialist giveaways as the Republican party and their peerlesss feeder, George W. Bush?

If we had merely given our nation's collective Amex, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover cards to a gaggle of Shanghai harbor whores, could the damage have been any worse? Could anyone have intentionally added 20% to the national debt?

And now they're talking about another stimulus check. You want to know what's funny about that? You really want to know?

Here's what I got in the mail yesterday:

To: The Whited Sepulchre
Fort Worth, TX

Dear Taxpayer,

You are entitled to an economic stimulus payment of $1,200.00 as provided by the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. You can expect your payment by 10/24/08. If you do not receive it within six weeks of this notice, blah blah blah blah.....

I haven't gotten the first economic stimulus check yet, and the damn fools are already talking about billing my grandchildren for another one ! ! ! Isn't the whole idea behind Keynesian economics something about government being the only entity that can swiftly and efficiently control the levers of the nation's economic engine to prevent catastrophe????? Hell's Bells, when my first check was approved, we were in another universe. Everything, relatively speaking, was just peachy.

I'm re-reading "The Most Southern Place On Earth - The Mississippi Delta And The Roots of Regional Identity" by James C. Cobb of The University of Tennessee.

It's a great book about the area in Mississippi where I grew up. Cobb outlines all the abuses of the sharecropping system, especially the requirement that the (largely illiterate) sharecroppers purchase all of their supplies from "The Company Store" - i.e., the plantation owner.

Here's a brief excerpt about what went on after the plantation owners spent a long hard weekend partying:

Frank Smith recalled being told by a plantation bookkeeper of the time when the planter who employed him had ordered him to charge all the tenant families on his place with another barrel of flour, rationalizing this cheating with the explanation that he had lost heavily at poker the night before and could not bear the thought of his wife and children having "to pay for last night".

Does that remind you of anything in the Year Of Our Lord 2008? Anything at all? Let's see what that paragraph would read like 30 years from now:

(A future historian) recalled being told by a government accountant of the time when Paulson and Bernanke told him to charge every American with $2,500.00, rationalizing this theft with the explanation that their friends at Goldman Sachs had lost heavily in the housing market, and could not bear the thought of their wives and children having to pay for....well, just about anything.

Some people might be offended by the parallels I'm drawing between the 2008 American electorate and 1920's sharecroppers.

Well, if you're not yet offended enough to start voting for 2nd parties.....

Lord have mercy, we're a nation of sheep.