Sleepless in Midland

Quote of the day 6-21-20 -- Clarice Feldman on whose lives matter

From What My Neighborhood Needs: Fewer Virtue Signaling Lawn Signs:

I’m old school enough to think all lives matter. Indeed, I think treating all people equally and entitled to the protection of their person, property, and rights of civil enjoyment is essential to preserve an orderly, prosperous society.

Speaking of old school, some of us still share Martin Luther King's dream that some day people will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

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9:41 AM 6/21/2020

PC crowd takes another scalp after UNT speaker said n-word in speech about hate

This happens all too often, and dammit, this was at my old alma mater. Kids, if you squelch someone's free speech it will eventually happen to you, too.

Here's Dallasnews.com: University of North Texas staff attorney resigns less than 24 hours after sparking controversy by using N-word as example during free-speech event:

At the event, titled “When Hate Comes to Campus,” Sewell said the following during her presentation:

“You know, you can say a lot of offensive things in here because it’s impossible to talk about the First Amendment without saying horrible things. Um, you know, ‘You’re just a dumb n----- and I hate you.’ That alone, that’s protected speech.”

Um, no. It's not protected from the PC mob. The pressure resulted in her resignation the next day.

And it's yet another example of selective outrage. Jason L. Riley made this observation a couple of months ago (Alternate link):

White people are led to believe that a word that has permeated the most popular forms of comedy and music in the country for decades somehow sends black people into conniptions when they hear it in any other context. But the first time I recall hearing the word as a child, it was spoken by other blacks, and my experience is far from unique. Even today, blacks are far more likely than whites to use the term in public. And the selective outrage over its use has grown tiresome.

Tiresome indeed. Yet still dangerous.

P.S. It's worth noting that she resigned on her on volition.  Governor Abbott signed S.B. 18 in June -- effective in September -- which is supposed to protect free speech at institutions of higher education.

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2:28 PM 11/10/2019

We really do look alike to people of other races

Most of us could probably provide an anecdote or two which demonstrate the truth of the old saw that people of other races all look alike. I assumed it was predominately white people who thought all black people looked alike until I heard a black man say that all white people look alike. So if the situation exists, it must be universal.

So here comes a study that proves it, at least as to whites. They used an MRI to measure the high-level visual cortex in the subjects to test the changes when exposed to images of people of different races. Anyway, here's a report about the study at You All Look Alike to Me’ is hard-wired in us:

Their findings affirmed previous studies, determining that participants showed a greater tendency to individuate— recognize differences in—own-race faces, and less for other races.

It was a small study, so if this is a serious area of analysis, then more work is needed. Also, all the test subjects were all white, and the woke scientist declined to extrapolate:

Previous studies have found the “other-race effect” is found in populations other than whites. But Hughes isn’t comfortable extending his findings to assume that black people also “de-individuate” white faces in the high-level visual cortex. The reason: Majority vs. minority perceptions.

Meanwhile, jury members should try to keep this in mind if testimony of an eye witness is crucial evidence.

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10:54 AM 10/16/2019

White robots - racism. But what about refrigerators?

Wide awake and woke folks are scanning the horizon for anything that could plausibly, or implausibly, be called racist.  It's a tribute to their imagination that they hit on white robots. But they've strained so hard they can't see straight.

Robot racism? Yes, says a study showing humans' biases extend to robots.

But why stop there? If an inanimate object can trigger racism, how about all those white appliances in our kitchens? I've got a white refrigerator that just seems to purr racism much of the time. Some might say it's just the motor running, but don't you believe it. It's racism, pure and simple.

Then there's the oven. White, again. And it can cause pain, too, if it isn't treated respectfully. Has to be racism.

Actually, what we have here is an overeager effort to ascribe racism to someone or thing. It's time to give it a rest. Better yet, as Joseph Epstein suggest, it's time to put the word "racist" on the list of banned words.

Related: Woke Polar Bear Apologizes For Being White.

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1:43 PM 8/3/2019

Ghost World -- found art

So I was surfing the web when I clicked on a link to Doane University tries to hide historical blackface photos, punishes librarian who displayed them.

And it immediately sparked a memory of a few scenes from a delightfully depressing movie titled Ghost World in which Steve Buscemi played lonely Seymour who was befriended by a female student named Enid played by Thora Birch.

The scenes were a minor part of the complete story, and it involved an old poster Seymour had retrieved from a fried chicken restaurant that had changed its name with the changing times. The poster was the restaurant's mascot -- a caricature of an African American -- that one might imagine could have been used in the 1950s. See the poster on the wall in this photo.

Enid persuaded Seymour to lend her the poster, and she used it in a student art display, calling it "found art." The reaction was predictable -- see the link above about Doane University for a hint.

As for why the movie was titled "Ghost World," it could be a description of the life those on the outside live -- invisible, like ghosts, to all the cool people.

P.S. The actress sitting on the desk in the photo linked above is Illeana Douglas playing the art teacher.

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3:03 PM 6/11/2019

Progressive Dem candidates now favor slavery reparations

We're learning from news reports that both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris support reparations for black Americans. The knee jerk reaction to that is that they are using Democrats' tactics of identity politics to pander to a voting bloc.

The problem for taxpayers, who comprise only *37% of the US population, is that all the burden falls on them whether they feel the need for absolution or not. Eloquent writers have provided plenty of reasons to oppose reparations. But let's accept for the moment that there would be some societal benefit to a system that provided absolution to the guilt ridden.

The problem for taxpayers, who comprise only *37% of the US population, is that all the burden falls on them whether or not they would like to do it.

Michael Eric Dyson's Individual Reparations Account provides a solution. Make the payments into the account optional. That way those who feel the need can do it, and those who don't don't.

What's not to like about optional reparation payments?

Previously: Individual Reparations Account not such a bad idea if donors can withdraw money if race relations sour

*numbers come from US Debt Clock as of the time of this writing. 122,425,807 ÷ 328,644,256 = 0.3725

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2:41 PM 2/26/2019

Happy Martin Luther King Day

Those of us over a certain age grew up in a different racial environment -- segregated schools is probably the most memorable indicator. But there was also the general belief that the way things were was the way things were supposed to be.

Then along came Martin Luther King to point out that maybe that wasn't the way things were supposed to be. He opened a lot of eyes.

Anyway, this post is a modest tribute to Dr. King on the day we celebrate his accomplishments. Watch his famous speech here and remember his dream for a future in which it's not the color of a person's skin on which they should be judged but the content of their character. Amen.

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10:16 AM 1/20/2019

Elizabeth Warren and Beto O'Rourke should compare DNA tests -- Warren could be more Mexican than Beto

We hear leftists complain about culture appropriation. They're referring to everyday things like food dishes which may have originated in some other country. But it's not a problem when politicians do it to advance their careers or enhance their images.

Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American for advancement to a more prestigious job. Beto O'Rourke did it to increase his take of Hispanic votes in the recent race for U.S. Senate.

Wouldn't it be amusing to see whether O'Rourke or Warren had the higher percentage of DNA to their claimed ancestral heritage? Especially so if they showed Warren to have more South American DNA than O'Rourke. After all, the details of Warren's test revealed that the results were compared with South Americans.

Warren's DNA saga recalls the 1936 movie Show Boat in which one drop of African American blood was sufficient to make a person an African American. By that standard, she's an Indian.

Meanwhile Beto O'Rourke is being groomed for a presidential run. Maybe the two of them will have reason for a racial face off.

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2:06 PM 11/8/2018

Stunner -- fake racist claim right here in West Texas

These days whenever we see or hear a news item in which one individual describes some act of racism it's probably a prudent approach to give it at least a 50% chance of being fake.

But it's probably hard for a reporter to put that principle in effect when he is staring at a super salacious story about racism.

That's what happened in our neighbor city of Odessa, TX, the other day. You've probably heard the story. First, a waiter claimed that a customer wrote a racist note on a receipt. Here's the Odessa American's first report complete with a glowing portrayal of the claimant: Racist receipt at restaurant condemned.

It took the restaurant owner's own investigators to do the fact checking -- the note was faked. But let's give credit to the Odessa American for reporting that important narrative breaker a week later in Saltgrass COO, waiter say racism story made up. Oops.

Does anyone wonder why so many people don't trust the media?

P.S. Newspeak addition: "Terrorist" is now a racial epithet.

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5:37 AM 7/25/2018

Reparations Happy Hour in Portland attempts to tap into white guilt

This is a fascinating concept. We're talking about this: Portland Group Hosts Reparations Happy Hour. Whites were invited to pony up money to pay for it, but they weren't invited to attend.

If it will satisfy those wanting reparations, then go for it. Unfortunately, anyone expecting that their donation would do anything but give the recipient an alcohol buzz will be disappointed.

Here's a win-win alternative: Starbucks may be the most woke corporation doing business with the public these days. So simply buying coffee there should accomplish the same thing, i.e., alleviate guilt.

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12:47 PM 5/27/2018

Happy Martin Luther King Day

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helped make our great nation even greater. His eloquent speeches touched a lot of people and changed a lot of attitudes about race. Here's something I said in this blog on a previous MLK Day:

Contrary to the song from "South Pacific," you don't have to be carefully taught that people who looked different were in fact different. It was simply a way of life. It was how things were. You had to be taught to change that attitude. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., opened a lot of hearts and minds.

Many of us who grew up prior to the civil rights movement were enlightened by King's famous speech. Don't judge a person by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Yes, indeed.

It's still true.

Unfortunately, race has become a political issue for Democrats who are in a constant search for even the slightest hint that can be turned into a accusation of racism. Donald Trump's alleged description of "shit-hole countries" is a good example. A charge of racism these days is less likely a discovery of real racism than it is a tactic to harm political opponents.

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12:49 PM 1/14/2018

Predictive policing -- police efforts to predict crime work but with limits

"Predictions are tricky, especially if they are about the future." The source of that quote is unknown, but its truth is obvious.

There's a pretty good definition of Predictive Policing at this article from last year: Is Predictive Policing the Law-Enforcement Tactic of the Future?. To wit:

Known as predictive policing, the practice involves analyzing data on the time, location and nature of past crimes, along with things such as geography and the weather, to gain insight into where and when future crime is most likely to occur and try to deter it before it happens.

When police departments try to predict crime they are successful, up to a point. The mapping of crime hot spots has been around for quite a while. And police departments have used it successfully to highlight areas where more patrols might be useful.

It has been well known for years that a small number of people commit most of the crimes. Those individuals become well known to police. (The issues of race and privacy permeate the atmosphere inhabited by police and citizens, but that's a topic for another day.) The issue of what to do to actually reduce crime is an ongoing problem.

Furthermore, new influences are emerging. Shibani Mahtani updates us on a recent development in Social Media Emerges as New Frontier in Fight Against Violent Crime. (It's behind a paywall but available here for free.) There we learn that police are grappling with the influence of social media on prospective murderers. It's not a good influence. Here's an excerpt:

Facebook and other platforms have emerged as new frontiers in the fight against violent crime that continues to grip major cities.

In Chicago, which is on track to have more than 600 murders for the second year in a row, a number it had been below for over a decade prior, community leaders and police say the immediacy of these platforms has played a major role in escalating disputes, while also providing more evidence that can aid arrests and convictions.

“It pours an accelerant on what was already there,” said Eric Sussman, the first assistant state’s attorney for Chicago’s Cook County.

The Chicago Police Department and prosecutors don’t keep data on how many instances of violence were provoked by an exchange on social media, but they say anecdotally that they are seeing a rise in the number of “petty conflicts that have leapt from social media platforms to violent crimes on the street.” A Wall Street Journal tally found at least 100 cases nationally where an act of violence was streamed on just one of these platforms, Facebook Live, since it was launched in early 2016.

“Unfortunately, in too many instances, these conflicts are resolved with a gun,” said a Chicago police spokesman.

Unfortunately, like so many law enforcement innovations, use of Facebook posts is more helpful in clearing crimes than actually preventing them. There are some who might suggest custom notification with warnings to people who pop up on the list of potential criminals. But if there is a disproportionate number of minorities in that group then it becomes problematic.

In any event, that quote at the top of this post still stands. Predictions are tricky, especially if they are about the future.

If the protesting football players knew what they were talking about it might make a difference

The rationale for the professional players who refuse to stand for the national anthem is claimed to be that they are protesting police killing of blacks. If so, their reasoning is based on a flawed set of facts.

Walter E. Williams has a piece titled Blacks vs. Police cites research which says that in 2017 roughly 22% of people killed by police were blacks. (For those reliant on quotas, that's too high. But the numbers alone don't really prove anything about police attitudes toward blacks.)

Dr. Williams takes it further, or rather narrower, by focusing on Chicago where there have been 533 murders and 2,880 shootings so far in 2017 of which fewer than 13% have been solved. He suggest that crimes of black vs. black might be a better focus of concern.

I would suggest a focus on the educational system that appears to fail black significantly. Professional sports shouldn't be the only avenue for success for black people.

Anyway, regarding the kneeling as a form of protest at football, those guys are entertainers who don't entertain me. So they can do what they want.

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4:10 PM 10/13/2017

Talk about gifted children on C-Span and get called a racist

So I was channel surfing Saturday morning and caught the end of C-Span's Washington Journal in which the guest, Pratik Chougule, talked about his article in TheAmericanConservative.com titled How America Turned Against Smart Kids. It was an interesting interview and an interesting article. For a sampling of the topic, a highlight from the article summarizes research on gifted children. As follows:

Still, the literature to date supports a number of generalizations on intellectually talented children. As measured by IQ and other measures of general intelligence, America’s gifted children:

- Inherit at least some of their cognitive edge. The vast majority of experts now acknowledge that intelligence is partly hereditary. There is no consensus, however, on the precise extent to which intelligence is inherited or how much intellectual ability can be manipulated at different ages.
- May lose IQ points through various environmental inputs. The following have been linked to reductions in IQ among children: corporal punishment, disease, formula feeding, scheduled rather than on-demand breastfeeding, and secondhand smoke.
- Have IQs that can be cultivated and channeled through environmental nourishment. The two most important factors, according to psychologist Joan Freeman, are material provision and parental involvement.
- Are overrepresented in certain ethnic and racial groups. Indian-Americans, Jews (particularly Ashkenazi Jews), and northeast Asians are consistently overrepresented in U.S. samples of gifted children.
- Are predominantly male in mathematical reasoning ability. At the high end of the distribution, boys, by age 13, outnumber girls by a margin of 13 to 1.
- Exhibit outlier behavior in such areas as their high capacity to feel empathy and their tendency toward sexual conservatism.
- Have limited ability to engage with peers due to their unique combination of emotional immaturity and superior intelligence. Hollingworth, for example, found that ordinary leadership patterns hardly develop when gifted children are in the presence of peers with IQs of more than 30 points below theirs.
- Have unique emotional vulnerabilities, including alienation, intensive sensitivity and perfectionism.
- Are significantly more likely to achieve professional success later in life. In a longitudinal study, children who were identified with 160+ IQs at age twelve were more likely by age forty to earn doctorates, academic tenure, patents, and high-level leadership positions at major organizations.
- Do not necessarily face an “ability threshold” beyond a certain point of intelligence. Judging by their achievements in middle age, the extent to which children in the top .01 percent of intellectual ability outperform their peers in the top 1 percent (the typical cut-off in talent searches) suggests that the two groups are on a “different developmental trajectory.” Longitudinal studies show that the top .01 percent are more likely to be vice presidents of major corporations, lawyers at prestigious firms, financiers, tenured faculty at research-intensive universities, and STEM leaders.

His penultimate paragraph tells how parents of gifted children have adapted to the challenge of getting them an IQ-appropriate education:

Parents of gifted children are able today, with unprecedented ease, to pack up and pursue new opportunities. With remote offices and online businesses, they can move across state lines for less restrictive homeschooling regulations. Rather than bothering with the Sisyphean task of “education reform” one PTA meeting at a time, parents now have the liberty to opt for individualized regiments with private tutors and coaches. This is among the reasons why top American students, notwithstanding the United States’ middling standing overall, have started to prevail in international math competitions after two decades of Chinese, Russian, and South Korean dominance. The accelerated-math community is abandoning public schools and turning to private enrichment camps, creating, as a recent report in The Atlantic described it, “a new pedagogical ecosystem—almost entirely extracurricular—that has developed online and in the country’s rich coastal cities and tech meccas.”

Anyway, read How America Turned Against Smart Kids to get the full picture.

Finally, in the C-Span appearance he touched on the distribution among ethnic groups of gifted children. Not three minutes later a caller to the show accused him of racism. What a shame that a research finding of differences among races is called racism these days. But that's life in a country in which a major political party thrives on identity politics.

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1:49 PM 5/20/2017

Thomas Sowell addresses the challenge of assimilation when their leaders are holding them back

He's talking about black people in this Wall Street Journal interview, linked below. But the same principle applies to any one of the identified ethnic groups. What holds them back is their leaders telling them that it's other people holding them back and that they need to stand up and resist their culture.

Here's the relevant part:

Has there been any change for the better? “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” he says. “In fact, for blacks who have education and who have not succumbed to a new lifestyle—the grievances, and the coarseness represented by rap music—it’s gotten tremendously better. What’s disheartening, though, is that when you study ethnic groups around the world, the ones that are lagging behind are those where their leaders always tell the same story: that it’s other people holding you back, and that therefore you need to stand against those other people and resist their culture. But that culture may be the key to success.”

Here Mr. Sowell pivots to 18th-century Scotland and the philosopher David Hume: “Hume urged Scots to learn the English language,” he says. “He didn’t do that because his job was that of an ethnic leader. He did it because he was an intellectual.” Yet it helped bring progress to his homeland. “One of the most miraculous advances of a people occurred in Scotland from the 18th century into the 19th,” Mr. Sowell says. “A wholly disproportionate share of the leading British thinkers was Scottish. I mean Adam Smith in economics, Hume in philosophy, Sir Walter Scott in literature, James Watt in engineering. You can run through the whole list. A people who were really far behind in one century had suddenly come out of nowhere and were on the forefront of human progress.”

Could black Americans one day be like the Scots? “They can be,” says Mr. Sowell, “and for those who haven’t gotten into this corrosive new culture, they’re already doing that. But it’s going to be very hard. Both the media and academia promote the idea that people fall behind because others are holding them back.”

Here's the link to the WSJ.com (paywalled) site, and here's a link to a free reproduction.

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3:22 PM 4/25/2017

The cop-as-pigs painting would be more suitable in the Obama library than in Congress

Oh how I wish I had thought of this, but no. It's Michelle Malkin's idea, or at least she's the one getting credit for it.

Now that the hideous on again, off again, cop-as-pig painting has been removed from the walls of the Congressional tunnel, hopefully for the last time, Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), who is so proud of it, has an easy out. He'll probably want to hang it in his office as a reminder of the fire on which he wants to pour gasoline.

But he needs to give it up. Donate it to the Obama library. President Obama probably got more mileage out of racial friction than any other living politician, with John Lewis running a close second. Visitors to his library need a reminder of that.

And this whole episode is a good reminder of why we celebrate that great peace maker Martin Luther King, Jr. Happy MLK day, everyone!

Individual Reparations Account not such a bad idea if donors can withdraw money if race relations sour

Michael Eric Dyson is the latest person to try to sell the unpopular idea of race reparations, but he puts a creative spin on it. See Michael Eric Dyson Calls for Whites to Have an I.R.A. – ‘Individual Reparations Account’.

He's not actually talking about a managed account into which deposits are made and from which money is withdrawn for causes benefiting black individuals. But that wouldn't be a bad idea. There would always be conflicts about who should get the money, but anything that would improve inner city schools would seem to be a worthy cause.

This managed type IRAs would be voluntary, so that those people with sufficient black guilt could contribute as much as they wanted. Maybe they could receive recyclable grocery bags, bumper stickers, or some other token so that their fellow citizens could be made aware that they've assuaged their guilt with generosity.

But to be fair, there should be strings attached. For example, if a white owned store is trashed during a Black Lives Matter riot then the store owners would be made whole from that fund.

After all the natural tendency to want to help one another has its limits. If they feel they are being used, then forget it.

So Obama compares himself with MLK

The Daily Caller tells us this: Humble Brag — Obama Says He’s Basically Been The MLK For Hondurans. He says that apparently because he believes open borders in the U.S. are best for the little children of the world and their families.

But the comparison with Martin Luther King, Jr., is apt only so far as both won a Nobel Peace Prize, although the only thing Obama did to win it was to get elected to the Presidency. He had a lot of help, but he did win the job twice.

However, MLK is best known for his efforts to end racism against blacks. And those of us who lived through that era must conclude that he was quite successful in helping end racial strife. Few can forget those famous words:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Right on.

Unfortunately, President Obama blew the opportunity to appreciate King's remarks by creating more racial strife than we've seen in years. Instead of comparing himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., a better comparison might be to Al Sharpton.

Democrats rethink emphasis on identity politics -- women, minorities hit hardest

Democrats have been fighting the melting pot theory and working against immigrant assimilation for years. And it finally bit them back when a boisterous white guy came along who inspired a lot of people to proclaim they want to make America great again.

Now there's no shortage of people ready to change that particular aspect of the Democrat party. Even Bernie Sanders is in on the game: Sanders: Dems must move beyond 'identity politics'.

I dunno. They've used it to agitate their base for so long their voters may have a difficult time letting go. It's the only place where the phrase "diversity is our strength" has any validity. Now if only they could find a place for the whites.

If only Robert Byrd were still alive, he'd clear the air on Jeff Sessions

Robert Byrd was lionized by Democrats. What a shame he is no longer with us, not for anything good he might have done, but to show up Democrats' hypocrisy.

For you see, his resume included the title of Exalted Cyclops for the Ku Klux Klan. But Democrats loved him anyway.

Now we are hearing that Jeff Session made a racist joke about the KKK a few decades ago. Byrd would have laughed at it. What a shame he isn't still alive to highlight Democrat hypocrisy over the subject.

But when it comes to partisan politics, hypocrisy and short memories are what we've come to expect from Democrats.

It used to be called suicide by cop, now it's inner city machismo

Question: Is doing homework and studying for school still "acting white" is some communities? Or is that an urban legend? We've heard it for years, and with no denials coming forth, one has to suspect it's true, at least in some communities. Maybe it's inner city machismo.

That legend is all grown up now, along with the kids who perpetuated it while in school. Incidents occur in which someone doesn't drop his weapons when asked to do so by armed police. See, for example, Police Say Video Shows Keith Lamont Scott Had Gun in Hand in Charlotte.

It appears as if dropping one's gun when a police officer yells "Drop your gun" may be the new "acting white."

Machismo requires that the person on the receiving end of that command never back down from a police officer. Be a man or die trying. It used to be called "suicide by cop." Then it became martyrdom. Que the riots.

What a shame, especially so since politicians are using these incidents to solidify voting blocs.

Rioters pick their spots -- Charlotte yes, Tulsa no

It's hard to miss the disparity between the responses to the police shooting in Tulsa and the police shooting in Charlotte. Charlotte is enveloped in riots, looting, and at least one killing amongst the rioters, all in the name of social justice. Tulsa erupted in peace and quite.

My own shallow assumption was that Tulsa was too far away. The people who were renting the mobs didn't want to foot the transportation bill.

Patricia McCarthy says there's more to it than that. See Charlotte riots, Tulsa doesn’t. Excerpt:

For inexplicable reasons, leftists believe that the violence wrought by angry minorities will benefit them, so they encourage it.  They subsidize it.  Obama has given his not-so-tacit permission to riot every time one of these tragic events occurs, from the Henry Louis Gates minor incident to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the Dallas officers.  And now BLM is rolling in money, $100M from "social justice" organizations. Soros gave them $33M.

What we see in Charlotte is what they pay for.  They are not wasting their money in Tulsa because Oklahoma is in the bag for Trump.

Makes sense. Hillary Clinton is probably worrying herself sick over the lack of enthusiasm for her in Obama's most loyal voting bloc, African Americans. Democrats' plan appears to involve pouring gasoline on the fires of racial strife to motivate that bloc to vote for Hillary.

It's a sick and cynical plan, but will it work? We can only hope it doesn't.

Meanwhile, as I've said previously, like Dr. Frankenstein, they were smart enough to create a monster. But they are not smart enough to control it.

Has Blazing Saddles been banned from TCM?

Die hard Gene Wilder fans probably like all his movies. But for casual fans like me, "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles" top the list with everything else far behind. "Young Frankenstein" was shown on TCM the other day. But where the heck is "Blazing Saddles?"

It's not set for TCM broadcast on their Gene Wilder tribute day which could lead one to believe they're afraid it might be politically incorrect.

Race relations was the joke around which the story was spun as the redneck world got turned upside down by a black sheriff. But when the movie was released the most controversial thing about it was the fart joke. We can't blame TCM, though, since race relations have gotten so bad in the last half dozen years. What a shame.

At least TCM has the movie available for purchase.

P.S. I found a copy at the local library. If you are looking, try to get the 30th anniversary edition with Mel Brooks' commentary.

Colin Kaepernick sits it out for ambiguous reason -- if he were serious he would focus on education

NFL players who pranced on the field displaying the hand-up-don't-shoot symbol probably didn't win any converts to the Black Lives Matter as the whole thing was based on misinformation anyway. But there they were, and agree or not, Americans supported their right to express themselves.

Along comes Colin Kaepernick sitting out the national anthem with a thumb-in-the-eye type exercise of free speech.  His act apparently was intended to convey an ambiguous message along the race lines. But what exactly does he want us to do?

Reparations would be on the table as would 40 acres and a Cadillac. (Did the word "mule" pop into your head? Racist.)

If he or anyone else is serious about helping inner city kids, they need to try to help the kids get a decent education. But there's a pretty big road block which he and they probably don't want to address. It's manned by the teachers' unions and the NAACP.

Silvio Canto, Jr., has an opinion about that. See The NAACP is about teachers' unions, not black children:

Why would the nation's oldest civil rights group deny African-American children a real opportunity to succeed?

My guess is that most of these NAACP leaders send their kids to private schools anyway.  In other words, what do they care?

Ah, but here's the real reason:

More importantly, the Democratic Party is owned by the public-sector unions.  It's good for the party on election day, but it does not do minority parents any good when they try to educate their kids.

Depressing. Kaepernick, are you paying attention?

Outside agitators -- with big money influencing social unrest, will Donald Trump be heard?

Back in the 60s there was that mantra that "outside agitators" were stoking the fires of inner city racial strife. They were probably right. And it's certainly happening these days when we hear such discouraging news that George Soros' foundation is helping fuel the forces of riot. But he's not alone. See Black Lives Matter cashes in with $100 million from liberal foundations.

Limousine liberals ease their racial guilt by donating to causes of disruption, but they themselves are far removed from the violence they've funded.

Along comes Donald Trump trying to be heard above the mayhem. If this is the beginning of an effort by him to confront real problems instead of petty grievances, then here's hoping he can rise above his old self and pull that off. And with luck, he may be able to influence some of the people who need some outside influence.

Texas voter photo ID law itself is not so bad, but it is hard to get the ID

Democrats like to use the South as the whipping boy about race -- perhaps it's a way of cleansing the part about the Democratic party being the party of the slave owners. In any event, the Texas law requiring photo IDs to vote now serves as the whip. And we end up with 5th Circuit decisions like the one in Veasey v. Abbott which has put the law on hold based on the possibility of racial discrimination. If there is any justice in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court should overrule that holding, but as Richard A. Epstein says about that, the odds are 4-4.

That said, photo IDs are somewhat hard to get in Texas. I was tasked with helping an elderly woman secure a photo ID so she could get a copy of her car title. And the documentation requirement is severe. A relative of hers was able to find a certified copy of her birth certificate, and without that we may not have been able to get the photo ID.

But here's the catch. She's a white woman. So the law really doesn't discriminate unless you apply the erroneous assumption that minorities have a harder time securing copies of their birth certificates than non-minorities. But I suppose that if you include illegal immigrants in the description of minorities, then yeah, there might be some difficulty.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, politicians created a monster with BLM that they can't control

Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" certainly became an apt metaphor. Is that what she intended, or was that merely a byproduct?

In the story, Dr. Frankenstein was smart enough to create a monster, but he wasn't smart enough to control it. Destruction resulted.

The Black Lives Matter movement is the modern day Frankenstein, reaping havoc in its path with hardly a week passing without police officers being murdered. George Soros is supposed to have been an early funding source and is probably still feeding the monster.

Then there's President Barack Obama. Those supporters of his who thought he would bring some racial unity sure got it wrong. He has been egging BLM on for quite some time. And only recently has he actually appeared to be serious about reining them in. Does he really mean it? This is an election year after all, and if he wants to help Hillary he will want to mobilize black voters. The BLM movement probably looked like a pretty good vehicle for that. So it's hard to imagine that he wants to do anything other than get the killings off the headlines.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, he's trying to control the monster. And like Dr. Frankenstein, he's helpless against the momentum he helped create.

Worst president ever.

NAACP chief erases any doubt -- Black Lives Matter movement is election year partisan politics

We've suspected this, and many have assumed it from early on. That would be the theory that the whole Black Lives Matter movement is about black lives only tangentially. It's really about getting Democrats elected.

Barack Obama has never missed an opportunity to politicize something to Democrats' advantage. And that becomes painfully obvious when he eggs on the protesters by comparing them to abolitionists.

Now we have the NAAACP head announcing it to TV news viewers. See NAACP chief: 'Ensure every demonstrator is a vote':

"To bring about the kind of change that we need, we need to ensure that every demonstrator is a vote and that we to show up en masse and in the millions at the polls in November," NAACP president Cornell William Brooks said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday morning.

Should we suppose those voters would be pushing the button for the candidate who promises to make America great? HA HA! Sorry, I had to do that.

Maybe the MSM shouldn't be let off the hook for its part in the racial mayhem

Colin Flaherty is no stranger to the issue. He has been writing about race issues for years.

His latest is Media Ignore the Tsunami of Black Violence against Cops in which he catalogs examples of how the media present the violence between police and black men as racism by police against black men. Unfortunately for anyone wanting a balanced look, they ignore violence perpetrated by black people against police.

Here's one anecdote:

In Syracuse on Father’s Day in the ghetto, 500 black people were blowing some weed and shooting some guns when a female cop showed up.

The videos show the crowds fleeing the gunfire as the officer runs towards it. When her backup arrived, they found the cop on the ground, surrounded by a large group of black people beating and kicking her and trying to steal her gun.

One black man was running around, pleading for a gun to shoot the police.

The next night, the cops returned and received similar scorn, hostility and violence.

The local papers pretended they had never heard of anything like that before, when, truth is: That is a regular part of life in Syracuse.

Maybe the media ignore it, not because it goes against what they are convinced is the narrative, but because to do otherwise would not portray them in the politically virtuous light they seek.

It's no help when the President of the United States encourages a false narrative. One wonders what, if anything, the next president will do.

See excerpt from Heather Mac Donald's book at Freebeacon.com

Disclosure: I haven't read the book. However, it certainly has received some good praise, and it's about as timely as humanly possible.

The name of the book is "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe." There's an excerpt at Freebeacon.com which addresses Obama's embrace of the false media narrative of the Ferguson, Missouri, encounter Michael Brown had with the police. Here's a brief excerpt from the chapter excerpted there:

This kind of misinformation about the criminal-justice system and the police can only increase hatred of the police. That hatred, in turn, will heighten the chances of more Michael Browns attacking officers and getting shot themselves. Police officers in the tensest areas may back off of assertive policing. Such de-policing will leave thousands of law-abiding minority residents who fervently support the police ever more vulnerable to thugs.

Obama couldn’t have stopped November’s violence in Ferguson with his address to the nation. But in casting his lot with those who speciously impugn our criminal-justice system, he increased the likelihood of more such violence in the future.

President Obama didn't pull the trigger on those police officers in Dallas. But his racial divisiveness certainly didn't do anything to quell the violence. It's as if he wants a certain segment of the population fired up and ready so he can use that force for political will.

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter paused to take a breath after the "lone gunman" killed the police officers in Dallas. Then they carried on as usual. War on cops, indeed.