I found this story on Fox News, about a mixed-race rapper who pulled out of a music festival when she found that the festival was charging white ticket-buyers more than they were charging “people of color”. I had to applaud her good sense, not wanting to be associated with that sort of behavior.
However, my applause were somewhat less enthusiastic when I read the complete article, where the young lady described what she did and why. She seemed to tie herself in verbal knots, trying to avoid calling the situation what it was. Here is a quote from the article-see if you can figure out exactly what she was trying to communicate.
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I have family members that would have, under those circumstances, been subjected to something that I would not ever want them to be in … especially not because of anything that I have going on.”
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What?
Now, this is how the organizers of the AfroFuture fest described what they were doing by charging whites twice as much as blacks to get into the festival.
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AfroFuture explained their policy and rationale for it on their Eventbrite page. Organizers cite “equality” and “equity” in their ticketing, and state their structure “was built to insure that the most marginalized communities (people of color) are provided with an equitable chance at enjoying events in their own community (black Detroit).”
“Affording joy and pleasure is unfortunately still a privilege in our society for POC and we believe everyone should have access to receiving such,” organizers wrote.
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So, they created inequality to promote equality? Did they even think about what they were doing? Speaking of tying yourself in verbal knots! It’s just another example of Black Racism. Good for Jillian Graham (Tiny Jag) for calling them out.
The Greatest Country on God’s Green (and getting greener) Earth. I am proud to be a Citizen of the United States of America.
The United States is the most Prosperous nation in the history of Mankind. People who come here from elsewhere know that, if they work and save, they can aspire to be wealthy, and their children will do better than they did.
The United States is the most Free Nation on Earth. Why else would hordes of people from most other parts of the world travel thousands of miles, across oceans and deserts, to come to America? Why are thousands of Africans, South Americans, Europeans, and Middle-Easterners clamoring to come to America?
The United States has the most polyglot, diverse population on Earth. People here in America speak hundreds of languages, and our governmental units, from local to national, accommodate them with ballots, signs, and government forms in so many other languages it boggles the mind.
Despite what detractors say, America has the best, most-advanced medical care system in the world. Our scientists and medical professionals bring to market more new, life-saving drugs and procedures than any other country. Americans earn more Nobel Prizes than any other country. America has non-profit organizations that, with donations from private American individuals, fund vital research on all sorts of genetic and communicable diseases, improving the lives of millions of people, both Americans and foreigners.
The US Military literally protects the World from Tyranny. After World War II, and the Marshall Plan, America rebuilt Europe, and allowed their countries to spend less on their own defense and more on their vaunted social programs. And We Protected Them, and still do. NATO is still predominantly funded by the United States of America. Would Germany be quite so prosperous today if it had had to fund its own defense? Probably not.
And the US Military is the largest benefactor in the world, when natural disasters happen. Any time there’s a bad earthquake, a tsunami, a devastating hurricane or tropical storm, the US is there, with food, infrastructure, and other supplies to help the suffering. Some people like to say that they don’t want America to be the world’s policeman, but just hear them scream if the US is not there within 24 hours after a disaster somewhere.
Americans are the most generous people on Earth. Americans give a higher percentage of their incomes to various charitable organizations than anyone else. So-called “social democracies” nurture Government as the source of all good works. In America, it’s the People who do most good works. Disasters here bring out the donors in minutes-the Red Cross and United Way rake in the donations when there is an appeal. Americans volunteer more of their precious time too, working at soup kitchens, shelters, and offices to help their fellows. Personally, I saw how generous Americans are. One of my Ricochet friends had some very bad family problems, and was in need of support. I started a GoFundMe campaign, and within a few days, our Ricochet Members donated over $7.500.00.
I get very angry when I hear Americans tear down their country, calling it “racist, sexist, greedy, and mean”. There are many Americans who grew up in the relative lap of luxury, and now, from their ivory towers and suburban homes, denigrate America. I believe every single American should appreciate how fortunate they are to be an American.
Speaking of ivory towers, most of the worst America-haters are found on US college campuses these days. Instead of being seats of learning and exploration, they have become nests of vipers, despising and spreading lies about their own country, the country that allows them this kind of free speech (become mere liberal propaganda). There is, however, an antidote to the modern “progressive” college campus. That antidote is Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale, Michigan. Named one of the best private colleges in the United States, Hillsdale accepts not one penny of government money in any form, and they have been Pursuing Truth and Defending Liberty since 1844. RushBabe and Hubby are endowing a music scholarship at Hillsdale, and we urge followers and friends to learn about the school, and support it. Here’s a production of the Hillsdale music department, just for Independence Day. I have to admit that, while watching this, tears came to my eyes. Maybe it’s the Music. Maybe it’s the Truth.
Next, here’s a taste of my favorite march for Independence Day. The Stars and Stripes Forever, played by the President’s Own Marine Band.
And here are some of the comments on that performance. Get a feeling for how people in other countries feel about America.
Man, that’s amazing. I’m from Brazil and it’s impossible to be a patriot here. I wish there was something like this here. But this… this is awesome. Glad many of you enjoy it. The 284 dislikes are from heartless bitches. God bless America!
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My deepest respects and regards to the culture and values of the american people, my neighbours. I am from a city called Monterrey in north east Mexico and I have nothing but praise for what the US has done in a short amount of time as an independent nation. Hopefully in the near future we can solve our differences and bring our nations to the level of mutual respect and dignity. Only then we can make this part of the world the most prosperous, peaceful and free, but In the meantime i’ll still enjoy what your culture has to offer.
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So, on this Independence Day, cheer for America! It deserves all our praise. And fireworks.
God Bless America. God Bless our President Donald Trump.
Needless to say, I won’t be clicking on that particular link!
For some reason, I can’t imagine anyone being proud of being a pervert (homosexual); essentially a mistake of nature. And no, the homosexual lobby will never get me to admit that homosexuality is not a perversion of Nature, a denial of what humans should be. Humans are designed by their Maker to reproduce, one man and one woman joining to produce little descendants, to carry the Human Race forward into the future. The Lavender Mafia would try to make normal, heterosexual people, admit that they are the wrong to think of themselves as normal. Try as they might, the Homosexual Lobby will not succeed in making their behavior normal, or “defining deviancy down”.
This site will never, ever celebrate “Perverts Month”.
That will seem like elementary school, compared to the new tie-up between two financial-data providers. Be afraid, be VERY afraid. You voluntarily sign up for a Facebook account, and you make a conscious decision to use Google products, like internet search, Gmail, and YouTube. You can decline to use Facebook, and there are alternate search engines (I only use DuckDuckGo now).
But you, as a consumer, have NO say in how your bank, credit union, or credit card companies report your intimate financial data to the Big Three Credit Bureaus. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that most Americans don’t even know that there are three, or what their names are. I’d also hazard a guess that most people paid very little attention to the huge data-breach at one of those credit bureaus a couple of years ago. Unbeknownst to most of the victims whose financial data were stolen, Equifax mostly notified big financial institutions, and did not suffer much reputational damage. I read the Wall Street Journal religiously, so I was able to follow the story closely. I’ll bet you didn’t.
Every time you apply for any kind of credit, from a department store, to an oil company or credit card company; to a bank for a mortgage or auto loan; those companies pull your “credit report” from one or all three of the big credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, or Experian). And do they ask you if you want them to pull your report? Or do they tell you that your information is provided to the bureaus, and retrieved from them, without your knowledge or consent? Of course they don’t.
Those three companies are the biggest repositories of data about you, that you have never heard of, and probably don’t pay much attention to. Well, just recently, two companies, Equifax and Fair-Isaac (the company that invented the FICO score, which determines credit-worthiness), have teamed up to SELL CONSUMER DATA TO BANKS. Yes, that is you that they are selling to banks. And did they bother to ask you if you wanted them to sell you? Nope.
Because you are not their customer. You aren’t even the end user. You are just theproduct. Now, do you have any information about the security of all this data they are selling about you? Are you aware of any protections they offer, for your valuable financial data? Nope, because they don’t offer any. In this age of constant exposure of you, your family, your friends, and your accounts on social media, most people don’t give any thought to the potential repercussions from cyber-thieves getting ahold of all this information about you. After the big Equifax breach in 2017, the company offered free “credit-watch” services for awhile, but didn’t contact everyone whose data were stolen, and the worst effect they suffered was their CEO finally resigned, months later. Personally, I am alarmed at the offhanded way these companies play fast and loose with your data, and make lots of money off of selling you to all their real customers. Why should I have to go through all the conniptions to freeze my credit files, and all the effort to correct errors in a file I had NO say in at all?
So it might behoove you to get more informed about who has your data, and why. Ask who determines your fitness to be granted credit, and how. Ask what data your bank reports to the credit bureaus, and if you can see it. Pull your own credit score from EACH of the big three at least once a year, and make them correct any errors you find. Just keep your eyes open, and take care with your credit, because no one else will.
…but I find myself in sympathy with a particular group of Muslims, whose culture is facing extinction. Over the last year, I have been reading in the Wall Street Journal about how China is closely observing all its people, placing cameras equipped with cutting-edge facial-recognition software, wherever the people are. China is building a ubiquitous “social credit” system for ALL its people, where they are continually observed at every activity, work and play, and judged for worthiness. Those deemed unworthy are denied jobs, the ability to travel, and other benefits of life. This horrifies me.
But the group who has been feeling these effects the most are the Uighurs, a Muslim group that lives in Western China’s Xinjiang Province. The Communist Han Chinese government deeply fears these Muslims, and thinks of them as terrorists. So many Uighurs have been literally placed in concentration camps; removed from their homes and detained against their will. Their mosques that haven’t been torn down, have been abandoned, and they are not permitted to communicate with friends or family outside (and even inside) China. The malevolent Chinese Communists call these camps “vocational education centers“. Ha! Uighur neighborhoods are still and silent, and the people left there are afraid to worship, or venture very far from home.
The Communist Chinese are pretty good at this sort of thing. Remember the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s? Where children turned in their parents to the authorities, and intellectuals were sent to collective farms in the countryside for “re-education”. An entire generation of Chinese was subjected to stunted development. And how about Tibet? Since being conquered by China, it has become a shadow of its former self, its people subjugated, their culture denied.
All in all, the Chinese Uighurs have actually been pretty peaceful, and not nearly as bloodthirsty as their Arab co-religionists. But the ChiComs can have NO hint of difference or rebellion inside their borders, so they ruthlessly destroy the millennium-old culture of its smaller ethnic groups. Han Chinese move into and take over the homelands of the Uighur, leaving their cities nearly unrecognizable.
I still think that Islam is Evil, but what the Chinese are doing to their Muslim minority is purely criminal, and Evil in itself. Many in the modern world think of China as the world’s biggest market for exports, or as an exotic vacation destination. Knowing what I do about how China treats its own people, I would never, ever go to China, for any reason. They should not get any Western tourist dollars, which just help perpetuate the evil. They certainly won’t be getting any of my dollars.
This week, we went to Southern California for a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, the subject of which was Politics and Principles. The venue was a nice Hilton Hotel near the John Wayne Orange County Airport. Over two days, we had a President’s Club reception, a nice dinner, with remarks by Dr. Larry Arnn, the President of the college, and an excellent lecture by Andrew Roberts, on The Importance of Churchill for Today. He brought, and signed, copies of his book on Churchill. Which weighs about 5 pounds! I bought one, and from just the first few pages it is going to be a joy to read.
The second day, there were talks by Peter Schweitzer, who spoke on the corruption of America’s political elite (which we are all familiar with already); Dr. Arnn, who discussed American Principles and Public Policy;
Christopher Bedford, on Trump and the Media;
And Dr. Shelby Steele, who discussed the current state of race relations in America. I know of him through his excellent writing in the Wall Street Journal, and I was excited to hear him speak.
I was very lucky, because on Saturday as we were just packing to leave, I actually met Dr. Steele in the hotel corridor, so I got a chance to exchange a few words with the man, who is very gracious.
The Hillsdale program ended Thursday at 3:00PM, so we had the rest of the day free. We headed over to the nearby South Coast Plaza Mall, which is any shopper’s dream. Inside the main court, we saw their wonderful Chinese New Year display. They did the Year of the Pig proud!
That’s a pretty happy pig, sitting on all that gold! But you really have to look up to get a real feel for the holiday.
The epitome of Festive!
On Friday, we headed up to Santa Monica, to meet a Ricochet friend of ours. Ray really wanted to see Venice Beach and its Canals, and our friend offered to take us on a stroll, and then out for lunch. It was a bit later than we planned, but we had a nice walk. Just in case you are not familiar, the “canals” of Venice, California, are narrower, and much shallower than the real Venice! But one of the canals is named The Grand, and people whose houses back up to the canal milk it for all it’s worth.
That’s their house number on the left! Very creative painting on their wall.
Very pretty, but that water is about two feet deep. No danger of drowning if you fall in.
We figured that the owner of this yard was a modernist type of artist. Both the tree with the crows, and the legs above, are in the same big yard.
When was the last time you saw a dinghy with a figurehead?
This is definitely Southern California! Ripe lemons!
Of course, when we were done and back to the car on the main road, what should we see across the street?
Yep, the homeless encampment. It was like we’d never left home.
Hubby and I have a new great-niece, who just turned one year old. For her birthday, I went to the book store to find a nice picture book (we will not be giving her any toys, just books for birthdays and Chanukah). What I found was not very nice, in my opinion. It seemed to me that most, if not all, recently-written kids’ books are written with some kind of political theme in mind. We have known for many years that the “educational” establishment has been indoctrinating our young people with the standard Progressive world view, including diversity, inclusion, homosexuality, environmentalism, feminism, and “gender-fluidity”, among many other disgusting themes. Don’t we remember the furor surrounding the book Heather has Two Mommies, that was featured in some elementary schools a while ago?
I found it interesting that, for the last weekend in December, the Seattle Times and Wall Street Journal both did features on new “literature” for today’s “woke” kids. The title of the Seattle Times story was “12 groundbreaking books for young readers of all genders“. (emphasis mine). The point of view is right there in the title, you don’t even have to read any further. Some of the titles are My First Book of Feminism (for Boys); From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (written by a “trans-gender woman”); Mae Among the Stars, written about a black woman who went into space, “to push back against sexism and racism”; Stories for Boys who Dare to be Different: True Tales of Amazing Boys who Changed the World Without Killing Dragons, written to push back against “toxic masculinity”; and “The Best Man”, urging boys NOT to become “masculine”. Hey, parents, this is what your kids are being urged to read! Your boys are being taught that to be a boy, who does boy stuff, is a bad thing! Your girls are being taught that if they do not end up as scientists or astronauts, it’s because of Sexism.
In the Wall Street Journal, their children’s book editor Meghan Cox Gurdon says, in her piece entitled “You’re Never Too Young to Take a Stand”:
“When posterity looks back at the children’s books of 2018, it will notice a strong political current that, as in a river, progresses in one direction. Posterity will observe, for instance, that the presidential election of two years before continued to have a downstream effect in the form of numerous picture books that celebrate certain ways of seeing the world and offer a rebuke to others.”
She cites picture books that have themes of acceptance of immigrants, tearing down all barriers, and acceptance of same-sex marriage. Yes, little kids are learning about homosexuality and same-sex marriage! She mentions a young-adult book about a dystopia that includes bad US government interning Muslim citizens, and the good American teen who helps a fugitive escape from a prejudiced land to Canada. And she mentions all the books of 2018 that featured the female Supreme Court Justices, and no mention of the males. Girls Good; Boys Bad is the refrain. And her final mention is a book entitled Woke Baby.
So, instead of looking for new books for my little niece, I will be buying her the well-loved books of the past, including Babar the Elephant, and Madeleine. Parents, be very careful out there when choosing literature for your kids. Read everything first, and make sure that what they are reading isn’t as subversive as all these books seem to be.
