Pro-Life Race Hustlers

Happy Pi Day. I haven't posted anything since Wednesday, so today I will be posting two or three entries.

I've argued that the Religious Right has a lot in common with progressives. They were essentially the same movement in the early 1900s and late 1800s. This is especially apparent with the issue of abortion. Pro-lifers often focus on the fact that "abortion harms women" or that "abortion exploits women." The laws they pass target abortionists, not the women who get abortions. This is essentially the feminist worldview - women can't be held responsible for their actions.

Now they've decided to play the race card. For weeks now, there has been controversy over pro-life billboards in Georgia stating "Black children are an endangered species." Now Republicans in Georgia are working to pass a law that would ban abortions based on race or gender. What a waste of time. The courts would probably just strike it down as unconstitutional.

Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, the group behind the billboard campaign, told FoxNews.com that she supports the legislation that she says will address an issue that has "such a disproportionate impact on the black community rather than every other community in Georgia, as well as the nation."

So the pro-lifers are relying on disparate impact - the same theory that has led to dumbed-down schools, public safety departments staffed by unqualified people, and the destruction of effective policing.

Aside from looking stupid, if conservatives begin using the idea of disparate impact, it could harm many of their political arguments. Conservatives (even mainstream ones) often criticize the fact that liberals use disparate impact theory to argue that schools and the police are racist, arguing that equal opportunity is not equal outcome. If conservatives use disparate impact in the issue of abortion, liberals could argue that conservatives are hypocrites on this issue (which would be true).

Davis noted that in 2008, blacks made up 30 percent of the population in Georgia but more than 57 percent of the abortions.

"Those numbers are so horrific," she said. "There has to be something else contributing to this number."

Yeah, it can't be the fact that black women tend to be poor, less educated (or uneducated), and have premarital sex more than white women. It has to be white racism. I'm used to this kind of ignorance coming from liberal racial egalitarians, but not from alleged conservatives. This story is starting to remind me of the story about how in the 1980s a rumor sprung up among blacks that the KKK owned KFC and put a chemical in chicken to sterilize black men. Her fear also seems rooted in the black distrust of doctors as a result of the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ended forty years ago.

"I believe it's deliberate," she said, citing Oregon as one example where most abortion clinics are located in black neighborhoods despite an overwhelming white population in the state.

But Ross dismissed that out of hand.

"I can't find facts to fit their conspiracy theory," she said, arguing that abortion clinics are located where there are clients.

It's kind of sad that liberals, who are known for their economic illiteracy, have a better understanding of how businesses operate than conservative pro-lifers. If black women are more likely to have abortions then white women, then it follows that more abortion clinics will be located near black neighborhoods than white.

"Because of health disparities, less access to birth control, less access to sex education," [Ross] said. "We have a higher rate of childhood sexual abuse. … And so when you have those types of disparities, you'll have unintended consequences.

Once again, the liberal is making more sense than the conservative.

Davis, who is black, said she just wants to see an end to what she called a racially motivated practice.

"If they will stop targeting my people, I will fade softly into the background," she said.

Here the fully story comes out. This "abortion is racist" campaign is being spearheaded by a black woman. So essentially Georgia Right to Life has been hijacked by a Michael Steele wannabe. Although I'm sure Georgia RTL wouldn't consider it a hijacking. They are undoubtably overjoyed about the fact that their campaign is now "diverse."

This is the result of years of conservative outreach to blacks: instead of there being only left-wing race hustlers, now there are conservative race-hustlers. Of course, I'm sure the Republican Party is overjoyed. Don't forget that the Bush administration was full of this mentality. For example, Condolzeea Rice once compared the Iraq War to the civil rights marches in Alabama, with the implication that critics of the Iraq War were racists.

I have no problem with people who support their racial or ethnic interests, but only if they do so with well-thought arguments. Davis is just a third-rate race hustler powered by black distrust of the healthcare system who is using the idea of disparate impact to make ludicrous claims.

It's bad enough when liberals play the race card, but when conservatives do it they just look like condescending, pandering hypocrites.

Conservative Female Supremacists

There have been a couple of columns by white conservative men recently that have essentially said "women are better than men." Roissy took Paul Greenberg on, as did The Spearhead and Dr. Helen. They do not seem to have noticed Jonah Goldberg's similar column from around the same time, so I'll be addressing his column here.

Female worship is popular among conservatives (when I use conservatives in this post - indeed, most of my posts - I'm referring to the mainstream conservatives, neocons, and religions right, not paleocons, libertarians, HBDers, and Patriots). Liberal men might believe that all of women's problems are caused by evil white male patriarchy, but conservatives view women as children and thus not responsible for their actions - there's always a man ultimately behind them. Abortion is a good example of this. Pro-lifers spend their time shutting down abortionists and passing laws that try to restrict them, but they don't go after women who have abortions with that much furor. Instead, they view them as victims (of men, of course) and try to help them - but probably wouldn't do the same for a mafia don who hired a hitman to kill someone for him. The women in combat issue is a another example. While there are reasons to oppose women in combat arms, such as physical standards, conservative opposition essentially boils down to "those poor little women might be killed and if they are captured they will be raped." No mention of the fact that male military deaths in Iraq outnumber female deaths by about 50 to 1. No mention of the fact that women are voluntarily enlisting to fight in the military - once again they are viewed as children irresponsible for their actions. (Also, if they care about women being raped, conservatives ought to focus on the epidemic of black-on-white rape, but that's a little off-topic.)

One of the errors that these conservatives make is assuming that women are responsible for civilization and that without women's guidance, men would be club-dragging barbarians. "Women civilize men," Jonah Goldberg concludes in his column. It would be far more accurate to state "men civilized women." It was men, not women, who established civilization and its laws. If women civilized men, then the ancient civilizations would have been matriarchal, but instead they were highly patriarchal. The ancient Greeks, in particular, had a dim view of matriarchal societies. Today's popular culture views the Amazons as "good guys," but they were villains in Greek myth, representing the uncivilized barbarians of the east and opposing the patriarchal, civilized, enlightened Greek men. Since conservatives like Goldberg are always criticizing liberals for undermining western civilization, I wonder what they would say if they knew that the fathers of western civilization viewed men as the civilizing force?

Goldberg makes more ridiculous statements. For example, in the lead he talks about mothers ironing their daughters' breasts in Cameroon to make them more attractive to boys. Let me repeat that: he thinks women civilize men, yet he opens his column by describing WOMEN WHO IRON THEIR DAUGHTERS' BREASTS! I know neocons aren't supposed to make sense, but really... He of course blames the horrific things that Cameroonian women do to their daughters on men. And this type of conservatism is different from feminism in what way? Sure, he might oppose abortion, but his worldview is eerily similar to feminists'.

Female equality seems to be a pretty reliable treatment for many of the world’s worst pathologies. Population growth in the Third World tends to go down as female literacy goes up. Indeed, female empowerment might be the single best weapon in the “root causes” arsenal in the war on terror.

He does have a point about female literacy being beneficial. Educated people are less likely to do stupid things and are more productive, thus educated societies are better - but how this involves women civilizing men he never explains. As for the War on Terror, the root cause of anti-American terrorism is American support for Israel, which has nothing to do with female empowerment. Plus there's the fact that women are increasingly joining terrorist, insurgent, and guerrilla organizations. Women made up a large percentage of the LTTE including many (most?) of their suicide bombers. Even Islamic militants, including Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, and even Pakistani fundamentalists use female fighters. They make up around a third of the PKK, FARC, and the Communist Party of Nepal, which are among the more well-known guerilla/terrorist groups. And what do the LTTE, PKK, FARC, and CPN-M have in common? They all promote female empowerment. This video about PKK women shows it pretty clearly with the interviews of angry young women with assault rifles, especially at the end when they show the feminist indoctrination. Female empowerment does not lead to peace, it leads to twice as many people being capable of waging war.

Looking at their pictures, it's pretty easy to see why Greenberg and Goldberg hold these views. Greenberg is an older man and grew up before the chivalry of the 1800s to 1960s died away and is struggling to deal with the conflicting ideas of chivalry and female equality. Goldberg strikes me as an overgrown frat boy. Maybe he got drunk a lot and did stupid things in college, but stopped when he got married so he thinks his wife civilized him.

Avatar Doesn't Win Best Picture

I was surprised that Avatar didn't win. The film was essentially the Hollywood worldview crammed into two and a half hours and combined with good CGI. It was about a human who allies with peaceful alien natives and fights off an evil human corporation and miliary to protect them. It was almost as if the writers had went to TVTropes.org, found all of the tropes they could use to promote their anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, environut views, and blended them into a script.

The entire thing was supposed to be an allegory for the Western treatment of various "natives." White people find a verdant paradise. White people move in. White people defile the paradise. White people steal the resources. White people kill the natives. Only this time, the natives fight back and defeat the evil white people! I wonder when Hollywood will get around to making an allegory showing how the blacks who inherited the prosperous lands of Rhodesia, South Africa, Haiti, and Detroit proceeded to wreck them. Or an allegory about the epidemic of black on white crime, in particular black on white rape. Or make an allegory showing the "noble" savages as, well, savages, which is what many "native" people throughout history were. Maybe they could show that "native" people aren't always environmentally-friendly, too.

In addition to being anti-white, it was anti-male (anti-white films tend to be - those two views frequently go together in Hollywood). While the good humans and the Navri included both males and females, the bad guys were entirely male from the leaders to the common soldiers. There was only one female bad guy, Michelle Rodriguez's character (an action girl, like most of the characters she plays), but she ended up helping the good guys. So the only good (morally) soldier was a woman and vice versa. Did a feminist write the script? Actually, this is pretty common, as in most movies the good guys will be diverse while the bad guys will be all men (usually all or mostly white, too). I was just surprised that considering that women in the world's militaries are very common even today, it was odd that they were basically nonexistant in the military in a movie set in the 22nd century, when women are supposed to be even more "equal." I guess we know Hollywood's idea of equality now. (I'll be writing a more general blog post about this trope sometime in the near future.)

The sad thing about the movie was that so many white men were enamored with the special effects and topless blue alien women that they were oblivious to the message directed at them: you are evil. Some liberal men undoubtedly saw the message, but agreed with it. I guess the 13 years of multicultural, feminist brainwashing (17 years for university students) must be pretty effective.

Even libertarians are buying into the Avatar-worship - Lew Rockwell is complaining that The Hurt Locker won and there were plenty of posts on the LewRockwell.com blog when Avatar came out praising it and its message.

One more thing: Spearhead ran an article in January critical of Avatar and its themes. The authors views are similar to mine, but though the article goes into much more depth: check it out here. It's a pretty good article.

"It's safer than the United States."

One idea I've found commonly espoused on websites and TV shows related to travel and geography is that many countries in the world are safer to travel to than the United States. I've heard or read most European countries, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, Turkey, Israel, Syria, Iran, and even Mexico described as such. Many liberals have picked up on this and use these countries as evidence as to why America needs gun control or better social services.

Of course, the real reason why those countries are safer to travel in than the United States is that none of those countries have large urban black populations. When people travel they often visit cities, which in America are filled with blacks. If you go to Tokyo you will find Japanese; if you go to Aleppo you will find Arabs; if you go to Berlin you will find Germans. If you go to a large American city, you will find nice, white enclaves with shopping districts, museums, parks, and tourist attractions surrounded by black ghettos. Note that you'll never hear anyone talking about a non-Arab African country as being safer to travel to than the United States.

As with most things in modern America, the key to understanding why it is less safe to travel in America than it is in many other countries is race.

The Pentagon Shooter Was a Libertarian

UPDATED

Last night, a man named John Patrick Bedell shot and wounded two police officers at an entrance into the Pentagon (or as Lew Rockwell calls it, the Pentagram) before being killed himself (here). It turns out he was a physics graduate from San Francisco interested in computers and electrical engineering. He was also a libertarian interested in Austrian economics and a firm opponent of drug prohibition.

Here's his Wikipedia user page, although he hasn't updated it since February 2007. Wikipedia will probably scrub it soon scrubbed it, so I'm posting its contents here:

User:JPatrickBedell

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My hope is to use the creativity of markets and advanced technology to transcend the destructive regimes that have fastened themselves upon the world. I have dreamed for an number of years of creating v:production econosystems, which I hope to apply to the creation of v:security service econosystems using new and economic mechanisms and information technology.

I have a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and studied biochemistry at San Jose State University. I've studied electrical engineering with the goal of creating microsystems for molecular analysis.^[1][2][3][4] You can see a proposal to use aluminum anodization as an adsorption method for DNA molecules on CMOS chips at v:DNA_integrated_circuit/proposal_import_2007 (which originates from an unsuccessful DARPA proposal to create a "microMIRV" interoperable with standard firearms ammunition), and a proposal to use xenon difluoride to create a picoliter-scale computer-controlled device for sorting biomolecules (available at v:Capillary_electrode_array/proposal_import_2007), including DNA and protein molecules. My goals include the discovery of a protein sequence for the diamondase enzyme, enabling the creation of macroscale diamond structures, and the creation of self-assembled macrosystems with CMOS DNA-integrated circuits. The scale of these and other projects have led me to develop financial instruments representing information as a tool to manage large projects that are very knowledge-intensive.

I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes. My work to develop information currency is an effort to create a framework for information management that uses financial markets to create the economic signals (prices) that will effect complex human actions in the real world based on specified information. My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006. I've posted the Orange County, CA District Attorney's complaint for this offense at http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/JPatrickBedell_2006-06-06_cannabis_felony_complaint .

One desired result of my effort is (will be) billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannabis plants growing throughout the United States with complete security of property. I have posted the image to the right in order to illustrate the use of cannabis as a monetary system using digital financial instruments. There are two information currency units in each of the PDF417 codes pictured. One of the information currency units is drawn from a series with "one gram cannabis" with the underlying asset, and the second ICU in each code has as its underlying asset the URL http://www.mises.org/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf and the SHA-1 digest value of the file at that location (fd8205cb8b4793d43b57ba6f6c7367aa700c307a). This is a way of associating the work of Ludwig von Mises with financial value, which may be a tool to implement his ideas in reality. I hope someday to see full-reserve banking and observance of Article One, Section 10 of the US Constitution.

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow's civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn't exist in 1938!

I am looking for collaborators for ongoing commercial and intellectual efforts. Email to jpbedell at mises.com is welcome!

The liberals will go crazy over this. Usually, the military is the target of liberals (such as anti-war protesters vandalizing recruitment centers), whereas right-wing political violence attacks the bureaucratic wing of the state (OKC bombing, Joe Stack). This was a week after Joe Stack's IRS plane attack and this shooting was probably inspired by last week's attack - Bedell was a nerdy man fascinated by computers (like Stack) and he was a Misean libertarian (meaning anti-government).

Indeed, the neocons are already spewing out lies - which the liberals will probably use for their own agenda. Take Fox News' headline to an AP story: "Pentagon Shooter Railed Against U.S. on Internet." Note that the shooter did not rail against the US in his various online posts, but rather against the federal government and its actions. In particular he thought the feds were covering up the death Air Force Colonel James Sabow, whom he and others believe did not commit suicide but was murdered as a result of a plot involving CIA drug trafficking. Bedell was not anti-American, but rather anti-government. The difference between a country and its government has been lost on most modern Americans, whether liberal or (neo)conservative.

As he was a computer nerd, he left traces all over the internet. He had a Linkedin profile stating he was an MSEE (Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, most likely). His Facebook page is still up (here) and his friends list is quite interesting. He's friends with a few notable libertarians - Lew Rockwell and William Norman Grigg (which doesn't necessarily mean anything - Lew Rockwell has several thousand FB friends), as well as a bunch of South Asians. I'm sure some neocon will use that as "evidence" that he was part of some foreign group, but it's more likely that he met them in his electrical engineering program since South Asians fill the electrical engineering programs (both as students and professors) in American universities.

Bedell was into cannabis, even going so far as to post a picture of his marijuana to WikiCommons here. In many of his postings on the Internet he showed an interest in Rothbardix, a Linux distro he was working on, that was tied to this concept he envisioned called "information currency." He describes that on his YouTube channel here. Of course, his online presence will soon begin to be scrubbed away so I was sure to save all of what I found. He was an interesting fellow.

In some ways it seems as if he was a Joe Stack copycat, but he was a different man overall. Joe Stack was angry with the IRS, whereas John Patrick Bedell was critical of the whole political and economic system altogether. Also, Stack had a family, whereas Bedell seems to be a high IQ, but lonely computer nerd with plenty of time to become well-read.

I can't help but wonder if these attacks are just a couple of isolated incidents that will soon be forgotten or whether the Second American Revolution is beginning around us...

UPDATE: At around 2:00 AM I noticed that Wikipedia scrubbed his user page (which was formerly here). I knew they would, as they scrubbed James von Brunn's user page after he carried out his shooting. His Facebook is still up, oddly enough.

If Diversity is Our Strength...

... then why isn't the Middle East a paradise? It has myriad ethnic groups - Arabs, Bedouins, Lebanese, Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Greeks, Turks, Persians, Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, other Caucasians, Assyrians, Turkmen, Kurds, as well as Asian workers in the Gulf. The people have many different religions - there are Sunni Muslims, Shi'a Muslims, Alawites, Druzes, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Yazidi, Mandeans, and Baha'i.

The media and politicians are always telling us how wonderful diversity is. It seems to me that such a diverse place should be a prosperous, peaceful region, yet it is the site of many current conflicts. I wonder why that is so?

Martin Luther King Sainthood

I don't think my motherboard has a slot for DERAM...


Every January we are treated to the spectacle of white Americans of every political alignment, social class, and geographic region trying to outdo each other in praising "Dr." Martin Luther King, Jr. I put "Dr." in quotation marks because Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. In addition to being a plagiarist, MLK was also a communist and an adulterer, although you'll never hear this from the lamestream conservatives telling you MLK was a conservative due to his "content of their character" remark.

I wonder why Martin Luther King has not been canonized yet. It would make sense in this Age of Obama. The only question is: which church will be the first to do so?