Vigango (that’s the plural, the singular is kikango) are the tombstone-equivalents of the Mijikenda tribe residing on the southeastern coast of Kenya. From the viewpoint of the natives, these simple effigies embodied the spirits of their deceased ancestors. On the other hand, just like lots of other examples of primitive art forms, these abstract anthropomorphic figures have, in later years, been adopted by the Trans-Atlantic Bourgeois Bohemians as trophies and status symbols testifying to their possessors’ affluence, highly developed aesthetic sensibilities, and sophisticated sympathy with exotic Third World peoples.
In their original tropical environment, wooden vigango simply sat there in local graveyards and were allowed to rot away, sometimes being replaced at a new location when the village moved by a second generation effigy called a kibao (plural: vibao).
The arrival of a lucrative international market for vigango naturally resulted in the removal of loads of them to the West along with their consequent collecting, connoisseurship, and conservation.
But we live in the Age of the Groveling GooGoo, bent on signaling his moral superiority and worthiness of membership in the Community of Fashion Elite by apologizing for Civilization’s alleged sins and treating the simple-minded superstitions of the primitives with a deference he’s would never remotely be willing to grant to his own inherited Religion, Culture, Country, or Civilization. Read the rest of this entry »
Oberlin College is the pricey liberal arts school which lost a massive defamation lawsuit filed by Gibson’s Bakery back in 2019. Oberlin has a fancy house called Baldwin Cottage which was built in 1886 and which is currently home to the Women and Trans Collective. The school’s website describes the collective as “a close-knit community that provides women and transgendered persons with a safe space for discussion, communal living, and personal development.” Basically it’s a special dorm that has living space for about 30 people.
The student paper, the Oberlin Review, reported last week that the school decided to upgrade the radiators in Baldwin Cottage but, to the dismay of some residents, they sent “cisgender men” to do the work. [emphasis added]
In general, I am very averse to people entering my personal space. This anxiety was compounded by the fact that the crew would be strangers, and they were more than likely to be cisgender men.
Baldwin Cottage is the home of the Women and Trans Collective. The College website describes the dorm as “a close-knit community that provides women and transgendered persons with a safe space for discussion, communal living, and personal development.” Cisgender men are not allowed to live on the second and third floors, and many residents choose not to invite cisgender men to that space.
I was angry, scared, and confused. Why didn’t the College complete the installation over the summer, when the building was empty?
A day later, the moment came. There was a knock on the door and a group of construction workers had to be let in to make the repairs. The student left for class and when he returned they were done. But they came back the next day to check on the work. The author writes, “I felt mildly violated and a little peeved.”
When the author asked around he found that some residents shared his concerns. One person was even asked to “hurry up in the shower” so workers could perform repairs in the bathroom. The author concludes that Oberlin “should have taken measures to keep students comfortable and safe” especially the ones in this special dorm.
Oberlin’s tuition, housing, meals, and fees amount to $78,147 per annum.
Want to spend $312,588.00 to educate your offspring to be phobic about the slightest possible contact with straight normal men?
Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and professor of political science at Northwestern University.
Professor Koppelman wrote a generally extremely sound essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (mostly a red rag, full of left-wing stupidity) commenting on some Yale Law School students’ and its Administration’s hysterical response to a student’s Constitution Day Party invitation.
However, the good professor opens the piece with a conspicuous bit of assurance that his head is in the Left Place ideologically. Catch this! (Use Outline link, because of paywall.)
The movement for diversity and inclusion has improved people’s lives in many tangible ways. A few days ago at Northwestern Law School, where I’m a professor, I went into the men’s restroom and saw that the school had provided tampons and sanitary pads on a shelf there. It made me happy. There are people here who menstruate and identify as male. Their needs matter, and the school now recognizes that.
But in other respects…
Jesus, Mary, and Freddie! Obviously hanging out with the loonies and wet ends teaching at contemporary elite universities addles the brain and assimilates even normal, well-educated people into group insanity.
Let me break it to you, Professor Koppelman: “People ..who menstruate and identify as male” need their heads examined a lot more than they need special accommodation in lavatories intended for men who pee standing up.
Where does the group insanity that makes the Modern University a hive of totalitarian crackpottery and the enemy of America, Western Civilization, and even the Liberal Ideal of Free Speech originate? It starts with the moral cowardice that declines to stand up in opposition to any complaint or demand, however absurd, irrational, or insolent, from anyone or any group bullying with the moral jiu jitsu of Victimhood.
But, as I’ve acknowledged, if you excerpt that paragraph of Woke Wankery, its a good essay that hits Yale Law’s nail solidly in the head.
Dick Press (of the illustrious J. Press family) has an amusing tale of meeting the former British Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Atlee when he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth in 1959.
Clement Attlee memorably defeated Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a landslide June, 1945 election taking his place alongside President Harry S. Truman and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. Following his retirement from politics Attlee was elevated to the peerage taking his seat in the House of Lords in 1955.
For reasons unknown, perhaps my perceived joie de vivre, I was selected to be a member of the Welcoming Committee for the Great Issues Class, a senior curriculum subject.
The Great Issues course brought to campus a weekly series of illustrious speakers to educate seniors on pressing national and international issues of the time. Speakers included Robert Frost (class of 1896), former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, containment strategist George Kennan, NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller (class of 1930), and conservative commentator Bill Buckley.
My assignment on a bleak snowy winter afternoon was to pick up Lord Attlee at the nearby White River Junction, Vermont railroad station where he was expected to arrive from Boston. I was to transport him back to Hanover. The conveyance was my battered 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air, veteran of numerous fraternity road trips to Smith and Skidmore, nicknamed “Sheldon Chevrolet” and always parked in the back lot of my Chi Phi fraternity.
As Lord Attlee arrived at the primitive White River station, he emerged quite alone introducing himself to me as if I were but a hired retainer. Holding a note telling him a student, Richard Press, would meet him when he arrived. I retrieved his two pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage that barely fit in the back trunk along with the proverbial spare tire.
“Mr. Press, my ungodly journey from North Station on an unspeakable turn of the century train car requires me to take whiskey refreshment. Kindly take me to wherever we might find immediate relief. I would most certainly enjoy your company elucidating your own Dartmouth College experience.”
Twenty minutes later we were seated at the cocktail lounge of The Hanover Inn, normally not a student domain. Lord Attlee ordered the lounge attendant, gaped open mouth in apparent trauma, “two double Scotch Whiskeys for each of us.” …
Dick Press presents the Labour leader in a very positive light. I could not help but recall that it was his stupid policies that kept Britain starving under food rationing until 1954.
Winston Churchill had several great comments on Atlee. He once said:
“An empty taxi pulled up and out stepped Clement Attlee.”
Churchill described Atlee as:
“A modest man, who has much to be modest about.”
According to Churchill:
Winston Churchill entered a men’s washroom in the House of Commons one day and, observing Labor leader Clement Attlee standing before the urinal, took up his stance at the opposite end of the room. “Feeling stand-offish today, are we, Winston?” Attlee chirped. “That’s right,” Churchill replied. “Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”
The new hypersonic glide vehicle was launched with a “Long March” rocket.
The Financial Times tells us today, in Mid-October, that China last August tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle featuring new technology that our military doesn’t understand and giving China a first-strike capability we have no way to counter.
China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise.
Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.
The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised.
The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation.
“We have no idea how they did this,” said a fourth person.
The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum. They fly at five times the speed of sound, slower than a ballistic missile. But they do not follow the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile and are manoeuvrable, making them harder to track.
Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese nuclear weapons policy who was unaware of the test, said a hypersonic glide vehicle armed with a nuclear warhead could help China “negate” US missile defence systems which are designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles.
“Hypersonic glide vehicles . . . fly at lower trajectories and can manoeuvre in flight, which makes them hard to track and destroy,” said Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A fascinating thing to see. So many automobiles in 1906! High-spirited, active people, not one of whom is still alive today. In fact, of the many people we see, one realizes that some of them, possibly quite a few of them will very soon be killed.
Jeffrey Flynn-Paul, a serious historian, writing in the British Spectator, does a superb job of demolishing the leftist “Stolen Continent/European Genocide” narrative that has been swallowed whole by the entire international pseudo-intellectual community.
The narrative of the ‘stolen country’ or ‘Native American genocide’ does not stand up to scrutiny by any honest and clear-sighted historian. It is a dangerously myopic and one-sided interpretation of history. It has only gained currency because most practising historians and history teachers are either susceptible to groupthink, or else have been cowed into silence by fear of losing their jobs. Reduced to its puerile form of ‘statement of guilt’, this myth puts 100 per cent of the burden on Europeans who are held responsible for all historical evil, while the First Nations people are mere victims; martyrs even, whose saintlike innocence presumes that their civilisation and society were practically perfect in every way. This is no way to honour or respect the realities of First Nation lives and their agency. And it helps perpetuate the idea that the US and Canada are fundamentally illegitimate societies, and that by implication, every other country on Earth is legitimate. If we were to be honest, there is not a single country on Earth which did not displace natives, or which did not engage in nasty wars or ethnic cleansings at many points during its history. The current fad for holding up the US and Canada to special scrutiny and particular opprobrium is therefore distorting at best. … Read the rest of this entry »
Administrators at Yale Law School spent weeks pressuring a student to apologize for a “triggering” email in which he referred to his apartment as a “trap house,” a slang term for a place where people buy drugs. Part of what made the email “triggering,” the administrators told the student, was his membership in a conservative organization.
The second-year law student, a member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative Federalist Society, had invited classmates to an event cohosted by the two groups. “We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House … by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc,” he wrote in a Sept. 15 email to the Native American listserv. In keeping with the theme, he said, the mixer would serve “American-themed snacks” like “Popeye’s chicken” and “apple pie.”…
Within minutes, the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term “trap house” indicated a blackface party.
“I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough,” the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote in the forum. “Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face.” She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said “has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric.”
“Trap house” has been a term used in progressive pop culture since at least 2016, when the socialist podcast “Chapo Trap House” burst onto the scene. Hosted by three white men, the podcast has received sympathetic profiles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, none of which suggest that there is anything racial about its name. Once associated with inner city crack dens, “trap house” has also become generic slang for any place where young people can score beer. …
Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message.
At a Sept. 16 meeting, which the student recorded and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word “trap” connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface. Those “triggering associations,” Eldik said, were “compounded by the fried chicken reference,” which “is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S.”
Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society had “triggered” his peers.
“The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities,” Eldik said. “That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.”
The statement signals that administrators at the country’s top-ranked law school now regard membership in mainstream conservative circles as a legitimate object of offense—and as potential grounds for discipline. The Federalist Society, founded by Yale Law students in 1982, has spread nationwide over the past four decades and become one of most influential legal groups in the country. Members include all six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, as well as the late Antonin Scalia, who spoke at the society’s inaugural conference.
The Civil Rights Movement of the last century has metastasized into an aggressive form of totalitarianism bent on eliminating freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought. The current Woke regime makes Jim Crow look positively benign.
Of course, not only can they surreptitiously mulct your savings, if you are a conspicuous opponent of the Regime, they can freeze your account completely and leave you penniless.
