Blacks – Page 10 – The Burning Platform

English Spoken Here

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.

Nothing is more important than acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things without first being grounded in real grammatical English.

When these kids grow up, their manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at least as much as the color of their skin — and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content of their character

I’m sure by now that the racial justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not. Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it is? Apparently so.

Notice that the speech issue — how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race” that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful, too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?

Continue reading “English Spoken Here”

PHILLY IS BALTIMORE

There was a protest yesterday in Philly. The organizers surely don’t sense the irony of their slogan for the rally – PHILLY IS BALTIMORE. They are right, but for reasons they refuse to acknowledge or comprehend.

The march started at 40th street in University City and proceeded down Locust Walk through the University of Penn campus. I wonder why these protestors weren’t at work in the middle of the afternoon. I guess they all used vacation days to protest the death of Freddie Gray and let us all know that black lives matter.

It’s funny, because a black cop was gunned down in cold blood by two black thugs a month ago in North Philly and there were no protests. Not a peep from the black community. It’s funny, because a white man walking his dog was slaughtered by two black Overbrook High honor students in West Philly a month ago and there were no protests. White people didn’t burn down their CVS as retribution. Black people are murdering other black people on a daily basis in Philly, but there are no protests. But an incident that took place 120 miles away in another city is reason for protest in Philly?

Continue reading “PHILLY IS BALTIMORE”

WHOSE FAULT IS BALTIMORE?

I’ve seen the liberal lying MSM pondering how WE could allow the riots, looting, burning and lawlessness to happen, as if it is our collective fault. Obama stands before his teleprompter and pontificates about the need for us to end the poverty that supposedly led to Purge Night in Charm City. That term cracks me up. The city has so much charm, its football team once snuck out of town overnight and headed to Indianapolis. It has so much charm its baseball team was forced to play a game with no fans in the stands.

I think most people can agree that Freddie Gray, a petty drug dealer, was killed in police custody for the crime of looking suspicious. The policemen who killed him deserve to go to jail for murder. As usual, the powers that be circled the wagons and intended to exonerate the hero first responders. The people of Baltimore had a right to be pissed. They had a right to protest. They didn’t have a right to burn businesses and cars. They didn’t have the right to riot, loot, and injure others.

It is the police department created and controlled for decades by Democratic progressive politicians that has committed the atrocities against the people who have been electing these progressives year after year. Baltimore has a corrupt, reckless, out of control police department enabled by a crooked and incompetent Baltimore politicians. The rap sheet for Baltimore’s finest is long:

Police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004)
Two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005)
An officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011)
An officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014)
The city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone.

The cries of racism and white oppression ring hollow. It’s a tired storyline. Facts are always inconvenient to race baiters with an agenda to extract more money from whites with a guilty conscience and the inability or unwillingness to speak the truth. Let’s examine some facts about good old Charm City, USA.

Continue reading “WHOSE FAULT IS BALTIMORE?”

Despair seen in Baltimore is rife in other cities

Guest Post by John Kass

Americans watched the fires burning in Baltimore, and the police retreating, the mayor there already having given the thugs all the space they needed to destroy.

I figure that’s when you felt it. Whether you live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or any other large urban area, you felt it:

This could happen here, as it has happened before.

Here’s all that it takes: A bad police shooting, or a merchant killing a black kid for stealing candy, some frightened white guy on the train with a gun, and political activists begin shouting race.

Watching the fires burn in Baltimore, remembering those fires burning in Ferguson, Mo., you may have given a passing thought to civil society. And how thin is that wall that protects it, as if it were built of paper left out in rain and dried in the sun, so easy to poke through, so easy to burn.

Some of you may have opted out, but I just couldn’t. I remember Chicago in the 1960s and the white migration out, and the black migration out soon afterward, the same thing happening in Detroit and other cities.

Then as now there was the anger and the fires and the looting and the politicians wringing their hands, afraid to offend, later meeting with gang leaders to have “a conversation” for peace.

It is the liturgy of race and rage and violence that many of us, unfortunately, now know by heart. And it was a warning.

The first warning, of course, came as they all do: unintentionally, this time from the foolish mouth of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

She was commenting on the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police. Gray’s spine was severed. Six Baltimore cops are under investigation.

Protesters wanted to protest. Most were peaceful. And that’s when she issued her now famous quote that should be seared on the mind of every mayor in the country.

“It’s a very delicate balancing act,” she said, “because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

Space to destroy? They used that space all right. They burned cars in it, and businesses, and senior citizen housing, the cops retreating to give the rioters “space to destroy,” the thugs advancing, as the rest of us watched.

Continue reading “Despair seen in Baltimore is rife in other cities”

THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING

Marketwatch posted an article this week titled Why the American Dream is Unraveling, in 4 charts. As usual, the MSM journalist and the liberal Harvard academic can create charts that reveal a huge problem, but they completely misdiagnose the causes and offer the typical wrong solution of taking more money from producers and handing it to the poor, with no strings attached. This has been the standard operating procedure since LBJ began his War on Poverty 50 years ago. Do these control freaks ever step back and assess how that war is going?

The poverty rate had plunged from 34% in 1950 to below 20% before LBJ ever declared war. It continued down to 15% just as the welfare programs began to be implemented. The percentage of people living in poverty hasn’t budged from the 15% range since the war began. This war has been just as successful as the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Any time a politician declares war on something, expect a huge price tag and more of the “problem” they are declaring war upon.

The Federal government runs over 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Over 100 million Americans received benefits from at least one of these programs. Federal and state governments spent $943 billion in 2013 on these programs at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient (not including Social Security & Medicare). That is 27% of the total Federal budget. Welfare spending as a percentage of the Federal budget was less than 2% prior to the launch of the War on Poverty.

In the 50 years since this war started, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. In terms of LBJ’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has utterly failed. In fact, a large proportion of the population is now completely dependent upon government handouts, incapable of self-sufficiency, and enslaved in a welfare mentality that has destroyed their communities.

Continue reading “THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING”

Obama Versus America

Guest Post by Thomas Sowell

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.

Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.

If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.

Continue reading “Obama Versus America”

WHITES TIRING OF DIVERSITY B.S.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Oprah and her black agenda movie Selma, are a complete flop. There was a massive advertising campaign for weeks before its release. On Rotten Tomatoes, the ultra-liberal film critics gave it a 99% rating. Of course, they were afraid of being called racist if they admitted the movie sucked. How courageous of these faux journalists. The hype was off the charts. They released it the week before MLK day. There are re-enactments of the Selma march tied to the movie.

And after all of that it did a measly $11.3 million in its opening weekend. Taken 3, which got a 10% rating from the courageous critics took in $39 million. In it’s second weekend (MLK weekend) receipts collapsed by 27% to a pitiful $8.3 million. American Sniper opened at $90 million during the same weekend. Selma will be out of theaters in a matter of weeks. It barely even got any Oscar consideration.

And it gets even better. The black leaders of urban ghetto kill zones across the country have been using your tax dollars to buy tickets for little black kids to see the movie for “free”. Checkout the website and see for yourself:

http://selmastudenttickets.com/

The liberal MSM says black leaders have raised $2.1 million to send kids to the movie for free. I call bullshit. The non-profits who raised the money are entirely supported by local, state and federal government funding. Therefore, you are paying. So, this movie has taken in less than $20 million and $2 million was paid for by you.

Continue reading “WHITES TIRING OF DIVERSITY B.S.”

THIS COULD HAVE BEEN OBAMA’S UNIVERSITY

I find this story terribly amusing. Cheyney University is one of PA’s state run universities. The others include Penn State, West Chester, Kutztown, and Shippensburg. It seems Cheyney is essentially bankrupt. None of the other 13 state universities are in dire financial straits. The other 13 have one thing in common. They allow white kids into their university. Cheyney is an all black university, whose enrollment has dropped from 3,000 in 1983 to 1,000 today.

With a graduation rate of 9%, it sounds like a top notch educational institution with brilliant students. Well at least Obama’s student loans are going to good use – drugs, malt liquor, and iGadgets. Of course none of these loans will be paid back – but don’t worry you are on the hook.

Their master plan is to increase their recruiting efforts. I’m sure the Phila School district, with its 50% graduation rate and average score of 700 on the math and verbal SAT will be a great place to recruit. They should offer an ounce of crack cocaine for every application.

When will the farce of supporting black people with the hard earned money of white people so they can feel good about themselves end? This joke of a university should be shut down today. Is that racist?

Oldest U.S. black college on verge of financial collapse

Wed, Dec 17 2014

By David DeKok

HARRISBURG, Penn. (Reuters) – The nation’s oldest black college, Cheyney University, one of Pennsylvania’s 14 state-run universities, is on the verge of a financial meltdown that threatens its ability to continue operating, a state official said on Wednesday.

Cheyney’s student body has shrunk by two-thirds, to about 1,000, since its 1983 peak, and its four-year graduation rate is just 9 percent. A quarter of students never receive a degree, and student loan defaults are high.

“Cheyney is in dire, dire, dire straits,” the state’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, said. The university has had a deficit for four of the last five years, growing to a cumulative $12.3 million shortfall as of June 30, 2013.

Cheyney’s fiscal problems – students who are unable to repay debt and increasing pension costs – were exacerbated by cutbacks in state higher education funding.

DePasquale called upon the State System of Higher Education – the governing body for the state-owned universities – and the legislature to help Cheyney find a way out of “a vicious, destructive cycle” in which declining enrollment and state funding leads to less money for investments that could attract much-needed students.

Cheyney, located in the Philadelphia suburb of the same name, was founded in 1837 after Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys bequeathed part of his estate to build a school to educate descendents of the African race, according to the university’s website.

Its alumni include journalist Ed Bradley, state and U.S. elected officials, several National Football League players, a U.S. ambassador to South Africa, and Robert Bogle, chief executive of The Philadelphia Tribune.

Cheyney “has done many good things since 1837,” interim university president Frank Pogue said in a statement. “We are doing many good things today, and we will do many good things in the coming years.”

The university has begun to shrink its workforce by 23 percent and to cut offices’ discretionary spending in half, DePasquale’s audit said.

School officials are planning more aggressive recruitment and will try to improve student retention and graduation rates. They hope to present a new policy to be implemented in January.

Across the country, states have cut higher education spending, especially as they struggled to recover from the 2007-2009 recession.

From fiscal 2003 through 2012, state funding fell by 12 percent while median tuition rose 55 percent across all public colleges, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report published Tuesday.

(Reporting by David DeKok in Harrisburg, Penn.; Editing by Hilary Russ and Leslie Adler)