John Derbyshire has some characteristically highly politically-incorrect comments on racial issues in America.

“It’s hard to find a sympathetic character in the entire saga,” opined our editors about the Zimmerman trial. Oh, I don’t know. I’m quite sympathetic toward Zim. He thought he’d be an active citizen, helping to keep his neighborhood safe. The poor sap thought he was living in the old, free America, where citizens looked out for each other, raised barns together, attended town meetings, and the rest.

That America is long gone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. Town meetings nowadays are packed with activists from ACORN and GLAAD, and before you can raise a barn you need to spend two years and $100,000 on lawyers to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. Whom did Zim think Neighborhood Watch has to watch out for? The poor guy’s living in the past, and that’s something toward which I’m definitely sympathetic.

Read the whole thing.

My wife Karen Myers recently started writing fantasy novels. Karen is a technical early-adopter, so, typically, she has opted for Independent Publishing, and is an active reader and correspondent these days in Indie Publication forums.

One of her Indie correspondents recommended to Karen the hot new Indie-published book these days. Its title is The Girl Who Would Be King.

Taxonomically, GWWBK is a Young Adult fantasy, but I think it is really a comic book/graphic novel, which (at the moment) is lacking its illustrations. GWWBK is the story of two orphaned girls, one good, one bad, who both discover that they possess superhuman strength and healing abilities.

The good redhead, Bonnie Braverman, devotes her newly discovered talents to fighting crime and helping people in distress. The bad blonde, Lola Lefever, becomes a serial killer, equips herself with a gang of criminals, and has a go at making herself King of Los Angeles.

The two girls share a mysterious link and are inevitably destined to fight.

Another review is here.

Highly recommended light fiction.

Bob Parks (who is black) posted an unusually frank essay describing all the kinds of things nobody talks about, originally posted by a teacher in the rants and raves section of the Mobile, Alabama craigslist.

The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you’re dreaming. This is important, so I’m happy to repost – indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. …

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.

She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop. …

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement. …

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy–in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers–and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.

One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food–not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.

Read the whole thing.

From Vanderleun via the News Junkie.

I live far from urban American decadence, way out in the boondocks. The main drawback of which is crappy Internet delivered via satellite. For some time now, I had been noticing that one of the major advertising blocks in my sidebar was missing, but I just figured that particular item had taken to loading slowly, and I was too busy to sit around waiting for it.

Technical savant that I am, it has taken me a mere six months to take the time to delve deeper into what was going on. I finally yesterday identified what was not coming up, and then logged into Google Adsense to investigate.

What do you know! I had no ads.

And why was that? Maybe there was a message somewhere… I looked and found this message from “The Google AdSense Team:”

Hello,

The Google AdSense Team

————————————————–

So I was banned by Google Adsense, back in last November, which I did not realize since the notice was (narcissistically) sent to my Google email address (which I never actually use).

The reason was my publication of “sensitive, tragic or hurtful content,” identified as a posting from 19 September 2012 reporting that France closed 20 of its embassies after the (vulgar and sophomoric) French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, for the second time, had published crude cartoons mocking Mohammed.

My posting made a point of publishing images of the actual cartoons, which at the time many news organizations refrained from making available to their readers for fear of Muslim retaliation. I thought the cartoons were trivial in content and in poor taste, but I did also think that Islamic threats, violence, and intimidation challenging free speech in Western countries, and the cowardice of the establishment media, were quite serious issues and well worthy of attention.

So, Google Adsense, I find, is, in essence, enforcing Islamic prohibitions against even publishing, in the context of news reporting, cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

I was invited “to appeal.” Google absolutely refuses to enter into any other kind of communication with as insignificant a former business partner as myself.

When I clicked my way through the “appeal” on-line forms, I found that an appeal really consisted of a form begging Google to re-instate one’s advertising account and swearing that one had removed whatever it was that Google didn’t like.

Well, I have edited my sidebar code. Good-bye, Google Adsense. That space block is now dedicated to Amazon Associates advertising.

As for the Google Adsense team: “Ich heisse Götz von Berlichingen”

Personally, I think it is disgraceful that an American company is taking it upon itself to define and punish so-called “hurtful content,” even when the quotation objectionable to the camel-fornicating community was made specifically for news reporting purposes. But Google is, we must recall, located in California, land of left-wing bedwetters, where the eucalyptus trees exude so much self-entitlement, sanctimoniousness, and political correctness that the entire atmosphere is full of the stuff. What can one expect from a bunch of metrosexual millennials who go to work in Bermuda shorts and hoodies?

KWWL story.

Sumner is in Northeastern Iowa.

Leave it to the Washington Post to celebrate Independence Day by getting some Canadian “free-lance writer” and self-styled historian to compare the USA (where we actually are allowed to hunt with dogs and own firearms) unfavorably with other (even more statist and socialist) “English-speaking countries.”

Paul Pirie (surprise! surprise!) immediately plays the old Slavery card, says we have too many criminals in jail (well, I may go along with him in opposing our victimless crime laws), and contends that we don’t take enough days off and work too hard. He even then proceeds, withe the height of insolence, to suggest that “[p]erhaps it’s time for Americans to accept that their revolution was a failure and renounce it.”

————————————-

The correct reply to M. Pirie (and the editors of the Washington Post) would be the same given by Sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman) to English Bob (Richard Harris) in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” (1992).

———————————

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstance which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

—William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 1948.