Month: November 2020

Reference: Macy’s under fire after calling Black sorority in parade ‘diverse dance group’ | Fox News

                The Zeta Phi Beta Centennial Steppers is a group of dancing performers in this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Zeta Phi Beta is a black sorority of long lineage.  During the performance, Macy’s tweeted out the following:

“What’s that sound, you ask? Why it’s the diverse dance group, Zeta Phi Beta Steppers!  Performing a special routine they put together to help us celebrate this unprecedented year.”

                Seems pretty innocuous to us; rather happy and celebratory in fact.  But boy oh boy (is that phrase offensive?  Good),  did that light up the nasty and useless crowd that apparently relies on social media for things to be offended by like the rest of us rely on air to breathe.  As the above article by Julia Musto states:

                “The tweet prompted a response from MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” host Joy Reid who explained that the Centennial Steppers are “not a ‘dance group.'”

                “Zeta Phi Beta is a Black sorority founded at Howard U in 1920 and part of the Divine Nine,” she said. The Divine Nine is a coalition of nine Black sororities and fraternities that make up the National Pan-Hellenic Council.

                Social media users called Macy’s description “reductive” and asserted that Macy’s had used the Centennial Steppers.

                “I’m tired of businesses using Black entities (including Historically Black Sororities and Fraternities) as a means to look more ‘diverse’ and accepting,” added @_AwesomeKid. “It’s clear how performative this attempt was, due to your lack of research for your own parade performers.”

                Now really, you have to go out of your way to be offended by that tweet.  Maybe the group isn’t itself diverse, but the Macy’s parade is wildly diverse if you’ve ever seen one.  But to jump on a well-meaning sponsor for this gossamer-thin reason just highlights the social backwardness and lack of proportion these morons prowling social media have in their quest to find something – anything! – to be offended by so they can clamber onto their soapbox once more and “educate” the rest of us in their wokeness.  (Sorry, that’s a pretty involved sentence). 

                There once was a rule when writing papers for school – write it, and then put it in your desk drawer and forget about it for a day.  That is, think before you speak (or write), because knee-jerk reactions are just that, made by jerks, and usually problematic.  That is our lesson for today to all those idiots who get their jollies from prowling social media for things to be offended by.  Even if they don’t learn anything from this message, they at least will have found something else to be offended by. 

                Well, here we are, near the eve of Black Friday, the annual national holiday celebrating racism and discrimination in all their varied and wondrous forms, created by the discriminatory systemically racist white supremacist rulers of the country as part of their ongoing plot to diminish and degrade and eventually eliminate blacks.  So let’s celebrate! 

                We are busy preparing our float for the Black Friday parade, complete with CSA flags, people in CSA uniforms and KKK costumes, nooses hanging from trees, etc.  Miss Black Friday will appear on our float this year as well (she will be white, of course). This year we are debuting “The Reader of Words” – a person at a podium dressed as a liberal elitist white male college professor, complete with a turtleneck shirt and corduroy jacket with elbow patches (and white hair and a goatee like Colonel Sanders), smoking a pipe.  He (yes, the patriarchy extends to Black Friday events) will solemnly read aloud each word alleged over the prior year by the BLM woke crowd to be upsetting, offensive, racist, discriminatory, or as making someone in one or another disadvantaged and historically discriminated-against group feel violated or “unsafe” and thus necessary to cancel. Those words include but are not limited to:

nigger, n-word, blacklist, looting or looters, master bedroom, housemaster, overseer (as in Board of Bar Overseers), plantation, grandfathered, guys, gals, redskins, Trump, Trumpism, poverty, dinosaur, Halloween, Christmas, divorce, disease, abuse, evolution, homelessness, “homes with swimming pools”, hunting, religion, slavery, terrorism, weapons, witchcraft, sorcery, war, violence, basket case, ladies lingerie, illegal alien, third world, lame, man up, are you deaf, crazy, psycho, long time no see, no can do, hysterical, you guys, white lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, retarded. . . .

                Whew!  We’re exhausted and we’re not 10% done yet, but we’ll stop here for the nonce.  FYI, some of these are from a list of words that the New York City Department of Education wants to eliminate from standardized tests because they are “upsetting” to students.  Really.  We don’t have to make up this stuff, it’s all around us these days, often paid for by your tax dollars.    https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/26/war-on-words-nyc-dept-of-education-wants-50-forbidden-words-removed-from-standardized-tests/

                At any rate, we hope you can join us, wear your own costumes and bring the kids, it should be quite a show! 

                Today we have whoever invented automated voicemail and the other associated ways that companies and government agencies can avoid speaking with anyone.  Who among us has not been tortured and wasted large parts of our lives by “If you want X, press 2”?   Used to be you could bypass all that by tapping 0, but they’ve wised up on that.  Before then, an actual person answered the phone.  Those people were called “receptionists”, a position now more or less consigned to the dustbin of history. 

                We’re sure that more than one person has seriously contemplated slitting their throat while slogging through one of these diabolical devices. 

                Now they are getting more sophisticated (which in this context means being able to eliminate perople entirely from the process) and you just can’t get a real person on the line for love nor money.  Try looking on a website for a phone number to call if you need help.  You can’t find one.  Something went phlooey with our Xfinity phone the other day and there’s no phone number, no people anywhere.  Apparently Xfinity has no customer service employees anymore. 

                What you can find, and we did, are “chats.”  And now those chats many times, as in this case, don’t get you to a real person anymore, they’re just bots with fixed answers to fixed questions, and if you keep pestering them they just refer you to user forums, as in this case, so you have to hope and pray someone else had the same issue and managed somehow to get it solved.  If you want anything more than that, well, we suppose you have to go to that company’s headquarters and picket outside until the media picks it up.  Then maybe you’ll get some answers quickly, though you also will probably get cancelled the next day. 

                So for this person or persons, death by hanging and drawing and quartering is too good, but we’re hard-pressed to find a more painful sentence.  Perhaps just trussing up him or her in a filthy cell with their own automated voicemail on 24/7/365 at the highest volume possible.  Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?

Reference:       https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-american-medical-association-officially-recognized-racism-as-a-public-health-threat-saying-it-creates-and-entrenches-health-inequality/ar-BB1b69xD?ocid=msedgdhp

            Well, the American Medical Association almost missed the bandwagon on racism, but apparently they have WOKEn up and joined a bunch of other woke bandwagon-riders including several cities and towns in Massachusetts such as Beverly, Boston, Chicopee, Everett, Framingham, Holyoke, Longmeadow, Medford, Revere, Somerville and Springfield.  According to the AMA, racism “negatively impacts and exacerbates health inequities among historically marginalized communities.” 

            Apparently, anything that bums someone out is a “public health threat” since it affects their mental health.  Well, certainly being poor, living in crappy areas, not having health insurance or having lousy insurance, living in areas infested with gangs and drugs, are all going to take a toll on anyone’s health.  And despite many blacks living in such lower-income areas (because of racism, of course) and having less money and lousy or no health insurance (because of racism, of course) and being getting lousy medical treatment (because of racism, of course), they blame their lousy health and outcomes on, surprise, racism. 

            One prominent example cited features statistics seeming to show that blacks and Hispanics are more vulnerable to COVID-19 and die from it in greater numbers than other ethnic groups (meaning whites of course).  The source of this particular analysis comes from, yes, The New York Times, that bastion of reliable, unbiased and fair “journalism.”  Their analysis shows that blacks and Hispanics are three times more likely to catch the virus, and twice as likely to die from it.  Another analysis, the largest of its kind apparently, found blacks in the US and UK are only twice as likely to get the virus. 

            Racism is the reason, of course, and not biology, because blacks have health conditions that make them statistically more vulnerable to infectious diseases generally.  “But that’s not simply genetics; it’s access to care, fresh food, and exposure to dangerous environments.”  As the above article states:

“We have to make sure that people understand that race is not biology,” Dr. Camara Jones, an epidemiologist and physician with affiliations at Morehouse, Emory, and Harvard universities, previously told Business Insider. “This false narrative of biologically-based differences in the races? It has been debunked.”

            Has it?  Well, blacks are black and whites are white.  That seems to be a biological difference.  Blacks disproportionately ascend to the heights of sports, such as basketball, football, track and field, etc., etc., despite racism.  That seems to be a biological difference.  Blacks constantly moan about their special type of kinky hair, which we cannot dislike no matter how looney and off-putting it is.  That seems to be a biological difference. Many black men cannot shave because of some medical situation peculiar to black men. That seems like a biological difference. 

            At least one study shows that blacks have higher bone density mass than whites, leading to fewer bone fractures.  https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/88/2/642/2845134.  Another study showed that biological differences between black and white individuals with breast cancer were linked to genetic ancestry, which appears to be a biological difference as the author states.   https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20170504/biological-differences-between-black-white-individuals-with-breast-cancer-linked-to-genetic-ancestry.

            Yet another study concluded that “[t]he new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ.”  https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf.  Sickle cell disease, an inherited disorder of the red blood cells, is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, which seems to be a another biological difference. 

            One geneticist has noted that:

“Analysis of DNA allows us to measure with some precision the genetic distance between different populations of human beings.  By this criterion, Caucasians and Asians are relatively similar, whereas Asians and Africans are somewhat more different.  The differences between the groups are small – but they are real.”

https://www.amacad.org/publication/unequal-nature-geneticists-perspective-human-differences.

            So it simply is not accurate to say that there are no biological differences between blacks and whites.  There are many in fact.  Those who maintain otherwise are using a politically correct advocacy narrative, not a science-driven one.  It is far easier to maintain the narrative that racism is the cause of all the woes that have befallen blacks if you can eliminate biology as a factor, but you simply cannot and be taken seriously. 

            Nevertheless, in the interests of political correctness, the obvious solution to appease the BLM crowd and white consciences is to build nice new houses in nice neighborhoods (or give them ours) for blacks far from nasty environments, give them all nice comfortable well-paying jobs with 100% paid for excellent healthcare and other lovely perks (job qualifications don’t matter because they are, of course, inherently racist and created by white supremacists), give their kids a good education (meaning having black teachers teach them all about the sins of America pursuant to the 1619 Project, which is the new K-12 gospel), send them all to HWCs (“Historically White Colleges” for free (or pay their student loans off if they’ve already been), graduate school too, and pay them each a reparations stipend of, say for a starting point, $50,000/year in perpetuity beginning at age 18 (more if they can document having slave ancestors). 

We also have to eliminate law enforcement entirely, send all whites (and those Asians, who don’t like blacks at all) to reeducation camps, commandeer all white property (because it all comes from our white supremacy and systemic racism) and distribute it according to social justice principles (whatever the heck those are).  Bernie and Liz and the “Squad” will certainly shepherd this approach through Congress and Kamala Harris will surely put a pen in doddering Joe Biden’s hand and help him sign it.  That should take care of everything.  The rest of us? Well, there’s a nice dumpster down the street for rent.

                Today we have whoever invented the lottery scratch ticket.  Who among us has not had to wade through a knee-high ocean of these things whenever trying to get into one or another convenience store?  Or had them blowing into your yard, or clogging drains near your home.  Who among us has not seen, when either exiting or entering one of these convenience stores, people hunched over in their cars furiously scratching away with the hope of riches, only to see their disappointed faces when the stars did not align for them?  Who among us has not stood in line at one of these stores while someone ahead of us in line buys $50 or $100 of these things, with money that in all likelihood could have been better spent elsewhere? 

                Yes, it’s indeed unfortunate that the state has jumped into the gambling business with both feet, between the lottery and the casinos and basically imposed a new tax on a population that can ill-afford it.  Not to mention creating the sad reliance of cities and towns on lottery income for “local aid.”  But it seems to us they didn’t have to buy into a process that produces probably a sizeable portion of the litter along roadways and parking lots throughout the state.  We wonder if this inventor gets a royalty or residual for each ticket.  If so, his or her wealth must rival Elon Musk’s. 

                In any event, we believe the world would be a better place without scratch lottery tickets, and their inventor should be ferreted out, hung, then drawn and quartered in full public view.  Or perhaps more fitting, burned at the stake by a heap of scratch tickets set ablaze.  While the flames will eventually consume him or her, the toxins from whatever glossy unnatural stuff they’re covered with probably will do the job first.

                By the way, we’re taking nominations for Inventors Who Should Be Taken Out And Shot; just leave a comment.

            Did you know that Kendall Jenner has 141 million “followers” on Instagram?  Right, we know, who the hell is Kendall Jenner?  Did you know that her sister, Kim Kardashian, has 191 million “followers”?  Right, we know, who the hell is Kim Kardashian?  Many other so-called “celebrities” have tens of millions of “followers”.  Most of them have little-to-no actual talent or credentials about anything.  And there’s a whole new breed of people who also never did anything other than become so-called “influencers” on the internet using one or other social media forums, such as Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok, etc. 

            “Influencers” in fact are just comical.  It’s apparently an actual career path these days.  You may recall Lori Loughlin (another no-talent nobody, but who is a “celebrity” nonetheless), who currently is in the pokey for buying off people to get both her daughers into USC.  One of those daughters was apparently a budding “influencer” but whose “career” now has been side-tracked by the adverse publicity surrounding her mother.  Well, when in Rome…

            There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of idiots in this country who turn to these “celebrities” to “follow” for information and opinions.  If you add media “personalities”, who generally also are idiots regardless of which political party they advocate for, just supposedly better informed, and their “followers,” what you end up with is an entire country of idiots that just cannot think for themselves.  Of course, just thinking aloud gets you cancelled these days, so it’s way safer to adopt someone else’s pre-packaged politically correct opinions and feelings.

            There used to be people called “reporters” who would write non-biased articles describing in purely factual terms what happened where, why, how and by whom.  Yes, sounds quaint, doesn’t it?  There used to be an op-ed portion of the newspaper, which was the designated place for opinion pieces.  The rest was actual news, except for the funnies and crossword.  But we have to think back probably 40-50 years for these memories.  Today everyone with a byline in the paper is an opinion columnist with whatever the “news” is being smothered in a frosting of personal opinion, bias and prejudice.  When the headline is “Here Are The President’s Lies Today,” then unbiased reporting is out the window.  What he said is supposed to be the point, not what the reporter or his/her paper thinks about it.  That’s what the op-ed page is for.

            But thanks to cable TV and the plethora of channels, all of which need programming to fill their time, the talking heads are almost inescapable and have become just another piece of the celebrity business.  Not a one of them talks any sense – the game is to either interview friends who agree with them, in which case it’s a lovefest.  Or it is to interview enemies, in which case the point is to goad, insult and embarrass them so the interviewer can show how smart he or she is, and how hopelessly ignorant and insane the guest is. 

            But all these clowns (we mean, “media personalities”) are also “celebrities” these days, with their own fanatical following regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.  Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Robin Roberts, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, they’re all the same.  Even people who used to have some talent are in on the act now, like the comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, etc.

            And all of this is based more or less on the assumption by all of them, and their hardcore supporters, that the rest of us are just too stupid to separate the wheat from the chaff.  So we say, cancel them all and give the rest of us a break!

References:  https://lawyersdefendingdemocracy.org/open-letter-seeking-accountability-for-false-claims-of-fraudulent-election/    

https://lawyersdefendingdemocracy.org/repairing-our-democracy-a-primer-on-the-damage-done-repairs-needed

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/525970-the-lawless-fantasy-to-oust-all-the-election-lawyers-of-donald-trump

                This group, amusingly named “lawyersdefending democracy” since they are doing anything but, has penned several diatribes against President Trump and his lawyer “enablers,” effectively asserting that our democracy will fall unless lawyers refuse to work for the President in challenging various aspects of the recent election.  They proceed from the assumption, which they characterize as a “fact” that there is no evidence of “widespread fraud” in the election.  Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.  Maybe there is just some fraud but it isn’t widespread.  Maybe there isn’t any fraud but a bunch of screw-ups.  Maybe the actions and prejudices and obvious biases of Facebook and Twitter constitute widespread election meddling.

                States at the last minute changing the rules for signatures, timing of receiving ballots, etc., certainly sounds fishy, but they are facts.  Machines that didn’t work or mis-counted ballots, that’s a fact.  And now that state officials are being forced to delve into every nook and cranny, in large part because of the legal actions of the President and his lawyers, every day brings a story of another batch of ballots found somewhere that were uncounted, or the like. 

                Moreover, anyone who believes that massive voting by mail isn’t ripe for irregularities, and that there is a long list of such irregularities already established, is a fool.  Relying on this pandemic to twist the rules is perhaps the hallmark of this election, even if it might not amount to “widespread fraud”.  Any reasonable observer, including lawyers, would agree that such – let’s just call them “irregularities” – should be investigated. 

                These diatribes by a privileged, self-appointed, sanctimonious and self-important group sadly amount to nothing more than their own distaste for the President and completely fail to acknowledge that reasonable people, including reasonable lawyers, may have different perceptions of events.  Maybe there isn’t some widespread fraud organized and implemented by Russia or China or whomever.  Maybe there is. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some curiosities that shouldn’t be investigated, and unless someone forces that to happen, it isn’t going to.  And the Democrats certainly aren’t going to do it on their own.

                The “fact” is that truth, like beauty, is often in the eyes of the beholder, and there is no societal group that should know that better than lawyers.  Any real lawyer that actually tries cases in the courts or administrative hearings knows quite well that truth doesn’t necessarily win cases – perceived truth does.  That is, whoever is more effective in convincing the factfinder wins on what is true or false.  The weepy sympathetic witness, whoever the factfinder feels more sorry for, the guilty murderer who goes free on the legal “technicality”.  It is a feeble-minded lawyer indeed who believes that truth is something objective and readily ascertainable. 

                What is even sadder is the pathetic lack of confidence in our democracy these lawyers demonstrate.  This country has gone through much worse than Trump and survived.  While claiming to defend the Constitution, they completely ignore the First Amendment, among other things, not to mention lawyers’ traditional role of representing unpopular clients.

                 This is all not to even include the outsize role both the overwhelmingly liberal and “progressive” media, and these social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, etc.. seem to have on peoples’ views and perceptions.  If there is any fraud anywhere it probably lies in these networks managing their systems to favor one candidate or party over another, for whatever reason.  But in the end that’s may be no different that big business or big labor buying votes with campaign contributions in the right places, but at least that is way more out in the open. 

                But attacking lawyers will always be popular among a certain set – everybody hates lawyers until they need one, right?  But as Jonathan Turley wrote at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/525970-the-lawless-fantasy-to-oust-all-the-election-lawyers-of-donald-trump

This effort has resulted in Twitter blocking the Lincoln Project for targeting lawyers in a tweet that was denoted as abusive. The Lincoln Project is said to have also joined Democrats in targeting law firms like Porter Wright and threatening its attorneys with ruin. It claimed that any law firm working for Trump with election litigation is a “dangerous attack” over our democracy. But trying to strip people of counsel is the real attack. The law firm buckled and cited new internal struggles and at least one resignation.

This campaign to intimidate the lawyers who represent Trump is not about vengeance but rather insurance. Even if the success of these cases is very small, his opponents do not want to risk the judicial scrutiny of the ballots. Posts on social media targeted clients of law firms such as Jones Day, and the Lincoln Project pledged $500,000 to make the lives of these lawyers a living hell. It is the kind of tactic which is used by antifa and other activists to “deplatform” speakers or harass individuals at their homes.

                . . . . The person most undermined is Biden. Instead of asking for the review of these cases to affirm his legitimacy as the next president, his backers are harassing lawyers and running a retaliation campaign. It is an ironic twist since many of us marveled at how guilty Trump looked in his acts to bully his accusers and derail the Russia investigation. The best thing for Trump would have been to support a full investigation. There is also no evidence of systemic election fraud. The best thing for Biden would be to support a full investigation. The threats and biased media coverage only worsen the suspicions of the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump.

                So yes, let’s just cancel all the lawyers, ruin their lives, reputations and livelihoods and cover up everything even if it isn’t as dramatic as it sometimes is advocated to be.  THAT is the real danger to democracy. 

Statistics from:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student-loan-debt-statistics/?sh=ee57fab281fe

                According to Liz Warren and all her “progressive” disciples, personal responsibility matters not anymore.  It is government’s role to wrap each person in the US, here legally or not, in bubble wrap and tenderly take care of them from cradle to grave. 

                Take her most recent proposal to just “cancel” student debt, which of course is portrayed as some “crisis” whenever you read about it, which is nonsense.  Student loan debt might be a personal crisis for particular individuals, but it certainly is not some broad-based economic crisis that government has to address or the apocalypse will arrive. 

                Why?  First, people accumulated their student debt knowingly.  We put aside in this discussion the problems with for-profit schools like ITT scamming students  that’s an entirely different issue.  Here we’re talking about the run-of-the-mill college student at traditional non-profit educational institutions.  They took on this debt, maybe even unwillingly, because it paves the road to a better tomorrow, supposedly.  But they agreed to it, and they agreed to repay it.  What is wrong with, in general, making them do just that?

                Second, what do you say to all the millions of responsible people who worked hard after graduation and paid off, or are paying off, their student loan debt without whining about it being excessive?  Even if it caused them hardship. Do we just write them all a check? 

Third, what do we say to all those responsible (and irresponsible) people who never had any student debt in the first place, but who are somehow managing to take care of themselves at real jobs doing useful work. Is that a crisis? Well, it might be pretty quick if all these college students who ran up debt get a big money payday and the non-college people get nothing. Since equity is one of the cool buzzwords these days, is that equitable? Or what is the carrot that they’re going to get that we haven’t heard about yet?

Fourth, this amounts to paying off the debt of all these leftist, antifa, BLM spoiled college brats-turned-graduates who believe that free speech is the most wonderful thing in the world UNLESS you don’t agree with them, in which case you are a monster needing immediate cancellation.

                Fifth, this proposal made now by Warren, with her claim that it is necessary now to provide a pandemic stimulus to the economy, is a pretty transparent and cynical attempt to capitalize on this health crisis to implement one of her pet political projects – she’s basically talking about buying votes for the Democrats with your money.  She proposes:

Cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, giving tens of millions of Americans an immediate financial boost and helping to close the racial wealth gap. This is the single most effective executive action available to provide massive consumer-driver stimulus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/11/elizabeth-warren-biden-harris-first-day/

                Sorry, but cancelling student loan debt is NOT the “single most effective executive action available to provide massive consumer-driven stimulus.”  That is just absurd, since as discussed below a huge chunk of the people affected don’t need it, and most of the people in the country won’t even be affected by it except to pay for it.  They might want a handout from the government (effectively to be paid by your descendants), but they don’t need it. This is the type of elitist notion that by and large would impact people not in need, and could only be advanced by ignorant socialists like Warren and Bernie Sanders, along with their “democratic socialist” pals.

                No doubt not having to pay one’s voluntarily incurred obligations would be a delight to people.  But if you look at the numbers, this is just giving people a gift most of whom don’t need it.  The big number everyone points to, of course, is the total student loan debt, which is running at about $1.56 trillion dollars.  Yes, that’s a big number.  But it is spread over 44.7 million people, so the average debt per person is $32,731.  The median student debt (meaning half owe more and half owe less) is only about $17,000. That leaves, of course, about 285 million people who won’t receive anything from this wealthy upper-class boondoggle. Did they vote to forgive the debt of college kids who don’t need it? Doubtful. Of course they’re probably white supremacist racists so no one need be concerned about their view.

                Now let’s think about that.  Half of people with student loan debt owe less than $17,000, not even close to the average price of a new car these days.  So just how is that some sort of crisis?  The answer is, it isn’t. Forget about the BMW and take the bus or subway and pay your debts first, like millions of others have. Yes, there are certainly bunches of people with student debt that is a lot higher, many owe over $100,000, which are the sad heart-string-pulling stories the media and “progressives” harp on. 

But the fact is that less than 2% of students have over $50,000 in debt.  Almost a quarter of borrowers owe between $20,000 – $40,000 (roughly 9.5 million borrowers).  Only 3 million have debt over $100,000.  Remember, there are 330 million people in this country, so that is not even one percent of the US population.  And dollars to donuts, a good portion of those with gigantic student debt like that got it by going to post-grad places like medical or law or MBA school, so they are much more likely to have the later income to pay it off.  So how is that a crisis?  Again, it isn’t.

                Yes, an increasing percentage of graduates have “excessive student loan debt” and that number has roughly doubled over the past 35 or so years.  “Excessive student debt” was defined as monthly payments consuming 10% or more of income, though obviously that depends on what income class you are in.  Yet that still isn’t even 15% of all borrowers.  So is that a crisis?  No, it isn’t. 

                Moreover, there are all kinds of repayment plans to ameliorate the impact.  There is Public Service forgiveness.  There are many opportunities for extended repayment terms and income-based options, some of which may offer loan forgiveness after 20 years.  Moreover, it appears that college graduates default at a relatively low rate.

                Now this all puts aside the basic notion of personal responsibility, which of course is no concern of Warren or the Democrats since they jettisoned that notion decades ago.  Why should people act responsibly when the federal government will cushion them from every bump and bruise life may inflict on them?

                Yes, for-profit and some two-year schools are notorious for scamming students, exhorting them to take out all kinds of loans including private loans, and those people make up about 40% of all student loan borrowers.  These folks also end up with much less debt since their schooling period is shorter, and/or they drop out and never finish.  But sadly they often end up in dead-end jobs that make it extremely difficult to find housing, health care, food, etc., never mind repay back money that they never really benefitted from and were more or less coerced into borrowing.

                If anyone needs a helping hand it is this group.  And if the “progressives” were to focus on this group – the actual needy rather than the higher-income and more-likely-to-vote group – then perhaps there is something to talk about.  But part of that discussion has to be to go after these schools, who really end up just being money-printing businesses for their owners.  And some limited progress has been made on that front.

But the notion of some broad-based cancellation of student loans, with no consideration given to how the student got into difficulty in the first place or even needs any help, is misguided and a complete waste of money, unless of course, you’re a Democratic politician planning to run again in 2 or 4 years and want to buy some votes.  There are other pressing needs.

                Boy, talk about narcissism, arrogance and egotism, the self-important media is just so full of itself.  They apparently believe that because they have “called” the recent election for Joe Biden, that that somehow triggers a whole host of required official federal obligations to the anointed winner, such as office space, funding and access to departments and otherwise confidential information.  They also seem to believe that just because they “called” the election the loser has some obligation to “concede.” 

                Untrue that is, as Yoda would say.  The press is NOT in charge of elections.  They might think about actually reading the Constitution sometime since they obviously haven’t (apart from the First Amendment, which covers them for just about every idiotic and wrong thing they say).  Under the Constitution, only the Electoral College can “call” the election for President, which this year will happen on December 14.  There is no legal requirement that a Presidential transition jumps into action just because one or another media outlet “called” the election or because the incumbent did or did not “concede”.  The press is quite mistaken if it thinks it has some official role in anything relating to a Presidential election (or any other election for that matter). 

                That is, it is tradition only from which these alleged requirements spring, and the exigencies of reality and practicality.  It may be that in the past the GSA head permitted a transition to commence, and ordinarily the winner is usually pretty clear-cut.  Here, well, like it or not the President has the legal right to contest the ballots and has the legal right to not concede, ever, if he wants.  While there are strong common sense reasons to get a transition underway (even if it turns out to be useless in the end), there is no legal requirement that that happen now, in spite of all the criticism and media suggestions otherwise. If there was, Biden would have been in court by now.

                But the point here is that these media characters act like they are God and have the right to anoint the next President, and have every right to start prattling and whining when someone challenges their view.  This is cancel culture come to the election process.  Anyone who disagrees with them, or just suggests that they lack the power they think they have, is subject to vilification and smearing.  This unwarranted arrogation of political power is nothing more than the media attempting to mount its own coup d’etat and making decisions that properly belong to the voters and the Constitutional process that has been in place for over 200 years.

                It’s the arrogance that gets us, like the rest of us are too stupid to recognize a pure but baseless power play when we see one.  Think what you want about Trump and his actions regarding the vote, and perhaps a baseless power play is also what he’s up to.  Just don’t tell us that it is the press alone who can dictate what happens after a Presidential election and possible transition, and that all this blather about conceding and cooperating with a transition is legally required just because the media says so.  It ain’t so.

Reference:          https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-england-clarke/fa-chairman-clarke-quits-after-coloured-footballers-remark-idUKKBN27Q2TN

                English Football (what Americans know as “soccer”) Association chairman Greg Clarke made the following statement recently in response to a question from a member of Parliament about the difficulty “gay” players have in “coming out” in the social media age:  “If I look at what happens to high-profile female footballers, to high-profile coloured footballers, and the abuse they take on social media… social media is a free-for-all.”

                Well, geez, even though this seems pretty innocuous, his reference to “coloured footballers” stirred up the usual woke de rigueur outrage from the usual suspects.  His reference to “outdated language . . . from decades ago and should remain consigned to the dustbin of history,” said one outragee.  (Yes, alas, the world is now made up of “outragers” and “outragees”).

                Yet the difference between that, and the annoyingly pervasive but perfectly acceptable as far as we know, men, women and people “of color” seems pretty thin to the point of non-existence – the proverbial distinction without a difference.  If he had said “footballers of colour”, we’d never of heard about it but what the heck is the difference?  But maybe “of color” is out of fashion, though if so we haven’t yet heard. Darn, we do so detest not being up on the current terminology. By the way, ever hear of the NAACP?  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? 

                And, of course, Mr. Clarke has been cancelled.  Certainly a vicious insensitive unwoke racist beast like that doesn’t deserve to have a life or a job.