Here is a nice story of Nice Time! David Brooks, who believe it or not pens some of the less offensive twaddle for the New York Times, writes books about “character” and “morals,” and taught a … Harvard? Yale? (Yale) … class about humbleness, has married! He is clearly very much in love with his bride, Anne Snyder, a good God-fearing Christian woman who is apparently leading him to Christ by way of her magic vagina.
After (or while?) Brooks and his previous wife — who not only converted to Judaism for him but also “converted” her name from Jane to Sarah — split quietly in 2015, he penned an outsized mash note to his young research assistant, Snyder, with his penis.
In addition, he would like to thank his wife Sarah, who also exists. Just kidding! She got a brief mention in the last paragraph of the acknowledgements for The Road To Character (really), in which he thanked her for taking care of their kids.
Orthodox Jewish…blogger Luke Ford… has compiled all sorts of background, including snippets from a whole bunch of Christians who are VERY EXCITED for their young compatriot, Snyder, and how she is super duper leading this one Jew to Jesus (with her vagina). We’ll steal just one or two and then send you over to Ford’s place for the rest.
Posted inDavid Brooks|Comments Off on Wonkette: ‘Is David Brooks Being Compelled To Christ By New Wife’s Vagina? We Are Just Asking Questions’
When I became interested in converting to Judaism, around 1990, I had weekly conversations with a friend who like me grew up as a Seventh-Day Adventist in Australia. This man worked as a pastor for many years before quitting and become an insurance agent to better provide for his family.
Like me, this bloke didn’t have much experience with Jews, but he did have this distinct memory: “When most people shop for a home, they bring their spouse, but when Jews buy property, they bring their accountant, their lawyer, their friends.” My friend found this distasteful.
I was not bothered by this accusation, but I didn’t understand its significance. Now I see that Jews have a group strategy for life while WASPs tend towards an individualist strategy. Most of the time in the struggle for scarce resources, a group strategy will out-compete an individualist strategy. WASPs come from northern Europe where life’s competition was historically much more against the environment and much less against other competing groups. Jews come from a history of group competition more than environmental competition. Almost all the prayers in the siddur (Jewish prayer book) are in the collective.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on Group Vs Individualist Strategy
Should not people and civilizations have the same fear of invasion from those different from themselves? Does not the category of “invasive species” apply to people as well?
For example, why would non-Muslims welcome an influx of Muslims or why would non-black civilizations welcome an influx of blacks? Why would a Muslim country such as Saudi Arabia welcome an influx of non-Muslims? Why would Japan welcome an influx of non-Japanese? Why would Israel want an influx of non-Jews? Such influxes would create social tension and destroy social trust.
When you let in a non-native species, you might not know the devastation the invader will wreck upon your civilization.
It used to be that Los Angeles was filled with beautiful white people. Now they’re a distinct minority. I grew up in white Australia and when I walk down the street these days in brown Los Angeles, and at times and in particular moods I feel uncomfortable because most of the people are so different from me, so brown, and they’re speaking different languages and they don’t have the same allegiances and customs that I have, and I remember that this city, this nation, this West, used to be white and now it is getting browner and stranger by the day, and this makes me, at times, annoyed.
I am a convert to Orthodox Judaism. The more immersed I become in Orthodox Judaism, the more strange the world looks outside of it. The more identify with my group, the more I have fears and concerns about outsiders. That’s the way group identity works. The stronger your group identity, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about outsiders.
A small ant from East Asia is keeping Israeli environmental groups awake at night. The ant, whose official name is the yellow crazy ant, has in recent years caused heavy damage to ecological systems and has wreaked havoc with crops in various part of the world, with local experts fearing it could reach Israel.
In a new report, written by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel in conjunction with the Nature and Parks Authority, the SPNI warns that the ant is one of eight invasive species of flora and fauna that could reach the area, and suggests preparing as soon as possible to prevent their entry.
The report, entitled “The Path to National Ecological Security,” will be presented this month to the Knesset Interior and Environment Committee, which will have a special session on coping with invasive species. These are species that succeed in stowing away in cargo or luggage on planes and ships and reaching new areas where they have no natural enemies. They thus reproduce rapidly, often causing environmental damage and sometimes even threatening public health.
The species mentioned are liable to spread rapidly in Israel, whose climate is hospitable to their reproduction and trade ties with those countries where these species are found. The yellow crazy ant lives in large groups and attacks birds and reptiles with an acidic excretion. It also harms plant tissue and can destroy crops like bananas.
Another threat comes from the palm borer, a large moth from South America that attacks palm trees and could pose a threat to Israel’s successful date industry. The larvae of the moth bore into the heart of the palm tree’s trunk and into its leaves. Also feared is the New Guinea Flatworm, which carries a parasite that could cause meningitis and thus poses a public health threat. It also attacks mollusks.
Another threat is the New Zealand mud snail, which pushes out local species.
Invasive plants also pose a serious environmental threat. The list of eight threatening species includes the Alligator Weed, which comes from South America. It crosses borders in the ballast of ships, and can survive both in water and on land. It spreads quickly and blocks access to light and oxygen in pools of water, which can seriously harm the quality of water and the flora and fauna in lakes, winter pools and streams.
The new report recommends developing tools to better control the infiltration of invasive species. “Israel’s borders are open to the infiltration of species that threaten nature, infrastructures and public health,” explained Alon Rothschild, the SPNI’s biodiversity coordinator. “This phenomenon, if not dealt with properly and in time, will cause ecological destruction and significant health and economic damage.
“The government environmental protection agencies don’t have the legal authority to deal with this phenomenon,” he continued. “There must be a law that will give them the authority and the professional tools to deal with invasive species, by regulating the import, commerce and possession of these species. The biggest challenge is preventing inadvertent invasion, like through cargo in which unwanted ‘hitchhikers’ are hiding.”
An invasive species is a plant, fungus, or animal species that is not native to a specific location (an introduced species), and which has a tendency to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment, human economy or human health.[1][dubious – discuss]
One study pointed out widely divergent perceptions of the criteria for invasive species among researchers (p. 135) and concerns with the subjectivity of the term “invasive” (p. 136).[2] Some of the alternate usages of the term are below:
The term as most often used applies to introduced species (also called “non-indigenous” or “non-native”) that adversely affect the habitats and bioregions they invade economically, environmentally, or ecologically. Such invasive species may be either plants or animals and may disrupt by dominating a region, wilderness areas, particular habitats, or wildland–urban interface land from loss of natural controls (such as predators or herbivores). This includes non-native invasive plant species labeled as exotic pest plants and invasive exotics growing in native plant communities.[3] It has been used in this sense by government organizations[4][5] as well as conservation groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the California Native Plant Society.[2] The European Union defines “Invasive Alien Species” as those that are, firstly, outside their natural distribution area, and secondly, threaten biological diversity.[6][7] It is also used by land managers, botanists, researchers, horticulturalists, conservationists, and the public for noxious weeds.[8] The kudzu vine (Pueraria lobata), Andean Pampas grass (Cortaderia jubata), and yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis) are examples.
An alternate usage broadens the term to include indigenous or “native” species along with non-native species, that have colonized natural areas (p. 136).[2] Deer are an example, considered to be overpopulating their native zones and adjacent suburban gardens, by some in the Northeastern and Pacific Coast regions of the United States.[citation needed]
Sometimes the term is used to describe a non-native or introduced species that has become widespread (p. 136).[2] However, not every introduced species has adverse effects on the environment. A nonadverse example is the common goldfish (Carassius auratus), which is found throughout the United States, but rarely achieves high densities (p. 136).
Posted inImmigration|Comments Off on Haaretz: ‘Israeli Experts Fear Invasion of Yellow Crazy Ant That Wreaks Havoc on Crops’
Garrow portrays Obama as a man who ruthlessly compartmentalized his existence; who believed early on that he was fated for greatness; and who made emotional sacrifices in the pursuit of a goal that must have seemed unlikely to everyone but him. Every step — whether his foray into community organizing, Harvard Law School, even the choice of whom to love — was not just about living a life but about fulfilling a destiny.
It is in the personal realm that Garrow’s account is particularly revealing. He shares for the first time the story of a woman Obama lived with and loved in Chicago, in the years before he met Michelle, and whom he asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College, is a recurring presence in “Rising Star,” and her pained, drawn-out relationship with Obama informs both his will to rise in politics and the trade-offs he deems necessary to do so. Garrow, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., concludes this massive new work with a damning verdict on Obama’s determination: “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”
…Jager, who in “Dreams From My Father” was virtually written out, compressed into a single character along with two prior Obama girlfriends, may have evoked something of Obama’s distant mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Like Dunham, Jager studied anthropology, and while Dunham focused on Indonesia, Jager developed a deep expertise in the Korean Peninsula. Jager was of Dutch and Japanese ancestry, fitting the multicultural world Obama was only starting to leave behind. They were a natural fit. Jager soon came to realize, she told Garrow, that Obama had “a deep-seated need to be loved and admired.”
She describes their life together as an isolating experience, “an island unto ourselves” in which Obama would “compartmentalize his work and home life.” She did not meet Jeremiah Wright, the pastor with a growing influence on Obama, and they rarely saw his professional colleagues socially. The friends they saw were often graduate students at the University of Chicago, where Sheila was pursuing her doctorate. They traveled together to meet her family as well as his. Soon they began speaking of marriage.
“In the winter of ‘86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” she told Garrow. Her parents were opposed, less for any racial reasons (Barack came across to them like “a white, middle-class kid,” a close family friend said) than for concern about Obama’s professional prospects, and because her mother thought Sheila, two years Obama’s junior, was too young. “Not yet,” Sheila told Barack. But they stayed together.
In early 1987, when Obama was 25, she sensed a change. “He became. . . so very ambitious” very suddenly,” she told Garrow. “I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
The sense of destiny is not unusual among those who become president. (See Clinton, Bill.) But it created complications. Obama believed that he had a “calling,” Garrow writes, and in his case it was “coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American.”
Maraniss’s 2012 biography deftly describes Obama’s conscious evolution from a multicultural, internationalist self-perception toward a distinctly African American one, and Garrow puts this transition into an explicitly political context. For black politicians in Chicago, he writes, a non-African-American spouse could be a liability. He cites the example of Richard H. Newhouse Jr., a legendary African American state senator in Illinois, who was married to a white woman and endured whispers that he “talks black but sleeps white.” And Carol Moseley Braun, who during the 1990s served Illinois as the first female African American U.S. senator and whose ex-husband was white, admitted that “an interracial marriage really restricts your political options.”
Discussions of race and politics suddenly overwhelmed Sheila and Barack’s relationship. “The marriage discussions dragged on and on,” but now they were clouded by Obama’s “torment over this central issue of his life . . . race and identity,” Sheila recalls. The “resolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” she said.
In Garrow’s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that “the lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.” And friends remember an awkward gathering at a summer house, where Obama and Jager engaged in a loud, messy fight on the subject for an entire afternoon. (“That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason,” they heard Sheila yell from their guest room, their arguments punctuated by bouts of makeup sex.) Obama cared for her, Garrow writes, “yet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his.”
Just days before he would depart for Harvard Law School — and when the relationship was already coming apart — Obama asked her to come with him and get married, “mostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future,” Sheila explained to Garrow. At the time, she was heading to Seoul for dissertation research, and she resented his assumption she would automatically postpone her career for his. More arguments ensued, and each went their way, although not for good…
Obama had met Michelle Robinson at the Chicago law firm where she worked — and where he was a summer associate — after his first year of law school, and the couple quickly became serious. However, Jager, who soon arrived at Harvard on a teaching fellowship, was not entirely out of his life.
“Barack and Sheila had continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990-91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack’s relationship with Michelle Robinson,” Garrow writes. (“I always felt bad about it,” Sheila told the author more than two decades later. Once Barack and Michelle were married, his personal ties to Sheila was reduced to the occasional letter (such as after the 9/11 attacks) and phone call (when he reached out to ask whether a biographer had contacted her).
If Garrow is correct in concluding that Obama’s romantic choices were influenced by his political ambitions, it is no small irony that Michelle Obama became one of those most skeptical about Obama’s political prospects, and most dubious about his will to rise. She constantly discourages his efforts toward elective office and resents the time he spends away from her and their two young daughters. Obama vented to a friend how often Michelle would talk about money. “Why don’t you go out and get a good job? You’re a lawyer — you can make all the money we need,” she would tell him, as the couple struggled with student loans and the demands of family and political life. (Garrow sides with Michelle, highlighting how, on the day after Sasha was born, Barack went downtown for a meeting.)
…And he goes deliciously small-bore, too, delving into the culture of the Illinois statehouse, where poker was intense and infidelity was rampant. “There’s a lot of people who f—ed in Springfield,” a female lobbyist tells Garrow. “What else is there to do?” Obama, however, did not. “Michelle would kick my butt,” he told a colleague there. At times Garrow delivers information simply because he has it; I did not need a detailed readout of all of Obama’s course evaluations from his years teaching at the University of Chicago’s law school. (Turns out his students liked him.)
The book’s title seems chosen with a sense of irony. Garrow shows how media organizations invariably described Obama as a “rising star,” in almost self-fulfilling fashion. Yet, after nine years of research and reporting, Garrow does not appear too impressed by his subject, even if he recognizes Obama’s historical importance.
The author is harsh but persuasive in his reading of “Dreams From My Father,” for instance, calling it not a memoir but a work of “historical fiction,” one in which the “most important composite character was the narrator himself.” (Reviewers were impressed by it, but few who knew Obama well seemed to recognize the man in its pages.) He points out that Obama’s cocaine use extended into his post-college years, longer than Obama had previously acknowledged. And he suggests Obama deployed religion for political purposes; while campaigning for the U.S. Senate, Garrow notes, Obama began toting around a Bible and exhibited “a greater religious faith than close acquaintances had ever previously sensed.”
Throughout the book, Obama displays an almost petulant dissatisfaction with each step he took to reach the Oval Office. Community organizing is not ambitious enough, he decides, so he goes to law school. But then he moves into politics because “I saw the law as being inadequate to the task “of achieving social change,” Obama explains. In Springfield, he is again disillusioned by “the realization that politics is a business . . . an activity that’s designed to advance one’s career, accumulate resources and help one’s friends,” as “opposed to a mission.”And upon reaching the U.S. Senate, he tells National Journal that he is “surprised by the lack of deliberation in the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Nothing measures up.
Obama was groomed by his extended family, well-educated people with ties to academia and American deep state power, for a career as a foreign relations go-between: what I call a Muslimist. Not an “Arabist,” but similar: an expert on non-Arab heavily Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya.
As Obama told his previous biographer David Maraniss, the “obvious path for me given my background” was to get a graduate degree in international relations and wind up “working in the State Department, in the Foreign Service, or working for an international foundation.…”
Dr. Jager has a similar job involving being an expert on Korea.
In 1985 Obama rebelled against that foreign affairs destiny, moving to insular Chicago. Of course, he didn’t get along all that well with the African-Americans he was now paid to organize, so he acquired a girlfriend straight out of his old International Affairs world.
The white girlfriend he left behind in New York was the daughter of a top Australian intelligence official with expertise in Indonesia who later because Australia’s ambassador to the United States. She was also the stepdaughter of a top Washington Democratic power broker lawyer who ran the Indonesian connection for a giant international mining company. I’ve always wondered who set them up: maybe Timothy Geithner’s dad, who worked with Obama’s mom?
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* I do find myself wondering how our media will choose to destroy, as they must, Garrow’s book, and his reputation.
Thing is, Garrow has won a Pulitzer Prize. How do you pretend he and his book don’t exist, and are unworthy?
* Didn’t stop him from dating Larry Sinclair later on. Incidentally, Sinclair confirms Garrow’s claims that Obama’s cocaine use persisted longer than he admitted:
Former President Barack Obama considered being homosexual as a young man, according to a forthcoming biography of the president.
The biography by David Garrow, “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” is set to come out on May 9. Garrow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In a chapter about the former president’s two years at Occidental College, Garrow reveals a close relationship Obama had with an openly gay assistant professor named Lawrence Goldyn.
“Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama,” Garrow wrote in the book. “Almost a quarter century later, asked about his understanding of gay issues, Obama enthusiastically said, ‘my favorite professor my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew…He was a terrific guy” with whom Obama developed a ‘friendship beyond the classroom.’”
The biographer added, “Goldyn years later would remember that Obama ‘was not fearful of being associated with me’ in terms of ‘talking socially’ and ‘learning from me’ after as well as in class.”
“Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex,” Garrow wrote. “But there is no doubting that Goldyn gave eighteen-year-old Barry a vastly more positive and uplifting image of gay identity and self-confidence than he had known in Honolulu.”
* It’s ironic that marrying Michelle may have been the best decision he made for his political career, but that she seems to be the least supportive spouse in history. He won both because of her and in spite of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually divorce.
* [Jager] She is ethnically half-Dutch and half-Japanese.
* No doubt for the near future we will be treated to a parade of biographical information about our 44th president fleshing out the portrait of a hollow, repellent narcissist.
* When asked about Obama experimenting with homosexuality, Garrow replied, “I think anyone and everyone, no matter what their role in life deserves a certain basic degree of privacy, in that context.”
Meaning “yes he did”. So the usual question: who knew and on what subjects did they blackmail him?
* I doubt it was a marriage of convenience–more likely, Michelle combined the intellectual and educational background Obama needed in a wife to be able to talk to her and the cultural background (authentic American black) he wishes he had. They seem a *much* more natural couple than Jeb and his wife, say.
* Why has it taken almost a decade for this amount of detail about his early life to come out in the mainstream media? Any other President would have had the media outing this woman during the 2008 Primary. We knew this level of info about Romney’s grade school shenanigans minutes after he won his first Primary.
* “Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex,” Garrow wrote.
I’m sorry: What?!! Who has ever resolved sexual confusion that way?
He’s just bullshitting his girlfriend there, trying to sound thoughtful by spewing what is obvious nonsense to anyone but him. Apparently with the young BHO, it was bullshit all the way down.
* Well, I guess it’s nice that the least vetted Presidential candidate in the modern era is finally getting a bit of attention. I wonder if there are any other interesting snippets in the book that might have been missed (i.e. deliberately ignored) by the reviewers?
The fact that the press never uncovered any of this either during the initial campaign or during eight years of his Presidency only provides further proof — as if we needed any — that they are duplicitous liars and slavish suck-ups when their guy is in power.
* He’s faker than most people realized. Picking a wife with which to have children as part of a staging effort in order to sell himself politically is as sociopathic as one can get. One didn’t have to linger long to be puzzled as to what he and his wife really had in common, she having wider shoulders than her thin effeminate husband. Nobody ‘considers gayness’ unless they’re already there to begin with. His body language with his male roommate in one of his well known photos is rather gay. Is there any question left anymore that he’s bi? Had Clinton won we’d have had two bisexuals in a row as president. What would that say about the state of the republic? It’s not likely he’ll put all this into his $60M book which is guaranteed to be a bore.
* I don’t see how Michelle’s affirmative action degree from Princeton adds any intellect to the Obama’s marriage. That she was an authentic American black was no doubt a positive factor for him, but I think that he is obviously smarter than Michelle was just as big a factor. A narcissist like Barack Obama is not going to want a wife who is his intellectual equal.
* “what’s the significance of the cocaine use…?”
Um, it’s a felony?
It would have derailed, disbarred and ash-canned any white or Republican candidate?
* It seems that Barak’s intersectional career was genetically empowered by his wide open nostrils being well-suited for comfortable hoovering of large quantities of clearly drawn white lines.
Malia O. is on a path of such Regression to The Mean Luo, that the whole new wing of Betty Ford Institute would be named after her.
* I wonder how the former First Lady feels about being a tool of political advancement and how she reacted when she figured it out.
* That might be one of the reasons she looks pi$$ed off so often.
* The significance of the cocaine use to me is that he was able to walk away from it. Of the four people I knew who used cocaine, all four destroyed their lives with it.
* Did he though?
The abrupt change in personality described by Miyoshi-Jager sounds like the mania brought on by a coke habit.
* Yeah, reading that passage, I conclude that Obama had already experienced very real gay inclinations — inclinations that almost certainly wouldn’t go away. He chose to be heterosexual because it’s more demanding? Yeah, that’s going to make his nerves jangle when he looks at a woman rather than a man. And I don’t exactly see marriage — least of all to Michelle — putting a damper on those inclinations. I can see a woman entertaining both homosexuality and heterosexuality, and choosing one rather deliberately — but not a man, whose sexual impulses are far more urgent.
The overall picture here is of a guy who decides, based on his long term plans, what he’s going to be — e.g., “heterosexual” or “black” — and lives out that life.
I have to wonder if one fine day we won’t hear about Obama’s long hidden love for another man. Or will he go full Liberace, in denial to the end?
I have to wonder as well how this is going to affect what looks to me to be the rather shaky marriage between Michelle and Barack. (What was Barack doing those several weeks alone in the South Pacific? In how many healthy marriages would that happen?) I don’t really see Michelle being the tolerant type who will put up with the disrespect that comes with being identified as a beard, especially in the black community.
* I think the qualities of emperor/leader you describe are very dependent on the homogeneity of the electorate. An electorate evenly split between cohorts of very different values give the opportunity for a government-by-decree, which is generally how Obama ruled.
The Supreme Court mandate on proportional representation put the lid on the coffin of real representative government. Proportional representation gives racial demagogues like Luis Gutiérrez, Keith Ellison, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee absolutely no reason to take any broad constituency other than blacks or Mexican self-identified nationals, into account.
If you have smaller, more geographically homogeneous countries, there can be better representation in the government, rather than simply an exchange of dictators.
* I think Steve’s interest in the precise month/year BHO took the LSAT is related to the obvious change in his personality, his “blossoming,” as it were. Steve has written on this subject before: since there’s no evidence that Obama’s grades at either Occidental or Columbia were anything to write home about, something other than sheer affirmative action must have gotten him into Harvard Law School. Someone else did cross-tabulations on admissions to Harvard Law School from Columbia in the relevant year, and found that two African-American applicants from Columbia to HLS scored in the top few percentile on the LSAT (maybe 95th+ percentile). Steve reasoned that BHO was likely one of those two.
Steve further concluded that upon receiving his (presumably) very high LSAT score, BHO underwent a personality transformation of sorts, finally realizing that that a world-class political career was within his reach. And of course, once he got to Harvard Law School, everyone else treated him like the Black Messiah, and starting thinking of him as a potential president. How many people in their twenties have the cold self-knowledge to take excessive flattery as just that, as opposed to believing the hype? BHO believed the hype. Acing the LSAT made him think of himself as an ubermensch.
Self-delusion? Maybe. But how many countries have you been president of?
Posted inBarack Obama|Comments Off on WP: ‘Before Michelle, Barack Obama asked another woman to marry him. Then politics got in the way.’
Heather Mac Donald writes: Another five-year anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, another opportunity for media glorification of racial mayhem. The New York Times outdoes itself this year with a fawning profile of one of the sadists who stomped and bludgeoned trucker Reginald Denny nearly to death on April 29, 1992, as Denny tried to maneuver his truck through the already anarchic intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles.
Henry Keith Watson, an ex-con who had just assaulted an Asian man, stood on Reginald Denny’s neck and head as others kicked him. Watson never served any time for his participation in this grotesque explosion of racial hatred. The Times notes admiringly that Watson apologized to Denny on a talk show.
That forced contrition—an apology was a condition of his probation sentence as well—was short-lived. “Now, 25 years later, Mr. Watson is not in the mood to say sorry,” Times reporter Jennifer Medina writes. Of course not. Why should he be? Watson “called himself ‘an angry black man’ one afternoon this week as he sat on the porch of his home,” Medina reports. “As he has done each anniversary, he is selling Florence and Normandie T-shirts and throwing a block party on Saturday”—a natural way to commemorate a conflagration that took over 50 lives and caused an estimated $1 billion in property damage. The Times does not bother speaking to any of the thousands of victims of that racial mayhem, instead foregrounding Watson’s complaints about ongoing “oppression.” “Nothing has changed, nothing,” Watson grouses. A friend of Watson’s, Nathan Smith, who was on parole in 1992, predicts that another riot is likely. Back then, Smith says, “We all felt like, ‘We’ve been telling you we’re angry and you’re not listening, so now we’re going to show you.” “Showing you” consisted of burning down businesses that have struggled to survive constant robberies and assaults on their employees and have only succeeded due to a fierce work ethic. “Showing you” also consisted of pulling drivers from their cars and mutilating them. Even if there were some legitimate “you” that is responsible for the social chaos of the ghetto, it is certainly not a Korean convenience store owner or a construction worker returning from work.
The familiar “nothing has changed” complaint embodies the entitlement mentality. Its logic is the following: “We destroy the businesses that have served us for decades; we unleash savage violence against every ethnic group other than our own. So why aren’t things better now in our neighborhoods? Government and society owe us reparations in response to our feral rage against other people’s livelihoods and lives.” But a riot is inevitably going to make the local situation worse. Mainstream businesses will be even less willing to move into a riot zone; property values, already depressed by high crime, will plummet further. Though governments usually do respond to riots with cash and programs, such intervention is not going to make any difference unless individuals in the community make better personal choices: paying attention in class, doing homework, not committing crime, staying in a job, and not having children out-of-wedlock.
The University of California’s massive diversity bureaucracy also got into the game of riot whitewash. UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Jerry Kang, is sponsoring a student art competition to commemorate the “social rebellion.” Students can submit performance art, poetry, or visual art to “critically examine the root causes of this historic event . . . and its relevance to contemporary issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Do not expect any installations featuring the charred remains of torched business. To gain “inspiration” for their art works, the competitors had to attend at least one panel in an April 28 conference on the “Los Angeles uprisings,” also organized by the Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. That conference assembled ethnic studies professors and racial activists; no first responders were included.
Posted inLos Angeles|Comments Off on Venerating Havoc – Academia and the media have learned nothing in the 25 years since the L.A. riots
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
