“…First, the violence we saw at the border was entirely predictable. This caravan, unlike previous caravans, had already entered #Mexico violently and attacked border police in two other countries.I refuse to believe that anyone honestly maintains that attacking law enforcement with rocks and projectiles is acceptable. It is shocking that I have to explain this, but officers can be seriously or fatally injured in such attacks.Self-defense isn’t debatable for most law-abiding Americans.“
Neither is denying those who would engage or support such violence entry into the United States.
That we should even have a debate (if one can term tagging anyone who objects to asylum-for-the-asking “racist” as a “debate”!) over the utter insanity of open borders demonstrates how the mental disorder which is contemporary Progressivism has infected the body politic. But it got us thinking about how many other areas of our national culture are suffering from its debilitative effects.
First up, as Jim Freeman details at Best of the Web, after decades of buying votes with taxpayer dollars, Progressives have saddled our progeny with debts which will prove well nigh impossible to pay:
“Adjusted for inflation, state and local government revenues have more than doubled since the 1970s. But state and local politicians haven’t collected nearly enough taxesto pay for the retirement promises they’ve made to their friends in government employees unions…
…The story doesn’t necessarily look better when one examines some of the specific beneficiaries of government pension systems. Steve Cortes writes in RealClearPolitics:
I grew up in Park Forest, Ill., a working-class suburb of Chicago. In my youth, Park Forest was pleasantly middle-class — a solid community of well-kept lawns, strong churches, and active sports. Unfortunately for my hometown, times have been tough over the years, reflected by a jobless rate about twice the national one and a poverty rate 43 percent higher than the state of Illinois average. As a consequence, Park Forest has lost almost a third of its peak population of 30,000 since the 1970s.
But like many such struggling communities, one class of people has found a way to prosper: public employees.Recently, Fox affiliate Channel 32 and Open the Books detailed the exorbitant pay package for part-time interim school Superintendent Joyce Carmine. She retired in 2017 making $398,000 annually, the highest-paid superintendent in Illinois, in a community where the median household income is $44,000. She will receive, courtesy of taxpayers, a pension of just under $300,000 for the rest of her life. Adding insult to injury, the school district hired this retiree back as a consultant at the rate of $1,200 per day for a total of 100 days, bringing her pay this year to $419,000 total for part-time work. Given the modest $75,000 median home price in Park Forest, her salary equates to 5.5 home purchases…per year.
If you can believe it, the story gets worse.According to Mr. Cortes, most students in the school system don’t meet state academic standards and by the time “those students matriculate to the local Rich East public high school, only 16 percent meet expectations and a truly shocking 0 percent exceed them.”…”
Worse, indeed…as this video so vividly brings home:
And as a related item from FOX News forwarded by George Lawlor confirms, the practice of rewarding abjectly unsatisfactory performance with plush pensions isn’t restricted to public education:
“Brenda Snipes, the elections supervisor for Broward County, Fla., who resigned after coming under scrutiny for the way her office handled vote counting during the Nov. 6 election, will receive nearly $130,000 in annual pensions once she leaves office in January, according to reports.
Snipes, 75, already receives a pension of more than $58,000 from her time as an educator and is poised to collect another $71,000 for 15 years as an elected official, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
“Although I have enjoyed this work tremendously over these many election cycles, both large and small, I am ready to pass the torch…Therefore, I request that you accept my letter of resignation effective January 4, 2019.”…”
In other words…
Scott should fire her a*s effective immediately! Where else but government can you perform substandard work for 15 years and walk away with a $71,000/year pension!?!
Reports Snipes plans to audition for the part of Magua in a remake of Last of the Mohicans…
…remain unconfirmed.
Next, as demonstrated by the following three items, Progressivism has polluted our society and its mores with the poisons of political correctness, self-absorption and the tyranny of the one.
“An epileptic 5-year-old girl pre-boarding a plane at California’s John Wayne airport was mocked by a Southwest Airlines agent, her mother claimed on Wednesday.
Abcde Redford – pronounced ab-city, according to her mother, Traci – had her name made fun of by the agent, who then proceeded to post a photo of the child’s boarding pass on social media, ABC 7 reported.
“The gate agent started laughing, pointing at me and my daughter, talking to other employees. So I turned around and said, ‘Hey if I can hear you, my daughter can hear you, so I’d appreciate if you’d just stop,'” Redford told ABC 7.“While I was sitting there, she took a picture of my boarding pass and chose to post it on social media, mocking my daughter,” Redford continued…”
“Abcde”: what, were “Shithead” (pronounced “ShaTHEAD”) and “Daniece” (as opposed to “Danephew”) already taken?!?
We’re quite certain if anyone was being mocked by the Southwest gate agent…which we frankly doubt…it was Traci Redford, for giving her poor daughter such an idiotic name in the first place. The employee allegedly posting the ticket on social media is an issue with which Southwest will have to deal.
As for the news report, it asserts facts not in evidence (taking Ms. Redford’s account at face value), and introduces another (Abcde’s epilepsy) which has no bearing whatsoever on the story, but was only introduced to engender sympathy for the epileptic little girl against the big, bad airline.
Sorry, but Ms. Redford should be thankful for what was in actuality a wake-up call, a foretaste of what Abcde will encounter for the rest of her life as a result of her mother’s nonsensical taste in names. And it’s yet another example of individuals seeking to force others to adjust to their personal foibles, whether they be unthinking mothers assigning their children unpronounceable names or the mentally ill demanding others address them by their pronoun du jour.
Even more, it’s the right to be outraged, to stand against injustice (real or, as is far more often the case, imagined) and gain your 15 minutes of fame courtesy of a 24/7 MSM and social media platforms only too happy to create stories out of perceived slights, oftentimes regardless of either truth or accuracy.
Next, Exhibit “B”, as FOX News, in a forward from Bill Meisen, introduces us to Mr. Keith Kawamoto, a charter member of the Professionally-Offended Club:
“A complaint (yes, just a complaint…as in just one!) about an ethnic slur offensive to Japanese-Americans has prompted Kansas to recall hundreds of license plates containing the random letter combination “JAP.”
The issue arose in October 2017 when Keith Kawamoto, 70, saw a Kansas license plate near his Los Angeles home and took a photo of it. Kawamoto then wrote several letters to Kansas officials, including Gov. Jeff Colyer. “I let them know it is considered a very derogatory racial slur and I don’t think it should be allowed anywhere,” Kawamoto said.
Kansas’ motor vehicles division apologized, but Kawamoto wanted Kansas to get all plates containing the three-letter combination recalled. The Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, first published Kawamoto’s photoof the Kansas plate.
When Barbara Johnson, a 67-year-old Japanese-American woman living in Abilene, Kansas, saw the story in the Pacific Citizen, she said it brought back memories of her childhood. “It was not a good time to be Japanese because of Pearl Harbor and World War II,” Johnson said. “I recall vividly as a child being called ‘Jap’ — and how it made me feel so small and hurt by being called that.”…”
Two thoughts come to mind: Keith Kawamoto has far too much time on his hands, and Barbara Johnson’s memory is short a few gigs.
Ms. Johnson is 67, which means she was likely born in 1951, roughly 6 YEARS AFTER the end of WWII, and some 10 YEARS AFTER after the Japs/Nips/Slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned, rice-eating bastages attacked Pearl Harbor.
The Korean War was in full tilt, and Japan was now, at least nominally, a U.S. ally, and a crucial staging area for the struggle raging just across the Sea of Japan. Roosevelt and his internment camps were both history, and the vast majority of the ill-feelings directed against Japanese and German civilians had been channeled by a shared opposition to the forces of World Communism.
We’re 63, only 4 years younger than Ms. Johnson; and growing up we had a number of friends of both German and Japanese ancestry. Yet we cannot recall even once either viewing them or having seen them viewed with racial/ethnic animus. This isn’t to say it didn’t happen; but we find it highly unlikely one of only four subscribers to the Pacific Citizen in the entire state of Kansas experienced what she claims to remembers…particularly in Kansas!
And if Kansas is going to spend the time and money to remove license plates with “JAP”, what about those bearing the random letters “NIP”; or for that matter, plates featuring “NIG”, “MIK”, “KIK”, “WOP” or “FAG”?!? Seriously, where does it end? And all because one or two people out of some 330,000,000 allow mere words to hurt them?
Then there’s those who find racism under every rock, behind every tree…and in every word, as detailed by NRO‘s Kat Timpf, who relates how…
“On a recent episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, sci-fi author Andrew Duncan argued that the depiction of the orcs in Lord of the Rings is racist and will have “dire consequences…for society.”
“It’s hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some peoples are just worse than others,” Duncan said. “And this seems to me — in the long term, if you embrace this too much — it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.”
First of all, I think that it is important to point out that orcs are A) not people and B) not real, so starting some sort of social-justice movement over their treatment is probably the biggest, most idiotic waste of time that I’ve ever seen — and this is coming from an adult woman who spends time playing a game called “Pet Shop” on her phone.
Second of all, the idea that The Lord of the Rings’ daring to have an army of villains is going to have “dire consequences…for society” is absolutely bananas.I’m not much of a betting gal, but I’d bet everything I own that not even a single person has ever seen or read The Lord of the Rings and become racist as a result. Nobody is honestly sitting there thinking, “Man, all those orcs were bad. I guess that must mean that X race is bad! I’m a racist now!” I honestly refuse to believe that this would describe even a single person, let alone so many people that our whole society is going to suffer because of it.
In fact, the only “dire consequences” that I can see coming from this whole debacle would be the consequences that any thinking like Duncan’s might have on the arts of fiction and fantasy. Think about it: If we’re going to say that the treatment of the orcs in Lord of the Rings perpetuates racism, then we’re also going to have to have a Wizard of Oz without flying monkeys. We’re also going to have to have a Beauty and the Beast without the wolves, a Lion King without the hyenas, and a Jungle Book without the vultures. The whole concept of a fantasy story with evil fantasy villains is actually put in jeopardy by this kind of stupidity…”
Perhaps henceforth works of fiction should carry disclaimers similar to those at the end of film credits: The names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents contained herein are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner, but in any event are in no way, shape or form…even subliminally…racist!
Oh,…and any resemblance to actual events or actual persons, living or dead…
…is purely coincidental.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we highlight the breakdown of civility…not to mention manners…with an especially odorous story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:
“…According to a Broward Sheriff’s Office complaint affidavit, Shanetta Yvette Wilson, 37, was in the checkout line at the Dollar General store on 120 S. Federal Hwy in Dania Beach on Sunday evening. John Walker, the customer standing next to her, got into a verbal dispute “in reference to the defendant farting loudly,” according to the affidavit.
Wilson allegedly pulled a small “lock back knife” from her purse, “opened the knife and told the victim she was going to ‘gut’ him,” the police report said. While doing so, she pulled back her right hand with the knife as if she was going to attack the victim with it, the report read. Walker was “in fear that he was going to be stabbed by the defendant,” the affidavit read…”
Reports police relieved Wilson of her knife, then offered her a change of underwear remain unconfirmed…as do several eyewitness accounts a number of bystanders required treatment for nausea and oxygen deprivation.
You get the picture. Progressivism is a plague; and for almost 120 years it’s sown ignorance, ingratitude, intolerance, indignation and envy, while producing a country in which five Black 15-year-olds found it socially acceptable to sodomize four younger, weaker White boys with a broomstick, an act so heinous and demented we’d hardly have thought it possible…until our research led us to conclude…
Here’s the juice: nits make lice, and thugs breed thugs. A a society which condones women being termed “hos” or “b*tches”, celebrates the killing of police, stifles free speech and takes pride in idleness, immorality and irresponsibility, all as a direct result of Progressive policies, can’t be expected to produce Nobel laureates or the winners of Fields Medals. Rather it will honor the likes of Colin Kaepernick, Michael Brown and Mike Tyson…
…while producing the likes of 18-year-olds who, having been bumped by a blind man on the D.C. Metro…
…beat him to ensure he knows who’s boss.
Unimaginable? Hardly,…and need we ask what the other passengers were doing?!?
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