POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Was the Nobel house divided?

An AFP report filed this morning informs that a majority of the Nobel jury objected to the peace prize being awarded to Obama, the two labor party representatives, one being the chairman, strongly supporting the choice.  Two of the three objecting members are quoted as saying the support the committee's final decision.  I guess they were worried that professional race-hustlers Jesse J. and Al Sharpton would figure out some way to make money off of their obviously Raaaaacist! objections to Obama's candidacy...

That, and they probably feared the mercurial attentions and insightful reportage of Barrett Brown, the other contributors at HuffPo, and Kos should this clearly racist behavior have been successful in denying Obama the Nobel prize.

Rocketman

My Brother, James – Titan

I am writing while the wound is fresh - and this is with purpose. I am not much of a mourner. Truth be told, I am not really built that way.

James Scott Shore was very much among my closest - in fact, aside from my wife, he was the closest person in my life. I loved him very, very much. And I will miss him dearly. There is no doubt. But nothing I feel can even begin to come close to what his loving wife and 3 loving kids are going through.

Alyssa, his wife, is a remarkable woman. I have known her now for many years now. But in recent days, I have seen many facets of her Person that have deepened my admiration for her exponentially. I am not surprised, mind you. I was immediately impressed with her from the moment James told me of her... this love of his... and even more so when I first met her in New Mexico 15 or 16 years back.

Specifically, Alyssa's ability to be of comfort to others while she and the kids are themselves at the top of the list to be comforted is incredible. Her grace and determination are likewise impressive beyond what I have witnessed in many, many years. Her ability to make rational decisions while all of our lives are in danger of being overwhelmed by emotion is also something to be lauded. Her affection to their 3 children - the way she embraces them - while one must imagine she herself feels like folding in upon her self - speaks volumes as well.

In all of these things she is selfless. Selfless.

Not only has my admiration and love grown for her over these past, most horrible days, but also for my dear friend James. Here is why: it is said that the character of a man can be measured by the friends he keeps. I say he is best measured by the enemies he has. But truth be told, a man can only be truly measured by the woman to whom he is cleaved. And so, I must adjust the regard which I hold my dearly departed brother, James Scott Shore. I must adjust it skyward...  to the outer-reaches where up and down mean nothing at all.

To Regina Alyssa - the allegiance of Clan O'Coilean I commit to the end of the age.

Shore Children Education Fund
Please make checks payable to:  Shore Children Education Fund and send to:

Shore Children Education Fund
c/o Schmidt & Bartelt Funeral Home
10121 W. North Ave.
Wauwatosa, WI 53266

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

Website - More Posts

Barrett Brown and Robert Stacy McCain

Barrett's latest piece is over at the Huffington Post. In it, he alleges that Stacy "is nonetheless almost certainly a white supremacist, as has recently been alleged by the Charleston Gazette . . . ." Among the bits of evidence for this same charge, he produces the following:

Incidentally, McCain has been accused of racism from so many directions largely because the totality of the facts clearly indicate that McCain is not only a racist but also not very good at concealing his racism. As I recently noted, he expresses concern over reports of teenage pregnancies among minorities while elsewhere laughing off reports of teen pregnancies in general. He's a member of the League of the South, which advocates for the legal secession of the southern states and otherwise celebrates the virtues of the Confederacy. This doesn't necessarily mean that he's sympathetic to racism. He could be really revved up about southern succession for reasons of something else. Other reasons. An eccentric taste for agriculture, perhaps. Incidentally, the president of that organization recently referred to this nation's sitting and former presidents as "domestic terrorists" and to our federal government as an "organized criminal enterprise."

The linked piece is a response to a post by Stacy in which he stated that the media spin regarding a study showing that religiosity could be correlated with teen pregnancy was irresponsible. Even the article in question noted that they couldn't establish a causal relation based on the study. Nevertheless, other possible interpretations of the data were given short to no shrift at all. And principal among these would be demographic factors. It's undeniable, given the data, that teen pregnancy rates are much higher among black and Latina teens than among white teens. Stacy doesn't in his piece express any racial repugnance, but he does suggest that other factors, including perhaps higher poverty rates among blacks and Latinos, might be considered to be more of a relevant "root cause" than religiosity per se.

Interestingly, Barrett seems to believe that the sheer quantity of allegations of racism against Stacy are presumptive evidence in this case. Those allegations have been disseminated by Charles Johnson, whose latest fake but accurate defense for not retracting his libels regarding Limbaugh, even though they're traceable to sources other than Limbaugh himself suggests that Charles has a rather casual association with truth these days. And in fact the Huffington Post itself hosted a piece repeating those same libels. And like Charles Johnson and CNN, they won't even retract what they said once it's been demonstrated to be a fraud.

Barrett ends his post this way:

Even then, the problem with McCain and those who have joined him in stripping the conservative movement bare of dignity is not one of racism, but of incompetence. A political movement can survive the deserved enmity of a few ethnic groups; it cannot survive more than a couple guys running around threatening newspapermen to duels or whatever the fuck is going on these days.

Which is pretty ironic, when we've seen race-hustling shakedown artists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton spouting lies on the news for the past couple of days.

I think the problem here is that Barrett's established his beat as "The Great Pundit Hunt." Presumably, this means that he imagines he's going to traipse across the internet fighting evildoers, almost all of whom happen to be conservative. It strikes me as a form of naive partisanship, but YMMV. If Stacy belongs to a separatist organization, that strikes me as a poor choice on his part, but at least he's not in the running for Supreme Court Justice, eh, Barrett? I mean, the racialist organization La Raza may not be in itself separatist, but that doesn't really matter when they support organizations that are, if we are going the guilt by association route.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Obama Owes Honduras an Abject Apology

Via Fausta:

Un estudio del Departamento de Asuntos Políticos de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU) sobre la causas que provocaron la crisis en Honduras, concluyó que la destitución del ex presidente Manuel Zelaya, "fue constitucional y de acuerdo las leyes del país", confirmaron fuentes oficiales de ese organismo.

"A study by the UN's Department of Political Affairs regarding the causes that provoked the Honduran crisis concluded that the ouster of ex-President Manuel Zelaya "was constitutional and in accordance with the country's laws," according to sources within the department.

And f*ck you, too, John Kerry.

UPDATE: What Fausta and I knew about the "coup" back on June 28th, that the White House should also have known.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Stolen Compassion and Authority

In a piece about the travesty of Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, Michelle Malkin quotes Obama quoting an elementary school principal:

Twenty miles from the glittering center of Chicago, at the farthest edge of the South Side, dozens of two-story brick buildings stretch for block after weary block. It was here where America provided public housing for African-American veterans of World War II and it was here, in the 1980s, that Barack Obama became a community organizer. Working with a band of outspoken mothers, Obama first auditioned his oratory and gained public notice. The despair evidenced by the many dilapidated buildings, and the seeming mockery of the project’s flowery name, Altgeld Gardens, prompted Obama to recount years later how an elementary school principal believed the children here no longer laughed like children. “Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside,” Obama quoted the principal as saying.

[emphasis mine]

In point of fact, the source for this observation is here, in the opening pages of James Baldwin's great short story, "Sonny's Blues":

When the last bell rang, the last class ended, I let out my breath. It seemed I'd been holding it for all that time. My clothes were wet--I may have looked as though I'd been sitting in a steam bath, all dressed up, all afternoon. I sat alone in the classroom a long time. I listened to the boys outside, downstairs, shouting and cursing and laughing. Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the joyous laughter which--God knows why--one associates with children. It was mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And myself.

And later:

A terrible, closed look came over his face, as though he were keeping the number on the bill a secret from him and me. "Thanks," he said, and now he was dying to see me go. "Don't worry about Sonny. Maybe I'll write him or something."

And:

His face closed as though I'd struck him. "No. I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down home crap."

There is no source that Barack Obama won't pilfer and arrogate to himself to usurp the authority that Baldwin writes about. And keep in mind that Baldwin was targeted by other black writers and critics for being inauthentically black by virtue of the purity of his prose, even though, in this story for example, he could make it an analogue of jazz improvisation.

Baldwin earned his blues mastery, just as Sonny, in the story, earned his. Neither used a teleprompter.

It's also about the discipline of listening, which Barack has never learned.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Hate Crime, Thought Crime

Naturally, Obama signed this piece of crap into law:

The law allows a do-over if the Justice Department decides “the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.” The idea, as then-Attorney General Janet Reno explained when the law was first proposed, is to “give people the opportunity to have a forum in which justice can be done if it is not done in the state court.”

Although such serial prosecutions are permitted under the doctrine of “dual sovereignty,” they look an awful lot like double jeopardy, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nevertheless claims the federal hate crime law upholds “the ideals of our founding fathers,” who evidently were big on punishing people for their beliefs, retrying defendants after they’re acquitted, and letting Congress make a federal case out of anything that attracts its attention.

Fortunately, we know that misogynistic douchebags like Olby aren't motivated by hatred. That's just people like Limbaugh.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

So Wrong On So Many Levels

I can't think of anything right about this business.

A guy wants his girlfriend back. He goes into her place and waits for her. She refuses to take him back. He thwacks her around, then when she runs to call for help, he impales her pet fish in the floor with a knife.

That's sad enough as it is, but as you read this piece, please consider every detail, including that his probation is for stabbing the fish (and the photo, of course).

And guys, let this be a lesson. After she's broken up with you, no stabbing her fish. Got it?

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts