Backup on Levon Helm, singer of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" for The Band, in final stages of cancer

Levon Helm, singer of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" for The Band, in final stages of cancer

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Via T

Video below as Embedding disabled by request

Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Levon Helm (CBS News)

Issa expects movement on Holder contempt charge within 'weeks'

Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has yet to charge Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt of Congress for failing to supply Mr. Issa’s committee with thousands of pieces of documentation relating to the Justice Department’s gun walking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

Rep. Issa told me on Tuesday night to expect movement on the contempt charge towards A.G. Holder very soon.

“We’re going through a process,” said Congressman Issa. “That process is going to take weeks but not months more.”

More @ The Washington Times

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Via The Moneychanger

Here's another example that whether you are a "terrorist" or a "patriot" depends on your standpoint. On 19 April 1861 Marylanders in Baltimore withstood foreign (Massachusetts) troops crossing their city to invade the South. To Lincoln, they were a mob, to Maryland, patriots.

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I'm going to get one for Dixie to go along with her pen knife.

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The Need to Lynch Zimmerman: The Coming Race War in America

Fred On Everything
VERBATIM POST

The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland. The title is not ironic. He foresaw a major racial explosion. The book of course was furiously ignored. It should not have been. It dealt with an apocalyptic vision that has lurked around the edges of American consciousness since before the Civil War. And still does. We just don’t talk about it.

What has this to do with Zimmerman?

This: Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration.

Let’s consider a few awkward facts that loom ghoulishly above the body politic, which seems to be decomposing. First, on every known measure of cognitive ability, on IQ, SATs, GREs, everything, blacks average about one standard deviation, fifteen IQ points, below whites. The gap is a fact. It exists. It is reflected in performance. It has proved intractable. In a technological civilization that rewards intelligence, the deficit sharply limits legitimate access to the higher reaches of money, power, class, and prestige.

Second, blacks continue to show little interest in schooling. Exceptions and degrees, yes. Yet consider cities such as Washington, which usually has a black mayor, black city council, mostly black school board, black staffs in the schools, black parents, black students, a high per-capita expenditure—and perhaps the worst schools in the country. This is a fact, and shows no signs of diminishing. It is repeated in countless cities.

If the United State had large numbers of manual jobs that paid a living wage, as for example assembling cars, things might not be so bad. But the United States no longer has many such jobs. The economy has no need for huge numbers of people who read at the level of second-graders, if that. The existence of these people is a fact. When such jobs exist, as for example on police forces, better qualified whites are invariably available. Without remedial intervention, the academic and professional worlds, the managerial ranks of blue-collar trades, would turn almost pure white, and there would be actual hunger in the inner cities.

The solution, to the extent that it can be called a solution, has been a combination of welfare and affirmative action. Each has produced its own kind of dependency. Whites in their own way depend on welfare payments to blacks in that ending welfare would send the cities up in flames. We now have dense concentrations of unemployed, unemployable blacks leading meaningless lives in rotting cities. They are angry, blame whites for their troubles, and do not have a lot to lose. The torching of Los Angeles in 1992 is endlessly repeatable. Only a spark is needed.

None of this improves, and it seems to be getting worse. On the Drudge Report and elsewhere on the web, video after cell phone video appears of pack-attacks by feral blacks on whites and Asians. These attacks often result in brain damage: the attackers are trying to hurt the victims badly, and usually laugh while doing it. Other videos time and again show black teenagers looting Seven-Elevens. The perpetrators show no signs of worry about being caught. They know that white police wouldn’t dare arrest thirty black adolescents.

Whites are frightened of blacks. They are afraid of taking the wrong exit from the freeway and ending up in a black ghetto. They are afraid when they pass young black males in a dark neighborhood. White women clutch their purses and cross the street, try not to get into elevators with them. The fear, seldom mentioned, determines where whites live, where they go, and where they send their children to school.

This unacknowledged fear engenders unacknowledged consequences. When white men buy guns, journalistic organs of that prissy rectitude we call political correctness—the Washington Post, probably National Review—speak of gun nuts, psychosexual inadequacies, and sordid fantasies. Hardly. The purchasers of guns have in mind defending their families should the need arise. The buyers do not fear attack by Jewish violinists.

Government also is afraid of blacks. Los Angeles burned because blacks didn’t like the outcome of a trial. Recently cities in England went up because a policeman shot a black. The Zimmerman shooting looks very similar, and blacks are very angry. Jesse Jackson has said that Trayvon was “hunted down like a rabid dog in the street,” that he was “murdered and martyred,” that it was a “hate crime.”

These are the words of a man looking for a fight. One may be available. Charging Zimmerman with murder buys time. If he is acquitted….

The signs are ominous. Tension rises in America. Incomes fall, foreclosures rise, jobs go east, police powers increase, trust in government evaporates, and expectations for the future decline. An unfocused edginess germinates. It is not a recipe for domestic tranquility.

The response of whites to riots by blacks has always been to back away. This prudence, as it is thought to be, has been enforced by the government. If a minority in Russia started burning cities, the army would shoot the rioters on sight. America doesn’t work that way, or hasn’t recently. The lack of consequences for beatings and flash-mobbings, the history of saying “racism” and walking, produces a sense of untouchability in blacks. It could be a mistake.

A spring is being wound. On one hand, when you live in a sprawling tightly packed concentration of people like yourself, it is easy to forget that you are very much a minority, that the majority holds all the high cards, and that food doesn’t really come from Safeway.

On the other hand, via the internet whites now know of the racial attacks, and grow quietly very sick of them. There is among many white men an undercurrent of “Bring it on.” This is not confined merely to cops, soldiers, conservatives, Southerners, westerners, the rural and the blue-collar. You can find it, carefully hidden, in federal offices and even among men in newsrooms. The extent of this sentiment is easy to underestimate. Those who share it don’t dare express it, and most journalists live in ideological bubbles.

We must lynch Zimmerman.

Racist or Factist?

I'm not familiar with the show as I watch little TV, but liked the post.

American Mercenary
VERBATIM POST

In the first season of "Breakout Kings" one of the lines that is repeated is "I can't work with this racist" and the reply "I'm not a racist, I'm a factist."

It seems that anyone who notes any sort of difference between races will be accused of racism, unless you happen to be a minority. Minorities can't be racist, or if they are it is only because "whitey made me do it." Of course I don't see how setting a white kid on fire while screaming "you deserve this whitey" isn't anything but a racist hate crime.

That being said, what follows is something that I have been pondering for a bit, and there really is no way to sugarcoat it and make it politically correct. Does that make me racist or a factist? I thank God that I blog anonymously because as any Soldier knows, this sort of frank discussion is not approved by the Equal Opportunity program. What follows would be called a "hostile work environment" or "discrimination" should I bring it up where someone who is offended could here. So knowing that my career could be on the line if someone finds what follows offensive, here goes.

The IQ spread of various "races" is an easily quantifiable data sheet. http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx I say it is easily quantifiable because others have done it. Repeatedly. Peer reviewed studies and everything. Decades of data.

Leftists attack this disparity between "races" at every chance, pointing out that IQ tests written by Europeans automatically disadvantage Africans. Unfortunately this discounts that Asians score better than white Europeans. Remember my previous post about "if the data shows the theory is wrong people who can't discern truth from falsehood cling to their theory?" Well here is one that is guaranteed to piss off both the left and the right.

If we accept that the data is scientifically significant then the idea that "race is a social construct" is false. Even though all humans can interbreed with each other the data shows that on average blacks aren't as smart as hispanics who aren't as smart as whites who aren't as smart as asians. http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2009/04/iq-by-nation-iq-by-race-us-iq-inherited.htm

Secondly, since the data suggests that there are differences in "race" then the idea of "equality" is absurd. There are the Larry Birds in the NBA, and there are Black chess masters. But the bulk of the NBA is black, and the bulk of serious chess players are not black. An unequal racial distribution among different activities is to be expected if there are differences in heritable attributes amongst the races.

But why do I insist that "racial equality" will never be achieved? Because of the math. If we had an equal population of blacks, hispanics, whites, and asians and distributed the intelligence of each group along known curves, then on average the smartest people in the room will be white and asian. On the flip side the "dumbest" people in the room would be black and hispanic. Since most occupations or careers require intelligence as a large portion of the mix that determines success in monetary terms, we would then see an unequal distribution of earned income along racial lines.

Now a Leftists would want you to believe that the unequal distribution of income along racial lines is due solely to "racism" or "injustice" and anything but actual, measurable differences in racial attributes. A racist would say that all blacks are subhuman and "white power" or some other equally offensive nonsense.

The truth is that both "genetic race" and "cultural race" play a part here. High intelligence black parents with a good work ethic pass those genetic and cultural traits on to their children who grow up to be successful. Low intelligence white trash who cook meth pass criminal skills on to their children who grow up to be unsuccessful members of society. The difference is that in "white culture" criminal activity is seen as disgraceful and in "black culture" the "thug life" is seen as sexy and even laudable.

If we accept that Darwinian concepts such as "fitness" and "hybrid vigor" then we see speculate that Culture creates the environment where stupid people in the black community pass on genes for physical strength and aggressiveness instead of intelligence because those traits are more successful in that culture. Somehow the successful black family in "The Cosby Show" has been replaced by "Snoop Dog" in the audience that needs it the most, inner city blacks. That isn't to say that "white culture" doesn't have "Eminem", only that white America never really left "The Brady Bunch" (or "Dawson's Creek" for the younger crowd). The ideas of what constitutes success in each culture is "getting paid" so to speak, but often from very different sources.

However none of this data disproves the existence or non-existence of widespread racism (which is the beauty of calling someone racist, it is like asking "have you stopped beating your wife?"). Blacks are still more likely than whites to be successfully prosecuted on a drug charge (although it could be that there are more stupid blacks getting caught with drugs than stupid whites getting caught with drugs if you argue it from an intelligence perspective). But it could also explain why there is such a disproportionate percentage of blacks in prison verses asians. However, cultural difference also explain the data.

At the end of the day, or at the end of the blog post, you have multiple data sets that say there are measurable differences in intelligence between races that can explain everything from income distribution to incarceration rates or you have the alternative that those differences are the result of artificial constraints placed on minorities (except for those statistically pesky asians) is a result of racism. I can't disprove racism (you can't prove a negative, it is impossible) but I can show that there are very valid explanations for why things are the way they are.

What minorities need is a culture that embraces the traits that allow them to compete with other races on more equal footing. If black women refused to sleep with black men who had an IQ less than 105 within three generations the IQ gap would be statistically insignificant. Unfortunately while "Urkel" may be the answer to black underachievement, "Urkel" isn't likely to get much play from the ladies. I would say that white culture could do the same thing, but who isn't rooting for Leanord to get back with Penny on "The Big Bang Theory"?